Word: valfierno
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...where both books dive headfirst into a huge pile of baloney. In 1932 a swashbuckling American journalist named Karl Decker published a piece in the Saturday Evening Post, in which he wrote that in 1914 in Morocco, he met an aristocratic con man, Marqués Eduardo de Valfierno, who told him that he had masterminded the theft as part of a scheme to sell six meticulously forged versions of Mona Lisa to six gullible millionaires. Each would be duped into believing he had secretly bought the picture that had just been famously stolen from the Louvre. But in order...
...this is fun to imagine, but garbage. Almost a century after the crime, none of the six alleged copies has turned up. Did de Valfierno even exist, or was he a fiction created by Decker in his declining years to sell a magazine story? Who knows, but all these years later, authors with a book to market still play footsie with Decker's wholly unsubstantiated story. The Hooblers retell the Decker tale in their last chapter, then lamely attach a disclaimer: "There is no external confirmation for it. Yet it has frequently been assumed to be true by authors writing...
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