(water rushing) (intense music)
Mark: What happens in the mind of con artists?
What makes their brain so well-equipped
for psychological trickery?
Is it greed? A lack of empathy? Loose morals?
Whatever it is, we are fascinated by con artists.
(intense music)
News Reporter: Frederic Bourdin
is a French serial imposter
the press has nicknamed the chameleon.
He began his impersonations as a child,
and claims to have assumed at least 500 false identities.
News Reporter 2: In 1994, a young boy,
Nicholas Barclay went missing in Texas.
Frederick Bourdin took the identity
of the still missing Nicholas Barclay.
News Reporter 3: Although Bourdin had brown eyes
and a French accent, he managed to convince the family,
and the authorities he was Nicholas Barclay.
News Reporter 2: The Frenchman,
a fraud named Frederic Bourdin.
News Reporter 4: Was ordered to do a DNA test.
He pleaded guilty to passport fraud and perjury.
News Reporter 5: Frederic served six years
in an American prison before being deported to France.
News Reporter 2: A private investigator compared the ears
of Bourdin to the ears of Nicholas Barclay.
Investigator: So I knew right away I had an imposter.
(intense music)
Mark: We've all been lied to.
We've all been offered something
that is just too good to be true.
And still we fell for it.
Although we love a good con, we hate it
when it happens to us.
To find out how to resist the manipulation,
we invited some of the greatest con artists
to our Institute.
Together with a team of experts,
we are going to analyze their stories, pick their brains,
and reveal what their body language tells us.
Welcome to the Institute.
-: Hello, Mr. Bourdin. -: Hello, hi.
-: How are you? -: Very good.
-: They are ready. -: Me too.
-: Mr. Bourdin, take a seat.
I'm Kerry Daynes. I am a consultant forensic psychologist.
And let me introduce you to Mark Frank.
He is a professor of behavioral science,
and we've got Moran Cerf,
who is a professor of neuroscience.
So I think that it's important to point out
that obviously we're not your doctors.
So we're not here to diagnose you.
And this isn't a form of therapy.
We're just hoping to learn from you.
-: It's my therapy.
-: It is your therapy?
-: I will take it as a therapy just for myself.
I'm not asking you to be my therapist,
but whatever happen in the next few days,
it will be my therapy.
-: Alright.
So what will be helpful to me is if I can start
to understand the psychological and social factors
that underlie your conning behavior.
So I'm gonna spend some time talking to you
about your history later on.
But we're also going to put you
through a series of assessments.
-: I'm gonna play games with you.
I'm gonna ask you questions and I'm gonna try
to understand how you think by looking at your brain.
So all the time where I'm gonna talk to you,
I'm gonna also monitor your brain activity,
and try to see if there are differences
between what you tell me, and what your brain says.
-: And then from my point of view,
being a behavioral scientist,
I'm interested in what is going on in the brain,
and how it manifests itself
on the external expressive behavior.
So in terms of what happens to people in their faces
and their voices and other non-verbal channels.
-: So I'm going to be talking to you in a very short while,
but why don't you go and settle yourself in.
Make yourself at home, have a look around,
and start to get a feel for the place and I'll see you soon.
-: Sure. -: Thank you.
-: You're welcome. -: Bye-bye.
(intense music)
-: Hello, Frederic. -: Hello, Kerry.
-: How was lunch?
-: Oh, very, very good. -: Good.
-: I like fish.
-: Good. I'm pleased to hear it.
So Frederic, you're 47, 48. Is it now?
-: No, I'm 46.
-: 46? Sorry, am I aging you?
Frederic: Next month I'll be 47.
-: Next month, oh not long to go.
You'll be 47 the same as me.
And I understand that you were born in Nanterre?
-: Nanterre. -: Nanterre? In France.
-: District of Paris. Yeah.
-: So when you were 23, you had found yourself in Spain,
and then you chose to be a missing boy?
(intense music)
-: Normally in Spain, you'll go there.
They put you in a shelter.
You stay there weeks, months,
and then you run away and nobody cares.
But in that place in particular, I don't know why.
The juvenile judge and the prosecutor went to see me,
and told me they really wanted to know who I was.
