The Washington Post Magazine: Cover Story

Identity Crisis Meet Michael Berry: political activist, cancer survivor, creditor's dream. Meet Michael Berry: scam artist, killer, the real Michael Berry's worst nightmare



Meet Michael Berry (left): political activist, cancer survivor, creditor's dream Meet Michael Berry (right): scam artist, killer, the real Michael Berry's worst nightmare (Left; Photograph by David Deal - Right; Photograph of Demorris Andy Hunter Courtesy FBI)


Michael Berry prowled the streets of South Central Los Angeles in a rented silver Volvo, searching for a clue. He turned onto a residential street called 12th Avenue, peered at each home and then slowed the car almost to a stop. His heart fluttered.

Off to his left was the address that had obsessed him for months. He saw a well-tended bungalow with crisp green grass. Watering the lawn was a man covered in tattoos and wearing a sleeveless undershirt and aviator sunglasses, who watched closely as Berry drove by.

"Oh crap, I didn't do this right," Berry muttered to himself, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter and trying not to stare back.

He had come 2,700 miles from his townhouse in Arlington to scope out the place that somehow had appeared on credit reports as his new home. Some cretin using the address had opened at least 15 new credit card accounts in Berry's name and run up thousands of dollars in bills for clothing, flowers, gasoline and telephone calls.

Berry had always taken pride in paying his bills on time. At 33, he was the chief operating officer of the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative women's group, mingling regularly with Washington lawmakers and Republican activists. The theft of his identity was changing everything: threatening not just his credit rating, which was in tatters, but his respectability, his very sense of himself as a man firmly in control of his own life. Now, as he drove by the tidy house in L.A., he was at a loss. "I felt," he says, "totally helpless."

He had tried to report the financial problems to L.A. police. Because he wasn't a resident, and the fraud was not considered large enough, they brushed him off over the telephone. When he called police in Arlington, a friendly officer took his report. But he got no promises. Arlington, the officer said, had no jurisdiction in California.

Berry pulled up the street, turned the car around and parked. Pretending to do paperwork in his lap, he kept watch for anything suspicious. "Be careful," he told himself. "Sit back and watch."

He had good reason to take care. Just days before, he'd learned from a Florida homicide detective that a man who had assumed his persona -- using his Social Security number and carrying a driver's license with his name -- was a convicted murderer who was wanted for fresh killings in two states. That meant that Berry, the real Berry, was liable to be taken into custody as a wanted man at any time.

Sitting in his office in south Arlington, Berry dialed a toll-free number and waited for the computerized voice at Chase Manhattan Bank to prompt him. He punched in the number of his Chase Platinum MasterCard. It was early January 2002, six months before his visit to Los Angeles, and he was trying to consolidate his debts onto one low-interest card.

He sat back in his chair as he told the clerk his current income and how much credit he wanted. When he hung up, he was certain the bank would comply, because he had never missed a payment, even when he was between jobs. A few days later, he heard the news. He was rejected. "I'm sorry," the clerk told him. "You have opened too many cards lately."

Berry was puzzled, but not particularly upset. "This is a mistake," he thought. He'd get it fixed. Determined by nature, Berry was used to working through problems and, eventually, getting where he wanted to be.

As an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, he'd found his way into the state headquarters of the 1988 Bush-Quayle campaign, landing a volunteer job recruiting and coordinating college activists. He became head of the Trojan College Republicans at USC, one of the state's largest college political groups. After transferring to Pepperdine University in his junior year, Berry parlayed his burgeoning Rolodex into prestigious internships at Ronald Reagan's post-White House office and in the Bush administration, where he worked as an advance man for Vice President Quayle.

He had every intention of staying in Washington as a political operative. But he cut short his plans after his father had a heart attack. He moved back to his home town in central California and took a job as a teacher, following in the footsteps of his father. Not long after, Berry faced his own health crisis. He was diagnosed with testicular cancer at the age of 24. For a time, he thought he might die. His doctors urged him to donate sperm in case he wanted a family someday. Then they removed one testicle and prescribed radiation therapy.

The treatments that cured Berry also nauseated him and sapped his vitality. But after the ordeal was over, he worked his way through the education bureaucracy and became an elementary school principal. He never lost interest in politics, though, and decided to move back to D.C. a few years ago. He became a special assistant to Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison on the Hill before moving over to the Independent Women's Forum.

