21. The Literary Grifter | Lee Israel

Need a breather from the blood and guts? After a few incredibly heavy weeks, Homocidal Tendency is taking a detour from our usual grisly crime scenes to dive into a completely different kind of underworld. 

This week, we travel back to the gritty, neon-lit streets of early 90s New York City to explore the desperate, brilliant, and entirely analog crimes of Lee Israel.

​Once a New York Times best-selling biographer, Lee found herself blacklisted, broke, and backed into a corner with a sick cat and no way to pay the bills. 

Her solution? A vintage typewriter, stolen archival paper, and one of the most prolific literary cons in modern history. 

Grab a drink, lock your doors, and join Matt for a bizarre tale of pure, unapologetic deception.

​In This Episode We Cover:

• ​A Palate Cleanser: Shifting gears after the heavy darkness of the Hog Trail Murders.
• ​The Making of a Misanthrope: Lee Israel’s early days navigating mid-century New York.
• ​Best Sellers and Bitter Ends: The Estée Lauder disaster and Lee's total fall from grace.
• ​The Mechanics of the Hustle: How a broken TV, tracing paper, and vintage typewriters built a black-market empire.
• ​Hubris and the Tell-Tale Typewriter: The fatal mistake of punching up Noël Coward's private life.
• ​Enter Jack Hock: Archival heists, dive bars, and fencing stolen history.
• ​The Sting & The Aftermath: The FBI closes in, and the ultimate, twisted irony of Can You Ever Forgive Me?

​Support the Show:

https://linktr.ee/HomocidalTendency

• ​Binge the Backlog: Need more? There are 20 heavy, binge-worthy episodes of Homocidal Tendency available to stream right now!
• ​Rate & Review: If you're surviving the ride so far, please take thirty seconds to subscribe and leave a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It’s the best way to help other true crime and horror fans find the show.
• ​Join the Community: Follow the podcast on social media for episode cards, behind-the-scenes research, and vintage photos from the cases we cover.

​About the Host:

When Matt isn't deep diving into the dark underbelly of historical true crime, you can usually find him exploring abandoned buildings or behind the lens. Check out his urban exploration and visual work over at Matthew David Photography.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Imagine being a New York Times bestselling author. You've rubbed shoulders with the elite, you've had your name in the papers, but the publishing world is incredibly fickle. The phone stops ringing, the advances dry up, and your agent won't return your calls. It's the early 90s. You're sitting in a cramped, freezing Upper West Side apartment. You're blacklisted, you're flat broke, and you're relying on welfare just to eat. But the hunger isn't what pushes you over the edge. What pushes you over the edge is looking down at your sick cat, knowing you don't have a dime to pay the vet bill. What do you do when your back is against the wall? And the only thing you have left in the world is your talent with words. If you're Lee Israel, you don't beg. You become someone else. You find a vintage typewriter, a stack of stolen archival paper, and you forge your way to survival. One fake letter from a dead celebrity at a time. Before we jump in, though, I just want to take a second and acknowledge the incredible dark paths we've been walking down lately. Between the grim shadows we explored at the Westside Piers in episode 19, and the absolute horrors of the hog trail merge last week for episode 20, things have been undeniably heavy. Those are tough cases to research, and I know they're tough cases to listen to. So, for this week I've decided we need a bit of a palette cleanser, a breather, if you will. But don't worry, we aren't leaving the true prime world, but we are taking a detour. We're swapping out the grisly crime scenes for the gritty, neon-lit streets of the early 90s Upper West Side, and we're trading the serial killers for a brilliant, desperate, and incredibly cynical literary grifter. But before we warm up the vintage typewriters and get into the strange tale of Lee Israel, let's go through a little bit of housekeeping really quick. If you're enjoying the show, just make sure you're subscribed wherever you get your podcast. It makes a huge difference if you can take 30 seconds and leave a five-star review and rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It generally helps put the show out to other true crime fans who haven't found us yet. Also, make sure you're following the show over on the social media. I always post the episode cards, behind the scenes research, and some of the vintage photos related to the case we're going to cover today. Alright, and that's enough of the business end of things. Grab a drink, lock your doors, and let's get into it. Before the FBI's things, the fake signatures, and the black market archival heist, Lee Israel was just a Brooklyn kid with a