They wanted me to prove to them who I was.
And then they said a magic word.
If you don't do that, we're gonna take your fingerprints.
And we're gonna take your picture.
And I knew that if they did that,
in a few hours they would know who I was,
and they would send me to prison.
So I said, okay, I'm gonna tell you the true.
I'm American, but I don't want you to call my family.
I want to call them myself. And surprisingly, they agreed.
They let me just do what I want.
There was the facts on the phone.
I took the phone and at the beginning
I started calling every police from big cities.
New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.
Telling them always the same story.
I'm a police officer. I'm a shelter director.
And we have a what's about a 14 years old kid here
who has been missing apparently four years
from your country.
We don't know who he is,
but the American embassy says American
because of his accent. But their answer was always the same.
Do you know how many posters of missing person
we have on the walls?
You need to call the center of missing person
(indistinct) in Virginia.
And I talked to a lady, nice lady, very helpful.
She really wanted to help.
So the lady came with Nicolas Barclay.
News Reporter 6: Nicholas Barclay was just 13 years old
when he disappeared here back in June of 1994.
He has blue eyes, light brown hair.
And Barkley also has three tattoos,
including letters on his left hand,
left shoulder and left ankle.
(news reporter muffles)
-: Do you think that maybe he's trying to tell us,
look, this wasn't calculated.
-: Exactly.
-: This wasn't premeditated.
-: He has eight hours, right?
It's nighttime. Eight hours. Everyone's gone.
It's him and a phone.
And by the morning he has to solve a problem.
He has to figure out who he's gonna be next,
and how he gets out of this thing,
where they're gonna take his fingerprints and so on.
And he manages like in very little time
to orchestrate what became his defining kind of life moment.
He finds a character. -: Yes.
-: He moves to a different country.
So he tells us a story where it happened to him.
But I think that eight hours, fast decisions,
critical ones that tap into, I think to me.
I find it as like a interesting moment,
and really revealing of his psychology.
(wind rushing) (intense music)
Kerry: So at some point, Nicolas Barclay's sister comes
to Spain to pick up her lost brother.
Tell us what happened.
-: I was in my room on that morning with the door locked.
I bleach my hair. I made some tattoos.
I got sunglasses. I got a scarf and gloves.
But still, I mean, I've seen what Nicolas Barclay look like.
So for me, it was just a nightmare.
What was, this woman was gonna be very mad.
Very shocked, very sad.
And I'm gonna get my ass kicked and sent to prison.
That was going in my mind.
I just got out of my room, went down the stairs.
And at the moment she saw me, she jump on my arms,
hugging me, saying that how she knew.
She said she knew, "I knew it was you.
I knew I was gonna see you. I remember that teeny nose."
What did I have?
A bandana, a hat, a scarf, and a small voice.
-: How do you change your voice?
Can you show us how you change your voice?
I know that is difficult to perform on command,
but you've obviously spent many, many months
of your life doing this.
So what is your teen voice?
-: Well, the voices is just a part of everything else.
-: Mhm hmm. You're not gonna let me hear it.
-: I'm shy. (laughs) -: Okay.
-: I'm sorry. (laughs)
-: [Newscast Voiceover] This is Eye Witness News at 10.
News Reporter 6: He disappeared
without a trace three years ago.
Tonight, a San Antonio boy is back home.
Nicholas Barclay's now 16 years old.
He vanished when he was 13.
Nicolas says he was kidnapped and taken to Spain.
He says for three years,
he was repeatedly drugged, beaten, and raped.
All part of a sex slave operation
involving dozens of missing children.
News Reporter 2: Somehow, a 13 year old boy
from San Antonio ended up in Spain without a passport.
He claims his captors changed his appearance
to make him unrecognizable.
He was no longer allowed to speak English.
Did they rape you every night?
-: Me? No.
Because they didn't rape me every night.
Some of them they like more.
Some of the kids, they like more,
they rape them usually two or three times a week.
-: When that was happening.
Did you think "I've gone too far here?"
(intense music)
-: What do people do when they feel emotions?
What do they do with their voices?
Their faces, their bodies?
How good are we at spotting it?
Who's good at this? Who's not good at this?
