Friday, October 22, 2010

"Son Of A Grifter", by Kent Walker

The full title is really "Son of a Grifter: The Twisted Tale of Sante and Kenny Kimes, the Most Notorious Con Artists in America". It's important to stress out the word "twisted" as it is very appropriate to describe that woman that Sante Kimes was.



Many wrongdoers believe they're doing the right thing, wether is murder or just being selfish in a relationship. But after you work on them for a while, at a certain level of depth they recognise that what they did was wrong. You can't be sure with Sante Kimes, though. That's one of the things that Kent Walker, her first son, conveyed through his book.
Some people lie to themselves. Particularly when they're busted, caught in the act, redhanded. They deny but you know that they know they did it. With Sante Kimes, the denial and self-delusional behaviour was so strong and solid that for a moment you could doubt if she wasn't really, perfectly convinced of her own lies. Kent Walker wrote:

Mom's greatest gift as a con artist is that she believes her own lies. She commits a crime and then convinces herself she's innocent. she invents a fiction and replays it in her mind till it's reality

After reading the book, I believe it.

Sante Kimes is an impressive character. "Con artist" isn't really a title that fits her, as you can't become a con artist before actually succeeding in your cons. And even though there were successes in Sante's adventures, it was the failures that characterised her the most. Sante was not only confident, charismatic, wealth hungry and quenching that hunger all the wrong ways, she was most of all destructive and possessive. If you're gonna cheat your way into something, whether that's someone's money or a business class flight ticket, you need to know when to stop. You need to know how far you can go before your advances become drawbacks. I think Sante didn't know.
But why destroy? Sante Kimes did, at some point, land herself a billionaire, as was her plan since ever. With love (even if fake) and some discretion, she could have kept his fortune and lived a great life. The truth is, she devastated all of that with unneeded scandals, trials, robbery and shoplifting, slavery, all of it requiring millions of dollars spent on lawyers. She could have been highly successful, by her own standards (and isn't that all that matters?) but she blew it all away because of an unexplainable unstoppable desire to burn and decimate.
Many have considered this the definition of Pure Evil. Is Sante Kimes a sociopath, or just Evil? Kent Walker asks the question itself. He writes:

Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life.

 Reality really does beat fiction when it comes to strangeness.

Whether she was pure evil or not, if that is possible, there was also something definitely wrong with Sante Kimes. She was detached from reality, living in her own world where her fantasies were true and shielded from any common sense or logic. Resistant to any convincing or even foolproof evidence. After securing her millionaire, Ken Kimes, Sante had to clear out his side of the family from the millions he owned. As expected, she had a conveniently twisted view of his family, and I honestly believe she was perfectly convinced of this elaboration:



When my mother and stepfather first became a couple, we used to spend occasional holidays with members of Ken's extended family. I met his son, Andrew, and his daughter, Linda, both of them already twenty-one, and they seemed harmless. Mom, However, put a stop to the shared holidays. They were too dangerous, she claimed, because long-haired college dropout Andrew, who lived in central America, was a violent drug-dealing hippie, and the rest of the Creeps had their own evil plans.
Within a year of latching onto Ken, Mom started to report strange, frightening events. The Creeps were out to get her.
They wanted Ken's money, and they wanted Mom to vanish.
Mom was the sole witness to most of these alleged acts of terror. Hyperventilating with panic, she rushed into the house one afternoon shrieking about a covey of rattlesnakes that some Creep had planted in her car. Perhaps they'd slithered away by the time help arrived. There wasn't a single snake in there that anyone could see.

And yet, she mentioned the snakes and other tales for long, long years, even when incarcerated, sentenced for life. I'm so convinced of her amazing brainpower to edit memories and beliefs, and I'd doubt even herself would honestly recognise the falseness of the elaboration.
After all, being a decent con artist means being able to act, to boast such confidence that people will also confide in you. This is not far from acting.
In his last visit to his mother in jail, the author speaks of an old desire to let everything out, a speech rehearsed "hundreds of time" where nothing would be left unsaid, a moment that would break Sante's armour and trigger human emotion in her. But facing Sante in prison and witnessing her never ending play, he writes:

We were never going to have that moment, my mother and I. Hours of screaming wouldn't have made a dent in her aura of persecuted innocence. She was going to die an enigma. She would never break character, she would never feel anything like remorse, she would never ask for forgiveness, not unless she saw an angle in it. I would never have the answer to that question that I've been asking and people have been asking me for years. Is Sante evil or crazy, or both?

Even though some people easily learned to hate her, most were trapped in her endless charisma. Kent Walker's 500 page biography of his mother doesn't spare the criminal side and doesn't try to diminish how guilty she was of all the horrible acts she committed, but it doesn't hide an incredibly resistant mother-son connection. She knew how to cheat and steal, but she knew how to care and love. The possibly worse mother in the world, in a few moments, was the best mother in the world. Those moments remain written in stone in the author's mind, and even though he can think of his mother as something between crazy and evil, he also admits to miss those days.

I can't keep quoting the book, although there are so many moments worth quoting. Sante's persona is both an endless source of admiration, amazement and disgust. She could be compared to a black hole into which all that is good got sucked and lost forever. Ken Kimes, a "decent person" with "good qualities", entrepreneur "turned millionaire by the sweat of his own brow", dies "old, querulous, alcoholic, nearly friendless, and on the run". Kent's words are terribly sad in the pages where his dead stepfather is described:

I put my hands on his body and pray to God that he'd be forgiven for the biggest mistake of his life, letting himself be consumed by my mother. I prayed that God would overlook the last two decades and judge him only on his good qualities. I begged for mercy, since so many of Ken's evil deeds would never have happened without my mother. I was asking God to let Ken into heaven, though the expression in Ken's lifeless face told me he was already in hell.

As tears roll down the author's face, Sante says, surprised "This is really hard on you!". Because there's something very wrong about her. The inhumanity that allows her to be surprised at the expression of love, at the presence of feelings of affection, remorse, regret, and everything that is common to all of us and is the very definition of Human Being.

Sante Kimes is still somewhat beyond my understanding. Except for Kent Walker, she might always feel something like a character of fiction to everyone. But it's a known fact that reality, more often than not, is weirder than fiction.


 

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