Lee Israel

Literary forgery

Israel is best remembered for her criminal enterprises.^[4] By 1992, her career as a writer of books and magazine articles had ended. She had tried and failed to support herself with wage labor.^[7]:21 To make money, she began forging a number of letters (estimated to total more than 400) by deceased writers and actors. Later, she began stealing actual letters and autographed papers of famous persons from libraries and archives, replacing them with forged copies she had made. She sold both forged works and stolen originals. This continued for over a year before two undercover FBI agents questioned Israel on a Manhattan sidewalk.

It is unclear how her forgeries were detected, but in her memoir she indicates that her ability to sell letters ended universally and abruptly. She mentioned that a Noël Coward expert insisted that Coward would not have referenced his homosexual activities so enthusiastically in letters at a time when such behavior would be punished with a prison sentence. Other suggestions are that the sheer abundance of letters being sold by her aroused suspicion, and that she had been caught using paper with anachronistic watermarks, or that she was using very ordinary (aged) paper for celebrities expected to have had the finest stationery, and so forth. Her memoir makes clear that her name, associated with celebrity letters, suddenly became toxic. At the same time she criticizes the guild of autograph brokers: although they never required her to recite her prepared lies about how a letter came into her hands, their own code of conduct required all of them to be able to attest unquestioningly to a detailed account of the provenance of each document.^[7]

In her memoir, in which she cites FBI documents from her case file, Israel says the agents left without arresting her or telling her what was going to happen next.^[7][4] She immediately returned to her apartment and started to destroy all evidence of her crimes, discarding in public trash cans more than a dozen typewriters she had used to emulate the look of the famous writers' letters.^[7] By the time she was served with a federal warrant ordering her to save this evidence, it had already been destroyed.^[7] Israel also claims she was never arrested or handcuffed, instead receiving summonses for federal court dates.^[7] In June 1993, Israel pleaded guilty to conspiracy to transport stolen property, for which she served six months under house arrest and five years of federal probation.^[4] Additionally, she was barred by almost all libraries and archives, ending any opportunity to resume her honest career as a biographer. She eventually supported herself copy editing for Scholastic magazines.^[7][4] Even after her exposure and sentencing, some of her forgeries were still being sold by reputable dealers as authentic—and at many times the price she had been paid for them. Some were even quoted in published books as if they were real.^[7] Israel later expressed pride in her criminal accomplishments, especially the forgeries.^[10][4][11]

Memoir controversy

Some reviewers of Israel's memoir questioned Simon & Schuster's decision to publish it, because she would profit from the sales.^[12] One reviewer wrote, "What this is is a hilarious memoir of a self-described miscreant and her pursuit of a meal ticket. Ironically, in a joke the reader will share, by purchasing her book we all participate in buying her that meal."^[13] Upon the publication of the memoir, Naomi Hample, a New York City bookstore owner who had purchased some of Israel's forged letters in 1992, was quoted by The New York Times as saying, "I'm certainly not angry anymore, though it was an expensive and very large learning experience for me. And she's really an excellent writer. She made the letters terrific."^[14]