remarkably sharp tongue and absolute zero patience for her ordinary life. She was born Lenore Carol Israel on December 3, 1939, into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents, Jack and Sylvia, raised her alongside her brother Edward. Though Lee was never particularly close to her family, it's a running theme of emotional distance that would echo throughout her entire life. From the jump, Lee wasn't what you would call a warm person. Even in her youth, she was developing a catankerous, fiercely independent, and somewhat misenthopic personality that would define her. She looked at normal working class society from the outside in. In fact, she would later write that she viewed the traditional 9-5 office workers as what she called short-sleeved wage slaves with complete pity. The idea of sitting at a desk under fluorescent lights taking orders from a boss made her skin crawl. Lee attended Midwood High School and then moved on to Brooklyn College, graduating in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in speech. But the late 50s and early 60s were also a pivotal time for Lee on a personal level. She was coming of age in a deeply conservative mid-century America, but she knew exactly who she was. Lee was a lesbian, and she wasn't hiding it. In an area when staying in the closet was often considered a requirement for professional survival, especially for women, Lee lived her life openly in the New York gay scene. She became a regular fixture at places like Julius's and the Greenwich Village, which was one of the oldest gay bars in the city. She embraced her identity without apology, drinking, smoking, and trading sharp-witted barbs with the regulars. She was an unabashed, proudly cynical gay woman, figuring out how to survive in Manhattan on her own terms. Knowing that a traditional corporate job was completely out of the question, giving her temperament, Lee had to figure out a way to pay the bills. She realized her greatest asset wasn't her charm, it was her brain, and her undeniable talent with words. Throughout the 1960s, she threw herself into freelance journalism. She started turning out articles on theater, film, and television, landing bylines wherever she could. She wrote for the soap opera diedress, scratched and clawed her way into the New York Times, and built a reputation as a writer who could deliver deeply researched, sharp, engaging profiles. She had a gift for assuming her own personality and capturing the essence of the people she was writing about, a specific talent that decades later will become the very tool she used to commit federal crimes. Her real breakthrough as a writer, the moment that she shifted from her struggling freelance life to a heavy hitter, happened in November 1967. She managed to secure a sit-down interview with Hollywood royalty, Catherine Hepburn. Lee visited Hepran in California just before the death of Hepherin's longtime partner, Spencer Tracy. The resulting profile was published in Esquire magazine. It was brilliant, insightful, and a massive success. Suddenly, Lee Israel wasn't just a tough-talking freelancer drinking Jin at Julius's anymore. The publishing world was taking notice. The door to becoming a full-fledged Arthur had just cracked open. So Lee has her foot in the door after that wildly successful Catherine Hepburn interview, and she decides to pivot. Instead of just writing magazine articles, she turns her sharp, analytical eye towards the writing of full-length biographies, and for a while, she was absolutely brilliant at it. In 1972, she published her first major book, a biography of the notoriously eccentric actress Talula Bankhead. It was well received, but it was just a warm-up. Her real masterpiece, the book that really put her in the spotlight, it came in 1979. It was a biography of the journalist and television personality, Dorothy Cagallan. And guys, this book was a monster hit. It shot straight onto the New York Times bestseller list. Suddenly, Lee was flush with cash. She was going to parties, living large, and basking in the kind of literary success that most writers only dream of. For a brief shiny moment in the late 70s, Lee Israel had made it to the top of the mountain. But gravity in the publishing world is a brutal force, and Lee was about to learn that the hard way. In 1983, riding the high of the Gagalan book, Macmillan Publishing gave Lee a massive advance to write an unauthorized biography of the cosmetics queen Estee Lauder. The publishers wanted something juicy. They wanted the dark, hidden secrets behind the glitter and the glamour of the beauty empire. But Estee Lauder was a powerhouse, and she did not want this book written. According to Lee, Lauder actually tried to buy her off to drop the project, but Lee, stubborn, proud, and completely uncompromising, refused the money. So Lauder went for the nuclear option. She retaliated by writing her own official audiobiography and deliberately rushing it to print. In