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MARIO WAS RIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Michael Finkel killed his family

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He is an american journalist,and memorist, who has written the books ; true story Murder,Memoir,Mea Cupal and the Stranger in The Woods.

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A few years ago, Michael Finkel's journalism career was as dead as yesterday's newspaper because he had lied in an article for the New York Times Magazine. Today, the 36-year-old Bozeman, Mont., resident has banked a half- million dollar advance on his first book, sold its film rights to Brad Pitt's production company and has a year-old marriage with a baby on the way.

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A few years ago, Michael Finkel's journalism career was as dead as yesterday's newspaper because he had lied in an article for the New York Times Magazine. Today, the 36-year-old Bozeman, Mont., resident has banked a half- million dollar advance on his first book, sold its film rights to Brad Pitt's production company and has a year-old marriage with a baby on the way.

What made the difference? The fact that a young, clean-cut father in Oregon murdered his wife and three young children, dumped their bodies in the water and then went on the lam to Mexico, using as his alias the name "Michael Finkel" and posing as a writer for the New York Times.

"I'm the luckiest guy who'll ever sit across the table from you," says the slightly built Finkel, a man with a big, disarming smile who looks you directly in the eye when he talks. His singular tale of disgrace and redemption has just been published as "True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa" (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $29.95), and it's already earned him attention from CBS' "48 Hours" and National Public Radio, not to mention a lot of reviews, some of which are positive, some of which are unforgiving of his journalistic sin.

Sporting rimless glasses with hip tortoise-shell accents that probably are less than all the rage in Bozeman, Finkel quickly and repeatedly concedes there are "no excuses" for what he did when he took interviews with a number of subjects on a story about working conditions on cocoa plantations in West Africa and created a composite character out of them. While there was, in fact, someone named Youssouf Malé among the young men he interviewed for the 2002 Times Magazine article, "his" story, as Finkel wrote it, was actually constructed from bits and pieces of other young men's stories.

While some might say that Finkel's sins were not as great as those of Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass, in a business whose credibility is constantly under scrutiny, it didn't matter. Adam Moss, then editor of the Times Magazine, fired him, predicting that Finkel was probably young enough to resurrect his career down the road, but not at the Times. Even now, there are some publications that won't give Finkel any ink and consider him a journalistic pariah.

"I committed pretty much the worst thing you can do, which is defraud the readers," he says. "Even right now, talking about it, I get this prickly sweat of shame on my forehead and it's like I can't believe I did that."

So why, then, did he do it? After all, his record as a journalist, writing for various magazines, was otherwise spotless. The simplistic answer, as comes through in the book, is that he thought it made a better story.

"I deluded myself into thinking I was serving a higher truth," he says. "I knew it was a one-time idiotic act, but I felt like it was an error of creativity rather than evilness. I didn't think I would get caught, but that's no excuse."

Finkel retreated to his Montana home to wait for the Times editor's note that would undoubtedly send his career into a tailspin. The day before the note was published, he got a call from a reporter in Oregon. He assumed the word was already out about his disgrace, but the reporter didn't know about Finkel's dismissal: Instead, he wanted to talk about a murder suspect named Christian Longo who was using Finkel's name when he was apprehended in Cancun, Mexico.

When Finkel heard the story, he wanted to know more, initially just about why Longo decided to pretend to be Michael Finkel. Something told him that there was a story here and perhaps a way to redeem his career.

"It felt like this was divine intervention. I had no idea what sense would be made of it, but it seemed just so far beyond coincidence that Longo was using my name," he says.

Longo came from a devout Jehovah's Witness family in the Midwest, fell in love as a teenager with a woman seven years his senior, married her and set out to live a middle-class version of the American dream. He had several jobs, including delivering the New York Times, and also started his own business, with financial support from his father, getting newly built homes ready for occupancy.

But Longo lived beyond his means, and as he and his wife, MaryJane, had their three children, Longo's income couldn't keep up. He wrote counterfeit checks, was caught and later "disfellowshipped" by the church, a process of being shunned by other church members, even on the street. He rented a car and illegally took it out of state, driving MaryJane and the kids to a warehouse in Ohio. From there, they hit the road again and ended up in Oregon.

Then one day Longo was gone.

MaryJane's body and that of their daughter Madison were found in a suitcase in the bay. The other two children were found soon after, their small, perfect bodies weighted down under the water by large stones.

