Word: hofmann
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...Nien Cheng's ordeal during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. When Cheng, who now lives in Washington, opened her mailbox a few weeks ago, she found a package of some 50 letters from sixth-graders in Alberta, Canada, who were deeply moved by her story. They wrote after Teacher Loretta Hofmann used TIME's excerpts last semester in a history course on China at Airdrie Elementary School near Calgary...
...severity of the sentence was in part a measure of the social harm Hofmann had caused. Salt Lake City had been thrown into a panic by the seemingly random nature of the bombings, and the Mormon Church had been rocked to its foundations by Hofmann's faked documents. Hofmann's most notorious forgery had been the so-called White Salamander letter, which he sold to Christensen and Gary Sheets in 1984 for $40,000. It alleged that Church Founder Joseph Smith had been led to the Mormon scriptures not by an angel, as Smith had maintained, but by a white...
...Altogether, Hofmann sold 48 documents, some of them bogus, to the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. At the time of the murders, Hofmann and Christensen were negotiating for Hofmann's greatest "find": a collection of documents once purportedly owned by Dr. William McLellin, an early church apostle who later turned apostate. McLellin's papers supposedly contained embarrassing stories about Smith...
...Hofmann bargained with church members to obtain the McLellin collection for the church for $185,000, and he had already received $150,000 for the documents from another investor. But he could not deliver: the "discovery" was the product of Hofmann's fertile and lucrative imagination. Christensen may have begun to suspect this; two hours before he was to inspect the documents, he was killed. Gary Sheets, according to prosecutors, was targeted for murder as a diversion...
...part of his plea bargain, Hofmann is to provide a full explanation of his scams. Perhaps the confession will untangle the web of confusion that has plagued the Mormons since Hofmann first began peddling his forgeries. The church is not likely to recover quickly from this painful and discomfiting episode...