And then even a little bit of a strategic element.
Who's more willing to lie?
And for what reasons and what reasons
are we willing to believe lies?
Many times we believe lies because we want to believe them.
Kerry: So tell me about your parents.
Tell me what circumstances you were born into.
-: (sighs) My mother was coming from a very troubled family.
For my grandfather, Arabic people should have dealt
with nuclear weapons and black people should were monkeys
and eated banana.
So when my mother got pregnant with me
with this Arabic person, she asked my-
She ordered my mother to have an abortion.
Kerry: She was only 18 At the time. Was she?
-: Yeah. She was about 18, yeah.
-: How do you know that your mother was asked
by her father to have an abortion? Who told you that?
-: His notes. He wrote it in his journal.
Kerry: Right.
-: Which I, one day found out in his closet.
I wasn't that hurt because his youngest daughter
spend my entire childhood saying things like,
"Why can't this fucking Arabic shit die?
Why this rat wouldn't die?
Why can't he just fucking die?"
All the time. Fucking Arabic. Fucking.
So I was used to racist insults from his youngest daughter,
which was a clear reflect of what her father was.
And my mother, she wasn't just not capable
of looking after me. She was abusive.
Some people say you can't remember
from that early age, but I do.
So I remember one trip we had in train.
I was hungry and she gave me some money to get a sandwich,
but the train was going to stop only two minutes.
So I start getting out of the train to take a sandwich,
but then I realized that the train was going to go
because the controller starting, blowing on the whistle.
So I jumped back on the train crying
because I was very much afraid
that the train was going away.
And I ran to her and I was very sad.
Very, very, very scared of the experience.
And again, I see the smile on her face.
Again, right now I can see it.
She was happy that I was despair.
(intense music)
-: Well, we're here in the memory room.
And I suppose we've all got a memory room, haven't we,
in our own minds that stores almost like a Facebook timeline
of significant events in our lives.
And it tells us so much about who we are.
Our memories, they can be cherished possessions,
or they can be the things that haunt us the most.
One of my earliest memories is going to a zoo.
But I must've been, I don't know, two or three years old.
So could I even biologically have that memory?
I don't think it's possible. Is it?
-: And we can see that again as we go to Frederic, right?
So he's telling his story of his youth.
There's some real things in there.
There may be some other things that may not be.
Part of that is I think also a little bit
of reading the audience.
-: Well, that's his motivation, isn't it?
Because it's not money that he wants.
He wants a response from the audience.
He wants to elicit those, I see some caring,
loving responses, or treat me as though I am a child
in need of your protection and your care.
-: You know, and I can shape the story in just enough way
till I start to get the reaction from somebody.
-: What's interesting here is that we are part of this thing.
So we kind of think of ourself as audience.
The story just is told, and we're just taking notes.
But actually our nodding our heads to the right moment,
makes the story go in one direction.
If we did this, then maybe it will go
in a different direction.
We laugh in the right spot.
So probably us three in the room got one version,
you and you independently got a different version
than I did.
And there's also the truth that he tells himself
before he goes to sleep.
Which is probably another version of the story.
Somewhere between all of those lies what actually happened.
(intense music)
-: Childhood.
So our first 16 years affect our adult life,
whether or not we care to admit it,
or whether or not we're aware of the connection.
Because during those first 16 years,
we're really building up a blueprint for the world.
So we're figuring out who we are,
how other people interact with us.
Are we going to be treated well?
Are we going to be treated with contempt or aggression?
Are we going to be neglected?
Our expectations are built really in our childhood.
And of course, things can change
throughout the lifespan, things evolve.
But I think that we spend an awful lot of time
as adults trying to fulfill desires that we had as a child.
Psychologists call it "unmet needs."
Unmet needs from childhood often drive adult behavior.
-: For me, the worst part was the neighbor.
One day unfortunately the TV broke down.
And the neighbor next door was a man living with his mother.
He said to my grandmother, "If you want,
he can come in my house, watch the cartoons."
So I went there and knock at the door.
He opened the door, he turn on the TV
for about seven seconds.
And then he turned it off,
and he said, "You see, there is nothing."