the fall of 1985, Lauder's book dropped at the same exact time as Lee's book, Estee Lauder, Beyond the Magic. It was a bloodbath. Lauder gave away copies of her book with her purchases of her cosmetics. Lee's unauthorized biography was totally eclipsed. It was trashed by the critics, and commercially, it absolutely tanked. This one massive failure couldn't have come at a worse time. By the late 1980s, the publishing industry was shifting. The market for the kind of deeply researched historical biographies Lee wrote was drying up. Publishers wanted celebrity tell alls with names like Tom Cruise on the cover. And this is where Lee's personality became her own worst enemy. When things got tough, she didn't play the game, she didn't network a schmooze, she drank heavily, she insulted the editors, and she burned bridges with a scorched earth intensity. Her agents stopped responding to her calls, the advances dried up. By the early 90s, the former New York Times bestselling author was living in a filthy, fly-in-fest apartment on the Upper West Side. She was completely broke and living off welfare. Lee had hit absolutely rock bottom. She had no friends left, no money, and no prospects. The only living creature she had any real connection with was her pet cat Doris. And then the unthinkable happened. Doris got sick. Lee was looking at mounting veterinary bills she had absolutely no way to pay. And as anyone who has ever loved a pet knows, you will do almost anything to save them. For Lee, a desperate woman back to endure a corner. That meant throwing the law out the window. She realized that the literary world that she used to rule had a shadowy, unregulated underbility, and she was uniquely equipped to export it. Now, to really understand how Lee managed to pull off such a massive analog con, you have to understand the canvas that she was working on. New York City in the early 90s was a completely different beast than the polished, tourist-friendly playground that it is today. In 1990, violent crime in the city had actually hit its absolute statistical peak. This was the era right before broken windows policing that totally changed the landscape. The subways were still covered in graffiti, the streets were still rough, and there were long stretches of abandoned buildings and shuttered storefronts. It had that heavy, dangerous, almost cinematic grit to it, the kind of atmosphere that feels perfectly frozen in time when you're exploring the forgotten rundown corners of a city. But the city was rough. It was also cheap, and it allowed people to hide in plain sight. The Upper West Side where Lee lived was a bizarre, fascinating mix of gorgeous, decaying pre-war architecture and sheer desperation. You had incredible historic buildings sitting right next to rundown, rent-controlled tenements. It was a haven for outcasts, struggling artists, hustlers, and people who had completely slipped to the cracks of normal society. And hidden within that chaos was the Manhattan Rare Book and Antiquian market. It operated like its own little secret society. It was an insular, deeply trusting, and highly unregulated underbelly. Back then, there were no digital databases to cross-reference historical documents. Cash was king, a good story went a long way, and nobody was asking too many questions if the merchandise looked authentic. It was an environment built on blind trust and analog records. In other words, it was an absolute perfect hunting ground for a desperate, brilliant writer with nothing else to lose. So Lee, Lee is broke, Doris the Cat is sick, and Lee's absolute desperate. However, her descent into federal crime didn't happen overnight. It was a slippery slope that started with a crime of opportunity. Lee was at a New York Public Library, uh Lee was at the New York Public Library doing research for a book on a vaudeville comedian, Fanny Bryce, a book her agent had already told her that nobody wanted to read. While looking through the archives, she was handed a folder of actual original letters written by Franny Bryce. Now, normally you look at these, you take your notes, and you give them back, but Lee noticed that the security was pretty laxed. She realized that nobody was watching her, so she slipped a few of these letters into her shoes and simply walked out the door. She took them to a rare book and autograph dealer in Manhattan and sold them for about $40 a piece. It was quick cash to pay the vet. But then she had an epiphany. She noticed that on one of the authentic Fanny Bryce letters, there was a large chunk of white space between the end of the text and Bryce's signature. Lee thought, I can make this better. She looked at the authentic letter, rolled it into her own typewriter, and typed up a couple of snappy, hilarious sentences in Fanny Bryce's voice right into that blank space. When she brought that letter to a dealer, the price suddenly jumped. The dealers didn't just want signatures, they wanted good content. They