Mark was tweaking when he forged his own death certificate. Meth gave him diamantaire focus and huge confidence. The drug was like a cheering section in his veins, telling him he was a genius, they’d never catch him. This was late in October 2003, at his desk in the apartment on Willoughby Avenue in West Hollywood.
Mark based the forgery, as usual, on his brother Luke’s death certificate, now more than ten years old. Using Photoshop, he altered names, dates, vital statistics. (Such a boon, Photoshop. For his first forgery, he’d had to use scissors and adhesive.) He imported the public health director’s signature straight into the file. The final flourish was the embossed seal he’d bought off the shelf at Office Depot.
Sometime between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M., Mark completed the death certificate, as well as a fake New York Times paid death notice—a ridiculously easy project, by comparison. In the high-WASP tones of his childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, he wrote a cover letter for the documents, addressed to the Los Angeles County Probation Department. He signed the letter in the name of his dead brother, Luke.
It was his sad duty, “Luke” wrote, to report the death of his brother, Mark Olmsted, from AIDS complications. He continued: The members of Mark's family had been shocked to discover, among his personal effects, evidence of his recent arrest. Mark had kept all of them completely in the dark about his troubles with the law. But here, enclosed, were Mark’s obituary and a certified copy of his death certificate, so that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department need no longer concern itself with Mark.
On November 4, a deputy probation officer replied by mail to “Luke.” The county was dropping all charges against his deceased brother, Mark, effective immediately.
More than ten years after L.A. County declared him dead, Mark Olmsted contacted me on Twitter, claiming to have carried out an ingenious, decade-long con during one of the most terrible pandemics in world history. He said he'd been diagnosed with AIDS in the early 1980s, at age 30, and had never expected to reach his 40s. But instead of dying, he had succumbed to a kind of temporary insanity—one that lasted for years.
To finance the life he kept thinking would end at any moment, he had committed increasingly creative and reckless varieties of fraud. He told me in our first conversations that he had faked his own death several times; I couldn’t quite keep track of how many. He had stolen his brother’s identity and faked his death, too, despite the fact that his brother was already dead.
Over the phone, he sometimes sounded like a profiteer of the AIDS era, and sometimes like a victim of it. I wasn’t always sure he was even telling me the truth. He talked and talked, in the insistent, consuming way that people who have endured trauma often do—a wall of words.
He had conned his way into great sums of money, but now he had little to his name aside from his strange story. It’s a love story, in a way, and a ghost story. A story of two men who, if they hadn’t been brothers, most certainly wouldn’t have been friends.
Luke, Mark’s brother, was two years older. He was a Boys’ Life boy, industrious and athletic, an Eagle Scout who earned all his badges. In high school, Luke had a steady girlfriend and starred on the swim team. When Sandra, their teenage sister, was beaten by a boyfriend, it was Luke she went to for protection, not their alcoholic father. She told me that Luke was more like a parent than a brother.
Mark idolized the stoic, all-American big brother who beat him at every game they played. But if Luke’s way was to confront pain head on, Mark’s was to skate across it. If he couldn’t win people’s affection by being virtuous, like his brother, he’d do it by being funny. He was quick-witted and precocious, Sandra said—the family cut-up. At the dinner table, when their father drank too much and lost his place in the middle of a sentence, Mark would finish it. And put a button on it. Everything was fine!
What Mark and Luke had in common—perhaps the only thing they had in common—was that they were both gay. Mark had known about himself all along, but he’d never questioned the sexuality of his hypermasculine brother. Then, when Mark, at age 18, came out to his parents, Luke wrote him from college. He berated Mark for the upheaval he was causing in the family. “I have the same feelings,” Luke admitted, to Mark’s utter astonishment. “But I don’t act on them.” From his dorm room far away, he was putting Mark in his place, as he always had.
A few years later, while Luke was preparing for medical school, he sought Mark’s help navigating the ropes of the gay scene in New York, where Mark was in film school. For once, Mark could be the wiser, more experienced brother; they moved in together. But Luke couldn’t walk into a bar and hold court the way Mark could. Luke's sexuality seemed to weigh him down.
After one of his extremely rare dates, Luke came home with a panicked look on his face. Mark, who loved to debrief his friends about their sex lives, was eager to tease him. But Luke could barely speak. “The condom broke,” he said.
At the time, in 1982, no test existed to confirm an HIV diagnosis—the virus itself wouldn’t have its name for another four years—but Mark assured Luke that the odds were in his favor. This was, what, the third person Luke had ever slept with?