Then he left.
He went upstairs and he say,
"Come, I want to show you something."
So I went up.
And he told me, "If you show me your penis,
I will show you mine."
And then he got me undressed,
and we got in the bed and he raped me in the bed.
And for a while.
And then he noticed that I was crying.
I wasn't crying a lot.
-: In the beginning.
You see a lot of the eyebrows down.
People do this when they concentrate.
Alright, so I'm trying to remember a date or a name.
He does show a little bit of sort of this sadness
in the recall, the lips come down.
Chin gets pushed up.
Again, very early on, as he starts to tell the story
about them exposing themselves to each other.
-: And he said, "You're crying."
And I didn't say nothing.
He said, "Do you want to go home?"
I say, "Yes."
He opened the door. I ran directly to my aunt.
And I told her, and she started laughing.
Like I've been telling the biggest joke there is on Earth.
So I went to my grandmother and my grandmother say,
"You don't have to go back there."
And that was it.
-: And then there's sort of a neutral,
"And then he raped me and then I was crying."
And then sort of skip over at this point.
So there was not as much detail
as what went on in the other parts.
Now, what do we make of this?
We don't know, right?
Is it because he's inventing the account?
Is it because of the trauma associated
with the account that he therefore just wants
to get over it? Alright?
There's some controversy as far as what happens
to people, recalling events that are traumatic in some way.
But from a behavioral point of view, again,
we can see a variety of things happening
throughout the sequence and changes within that sequence.
-: Do these micro expressions say anything
about the truthfulness?
-: There are no behavioral signs
that guarantee somebody is lying or telling the truth.
And it's not sort of what we're really doing here.
We're not out to say, "Okay, he's lying about this.
He's telling the truth about this."
Or anything along those lines.
It's just, what's sort of the emotional behavioral profile
of these individuals as they're recalling and going forward?
(intense music)
-: He talks very, very easily.
And it's almost as though he's already
been through the first stages of therapy.
And he's got his story in his mind,
but he's stuck somewhere in his past.
He's not moved through and processed his past.
He's very much still in there.
And what I mean by that is there were times
when the emotion came to the fore really quite rapidly.
He became tearful.
But he said to me that he felt
that if he really had caused great distress,
then he wouldn't be able to be in this world.
-: If the family of his boy would have been convinced
that I was this boy.
And today it would have be revealed to them
that I wasn't.
Then I don't think I would be sitting in front of you today.
-: So what do you notice?
-: It's sadness I would say.
-: It's a bit of a trick question.
Basak: Yeah.
-: Because it's not what's there.
It's what's not there.
-: He was basically saying that if he thought
that he had done something dreadful,
then he wouldn't be able to live with himself
because that's not the type of person that he is.
So it means that I have to take into account
that he's only here for a few days,
and it limits me because I don't want
to challenge him too much on that.
Because obviously he's somebody who's
in a fragile, emotional state.
-: When people are genuinely distressed, right?
Our emotions are involuntary actions.
We don't pick and choose them. Right?
And so with the involuntary aspect of emotions,
that makes them somewhat hard to fake.
We can often portray, we can smile when we're not happy,
and things like this.
But distress, which is what you might expect
at a moment like this, is one of the
hardest ones to fake, right?
It involves, there's the muscles
in the middle of the forehead, right?
When people are distressed,
we tend to see that inner part go up.
So if he was feeling distress at this moment.
I mean, you know, maybe he thinks about it, maybe.
But as far as actually feeling it at that moment,
this suggests it's not there.
-: Oh.
-: Because that muscle does move.
He does show it in other parts of the interview.
Not that he's paralyzed or can't show it. He does.
-: Are we falling for somebody who wants
to elicit care and sympathy in other people?
-: So, okay.
So it's a binary thing. We have two options.
Either it's a really, really good trick,
and we're part of that,
or we're really tapping into something very,
very fragile and then we should be-
-: Cautious.
-: So to be on the safe side,
I would definitely say cautious is kind of our go-to.
But I think that one way to see if we're really falling
for that is to between the three of us.
We can respond to the same story differently.
(intense music)
So with Bourdin we ran an experiment.