wanted the wit, the gossip, and the venom of these dead celebrities. And right then and there, a light bulb went off. If she could punch up a real letter, why couldn't she just write one from scratch? To pull this off, Lee knew she couldn't just use regular printer paper and a modern word processor. There are rare book dealers in Manhattan, they were snobs, but they they weren't stupid. The physical evidence had to hold up to scrutiny. First, she needed the canvases. Lee would go back to the library she had legitimate access to as a researcher. She would check out obscure journals and diaries from the twenties and thirties. Then, hidden away in the stacks, she would secretly tear out blank pages of the books from the back of the books. This gave her genuinely vintage paper with authentic, period, accurate watermarks. Next, she needed the machinery. Lee began scouring the thrift stores and junk shops all over the city to buy vintage typewriters. And she didn't just buy one. At the height of her operation, she had over a dozen different typewriters stashed in her apartment and storage unit. She assigned specific typewriters to specific dead authors. Dorothy Parker got one make and model, Noelle Coward got another. She memorized the quirks of the machines, a sticky E or a faded ribbon to ensure consistency. To forge the signatures, she bought tracing paper and built herself a homemade light box out of a broken television set she found on the street. She would trace the authentic signatures over and over until she could replicate the exact pressure and fluidity of the original author's hand. To finish the illusion, she would occasionally bake the letters in her own oven to yellow the paper, or smudge the ink slightly to make it look like Gid had survived decades in a dusty attic. But here is what makes Lee's case so completely unique in the annals of true crime. Her greatest weapon wasn't the typewriters or the stolen paper, it was her brain. Lee wasn't just a forger, she was a literary forger. She used all of her skills as a biographer to crawl inside the minds of her subjects. She wrote letters pretending to be the sharp-tongued Dorothy Parker, the sophisticated Noel Coward, the fierce Lillian Hellman, and the brooding Ernest Hamaway. And her writing was incredible. She didn't write boring notes about the weather. She wrote dishy, hilarious, deeply cynical letters full of inside jokes and insults about other famous people. She later bragged that she wrote better coward than coward. She was giving the collectors exactly what they wanted. The illusion of peeking behind the curtain of the literary elite. She was churning these out, selling them from anywhere from $50 to a few hundred dollars a pop. She wasn't getting rich, but she was paying her rent. She was buying her barbon, and she was keeping her cat alive, the most important thing. She had become one of the most prolific and successful literary forgers in modern history, operating right under the noses of the supposed experts. But it is with all Greek cons. The greed and the ego eventually take over, and Lee was about to get sloppy. The thing about getting away with crime is that it usually makes you sloppy. You start to think that you're untouchable. You start to think that you're the smartest person in the room. And to be fair, Lee Israel, she usually was the smartest person in the room. But her ego was writing checks that her typewriters couldn't cash. Her first major mistake was the simple economics, supply and demand. In the insular, highly specific world of rare book dealers, a newly discovered letter from a major literary figure is a massive event. It happens maybe once or twice a year. Lee was walking into these shops with a newly discovered letter every single week. Over the course of about three years, she forged an estimated 400 letters. She flooded the market. Suddenly, dealers who had spent decades hunting for a single scrap of paper from Dorothy Parker were looking at stacks of It defied statistical probability, and the whispers started to circulate through the Manhattan antique shops that something wasn't quite right with Lee's estate sale fines. But the real factor, the real fatal era, came down to the actual content she was writing. Lee was a brilliant writer, but she let her own sensibilities bleed into her subjects. Her favorite subject to forge was the legendary British playwright Noelle Coward. Now, Coward was gay, but he lived in a fiercely homophobic era. In his actual authentic letters, he was incredibly guarded, discreet, and actually coded about his private life and sexuality. He never put anything in writing that could be used against him. Lee, however, was a proudly out lesbian who lived in the 1990s in New York. When she stepped into Coward's voice, she infused it with her own modern, unapologetic flair. She wrote Forged letters where Coward openly discussed his sexuality and complained bitterly about the passionless passionate