Mark himself had had hundreds of partners. Earlier that same year, he’d experienced what were already recognized as the telltale symptoms of initial HIV infection: a fever lasting several weeks, flu-like ailments, and swollen lymph nodes. He had been dealing with the fear for a while. It would rise up out of nowhere, like a frigid eddy of wind. He didn’t mention any of this to his brother, but the fear prompted him to scrupulously practice safe sex from then on. It also led him to binge-drink, behavior that Luke condemned.
In late 1988, Luke came from San Diego, where he had begun his residency, to visit Mark at his new apartment in Brooklyn. From his second-floor window, Mark saw him arrive. Or at least he thought it was him. The person on the street looked like a grotesque, funhouse-mirror version of his brother. A Giacometti Luke. Mark waited until they were standing in his kitchen, then said, “Why are you so thin?”
Luke immediately began talking about his macrobiotic diet. It was a big fad at the time, rice and seaweed.
Mark doubted that a diet had caused so much weight loss. He interrupted Luke, his voice shaking, and announced that he’d tested positive.
Luke matter-of-factly said that he had, too.
Mark felt the room spin. It was his fault, he said. He was the one who had encouraged Luke to go to bars and pick up strangers.
But Luke wasn’t interested in self-pity or blame. He had been closely following the work of AIDS researchers, reading and studying. This was a scientific problem, and he felt confident that he could solve it. Neither of them was going to die.
In early 1990, Luke invited Mark to join him on the West Coast. Mark was writing screenplays now. Wouldn’t it be better for him to be in California? But they were making a pact, Mark told me: “Whoever got sick first, the other one would take care of him.”
Mark took an administrative position at an ad agency in Los Angeles, where he covertly wrote at his computer. Luke, who was now an M.D., got a job at a leading AIDS-medicine clinic. The state of AIDS science was still highly speculative, and so were his research methods. Mark told me that his brother engaged in one-man rogue experimentation: Luke drank his own urine, took selenium and zinc, kept a macrobiotic diet, lay in tanning beds for hours, replaced his blood with that of asymptomatic HIV-positive men, and oversaw an unsanctioned after-hours study in which he tried to stimulate immune response by injecting volunteers (and himself) with typhoid vaccine. None of it worked, and some of it might have qualified as malpractice, but Luke had a messianic conviction that the next thing would.
It was Luke who developed symptoms first—a hacking cough, which he blamed on the L.A. smog. He complained that he felt cold. He would wrap himself in a poncho and lie on the couch. He defended his macrobiotic diet, even as the weight melted off him. HIV, untreated, kills within an average of ten years, and it had been about that long for both brothers.
Like many doctors, Luke proved to be a terrible patient. He resisted going to the hospital when he contracted pneumocystis pneumonia, an opportunistic infection that was often the proximate cause of death in AIDS. He became more and more preoccupied with his failure to find a cure.
One afternoon, when Mark was heading out to the gym, Luke called to him from the couch. “How long will you be gone?”
“An hour?” Mark said.
Luke said, in his doctor’s authoritative voice, “When you’ve just had pneumo, you can easily pop a blood vessel in your lung. And drown in your own blood.”
If Luke was really worried about that, Mark said, he would call him midway through the workout to check on him.
Luke began to weep. “I don’t want to die alone.”
Mark went to the gym, and when he got back to the apartment, Luke was sheepish, because they both knew how melodramatic he’d been. People in their family didn’t carry on like this. But Luke had surely noticed Mark’s terrible discomfort, his brother’s instinct, as strong as ever, to run away from pain.
In the fall, Mark says, Luke’s co-workers had to ask him to stop coming into the clinic. “The doctor can’t be sicker than the patients,” they told him gently. He would return just once more, as a guest at an office Halloween party in 1990. That night, he and Mark came dressed in matching “Flying Nun” habits and wimples. Mark had jerry-rigged his costume out of paper and Scotch tape in a matter of minutes. Luke had taken hours with his, patiently measuring, plotting, and cutting. Luke had always beaten Mark at everything—sports, chess—and at the end of the night, he won the costume contest, too.
By January of 1991, Luke was dying. Mark helped him into his car and drove him to LAX so that their sister, Sandra, in Seattle, could take care of him during the time he had left.
Luke needed a wheelchair to get to his departure gate.
It was Luke’s decision to leave, Sandra said: He knew that Mark wasn’t strong enough to help him die.
