Masterminds: The Anthon Forgeries
Masterminds: The Anthon Forgeries
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Masterminds: The Anthon Forgeries
The Anthon Forgeries
Click to viewSeason 1, Episode 1, Aired 7/16/03
Mark Hoffman made a career for himself as one of the most skilled forgers in American history. Forging and altering coins, books, and historical documents, he conned unwary collectors and historians out of thousands. But his life as a counterfeiter reached its greatest heights when he successfully duped the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints by selling them phony documents and letters detailing the early Mormon movement. With church officials unaware of their true authenticity, Hoffman became bolder and stepped up his game, earning hundreds of thousands with his false documents. However, when massive debts began to pile up and he couldn't produce his forgeries at a fast enough rate, Hoffman tried to buy time by sending mail bombs to those who threatened to ruin his career, and crossed the line from counterfeiter to murderer.
The Facts
Oath of a Freeman
In addition to documents from Mormon history, Hofmann also forged and sold signatures of many famous non-Mormons, including George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton, Paul Revere, Myles Standish, and Button Gwinnett, whose signature was the rarest, and therefore the most valuable, of any signer of the Declaration of Independence.
He also forged a previously unknown poem in the hand of Emily Dickinson. But Hofmann's grandest scheme was to forge what was perhaps the most famous missing document in American colonial history, the Oath of a Freeman. The one-page Oath had been printed in 1639, the first document to be printed in Britain's American colonies; but only about fifty copies had been made, and none of these was extant. A genuine example was probably worth over a million dollars in 1985, and Hofmann's agents began to negotiate a sale to the Library of Congress.
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