The truth is, it has become easy to lie

From football coaches to authors to murderers, honesty seems to be getting pushed to the brink of extinction.

By STEPHEN BUCKLEY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 20, 2002

ATLANTA -- Is truth dead in America? If it is, what killed it?

Was it a media culture that values speed and simplicity over nuance and context?

Was it our doubled-edged obsession with the Internet and fax machines and cell phones, tools that give us greater access to truth even while making it easier to deceive?

Was it a sort of pragmatism run amok, in which truth is just a pesky obstacle on the way to our dreams?

This much is true: Americans lie. We lie more, and we lie more easily. We lie on resumes; we commit perjury; we bolster our personal narratives with half-truths and made-up facts.

Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, says he was a Vietnam War hero when he was never there. Stephen Ambrose apologizes for lifting historians' words for his book, The Wild Blue. Football coach George O'Leary leaves his job at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, but is fired before he starts at Notre Dame over a 20-year-old lie on his official bio.

These episodes jolt us every few months, then go away. The protagonists move on, and so do we. Maybe that's why we lie: Because more than ever, we think we can get away with it. Because more than ever, we react to untruth with a collective shrug.

Which brings us to Dave Basham, Richard Hyde, Ralph Perdomo and Jack Reale. They all live in and around Atlanta, and they know lies.

They sift through deception, weigh it, study it. They listen to liars, interrogate them, trap them, sort through motive and pathology. They have helped send liars to prison.

Basham, thick-chested and down-to-earth, conducts lie detector tests and investigations of all kinds. Hyde, hyperbolic and hyperactive, is an investigator for an elite law firm; his past lives include muckraking journalist and undercover detective. Perdomo, a silver-haired, pistol-toting renaissance man, was a private investigator for 40 years, whose client roster includes Rob Lowe and Dennis Rodman. In the late 1990s, he was also a politician.

Reale, an eloquent baritone who has been a trial lawyer for 26 years, represents George O'Leary. Two decades ago, O'Leary said he played three years of football at the University of New Hampshire. That wasn't true. Later, his bio said he earned a master's degree from New York University. That wasn't true either.

Was he a liar, or a fool? What does his deception say about him? What does our reaction say about us?

Are all lies created equal?

It's a question Richard Hyde keeps meandering back to as he sits in his office, battered Rockport hiking boots hanging off his desk.

His silver cell phone rings. He checks the number.

"Ex-wife," he says, and doesn't answer.

He is shielded by a state-of-the-art Toshiba laptop. The walls in his office are bare but for an enormous map of the state of Georgia and an Atomic Clock that reads 15:37.

The ex-wife calls again. He doesn't answer.

"Is that dishonest?" he asks. "Is that a deception?"

During his years as an undercover detective, Hyde "lied dozens of times every hour." He says he also lied as an investigative TV journalist, when he won four Emmys for the stories he did over five years.

Today he works as an investigator for one of Atlanta's most prestigious law firms. His boss is Mike Bowers, former attorney general of Georgia. Bowers entered the 1998 governor's race, but his campaign crashed when his longtime affair with his secretary came to light.

Hyde, fast-talking and loud-laughing, smiles when he tells people this. He can afford to smile a lot these days, given that he makes $175 an hour. Pretty good for a man who took 11 years to get his college diploma, which he carries around laminated in his wallet.

He'll tell you within minutes of meeting him that he's half-Creek Indian and a Southern Baptist, a "beat-up hunk of meat with my belly hanging over my belt." He'll tell you that college took 11 years because he was married and raising two kids, and trolling Atlanta's underbelly at all hours, trying to catch bad guys.

As a police officer, he lied all the time.

Two suspects are in separate rooms. Detectives tell one suspect that his pal has ratted him out; it's not true.

"Is that lying?" he says with a grin. "Hey, the law encourages you to use trickery."

A female police officer stands on a sidewalk dressed as a prostitute waiting to snag an unsuspecting john.

"Is that lying? Or is that good police work?"

When Hyde was an undercover detective in Atlanta, the department suffered a budget crunch. It ran out of money for drug buys, so Hyde and his partner drove their undercover car out to Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport and pretended to be cabbies. They took passengers downtown, then used the cash for their buys.

"They didn't get held up in the cab," Hyde says. "They didn't get charged the wrong fare. It's just what we had to do to put crooks in jail."

His point is simple: Lying isn't always wrong, and telling the truth isn't always right. Depends on whom you're lying to, why you're lying, and who was harmed.

Where does that leave people like O'Leary?

Georgia Tech, where he coached from 1994 until last December, is a public school and thus a government institution. If O'Leary provided inaccurate information to the school, it's a felony.

"Technically, he broke the law," Hyde says. "Is it the crime of the century? No. What he should have done is say, "Hey, I don't know if this matters to you guys, but there's some stuff on my resume that's not right. Please forgive me.' Had he done that, he'd be the coach at Notre Dame today."

What's worse: the lies of public figures, or how the news media cover those stories?

Yes, Reale says, O'Leary did lie two decades ago -- after Syracuse University hired him and asked for some personal information. He didn't write the inaccuracy himself, but he never corrected it either.