Over the next three weeks, Luke deteriorated quickly. He lost control of his bowels, then the use of his right arm. He went in and out of sleep, emerging just long enough to plead, “Don’t let me wake up again.” The family had stockpiled morphine so that they could honor this last request. Luke died on February 9, 1991, at the age of 34.
Mark lost not just Luke, but nearly all of his friends to the virus. David, Tim, Paul, Kim, Robert, Glenn, Eric, Alan. He had barely begun grieving for one when another died.
Do I understand what he was up against? Mark asks me. Did I see that the disease had every single advantage? When you’re facing that kind of enemy, in that kind of battle, you’re allowed to cheat, aren’t you? There’s even an expression: “cheat death.”
But as far as we know, I say, no one else did what you did.
He smiles, because I’ve made his next point for him: Who else had the brains? The nerve?
Today, many survivors compare their experience of the AIDS epidemic to living through a war. Nearly 80 percent of Americans diagnosed with HIV before 1996—as both Mark and Luke were—would die, nearly half a million people. The scheme that Mark hatched arose out of a combination of cunning and desperation.
The rent was due, $850. Mark couldn’t possibly cover all of it, not by himself, not on his $21,000 salary. But Luke had left behind a bank account containing $10,000. Mark had been signing checks for his ailing brother for months before he died. Without thinking too much about it, he just kept signing them.
As the executor of his brother’s estate, Mark was supposed to mail copies of Luke’s death certificate to various agencies and creditors. But he had put the document out of sight instead. Holding it in his hand for the first time, he had shuddered. His own imminent death seemed to whisper to him from that piece of paper.
So when Luke’s disability payments arrived in the mail, Mark kept depositing them. It was easy: Luke’s bank was in San Diego, and he’d done all of his financial transactions by mail. And when Luke’s driver’s license came up for renewal a month or so after the funeral, the next step seemed both obvious and inevitable.
At the DMV counter, the clerk barely glanced at Mark. She had probably processed a hundred applications that day. Several weeks later an envelope arrived in the mail from the DMV. It contained a new State of California driver’s license bearing Luke Olmsted’s name and vital statistics—and Mark Olmsted’s picture.
The first time Mark used one of Luke’s credit cards would have been within months of the funeral—early 1991. He was probably drunk, he told me, settling a bar tab. The booze would have helped with the nerves. But was it really a crime—was it really identity theft—if he had every intention of making good on the monthly payments?
The second time Mark used Luke’s credit card… Seriously? Who remembers?
Rapidly, he emptied Luke’s bank account and racked up more and more charges on Luke’s credit card. Mark went out four nights a week, traveled when he felt like it. He partied: Alcohol medicated his terror of HIV. Crystal meth kept alive his libido, which was, he says, essential to his sense of who he was, and which his AIDS meds had all but annihilated. All of this was behavior Luke had deplored, but Mark regretted only that it was expensive.
One day, he noticed the box at the bottom of Luke’s credit card bill, the one that allowed you to insure the full balance in the event of the cardholder’s death. Mark X’ed the box. A plan was coming into focus.
He was always mentally filing away information that could be useful to him. Now he remembered the time he’d first held Luke’s death certificate, the aura of taboo that clung to it, the shudder it had elicited. It had a power that he could use.
At his desk on the day he first committed financial fraud, Mark didn’t feel at all anxious. During film school, he’d worked as an office assistant, and the task at hand didn’t strike him as much different: the copying, the office supplies, the fastidious busy work. By cutting and pasting a small rectangle of text from one photocopy of the death certificate onto another, Mark was able to postdate Luke’s death to 1992. He mailed the forged death certificate to the credit card company and waited.
When Luke’s next credit card statement arrived, it showed a balance of zero dollars. Like waving a magic wand, Mark thought1 .
After a test transaction on a second credit card—probably a bar tab again—went through, Mark began to use all of Luke’s cards, with a diminishing regard for the balances. These were his last years, and he wanted a good life.
In March of 1993, Mark fainted while he was cleaning his bathroom. When he regained consciousness, alone in his apartment, he couldn’t catch his breath or stop coughing. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. It was the beginning of the end.
HIV progresses by invading and destroying the body’s T cells, which fight infection. A healthy person has up to 1,500 T cells. Full-blown AIDS, with the complete collapse of the immune system, hits when you have fewer than 200. Mark had 125. He quit his job and went on disability, $18,000 a year. As often happened with AIDS, his numbers rebounded, just enough to take him out of immediate danger.
