Authors: David Samuels
Frank Shorter was suspicious of Hogue, and he voiced his suspicions to his fellow
instructors. But somehow the Olympic gold medalist’s opinions never took hold. Hogue had a
way of endearing himself to his students, many of whom were doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives in their everyday lives, and who welcomed a chance to learn new training methods from a top runner who was also a professor at Stanford. Hogue soon earned a reputation for
modesty and kindness to go with his prestigious academic position. When asked direct questions, he looked down at the ground, and then responded in the fewest possible number of words.
When a woman at the camp wanted to buy a bicycle that she couldn’t really afford, Hogue got her the frame for a nominal price. The other instructors never guessed that Hogue was not a professor at Stanford, or that he had awarded his PhD in bioengineering to himself. Nor did anyone suspect that Hogue might be responsible for a rash of thefts that plagued the camp that summer. (The expensive bicycle frame that Hogue sold to the student on the cheap turned out to have been stolen several months earlier from a bike shop run by the father of Alexi Grewal, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist.)
Dave Tesch’s live-in girlfriend, Meg Barry, was also suspicious of Hogue. A gifted gem
cutter, she spent her professional life examining precious stones through a jeweler’s loop and under a microscope, minutely evaluating their color and size while searching out flaws that might adversely affect their value. She was not happy when Hogue showed up in San Marcos
one afternoon and knocked on the door of the house she shared with Tesch. Parking his truck outside the house, which he occasionally used to take showers, Hogue came and went, helping out around the shop, sleeping in his truck, and otherwise leading a life that appeared to have little in common with that of a normal Stanford professor. When someone attempted to break into the house, Barry immediately thought of Hogue.
The mystery of the theft that nearly destroyed Tesch’s business remained unsolved until
March 1988, when a young wannabe surfer from Utah named Bruce Stucki stopped by on his
way back home with a story that he thought might interest the bike builder. Stucki and his friends were Mormons who loved to race bicycles. He told Tesch that one of his friends had recently been at a party in St. George, Utah, where an acquaintance had whipped out a Mitsutoyo metric dial caliper, a specialized tool, engraved with Tesch’s name, which Stucki had immediately
recognized. When Stucki returned to Utah, he informed Detective Matt Jacobson of his
discovery. Jacobson called Tesch, who provided him with physical descriptions and serial
numbers for the frames that had been stolen from his shop.
Jacobson, who was not especially interested in bike racing, was particularly disturbed by
a collection of athletic trophies he found in the locker, which had been awarded to Hogue for races he had won while running under an assumed name. “They were obviously meant for an
eighteen-year-old,” the detective remembered, when I visited with him in Utah. For Jacobson, who now specializes in investigating crimes against children, the thief had committed a
particularly disturbing sin. He had entered a race under a false name and deprived younger
runners of the places they had rightfully won. Within minutes of Jacobson’s arrival, Hogue
walked up to the storage locker. Jacobson placed him in handcuffs and read him his rights. “I remember telling him how appalled I was that someone would do this,” the detective recalled.
“And it didn’t seem to shake him or even faze him at all.”
The only hints as to James Hogue’s state of mind on the day of his arrest survive in the
form of two photographs taken upon his arrival at the police station. The photographs show a frightened-looking young man between twenty-five or thirty years of age staring into the camera.
He looks like someone who has spent weeks or months living in the woods or on the floor of a bus station. A growth of beard obscures the shape of his face and his thin, boyish features.
Sleeplessness, pain, and nervous exhaustion have settled in the hollows beneath his eyes.
As it turned out, Hogue’s theft from the Tesch Bicycle Company was the key to a far
more intricate deception, the clues to which were neatly laid out in the storage locker in St.
George. The correspondence there showed that Hogue had been occupied with a larger, more
imaginative goal than disposing of the stolen bikes. He had been dreaming of a better life, to be led by a person who was not James Hogue. The product of careful research and planning,
Hogue’s new identity would be backed up by newspaper clippings and trophies that bore the
name Alexi Santana—a self-educated Nevada cowboy who could run a mile in just under four
minutes and, according to the correspondence found in the shed, had applied for admission to some of Americas finest universities, including Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Brown.
“It was a weird, unbelievable story,” Tesch recalled. “Like ‘I was born a poor black
child,’ the old Steve Martin routine.” The name Alexi Santana also rang a bell: it sounded like a combination of the first name of Alexi Grewal, the Olympic cycling gold medalist, and the
surname Santana, the tandem-bike manufacturer. In the weeks leading up to his trial, Hogue
called Tesch from jail, hoping to convince him to drop the charges. Tesch refused to return the calls. Instead he called a woman who lived in Provo, Utah, whose name he no longer remembers, but who might have been Hogue’s sister, or his girlfriend, who had custody of Hogue’s blue
Toyota pickup truck. As his business sunk deeper in debt, Tesch took to calling this woman
again and again, leaving angry messages on her answering machine. She called back one night when Tesch was already in bed, after taking his nightly dose of Halcion. Half asleep, and in the grip of a powerful and disorienting drug, Tesch picked up the phone and began ranting and
raving, pouring out a year’s worth of rage at having been fooled by his friend and demanding title to Hogue’s truck. The woman refused.
Detective Jacobson called Stanford University to inform the university that the applicant
Alexi Santana was actually a twenty-eight-year-old drifter named James Hogue, who had been
impersonating a Stanford professor and was now on his way to jail in Utah. Hogue pleaded
guilty to the theft and was given a sentence of one to five years in prison. A story appeared in the April 17, 1988, edition of the
San Jose Mercury News
duly noting that police had also “found evidence that Hogue, using the name ‘Alexi Santana,’ was corresponding with Ivy League
universities about athletic scholarships.” Years later, Detective Jacobson simply did not
remember whether or not he had called the other universities with which Santana had been
corresponding to warn them that the applicant was an impostor.