god, I can't fucking say that. Complained bitterly about the passion and Lynn I can't say it. His sex life, it was it was dead. That's what she was saying. Anyways, they were incredibly entertaining letters, but to coward historians, they're they were a glaring neon lit red flag. When a prominent dealer finally sent one of Lee's letters to the Noel Coward State for authentication, the experts took one look at it and said, Absolutely not. He would have never written this. But the mistakes, it it just wasn't coward. She made a mistake. Um she messed up on a date, a letter from Ernest Hemingway, claiming he was in a city that his passport proved he had never visited. She used a typewriter for a Dorothy Parker letter that had never been manufactured at the time. The letter was supposedly written. The experts they were getting wise. The major dealers in New York began quietly communicating with each other, realizing that they had all bought fakes from the same abrasive woman. Virtually overnight, Lee was blacklisted from the rare manuscript market, just said she had been from the publishing world. Nobody would buy a single scrap of paper from her face-to-face. Now, a normal person might take this as a sign to pack it in and stop committing federal crimes. But Lee was broke again, and she still had to feed Doris, the cat, the most important part of the story. If she couldn't sell her fakes, she decided she would sell the real thing. Lee used her legitimate, albeit dusty, credentials as a published biographer to gain access to secure archives of major institutions like the Columbia University, Harvard, and Yale. She would request folders of highly valuable authentic letters from famous authors. She would take these back to her desk, pull out a notepad, and painstakingly hand copy the exact text of the real letters. Then she would go back to her apartment, pull out her vintage typewriters, and forge an exact replica of the authentic letter. The next day, she would return to the library, slip her freshly taped fake into the archive folder, and steal the original. The priceless document by hiding it into her coat or her shoes. She wasn't just forging anymore. She was desecrating historical archives. But there was still one glaring problem. She couldn't sell the stolen letters herself. Her face was too hot. If she walked into a dealer with an authentic letter, they would assume it was just a fake because she was holding it. She needed a middleman. She needed a front man who had the charm and the hustle that she completely lacked. So, Lee Israel is sitting on a gold mine of stolen, historically significant letters that she swapped out for her brilliant fakes in the university archives. But her reputation is completely shot. She can't walk into a single rare book dealer in Manhattan without them practically chasing her out with a broom. She needs a fence. She needs somebody who can walk through those doors, smile, and sell the stolen goods without raising any red flags. Enter Jack Hawk. Now, if you've seen the 2018 movie adaptation of this story, Can You Ever Forgive Me? You probably picture Jack Hawk as the actor Richard E. Grant, an older, fabulous, grey-haired English dandy. But the real Jack Hawk was very different, and honestly, a lot more dangerous. The real Jack Hawk was tall and blonde and American. He was a smooth-talking grifter who navigated the New York gay bar scene with incredible ease. But beneath the charm, Jack had a genuinely dark past. While Lee Israel's crimes were strictly white colour and involving paper, Jack had actually done hard time. He had recently been released from prison after serving two years for armed robbery, and it wasn't as sophisticated heights. He had literally held a New York City taxicab driver at knife point. He was a hustler in every sense of the word. He was also living with HIV at a time when the AIDS epidemic was completely ravaging New York City. Jack knew his time was limited, and he lived with a reckless, fatalistic energy. Lee and Jack were already acquainted, in fact. They had a messy history. Years earlier, Jack had actually forged Lee's signature on a movie option extension to try and secure a deal for himself. He would think that would make Lee write him off forever. But in a weird way, she respected the hustle. When she needed a con artist, she knew exactly who to call. They were the ultimate odd couple of true crime. Lee was bitter and preferred the company of her cat. Jack was charismatic, an outgoing gay ex-con who loved the bars, the parties, and the scene. But they bonded over their shirt status as outcasts. The world had turned their back on both of them, and they were gonna make the world pay for it. The dynamic of their criminal enterprise was incredibly simple and effective. Lee was the brains and the muscle behind the operation. She went into the archives, did the research, copied the text, forged the replicas, and physically stole the real letters by