That was when a film producer flew him to Rome to write a movie.
Dissociative identity disorder is a condition in which a person mitigates trauma by taking refuge in one or more alternate personalities. Posing as Luke fulfilled a similar purpose for Mark. It made him feel safe, as he repeatedly told me. But in another, more mundane sense, committing identity theft was no different for Mark than waiting tables might have been: He was financing his screenwriting career.
In early 1991, within months of Luke’s death, a well-regarded documentary filmmaker named Christian Blackwood had optioned a romantic comedy Mark had written, about a modern-day immaculate conception. Mark and Blackwood (who wanted to get into features) spent six months furiously rewriting. In a stroke of luck, Blackwood ran into Whoopi Goldberg at the airport and pitched her the movie. She was won over, and—according to Mark and others who were close to the development process—she wrote a letter, at Blackwood's request, attaching herself to the project, so he could raise money for it. (Her representatives declined to comment for this story.) But soon afterward, Blackwood stopped responding to Mark’s calls, and on July 22, 1992, less than two months after Goldberg had sent him her letter, he died, of previously undiagnosed late-stage lung cancer. The movie collapsed. Mark was devastated. Death surrounded him, it seemed, and it was closing in.
Less than a year later, a friend put the script in the hands of producer Steve Abbott (A Fish Called Wanda). Abbott optioned it to MGM and attached Norman René, who had made the pioneering AIDS drama Longtime Companion, to direct. Abbott’s company flew Mark to Rome to work on rewrites. For ten days, René and Mark collaborated at the director’s home. “Completely a dream” is how Mark remembers this time. They took a side trip to Tuscany, to the farmhouse of a friend of René’s who’d gotten tired of the rat race in New York. The Italian weather, in April, was just cool enough to stop Mark from wondering why René never took off his sweater.
Then, as Blackwood had done, René fell out of touch. Mark heard that there’d been delays in insuring René as the director of the movie. What was the holdup? Finally came news: René had AIDS. The sweater he’d kept on in Rome had been hiding the Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions covering his torso. On May 24, 1996, Norman René died. The script would continue to draw interest, but as time passed too many other movies would make use of similar ideas. The project’s moment, and perhaps Mark’s, had come and gone.
During the mid-’90s, Mark ran up his credit card debt to $30,000. He bought new furniture. He traveled to London, New York, San Francisco, Montreal.
There were a lot of credit cards to keep track of—not just in Luke’s name but also in Mark’s. Realizing he’d have to forge a new batch of death certificates, this time for both Luke and himself, Mark got cold feet for perhaps the first time. It was too much money, too much scrutiny. With a sense of dread, he sent off five new forgeries.
When a rep from one of the credit card companies phoned, asking for Luke Olmsted, Mark’s mind raced, getting everything straight. If she wants to speak with Luke, then this concerns one of Mark’s credit cards.
“This is Luke Olmsted,” he said. He made his tone peremptory and slightly annoyed, as if it were she who had to prove her legitimacy to him.
“Mr. Olmsted, we have your brother’s death certificate,” the rep said. “And the thing is, it needs a raised, colored seal.” Her voice was unhappy, apologetic. What a job it must be, to have to phone the recently bereaved and make them cross their T’s and dot their I’s.
But Mark was practically having a heart attack. They were going to catch him. There was no way they wouldn’t. “The seal is on the back,” he managed to say. But she would have seen the seal. That’s why she was calling. She knew.
Mark had dutifully bought an embossed color seal that read “CC” and used it to validate “certified copies” of the death certificate. No one had ever questioned its authenticity before. If the woman scrutinized the seal—and she probably had already, she must have—she would notice that the small print encircling the “CC” read “Corona Cougars.” Mark had bought the seal at an Office Depot. The Corona Cougars were a local youth baseball team.
He heard paper rustle in her office in Omaha or Wilmington or wherever she was.
“No, this is fine,” she said. It was evident in her tone of voice that she had barely glanced at the seal, that she wanted to get the death certificate out of her sight as quickly as possible. They said their goodbyes.
If Mark had given up on surviving AIDS, if he had grown recklessly indifferent to his T cell count, he had redirected all of his anxiety to money. He obsessively watched his balances rise and fall. He was consumed with having enough money to survive—with finding a way to get more whenever he needed it. Money became inseparable from the terms of his illness, and a kind of metaphor for it.