It's known in the literature
as the "Choice blindness" experiment.
It was invented about 10 years ago,
by two Swedish scientists, Klaus Hall,
Peter Johansson, colleagues of mine
that I work closely with.
And they invented a clever way to make people cheat life.
We show you two cards with two pictures
of two people you don't know.
And we ask you, who do you find more attractive?
The person on the left or the person on the right?
Afterwards, you will see the picture you chose again
on the screen, just that picture.
And I'm gonna ask you to just think
about the reasons you chose this person.
You did it a hundred times.
It seems to you like, it's a simple experiment.
And that's all that Bourdin knew.
That he sees two pictures, he makes a decision,
and then he has to explain why he made the choice.
-: Because she look honest.
Computer Voice: Trial two.
Frederic: Innocent.
Computer Voice: Trial three.
-: She's more real.
-: But there's a trick here.
And a trick makes it interesting.
The trick is that every now and then,
maybe every 10 tries or so.
If he chose the card on the left,
I give him the card on the right.
The card he didn't pick.
And then he is confronted with a choice
that he did not make.
But he thinks I gave him the one he asked for.
So when I asked him to explain his choice,
he either as to tell me, "This isn't my choice,
I don't know what happened here. It's a different card."
Or he has to come up on the spot
with a creative answer to a choice he didn't make,
that will actually assume that it is his choice.
And then we look at his brain and see how fast,
how good, and how unique is he in coming up
with a story that explains something he didn't make
as if it was his choice.
If you see that suddenly the activity moves
from being very slow to very fast.
You can characterize this as he is using memory
more than usual.
It's very hard to get that.
So at least when I get that, I say, "Okay,
this is a person for whom coming up with stories is easy
and happens fast." So he is unique in that aspect.
(intense music)
-: So when you were 16, that was the first time
that you ran away from the center.
-: They didn't treat me well because I was weird,
because I was different, because I was strange.
-: So you ran away to Paris.
-: So yeah, the first time I ran away to Paris,
and I walked toward Paris in nighttime,
in the middle of nowhere, I don't even know where I was.
I met two men, two adult men.
They invited me to a pub. They made me drink beer.
Then they ask me as if I was gay.
I told them not.
And I saw a man following me.
So I went into the phone booth.
I called the police and I told him that I was a tourist.
And I've seen an English child is it was
about 14 years old and he needed assistance.
He looked lost.
-: Where did that thought come from?
Where did that idea come from?
And I can understand that you felt unsafe,
and you felt that you wanted to do something.
But why did that involve creating the identity of somebody?
Well, particularly a British teenager,
when you're a French teenager in Paris.
-: I didn't like myself.
-: We really need to address this issue,
I think, before we move any further
with our assessment of Frederic.
I'm really keen to hear your observations
about whether or not he is as vulnerable
as he portrays himself to be.
He is still somebody who is vulnerable, is traumatized.
And he said, if he thought that he had caused distress
to the family of Nicholas Barclay, which clearly he did,
then he wouldn't be able to live with himself.
He wouldn't want to be here anymore.
-: When you first told me that,
I didn't even know how to kind of think about it.
And I went home and I kept thinking about it,
and kept thinking about it and was extremely concerned.
I basically imagined the worst case scenario,
and said, would I tell myself, "Oh,
but it was kind of a TV show. So it's okay."
And I felt uncomfortable.
-: When I looked at the footage of this,
I notice he was referring to 15, 20,
whatever many years ago this was.
So that made me a little bit more comfortable.
He was, "I wouldn't be here today
if I'd felt that way then."
-: Is he at risk of leaving here,
and maybe showing up somewhere unexpected as a teenage boy
because he said during my interview,
"I could do this again.
I've been thinking about it recently.
I could get away with this again."
And he told me in the corridor,
not so long ago that he doesn't plan to go home from here.
He plans to go to Serbia.
(peaceful music) (owl hoo-ing)
Hi. -: Hi.
-: I've been looking for Moran everywhere, have you seen him?
-: Oh no, it's been awhile since I saw him.
-: Don't know what to make of Frederic Bourdin.
He confuses me in some respects. Have you spoken to him?