stuffing them into her shoes or her coat. She would then hand the stolen authentic letters over to Jack. Jack would stroll into the high-end rare bookstore dealers and autograph shops in Manhattan. He would lean over the counter, turn on his boy's charm, and spin a tragic sob story. He'd tell the dealers that his older lover had recently passed away, and he was just clearing out the apartment and found these old letters in the closet. The dealers they bought at Hook, Line, and Sinker. They handed Jack a check or a stack of cash, and he would walk right out the front door. But when you get into bed with a known grifter, you can't be surprised when you get grifted. Jack was pulling in sometimes two or three hundred dollars for each batch of letters. He would meet Lee to split the cash, but he wouldn't tell her the actual sale price. If he sold a batch for $1,500, he would tell Lee he only got $750 and hand her half of half and pocket the rest. Lee eventually figured out that he was skimming off the top, but she was trapped. She couldn't sell them herself, and she couldn't exactly go to the police and report her accomplice for stealing the money he had made from selling stolen property. They were locked into this toxic, mutually beneficial crime ring, and they were making a killing. But Jack's sloppy nature and their sheer audacity of stealing from the most prestigious archives in the country meant that the clock was ticking. So Lee Israel and Jack Hawk are running a highly lucrative, highly legal operation. It was a bull plan, but like all bull plans, it was just one mistake away from completely unraveling. Jack Hawk had walked into the office of a prominent New York rare manuscript dealer named David Lorenhns. Jack spun his usual sob story and offered to sell Lorenhs a general, beautifully preserved letter from Ernest Hemingway. Lorenhs recognized the quality and signature, so he bought it. But he was an expert, and he did his due diligence. Researching the providence of the Hemingway letter, he discovered a massive red flag. According to historical records, this specific letter wasn't supposed to be sitting in his office. It was cataloged as belonging strictly to the archive collection of Columbia University. He made a phone call to the university. The archivist went down into the stacks, opened the Hemingway folder, and pulled out the letter. To the untrained eye, it looked perfect. But under professional scrutiny, the truth was obvious. The letter in the Columbia Archive was a forgery. And when they checked the visitor log to see who had recently requested the access to that specific Hemingway folder, right there on the sign-in sheet was the name, Lee Israel. Once an institution like Columbia University realizes the archives are being robbed and replaced with fakes, this stops being a minor dispute between eccentric book dealers, it becomes a federal crime involving the transportation of stolen property. The FBI was officially called in. The feds realized they had a unique opportunity. They knew who the thief was, but they needed to catch the operation and act. So the FBI went back to the dealer, David Lohenhurst, and asked him to set up a trap for Jack Hawk. A few weeks later, Jack, completely oblivious to the heat coming down on him, strolled right back into Loenhart's office to vent another batch of stolen letters. But this time, things were different. Loenhurst was wearing a wire, and FBI agents were sitting in an adjacent office, listening to every single word through a pair of headphones. Lohenhurst played it perfectly cool. He had Jack repeat his fabricated backstory on tape, establishing the fraud, and then wrote Jack a check for the stolen goods. Jack took the check, smiled, and walked out the door. He had no idea he was being shadowed by federal agents. Now, this is where the story splits, because in true crime, the criminal and the cops rarely agree on how the final scene plays out. If you read Lee Israel's 2008 memoir, or if you watch the movie Abdutation, Lee paints herself as the cynical lone wolf. She claims she was walking out of a Manhattan deli when two undercover agents converged on her on the sidewalk, flashed their badges, and told her it was over. She claims that Jack had betrayed her. But according to the dealer David Loenhertz and the FBI's version of events, their reality was much more cinematic. The agents tailed Jack as he left the dealer's office and walked straight to a bank located inside the Empire State Building. Waiting for him inside in that bank, ready to split the cash from the finished letters was Lee Israel. The FBI wanted the two of them together, holding the check. And then they swooped in. They busted them right there on the spot. No deli, no tragic betrayal, just two grifters holding the bag in the middle of one of the most famous buildings in the world. But here's where it gets interesting. Lee wasn't going down with a fight. She knew the FBI was building a massive