His debt had reached $50,000 by now. He was on the verge of defeating even his own genius for finding ways to support himself.
Under Luke’s name, he had briefly returned to full-time work, at a small magazine, but they paid him so little that he had to simultaneously collect unemployment as Mark. Then he contracted pneumonia again.
Desperate to raise money, he drove to a government office in West Hollywood to apply for Social Security as Luke, on the pretense that he was too sick to work. The benefits would be modest—they’d be based not on Luke’s substantial physician’s salary but on Mark’s earnings, as Luke, at the magazine—but if the claim were approved, he could apply to receive them for the rest of his life.
Behind a plexiglass window, the clerk typed into a computer. He squinted at Mark in confusion. “This says Luke Olmsted died,” he said.
Mark gave him a huge smile. “But I’m right here,” he said. He showed the man his—Luke’s—driver’s license. He was about to launch into the explanation he’d prepared: that he, Luke Olmsted, had been working in Africa for Doctors Without Borders when his passport had been stolen, and that was why he didn’t have another document proving his—
“These mistakes can happen,” the man said apologetically. With a few keystrokes, he brought Luke Olmsted back from the dead. But the application was denied higher up, apparently because Mark wasn’t sick enough.
Mark had an ace in the hole—a life-insurance policy that he’d taken out years ago. From ads he’d seen in gay magazines, he knew he could cash in on it. A viatical settlement was (and is) a transaction in which you sell your insurance policy to a third-party financial company. The company advances you a percentage of your life-insurance payout, to give you money to live on, then collects the full benefit after you die. As a rule, the closer you are to dying, the more money you get.
The problem, Mark told me, was that AIDS was no longer an automatic death sentence. With the advent of protease inhibitors in the late ’90s, there was a growing sense that many people were going to survive. Mark would have to convince the viatical company’s actuaries that he was statistically likely to die within two years or there would be no payout.
The only way to do that was to stop taking his medication altogether. His doctor would have told him this was suicidal. But he did it anyway, and drove down his T cell count so precipitously that the company paid out $58,000 against his $100,000 insurance policy.
Once he resumed taking his meds, his T cells rose again, just barely. Mark had been dying, very slowly, for a decade, his T cells languishing between 125 and 400. His HIV meds had never been all that effective, though admittedly he had never been systematic about taking them. Partly it was the side effects—unbearable thirst, nightmares, suicidal thoughts, and the destruction of his sex drive. Partly it was that he didn’t see the point: Wasn’t AIDS going to kill him either way? He was also drunk or high much of the time. He was using more and more crystal methamphetamine.
After paying off his credit cards with his viatical windfall, Mark had about $10,000 left to live on. Once it was spent, he would need a new source of income. When his meth supplier, an affable, broom-skinny Vietnam vet, offered to get him started as a dealer, Mark jumped at the chance.
Dealing crystal, Mark told me, is its own kind of rush, especially at the beginning. You build your customer base at light speed. Your income grows exponentially from week to week. If you deliver the product in a timely fashion, rather than making people wait hours for it, you are adored. Capitalism has yet to produce a more instantaneously profitable form of employment. You can hardly fail at drug dealing, and if you have grandiose ideas about yourself (BREAKING: Mark did), your success will confirm that they are wholly justified: Well, maybe it’s not the career I had in mind, but Jesus, look how great I am at it.
It was all right to make lots of money illegally, Mark reasoned, if you were generous with it. He helped out struggling artists he knew. He carried rent for three male assistants, street kids, basically, who repaid him with sex. Mark, who had no illusions about the arrangement, called them “my barnacles.” (I’ve changed the men’s names, along with certain identifying details.)
There was Jeff, an ex–flight attendant from Boston whose religious parents had rejected him. Tim, a former hotel concierge who would make glib diagnoses of your problems (“Obviously, you’re in love with him”). Sean, a onetime tennis pro who kept elaborate notes on imaginary plane crashes and believed he could reroute the sewage system of San Francisco using only his mind.
The apartment, on Willoughby Avenue in West Hollywood, was strewn with chaps, harnesses, armbands, cuffs, rope. There was a smell of butane in the air, from the torch used to light the glass meth pipe. Men would come for the crystal and stay for the sex.
Business hours were whenever Mark’s cell phone was on. Most drug dealers are human tripwires, but he’d buzz in whoever. He didn’t even have a weapon.
Even as Mark tried to keep the business small—“boutique-y,” as he called it—his income soared. At least one customer limited his visits because he knew it was just a matter of time before the police came. There was way too much foot traffic up and down the stairs.