Finkel wrote a letter to Longo in jail, asking if they could talk.

"I had no idea if I would be able to publish anything from it, or even if the guy would get in touch with me," he says.

Longo did contact him and the two began a complicated, intense relationship that developed through thousands of pages of letters and hundreds of phone calls -- all of which Finkel taped.

Although both men pledged to be entirely honest with each other, there were degrees of honesty on both sides. For Finkel, honestly was absolutely imperative in order to prove himself again.

"I thought that if I were able to be truthful with Longo -- an accused murderer and a possible con man; a person who might easily forgive deceit -- then I'd demonstrate ... that I had moved beyond the dishonest behavior that had cost me my job," he writes in the book. And yet, after Finkel talked about Longo to another writer who was working on a book about the murders, Longo tested him to see if he'd admit to the conversation. He didn't. And he remains ashamed of lying to a convicted murderer to this day.

"I was trying to be absolutely honest to Longo and I failed," he says. "If I can be honest with this guy, this was like the ultimate test. And I failed. I think of the whole relationship with Longo as a chess game that I lost."

Finkel found himself driven to reveal everything about his life to Longo. With his career gone, Finkel found in Longo a kind of father confessor figure and, ultimately perhaps, an indirect agent of his redemption.

"The letters I wrote to Longo are some of the most open, brutally honest letters I've ever written," Finkel says, adding that Longo was the first person he told about his engagement to Jill Barker.

It was a "cat-and-cat game," Finkel says now, with the two men "pawing" at and manipulating each other for their own purposes. Through it all, Finkel thought he understood Longo. It wasn't until Longo had his day in court that Finkel saw for the first time that he had been "test-driving his defense" with him all along.

A trust had been broken. Finkel had been betrayed. And no one was more surprised than Finkel himself.

"My fight-or-flight mechanism ... had served me well in Gaza, in Afghanistan and all the places I'd been. I thought the reason I'd been able to escape unscathed was that I had a pretty good sense of another human, and it totally threw me off" with Longo, he says.

As the book develops, we can't help but see the odd parallels in the lives of Finkel and Longo. The disgraced writer sees the accused murderer as "the only person in my life I felt morally superior to." And believing himself better than other people was also important to Longo who, Finkel writes, "wore his vocabulary as a form of intellectual armor, a way to show others that even as a prisoner he was still in some ways superior." Longo, who had stolen Finkel's name, fancied himself a writer and fantasized about living the life of a foreign correspondent, someone like Finkel.

Sitting in the bright San Francisco sunlight two years after Longo was sentenced to death for the murders, Finkel points out that the room he uses as his writing studio -- a janitor's closet in a Montana elementary school -- is very small and windowless, about the same size as Longo's windowless cell.

And yet, Longo strangled his wife, a woman who eventually knew her husband was lying to her but was willing to follow him until the final four minutes of her life. That's about the time it takes to strangle a human being, Finkel says. He asks you to imagine her looking into her husband's eyes. He wishes he could know what she thought during the final four minutes.

Yes, Longo is evil and, so far, it's impossible to understand what led him to such monstrous violence. That question haunts Finkel, but so does something else:

"It's beyond imagining, but yet there's a convenient way of demonizing or monsterizing a person like Longo," he says. "But that's too easy of an out, that somehow he's not human, but he is human and so therefore it is part of it -- he is human, he has exactly the same number of genes you do or I do."

Recently, Finkel has been in touch with Longo again and has sent him an advance copy of his book. He knows, somehow, that Longo will always be part of his life. Longo is appealing his case now and the process could take years. Finkel thinks Longo may never be put to death for what he did.

"True Story" is an ironic title. Michael Finkel knows that. Otherwise, he says, he told the story "exactly how it happened." And, of course, he triple- checked every fact, the spelling of every word.

"America might be the land of second chances, but it ain't the land of third chances," he says. "I am guaranteeing you that if you see my byline on a story, it's going to be the cleanest story you've ever read."

Michael Finkel wants you to count on that.

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After getting fired by the New York Times for lying in print, a reporter stumbled on the story of his life

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A few years ago, Michael Finkel's journalism career was as dead as yesterday's newspaper because he had lied in an article for the New York Times Magazine. Today, the 36-year-old Bozeman, Mont., resident has banked a half- million dollar advance on his first book, sold its film rights to Brad Pitt's production company and has a year-old marriage with a baby on the way.