case against her, and she knew the primary physical evidence connecting her to the 400 forged letters floating around the country were her vintage typewriters. Before the feds could get a warrant to search her upper west side apartment, Lee went into absolute panic. She grabbed the tracing paper, the vintage watermark stationery, and her collection of typewriters. In the dead of night, she dragged them out of her apartment. She walked blocks and blocks, shoving the heavy metal typewriters into different trash cans all over Manhattan, destroying the literal keys to her criminal empire. By the time the FBI finally arrived with the paperwork to toss her apartment, the machinery of their literary cryptor was completely gone. But unfortunately for Lee, the paper trail she had already left behind was more than enough to bury her. So, the FBI has Lee Israel dead to rights. She managed to trash the typewriters, but the federal agents had the forged letters, the stolen library originals, and the recorded fashions of her accomplished Jack Hawk. The jig was officially up. In June 1993, Lee Israel stood in a Manhattan federal court and pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to transport stolen property. Given the sheer scale of theft and the fact that she was robbing some of the most prestigious historical archives in the country, she was facing a serious prison sentence. But Lee caught a break. Because she was nonviolent, it was white criminal collar crime, and because she was a first-time offender in her fifties with failing health, the judge showed some leniency. She was sentenced to six months of house arrest and five years of federal probation. She was also ordered to pay restitution to the dealers that she had scammed, though everyone involved knew she had not a dime to her name. As for Jack Hawk, he cooperated fully with the FBI to save his own skin, but sadly he didn't live long enough to face any real long-term consequences. In 1994, shortly after the trial concluded, Jack died from AIDS-related complications. While avoiding a federal penitentiary, it was a went, Lee received a secondary punishment that completely destroyed what was left of her life. As a part of her probation, she was permanently banned from nearly every major library and historical archive in the country. For a woman whose entire identity and only legitimate skill set was being a historical researcher and biographer, this was a decence for her career. She couldn't do the research required to write a real book even if she wanted to. For the next decade, Lee slipped into total obscurity. She took menial jobs, including working as a copy editor for magazines she used to write for, just to keep herself and her cats fed. She was exactly where she started, broke, bitter, and isolated. But a writer is always gonna write. In 2008, Lee Israel managed to pull off one final brilliant hustle. If she couldn't write biographies about other people, she was gonna write one about the only subject she had left to her, herself. She published a memoir detailing her entire criminal enterprise. She titled it, Can You Ever Forgive Me? A phrase she actually used to sign off in one of her forged Dorothy Parker letters. And here's the ultimate bizarre irony of The Israel's life, the memoir was a smash hit. Critics absolutely loved it. They praised it for its dark humor, its spiding wit, and its unapologetic honesty. The publishing world that had completely blacklisted her for decades earlier was suddenly fawning over her again. She finally received the critical acclaim and the literate respect that she'd been chasing her entire life, but she only got to it by writing about how brilliantly she had scammed them all. Lee didn't survive to see her story hit the silver screen. She passed away in New York in 2014, at the age of 75, after a battle with Millanome. Four years later, her memoir was turned into an Oscar-nominated film starring Melissa McCarthy as Lee and Richard E. Grant as Jack Hawk, cementing her legacy not as a respected biographer, but as one of the most fascinating anti-heroes in literary history. To her dying day, Lee remained completely unrepentant. When asked in an interview if she felt bad about the forgeries, she would bluntly state that she didn't regret a thing. She actually considered the fake letters to be her best work. She hadn't just copied dead writers, she had brought them back to life. Sometimes, the most compelling true crime stories don't involve a bloody crime scene or a serial killer. Sometimes they just involve a desperate woman, a sick cat, and a vintage typewriter. And I have to say, I fucking love telling you this story. It's been like a breath of light in my journey as a podcaster. I hope you enjoy it. I know I did. Thank you for joining me on this slightly lighter, but no less twisted journey this week. As always, I'm your host, Matt. Keep your doors locked. Double check those signatures, and I'll catch you next time.