CATCH THE DEVIL

A journalist portrays the banality of evil in our time.

Paul Skalnik, writes journalist and debut author Colloff, “had an instinct for what people wanted to hear,” an essential talent for a successful con man. And successful Skalnik was: He married nine times, sometimes simultaneously, and bilked his wives and countless other people out of money, cars, jewelry, real estate, whatever he could steal. He did so while claiming to be many things that he was not: an ace Marine Corps fighter pilot who had been shot down over Vietnam, a wealthy lawyer temporarily short of cash thanks to big investments, a University of Texas star football player grounded by injury, a C-suite captain of industry. Somehow people fell for it, right and left. But more than that, and at a more depraved level of pathology, Skalnik sexually assaulted numerous women and girls, including a “slight and freckled seventh grader.” All these crimes added up to a constant series of jail and prison terms, and there, Colloff chronicles, Skalnik found his truest métier as an informant, pinning murders, drug trafficking charges, and countless other crimes on fellow inmates whom he swore under testimony had confessed to him. “I have placed 34 individuals in prison, including four on death row,” Skalnik wrote in 1984. In exchange for his information, prosecutors cut him endless deals—including dismissing charges for assaulting that minor. All the while, Colloff adds, “Nothing suggested that he felt remorse, or anything but indifference that his testimony might bring about someone’s death.” Indeed, much of her narrative settles on a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran on whom he pinned the murder of a teenage girl, and who remains on Florida’s death row, even though another man confessed to the crime. Conveniently enough, Skalnik died, too, but refused to Colloff’s face to recant his perjurious testimony.

A fiery indictment of a system that rewards jailbird snitches for “telling just the right story.”