Michael Berry, in his Arlington office, knows Washington's ins and outs, but he'd never encountered anything like the mess created when his idenity was stolen. (Photograph by David Deal)


Berry tried to put his savvy to work for him. After the rejection from Chase, he made a round of calls to the top three credit bureaus, Trans Union, Experian and Equifax, companies that operate near the center of the U.S. economy. Working with banks, retailers, landlords, car dealerships and an array of other enterprises, the credit bureaus collect and share extraordinarily rich financial details about nearly every adult in America: where we live, how much money we owe and to whom, and whether we pay our bills on time.

Credit bureaus sold some 1.2 billion credit reports in the United States last year, more than double the number a decade ago. Many of the transactions that characterize American life depend on those reports. They are factored into mortgage loans and credit offers, used to weed out risky tenants and screen people for mobile phone service. Some identifying personal information in them, including addresses and Social Security numbers, also has helped fill the reservoirs of information brokers, who resell data to lawyers, debt collectors and jilted spouses searching for wayward mates. The reports are also perfect fodder for identity thieves.

The credit bureaus mailed Berry his own reports, which were sullied by all kinds of purchases he hadn't made. According to the credit agencies' computers, he had sought, received and quickly used thousands of dollars in instant credit from Gap and Old Navy. He had maxed out a $1,500 limit obtained a few weeks before from the QVC shopping channel. He had charged hundreds of dollars' worth of gas in the Los Angeles area on a new Exxon card, along with $462 on a new phone line in Riverside, Calif.

Anxiety surged through Berry at these revelations. He'd been paying off his car loan early and sharing a townhouse with two roommates to save money, but he knew all the wild spending attributed to him would damage his credit rating. If he didn't get this cleared up, he might have trouble buying a house.

Berry discovered from other businesses that his fictive counterpart had sent hundreds of dollars' worth of roses and a stuffed bear to a Los Angeles woman named Joann. "These flowers are from You Know Who," read the note that accompanied the flowers. "I love you a lot and your conversation." A few days later, You Know Who sent another pile of roses to a woman named Maisha, this time with a contrite note attached: "I am sorry for lying, cheating, being selfish."

It was as though You Know Who -- and maybe others -- was in a spending frenzy, trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of Berry's identity before the scam was shut down. In some cases, the fraud artist or artists got cute, using "Bebe Hooker" as his spouse's name on one credit application, and "Lucy Love" as his mother's maiden name on another. But the incorrect information didn't get in the way of the applications being approved.

Old Navy had decided to open a new account, in January 2002, for instance, even though the man impersonating Berry used the wrong address. At the same time, the company that issues cards for Old Navy -- Monogram Credit Card Bank of Georgia, a subsidiary of General Electric Capital Corp. -- also had granted the impostor credit cards for Exxon, Gap and QVC.

Monogram knew it was taking a risk on those accounts. About a month after the Old Navy account was maxed out, Berry received a computer-generated letter from Monogram. The company expressed its uncertainty and asked Berry to tell it whether a mistake had been made.

"Dear Cardholder," it began. "We have recently opened up a credit card account, in your name, with OLD NAVY. Since, the address in the application did not match the address contained in the consumer credit bureau report, we are writing to you to confirm that the credit card account was opened at your request. "If you did apply for this account, you do not need to respond."

When Berry called Monogram, a representative assured him the Old Navy account would be closed and the charges removed from his credit report within six weeks. Berry felt better after hanging up the phone -- a sense of relief that wouldn't last long.

Identity theft is perhaps the most glaring symptom of the ills that have accompanied the data revolution of the 1990s. Bounced checks. Loan denials. Harassment from debt collectors. Victims of identity theft -- and there are millions of them -- are often haunted by the consequences for years.

Some government officials estimate that as many as 750,000 people a year are victimized. Others think that number is way too low. Last month Gartner Inc., a business research group, estimated that 7 million Americans have fallen prey to identity thieves in the past year alone, an extraordinary figure mirrored by a new survey from Privacy & American Business, an industry-funded think tank. Another study, by Star Systems, a company that facilitates the majority of U.S. ATM transactions, suggests that almost 12 million Americans in all, or about one in 19 adults, have been hit by such fraud.

David Medine, a former Federal Trade Commission and White House official, and now a leading information law specialist at the law firm Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, has an unscientific test he uses to judge the extent of the problem. He asks friends at Washington parties if they've been a victim or know a victim. These days, Medine says, almost everyone has a horror story to contribute to the conversation. "You have this seemingly low-level crime that, cumulatively, is a national crisis," Medine says.

The financial costs are staggering, though no one can put a precise dollar figure on them. Star Systems estimates the losses at $24 billion, the vast majority in the past decade, a burden shouldered largely by the nation's financial institutions as a cost of doing business.