The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman

This ended up being a bit like a philosophical true crime docuseries exploring some of the greyer areas of our notions of free will. 

As ever with this sort of thing, I wasn't entirely sure how deliberately the key questions were being asked by the film-makers. And whether some of the stuff which had been rather obviously left out, had also been omitted in a calculated manner. 

Two extended cases of puppeteering by a man called Robert Hendy-Freeguard are detailed, in two distinct timelines, one in the early nineties and the other a couple of decades later in 2011-13. 

In the first a crime is very definitely committed and then somewhat less definitely so, and the open-endedness is even more conspicuous in the second. 

How much psychological coercion is required for the law to be broken? 

I think most of us will watch this and understand the ethical lines that were crossed, but will also understand why it is hard for the legal system to pinpoint exactly when a person has been deprived of liberty without obvious physical constraints. This conundrum has after all lain at the heart of our British notions of freedom ever since Hobbes penned Leviathan. 

The really cunning part of Freeguard's plan here was that he somehow prevented his victims from appreciating how they had been co-opted into acting as his accomplices by persuading them that they were accomplices in some other grand, fabricated conspiracy. Yet were they after all, accomplices?

I doubt I am alone in thinking that of all the complex psychologies on display here, it was this man's that became the most fascinating and ultimately entertaining across the three episodes. 

I have come across a handful of conmen over the course of my life and there has always been something almost coarsely obvious about them. 

Many of their sort seem to acquire followers who appear to be knowingly along for the ride, in effect conning the conner into believing they've been conned. 

The first I came across was a man who went by the name of Perry Shah who wined and dined my parents in Marbella in the early 80s, claiming to be a close descendent of the King of Afghanistan. From day one my father confided to me that this would lead inevitably to a request for money in a hurry once we had returned to London. Which, of course, it did. 

I have also come across a related species  — the snake oil salesmen — who are perhaps distinguished by their tendency to end up at least partially self-bamboozled by the fantasy world they build around themselves. 

Well below the threshold for legal intervention in our modern commercial world are those who would market a product that only really exists in fully-completed, functional form inside their own heads. One might posit that our global economy has come to depend on them.