Then, in 2002, Mark developed cytomegalovirus, a common virus that can be very dangerous in people with lowered immunity. He had to be hospitalized, and his T cells plummeted to 300, their lowest level in ten years. His doctor was despairing. Terrified, Mark thought, This is it.
There was one last combination of antiviral meds he could try. Briefly sober during his three-week hospitalization, he resolved to finally stick with his antiviral-drug regimen.
Within a year, HIV was undetectable in his blood. The good news was that Mark was going to live. That was also the bad news.
It was a 93-degree day at the height of drought season in Los Angeles: August 14, 2003. Mark was lying on his bed, talking on the phone and luxuriating in his A/C, when he heard a huge crash. The entire apartment shook. He rushed out of his bedroom, he says, to find his front door smashed open. Six narcotics cops in bulletproof vests were aiming rifles at him. Another held the leash of a drug-sniffing dog that was straining to search the apartment.
While the dog went about its work, one of the officers handcuffed Mark, then escorted him onto the landing just outside the apartment. The officer sized Mark up: white male, 40s, and likely terrified of going to prison.
Then, Mark says, the officer made him an offer: Give up three names, and make this all go away.
Mark replied, nervously but politely, that he wouldn’t be able to help.
He says the officer pressed him again: You think the other guys will be as loyal to you?
The funny thing was, Mark believed he was finally living with dignity now. Even if he was dealing meth, he was paying his bills with cash he had actually earned. Maybe that’s why he spoke to the officer as if they were both standing on a much bigger stage. “Let the chips fall where they may,” he said.
Five weeks later, in court, Mark’s public defender made much of the fact that her client was HIV-positive. The judge sentenced Mark to $2,200 in restitution and 300 hours of community service—a white-boy special. His record would be expunged after that.
Mark promised the judge that his criminal career was over. Ever the dutiful WASP, he taped notes on the doors of all of his neighbors when he got home, apologizing for any inconvenience the Sheriff’s Department bust might have caused.
Mark was determined to go straight. “I knew that the judge had given me a huge break,” he said. He embarked on a search for a legitimate job. Because he spoke five languages in varying degrees of proficiency, he thought he might be qualified for a subtitling position he saw on Craigslist. He applied, and the owner of the company scheduled an interview. Mark still dreamed of working in film, even if that meant starting out at the margins.
But he couldn’t seem to stop using and dealing crystal. He liked the money, and the high, and the sex, too much.
And he found himself chafing at the judge’s sentence, light though it was. Maybe he could make those 300 hours of community service disappear, just like he’d made his credit card debt disappear. On October 25, 2003, Luke Olmsted wrote to the Los Angeles County Probation Department to inform them of his brother Mark’s death. For one last time, Luke, kept alive on paper for the past 13 years, would try to make Mark’s problems go away.
At first, it seemed like the letter had done just that. But at around 3:45 P.M. on February 5, 2004, Mark heard a huge, crunching impact in his hallway. It was a sound he recognized. From the other side of the door he heard shouts: “Sheriff’s Department! Search warrant! Open the door!”
Eleven cops stood on the landing.
Yes, he told them quickly, Mark Olmsted used to live here, but Mark was dead.
I’m Luke Olmsted, he insisted. Really, they were making a mistake. They could check his wallet—he had ID.
By then they’d cuffed him. A deputy took the wallet from Mark’s pocket and handed it to Detective Ken Price of West Hollywood Narcotics. Price saw two driver’s licenses inside, one for Mark Olmsted, the other for Luke Olmsted. But the photographs appeared to show the same person.
“Who,” Price patiently asked, “is Mark Olmsted?”
Mark Olmsted was his brother, Mark said quickly. Mark had died on October 25, 2003. He had the death certificate in the safe on the shelf above his desk. He gave Price the combination.
Price discovered six passports in the safe. He glanced at two: One was in Mark’s name, and the other in Luke’s, and the passport numbers were identical. Probably both were fakes.
Meanwhile, the police dog had begun alerting—to meth in the false bottom of a flower vase, to meth in a desk drawer. The officers doing a hand search of the apartment were turning up sheafs of practice forgeries: more driver’s licenses and death certificates, in black-and-white and color. They also collected about a dozen prescription bottles issued to Mark Olmsted after his supposed date of death.
I’m Luke Olmsted, Mark kept saying, as if the words were a magic spell that would make all of the incriminating evidence vanish.