-: Yes, he kept saying how the world is just broken,
and how sad everything is. And then-
-: And did he make you feel sorry for him in particular?
-: Yeah, I think so.
Picture he gave to me was like, he did some mistakes,
but it was not his fault.
And now he's doing everything best he can
in this horrible world to make things right.
But also what I realize now you're saying,
he was really looking at my face every once in a while,
quite directly.
And like, I think he was also seeing
how I was feeling. -: Mhm.
And you know what, he's very, very skilled at that.
He is one of our most skilled con artists
in assessing what other people are feeling.
So he's incredibly perceptive in that way.
-: Yeah.
-: So I wonder if you were feeling more sympathy
towards him, whether you would have had more
of a personal story from him?
-: No, he just told me about his children,
and his wife and how his wife left him.
And another sad story. There was a lot of sad stories.
He doesn't trust anyone. He doesn't trust anyone.
(intense somber music)
-: For a con artist to choose the right victim,
he needs to be able to read minds.
This particular experiment,
which features 10 men lying, or telling the truth,
helps assess the con man's ability to read accurately
what somebody truly believes.
Make a judgment.
-: I will. -: Circle.
-: I will circle my first impression.
-: They should be killed. I mean, should be executed.
I personally couldn't partake in that decision.
I mean, I wouldn't have an active part saying yes.
But it has to be done. I mean.
Interviewer: Well, why do you believe that?
Why does it have to be done?
-: Well, not necessarily have to, but I-
Mark: The guys Bourdin is watching are asked to lie
or tell the truth about their opinion
on the death penalty, or banning smoking.
So they either say they are in favor or against.
Bourdin has to figure out whether they're lying or not.
-: Are you lying to me now? -: No.
-: Number six. (intense music)
Okay, well thank you very much for doing this.
-: So at times when, for example,
you were found on the street, weren't you,
by a couple in Munich. -: Yeah.
-: Who wanted to adopt you. -: Yeah.
-: Yeah, tell me about that. (intense music)
-: I decided to lay down on the highway.
That wasn't the first time I did it.
So I knew that there was two option.
Either the car go just on top of me,
and that will be the end of the story.
Or someone would stop, call the ambulance,
the police, and whoever.
That's exactly what happened.
A car stop. Lots of people stopped.
They called the police, the ambulance, and then there's me.
And a very important question is how old are you?
So I said 14.
So they took me to the children hospital.
And the next morning I saw a big black guy,
and a nice lady coming.
And they presented themselves.
Their name were Bill and Jasmina.
The man was from the United States.
And you know, they stay with me,
they bring me McDonald's and everything.
But then at a certain point I wanted to leave.
And so the police stopped me,
and put me in a psychiatric children hospital.
So I stayed there a few days and then came the question,
what was gonna happen to me.
They say "We want to put you in a children home,
but the police first want
to take your fingerprints and your picture."
The German police immediately found out who I was
because I've been acting very much in Germany.
And then I called Bill and Jasmina,
and they were mad at me because they discovered
that I wasn't 14, that I was 19.
-: That's it. So they were upset.
They were upset to find that they had been hoodwinked.
I think that people have an awful lot of empathy
and sympathy with somebody who wants to be loved
be cared for, and feel that they belong somewhere,
because we all feel that.
But it's the exploitative way that you went about it.
And I feel that your background certainly explains that.
It explains the behavior,
but it doesn't justify the behavior.
I think that you do try and justify your behavior somewhat.
-: No. Explain it.
Because there is no justification.
There is only action, reaction.
What you say makes sense.
I understand what you're saying.
I'm not in denial, but I'm at the same time
have to tell you, what was I supposed to do?
-: The hope was that he could go to America,
and he would be enveloped in this wonderful,
idyllic family life.
Which of course it didn't turn out to be
because he's chasing a fantasy.
-: I guess next question is.
Let's say he becomes perfect Nicolas Barclay,
but the family still doesn't love Nicolas Barclay.
Does he succeed or fail?
-: He fails, but he sets himself up to fail,
doesn't he constantly?
Because if you are looking for love and affection,
well, A, how realistic are you being?
He's actually wanting to recreate a childhood
that doesn't exist.