For 20 years after that, no one verified his bio, not the San Diego Chargers (where he was an assistant coach in the early 1990s), not Georgia Tech, not Notre Dame.

"It was an after-the-fact inaccuracy that had little to do with his job," Reale said. "Now, it's become the Rosenbergs meet the Lindbergh baby."

When O'Leary applied for the Notre Dame job, he said he had 39 hours toward his master's degree -- although since the late 1980s, his official bio said he had completed the degree.

Reale does not know why O'Leary never changed the bio. He does not know why O'Leary lied in the first place; after all, he already had the job. What Reale does believe is this: The subtleties of the story were obliterated by the media, and their coverage did more disservice to the truth than did O'Leary's deception.

"It is never appropriate or good to have something out there that is not totally accurate," he said. But "half the stuff you read in those (college athletic) media guides is fluff and embellishment. If he had applied to a hospital as a doctor, and then it turns out he never actually went to medical school, then that would be different."

People lie all the time in our society, he says. They say they caught an 8-pound bass when it was really 3 pounds. They say they're 77 years old when they're really 81. They say they have real hair when they've got a transplant. They don't lose their jobs.

"We really jumped on this guy and ripped him to shreds," the attorney said. "He wasn't arrested for drunk driving or spouse abuse, there was no misappropriation of funds, or bad behavior.

"Why do we do these kinds of things?"

Does technology lead us to truth?

Dave Basham says yes -- and no.

The flat, unassuming machine with wires and graph paper and short needles at the back of his office has led him to truth hundreds of times. It's a polygraph, and it is an important tool of his trade.

Basham runs the Answers Private Detective Agency. His business is an assortment of corporate work and domestic cases. He has done this kind of work for more than 35 years now, first in the military, then as a private investigator.

He says he has seen the gamut of liars. Husbands who have denied their cheating ways for years. A candidate for a chief financial officer's job who said he had a master's degree when he had never graduated from college. A man who had murdered someone in another state.

He says that today, we have more opportunities than ever to deceive.

The Internet helps him do a background check in a half-hour (it used to take days), but it also is a place where you can conceal your identity and where your true identity can be stolen, a place where phony degrees, drivers' licenses and Social Security cards are a mouse click away. He gets two or three sham offers every day.

Cell phones and fax machines?

These days, those are just two of the three tools you need (along with a computer) to start a bogus business from the basement. Or you can buy a cell phone in Miami and use it all over the country, and no one will ever know that you're not calling from Miami.

George O'Leary's case doesn't surprise him. Resumes and official bios aren't new technology, but they are opportunities to lie. Today, he says, even people applying for minimum wage jobs need resumes. The more competition, the more pressure to lie about ourselves on paper.

"It's like a lady who's asked for a passport photo, but provides a glamour shot instead," says the 52-year-old investigator.

From a nondescript white building off the highway, Basham and seven other sleuths handle hundreds of cases a year. Some take less than a day. Others go on for years.

There may be no way to purge our society of lying, he says. Even the investigator acknowledges that he lies occasionally.

"When your wife asks you about that new dress," he says, "there's really only one answer."

Can we handle the truth?

Ralph Perdomo thought the answer was yes. He thought they wanted him on the Putnam County Commission. He thought they needed him.

He campaigned on his integrity. He was private investigator-cum-renaissance man, who wrote fiction, took artsy photographs, made his own brandywine.

Voters knew him as a man who had risen to become one of America's most famous private investigators. His work and court testimony helped imprison a wealthy Atlanta lawyer and judge named Fred Tokars, who killed his wife in 1992.

Today a .38-caliber pistol rests just out of sight in Perdomo's airy office, on a shelf beneath the CD case. The surrounding walls and shelves are crammed with cameras, photos, diplomas, certificates and hundreds of books -- novels, software manuals, psychology manuals with titles like Understanding Human Behavior.

Over four decades as a private investigator, Perdomo thought he could write his own book about human behavior. "I love watching people," says Perdomo, 68. "People are fascinating."

None of his gritty experience, though, prepared him for politics, where he thought his honesty would help improve life in this verdant area of lakes and ponds and bucolic communities with names like Sebastian Cove.

He was wrong. No one wanted to hear of commissioners spending $10,000 to pave a private driveway. He didn't win friends by questioning why certain residents were able to get culvert pipes run to their new houses for free. People got tired of hearing him wonder out loud why county equipment and materials were being used to build roads on private property.

He kept hearing, "That's the way it's done. That's the way we always do things."

To which he would respond: "Things change."

"I was really surprised at the lying that goes on in politics," he says. "It really opened up my eyes to a totally new world."

This is what his truth-telling got him: The public voted him out of office after his first two-year term.

It made him realize again how numb we've become to deception, how much the world has changed.

"If I lied to my daddy," he says, "he'd beat my tail till I couldn't sit down, and I'm grateful for that. Because that doesn't happen today."

On Jan. 9, Jack Reale said he didn't know how long it would take his shattered client to recover from losing the job as head coach at Notre Dame for lying.

On Jan. 11, the Minnesota Vikings named George O'Leary an assistant head coach in charge of the defensive line. O'Leary was rescued by the Vikings' new head coach, who played for O'Leary when he coached high school ball on Long Island.

He was out of work for 34 days.

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