At the West Hollywood precinct, he signed the booking paperwork in Luke's name. But these would be the last documents Luke Olmsted would ever sign. The cops ran the fingerprints of the man in their custody and confirmed beyond any doubt that he was Mark Olmsted.
Detective Price had known all along, as he would later write in his report. He had recognized Mark from having participated in the first arrest in the Willoughby apartment five months earlier.
Mark was indicted on six charges and quickly pleaded out to two—possession of a controlled substance for sale and manufacturing false documents. On April 12, he was remanded to the custody of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and began serving a 16-month sentence.
He was a no-show for his job interview.
In a minimum-security unit at Chino, an Inland Empire prison, Mark tried to avoid socializing, but he quickly found himself the target of homophobic jokes and slurs. One day, a muscle-bound prisoner I’ll call Brick confronted him. Brick had heard that Mark was gay and thought he could intimidate him—specifically, that he could “tax” the food packages Mark’s friends and family were regularly sending him.
Mark did something he hadn’t done in a decade. He told the truth about who he was.
Yes, he told Brick, he was gay, and also HIV-positive. But if anyone tried to tax him, he would fight. He would spill his HIV-positive blood all over the fucking place, if that’s how they wanted it to be. (In fact, with the virus suppressed by his meds, Mark’s blood wasn’t infectious, but his fellow prisoners’ horror of AIDS was equaled only by their ignorance about it.)
Brick raised his palms placatingly, to show Mark he was letting this go. They were both doing short time, right? No reason to extend it.
In the months that remained, Mark got clean and, in the letters he wrote to friends and family, made his amends. He served out the rest of his sentence without incident. In prison, you had to live in the present, in a state of incessant, nagging fear. Being HIV-positive for almost two decades had prepared him perfectly for that.
On a cool Saturday morning, I ring the buzzer of Mark’s apartment, on a quiet side street in Hollywood, where he lives with his boyfriend.
“I almost bought a house with my viatical,” he says, as he closes his front door. “I just didn’t want to leave my family paying a huge mortgage. If I’d only known how crazy real estate was going to get around here.” He pauses for effect. “Oh—and that I was going to live.”
As we sit down with glasses of water in his small living room, I ask him whether he’s still alert to opportunities to—I want to say “scam,” but I have to work my way there. It seems rude. But he doesn’t care in the least.
“When I heard Trump might reverse student-loan forgiveness, it did cross my mind: Just send in your death certificate!” We both laugh. “But no.”
After his release from prison, Mark says, he found that prospective employers were wary of hiring an ex-con. But one day he noticed a familiar-looking subtitling job posted on Craigslist. To his relief, the company’s owner didn’t remember his interview no-show the previous year, and Mark has been working for her ever since. Last year he earned $28,000, the most he has ever made since getting out of prison fourteen years ago. He has credit-card debt of about $14,000. He’s paying it off monthly.
“I feel like I lived my 80s during my 30s,” he says, “because I went to so many funerals. Now it’s like I’m living my 20s at the age of 59.” He’s talking about the instability of freelancing, but also about the way his personal chronology has been completely deranged. Long-term HIV survivors sometimes describe feeling like they’re in a kind of suspended animation, still trying to resume lives interrupted by a supposed death sentence.
There is a version of himself that Mark left behind somewhere in his past, or maybe it was taken from him, it’s hard to know for sure. He was the smartest and funniest of his friends; everybody knew he was going to make it in Hollywood. The office jobs were just temporary, until he broke big. And then AIDS happened. It stole his future, without killing him. Mark is nostalgic for a person he never got to be.
He tells me about the latest business opportunity he has concocted: “Screenwriting for Oligarchs” would be an adult-education course for wealthy but untutored Russian film investors (he has met some) who want to produce American films.
We walk down the narrow hallway to his office-slash-bedroom. It barely accommodates his bed, his desk, his books, and his computer, along with a huge archive of photos, artwork, screenplays, manuscripts (among them the prison memoir he’s written, Ink from the Pen), and legal documents.
He points out the huge framed collage hanging over his bed, hundreds of scraps of paper laid over and beside each other. As I come closer, I can identify bar napkins, receipts, and Post-its in their highlighter hues. A phone number is scrawled on every one. “My one-night stands,” Mark says. His voice is both boastful and sad.