There's no such thing as the perfect,
Walton's childhood, is there really?
Were you looking for some kind of family utopia?
-: Shelters, family. I was looking.
Sometime, I found those places.
Where I was one, nobody give a damn
about what was my real name?
They call me new name I gave.
I was just 14 years old Alex, or 14 years old Ernie.
I was looking for this place where I could be,
where I could have a normal childhood.
Going to school, play sports.
And that was what I was looking for.
The perfect place.
Loving mother with their kids hugging them.
And you can see in their eyes and the way they speak
that they love them.
I wanted that. I didn't want nothing else.
I didn't want no money, I didn't want Nike's,
or I didn't want no comfort.
I could have slept on the floor like a dog
if I did have that. I didn't want nothing else.
Just love.
-: If you present a different identity to your own,
to other people, you know in your heart of hearts,
that whatever love and affection you are getting
is based on a lie.
-: He's not just saying, look, I'm Nicholas Barclay,
but I'm Nicholas Barclay who has been traumatized.
-: But by being this traumatized child over
and over and over again, you are re-enacting trauma.
You're re-enacting dysfunctional relationships
all of the time and dysfunctional behavior all of the time.
So it's never going to result in a happy ending.
-: I knew I was gonna go to prison and I say, "Okay,
I'm gonna go to prison." I took, I will pay.
-: You were sentenced to six years in prison
for passport fraud and perjury.
So an American prison is a very, very different environment
to a children's home, or a foster home,
or a children's hospital.
So how did you cope in that environment?
-: Inmates knew very quickly
that I could do absolutely anything.
I could put needles into my arms. I cut cut my face.
I could act crazy. And the guards aided this.
-: So, it was an act then.
So this wasn't you feeling that you wanted to self harm?
This was you acting crazy?
-: Both. -: Both.
-: I wanted to cut my face, not deeply, just superficially.
But you can make a lot of bloods anyway.
And that was a clear message.
So yes, it was manipulative, but at the same time,
it felt good because it took my mind somewhere else.
And at the same time, looking on the face and trust me,
it's something of older inmates looking at you.
And I'm talking about hundreds of inmates looking at you
with blood everywhere, at least you know for sure
that they weren't gonna come and look after you.
Especially American, white American supremacist,
and all this. They didn't like it.
They smell problems with me.
But then the Mexican, because I speak Spanish,
because of, I don't know maybe my aura,
I don't know what it is, adopted me.
Really like a family, they were looking after me,
we were eating together.
-: And how much of the real Frederic Bourdin
did you show to them?
-: There was not much left.
I was just a Mexican.
My accent was Mexican, my way of dressing was Mexican.
Where and when there was fights,
I had to be a Mexican.
And I couldn't just go to a phone booth,
and call the police and say,
"I'm 14 years old and I'm in prison."
So I had to be, and I had to become part of the environment.
-: There's a number of ways you can try to lie.
You can try to go the equivalent of the poker face.
-: Yeah.
-: Try to control your behavior.
Some con artists try to create the backdrop.
So if I'm kinda trying to convince other people
that I am a prince, or some rich guy,
I need to sort of paint the walls if you will.
Put up stuff that looks really expensive,
show up in a helicopter, or a private jet.
And you let people deceive themselves about you.
It's almost like you don't have to lie.
But there's another way you can do this.
And that is to so deeply inhabit a character,
so to be able to sort of transport,
like method acting right? -: Yeah.
-: But for day-to-day life, not for a play, for a life.
Not a lot of people can sort of turn into another character.
And there are some branches of con artist,
that's the method.
It's hard to do, and I think this is what we have here.
(intense somber music)
Narrator: In 2003, Frederick Bourdin was released
from prison and deported back to France.
Bourdin moved to the French city of Grenoble,
where he learned of the disappearance
of the boy, Leo Belay.
He assumed the identity of the boy,
but a DNA test revealed Bourdin was lying.
News Reporter 2: According to an American magazine,
a psychiatrist evaluated Bourdin concluded,
"We are very pessimistic about modifying-" (voice fades)
-: I think it is true that he was always
in this quest for love that he didn't have as a child.
I think that is true.
