Lawrence X. Cusack JFK Papers
Lawrence X. Cusack was responsible for trying rewrite the way that America and the world remembers John F. Kennedy. In 1997 Lawrence X. Cusack produced a number of documents which he claimed had once belonged to his father. His father having been an attorney who had once represented the mother of Marilyn Monroe. To that end the documents featured evidence of an affair between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
Cusack for his part was living as lavish a lifestyle as one could imagine, spending as much as $50,000 a month and having 11 luxury cars. The money came from the $7 million that he got from the sale of the 200 different documents that he claimed once belonged to John F. Kennedy. Seymour Hersh wrote an expose on the Kennedys which he called The Dark Side of Camelot. He vouched for all the documents and even showed them to ABC. The papers and the book landed Hersh a $2 million deal with ABC.
But when ABC got a closer look at the documents and had experts compare times and details, the forgery was discovered. On the day the special featuring the documents was set to air, ABC instead aired a 20/20 special that involved confronting Cusack about the forgeries. Cusack went to trial, all the while claiming that the documents were real. He was convicted of 13 different counts of fraud which came with a sentence of 10 years in prison. His crime would have normally only carried a 5-year sentence but due to the large amount of money lost by investors, the misrepresentation of history and the tarnishing of the Kennedy name, the sentence was increased.