It’s impossible to know how many of the men to whom those phone numbers belonged are still alive. An unknown fraction of people diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s have survived to the present day, and in many cases, like Mark’s, no one quite knows how they managed it. Mark himself takes nine pills every day, one to suppress HIV, and eight others to treat the disease’s long-term effects. (The viatical company is still waiting to collect on his life-insurance policy. Somewhere, an unemployed actuary is cursing Mark’s name.)
A University of Pittsburgh HIV researcher, Ron Stall, Ph.D., has described a condition he calls AIDS Survivor Syndrome—an array of more than 30 pathologies, including complex PTSD, substance abuse, and suicidality2. One of the most common is survivor’s guilt. For a long time, Mark’s guilt had been crushing, and if incarceration was a kind of absolution for him, it’s surely one Luke would have deemed appropriate.
After Luke’s funeral, Mark says, he spent days bagging his brother’s belongings and disposing of them. Alone in the apartment he and Luke had shared, he couldn’t stop thinking about the arbitrariness of it: Why hadn’t it been he who died? He, who’d fucked around so much, when Luke had been so boringly monogamous. “Thank God for prison. I needed to feel punished,” he says.
When I ask Mark about the first days following his release from Chino, he suggests we go for a walk. He locks his apartment door and leads me onto his little residential street. We head toward its intersection with one of the busiest avenues in the city.
Side streets in urban neighborhoods often get used as open-air garbage disposals. When he first got out of prison, Mark says, he would walk around this neighborhood every day, carrying a Hefty bag that he’d fill to bursting. The streets were absolutely choked with trash—needles, vodka flasks, beer cans. He was a one-man chain gang. Someone had to do something.
His old life was still waiting for him, if he wanted it. Once, he saw his former assistant Jeff on the street, he remembers; another time, Sean. It was one of the three assistants who betrayed him, he’s certain; he’s had a lot of time to think about this: “The police knew too much about me when they raided the apartment.” He recalls a strange phone conversation in which Tim, the handsomest of the assistants, didn’t sound like himself and seemed to be trying to get him to say things…
Now he points down the street: Over there, at Fountain and Western, was his Crystal Meth Anonymous meeting. He grew wary of those meetings; he’s not a joiner, which is also why he never volunteered for ACT UP while he lived in New York. He still feels shame about that. He feels shame, too, about fleeing New York just as all of his friends were starting to get sick. Wasn’t it more important to be with Luke, though?
“I would go to prison for another ten years if I could have him back,” he says. But the words bring him close to something, closer than he wants to be. “Well, maybe not ten,” he jokes. “But five.”
Maybe, Mark says, he wouldn’t have gotten addicted to crystal if he hadn’t been traumatized by the early deaths of so many men he loved—above all, his brother. If Luke had lived, Mark’s whole life would have been different. Luke would have discovered Mark’s drug abuse. He would have confronted Mark. He would have accused him, justifiably, of pissing away his God-given talents. Of lying to everyone who loved him.
If Luke hadn’t died, Mark would never have gotten to the point of actually dealing crystal. Because Luke would never have let him fall so far: “He would have paid for rehab. He would have done whatever.”
On this point Mark is resolute: Luke would have saved him.
1. For clarification on how Mark pulled this off, GQ reached out to Steven Weisman, an expert in scams and identity theft and a professor at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Professor Weisman writes:
“In all of the years that I have been involved with scams and identity theft, I have not seen this particular scam.
The scam depends upon the credit card companies not becoming aware of the death of Mark's brother. Credit card companies generally become aware of the death of one of their customers by being contacted by someone representing the estate. In this instance, it does not appear that this was done.
The primary source of financial information used by banks and other financial institutions to evaluate credit card applications or other financial transactions is the three major credit reporting agencies, Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian, which each operate independently and do not generally share data. When someone dies, the usual procedure is that the Social Security Administration is notified by the funeral director. The SSA, in turn, will notify each of the three credit reporting agencies; however, this process can take months.
A bigger question is whether the credit card companies had any reason to check with the credit reporting agencies as to the death of Luke if the cards appeared to be in use and they had no other indication that Luke had died.
Mark is correct in regard to the credit reporting agencies not sharing information about [the death of a cardholder].
This story reminds me why scam artists are the only criminals we call artists.”
2. Stall stipulates that criminal behavior is not a pathology associated with AIDS Survivor Syndrome, and that there is no evidence linking the two.
Nathaniel Penn is a GQ correspondent. He wrote about the tragic effects of solitary confinement in the March 2017 issue of the magazine.
Portrait of Mark Olmsted by Ian Allen.