II. The Lottery
Alexi Santana’s memorable application to Princeton University was one of nearly
fourteen thousand for twelve hundred places in the Class of 1992. Once, when Fred Hargadon, the head of the Princeton admissions office, was asked to describe the perfect candidate for admission, he answered with the name of a fictional character, Huck Finn. Most students
selected for admission probably have less in common with the illiterate son of a violent alcoholic than with his diplomatic young friend Tom Sawyer. Still, Hargadon’s answer does neatly
summarize the virtues that Princeton looks for in at least some of its applicants—originality, self-reliance, and the kind of “diverse life experiences” that might keep the school’s Tom
Sawyers entertained.
Santana’s score of 1410 on the SAT was well above the average of students admitted to
Princeton, and his Hispanic-sounding surname likely recommended him for special consideration as a minority applicant. But it was his memorable and very inventive personal essay, the story of a self-educated ranch hand who read Plato under the stars, that lifted his application to the top of the pile. Santana had “trained on his own in the Mohave Desert, where he herds cattle for a living (mostly in a canyon called ‘Little Purgatory’),” the admissions office reported, in a private letter sent to wealthy alumni in the early summer, after the Class of 1992 had been accepted. “On a visit to campus in March, he slept indoors for the first time in ten years.”
As his application was being read by members of the Princeton admissions office, Hogue
was living in the storage locker and in his sister Theresa’s house in St. George, and spending long afternoons in the public library, researching the published statistics that tell who is admitted to universities like Princeton and why. The great majority of every Princeton class, Hogue
discovered, was made up of the children of parents whom most Americans would describe as
“rich.” About a fifth of every Princeton class consisted of students whose fathers or mothers went to Princeton; the SAT scores of these “legacies” were often well below average for their class. Applicants from sparsely populated states like Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming received preference over students from competitive high schools in cities like New York, a system dated to the end of the First World War, a time when officials at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale were working hard to find an answer to what they called the “Jewish question.” They arrived at a formula for “geographical distribution” (now styled “geographical diversity”) that would
increase the number of “white” students on their campuses while radically decreasing the
numbers of Jews.
By accepting the barefoot shepherd from the Nevada desert, the university hoped to
demonstrate that a Princeton degree was proof of some inherent personal merit, rather than a cunning device by which members of the American professional elite might pass on their social status and earning power to their children. Yet even a cursory look at the numbers revealed that Princeton’s sense of itself as a pillar of meritocracy was no less a fiction than the story of the self-educated ranch hand who taught himself to read Plato under the stars. The America of the nineties was a nation in which elite educational credentials were more tightly correlated with social and economic status than ever before; a Princeton degree was a passport to jobs at name investment banks, venture-capital firms, management consultancies, and high-tech companies.
Most students accepted to Princeton were the children of parents who had graduated from
Princeton or some similarly exclusive college, who worked professional-class jobs, lived in expensive houses in exclusive neighborhoods, and earned incomes of $100,000 a year or more, placing them within the top 10 percent, and often the top 1 percent, of money earners in
America. These lessons were hardly lost on the lonely drifter, whose ability as a runner was matched by his talent for telling stories that might take him where he wanted to go.
III. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
The story of the young Huck Finn from Nevada with high SAT scores and a Hispanic
surname had a particular appeal for Princeton’s track coach, Larry Ellis, who had coached the 1984 American Olympic men’s track team and was the first black man to assume a head
coaching job at an Ivy League university. Ellis was already impressed by the press clippings and race results that Santana had sent in along with his application, which showed the
eighteen-year-old ranch hand beating his competition on a cinder track with times as fast as or faster than those run by Princeton’s older, more experienced athletes. In fact, when Ellis first heard the story of the young man who had taught himself to run in the desert, he was so
impressed that he shared it with his wife. “Larry was so surprised about an athlete who was able to roam throughout the country, practically educating himself,” his widow, Shirley Ellis,
recalled. “The boy’s mother supposedly was in Europe; she was an artist. His father had died. He lived on an Indian reservation and was a very active person.”
Ellis did not care that Santana’s background might strike many people at Princeton as
unusual. He urged Santana to visit Princeton, and sent him a round-trip ticket. When the assistant track coach, Fred Samara, heard that the runner was coming to visit, he took a member of the team, Jon Luff, aside. “Santana’s coming out here,” Luff remembered him saying, “and I want you to run as hard as you possibly can, every day, the entire time he’s here. And I want you to come back Monday and report to me, and tell me exactly what you think.”
Luff, a dark, remarkably handsome young engineer who could work as a Ralph Lauren
model if engineering ever gets boring, came to Princeton from Colorado; as a fellow Westerner, the coaches reasoned, he would be able to relate to Santana and show him around campus. When Santana arrived in early March, he went to the field house to meet with the coaches. Luff met him outside.
“He always wore a hat, probably to hide the fact that he was going bald,” Luff observed
later. The applicant was short and small and only weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, and it was easy to believe that he was eighteen or nineteen years old. He had a slight build and a soft handshake, and he kept his eyes firmly focused on the ground. Dressed in a simple and
unvarying uniform of jeans, a white T-shirt, a windbreaker, and cowboy boots or running shoes, depending on the time of day, he made a good first impression on Luff.
Over the weekend that followed, any doubts that might have existed about the barefoot
runner’s talent were put to rest. One of the better runners on the Princeton team, Luff tried his best to beat Santana. “He could have run thirty minutes for ten thousand meters. He probably could have run fourteen minutes for five thousand, if he wanted to,” Luff said. “I couldn’t crop him. I couldn’t really even tire him out. And so, of course, I came back and said, The guy’s for real. He can really run.’”