But it was not the only thing he was craving.
He was also craving attention.
It was very important for him that he was not a nobody.
(Bourdin speaks Spanish)
-: Welcome to my personal nightmare.
-: And what I showed them is really what I am.
Desperate somehow, sad, lost.
And because human beings are,
naturally I would say good inside.
They look at me and they see what there is to see,
not what I want to show them.
-: The primary scale of anybody who wishes to deceive.
But also because this is about con artistry.
And I know that you don't like that term.
But it's about evoking real emotions in people. Isn't it?
-: It's evoking real emotion within myself first.
When I did the thing so many times,
it never occurred in my head to say,
"Okay, I'm gonna deceive those people." No.
-: It never occurred to you that you were deceiving them?
-: I know that I was lying to them about my age,
and my identity.
But to me, it was more like a technical things.
-: You never knew, really knew, where to stand with him
because he would tell you that he was a liar.
That he'd always been a liar.
And the only thing he was not lying about is
that the thing he was looking for,
the thing he was after, was love.
That's the only thing that was true.
Frederic: Now today, I don't give a single-
I don't care about myself.
I only care about my kids.
My children, they are my world.
Kerry: Does that then fill the void that you felt?
-: No. You cannot fill a void like mine.
I wish you could.
I wish there was an injection or something
they would put on my arm and say,
"That's it, no void anymore."
-: So, what do you do to cope when you're
not feeling so good at the moment?
-: Well, I play video games.
So that's, yeah. I love video games.
Because video games, people don't see me.
So I still can pretend I'm 14.
I'm a kid that never grew up.
I'm the real Peter Pan. That's me.
Normal person would have jumped from a bridge
or hanged themself, or end of this misery from long ago.
But for some reason I keep with it.
-: So it's hard to be you.
-: Yeah.
Yeah, because everything I did in my life
as an adult was to feel good because I don't feel good.
So when you don't feel good, you want to feel good.
You want to feel normal. You want to feel happy.
(somber music) (waves crashing)
-: I'm really glad I got to speak to you a number of times,
because I felt that I got the more authentic you
after we'd spoken about your history.
And I think I got the more spontaneous you.
And I loved chatting to you in the garden.
So I'm really glad that I got to know you
a bit better over the whole process.
I would say that you don't see yourself as a con artist
because you were acting out of emotional need,
rather than for financial gain.
So it's the difference, isn't it?
Between greedy and needy?
-: Yeah.
-: I accept that.
What I will say is though.
That when you are very focused on your own emotional needs,
you can become insensitive,
or blind to other people's emotional needs and rights.
-: That might be true.
-: And I think that that is what has happened.
-: Mhm hmm.
-: When people are under stress,
this increases the likelihood
of doing the dominant response.
The dominant response for you is
to try to become someone else.
Maybe some of the details of your past
that you use to test,
maybe a little bit more questionable in some ways.
You study the characters, if you will.
Almost, we use the word method acting.
And that seems to be how you sort of approach this,
and you inhabit this.
And you'd mentioned this to Kerry to some extent.
Asking about, well, what do you do to affect
the appearance of a 15 year old?
-: When you have to make choices and then explain them,
you're much faster and much different
than a lot of the other subjects
in quickly coming up with a new story,
and overwriting existing memories with a new narrative.
And when you write a new story, it becomes reality.
-: So, I'd like to give you a challenge
because you've got some brilliant skills here,
brilliant skills.
If you feel the need, as I know that you do,
to embody another person, to inhabit another persona
for a while because it's difficult to be Frederic Bourdin.
Then study and mimic a healthy adult
because a healthy adult is somebody
that knows that within them, of course,
there's an inner child,
and that inner child might be wounded.
But they don't look for other people to nurture that.
They nurture that wounded child themselves,
and they are far more concerned for the people around them
that maybe you did at times.
And that's just a far more satisfying way of living life.
And I believe that you've got the skills to do it.
I really do. Does that make sense?
-: It makes sense. -: Yeah.
Will you try?
-: I'm an eternal learner. So. Let's see.
Okay. (somber music)
-: Thank you.
Kerry: Well, Frederic. Take care.
(somber music)