Sometimes things really are too good to be true. In 1971 publisher McGraw-Hill, Inc. and Life magazine thought that they would soon be in possession of the life story of industrialist Howard Hughes as told by the reclusive billionaire himself to writer Clifford Irving. By the middle of January, 1972, they were no longer so sure of Irving; on January 7 Hughes had held a press conference by telephone in which he refuted the idea of a literary partnership with Irving. Fearful that they had been had, Life approached the Postal Inspection Service to see if they could shed any light on the situation. The service didn’t see any crime involving the mails in the case, so they pointed out that they couldn’t do anything, but after Life talked to Irving’s lawyer, Martin Ackerman, he wrote to postal inspectors asking for help in determining whether there had been mail fraud in the case, with Irving as the victim duped into thinking that he had been authorized by Hughes to write about him.

Soon it appeared that something strange was going on, as the Swiss government disclosed that the “H. R. Hughes” depositing McGraw-Hill checks in a Swiss bank was a woman. It seemed at this point that it was not Irving, but McGraw-Hill, who had been defrauded. At this point, a massive Postal Inspection Service investigation based out of New York started to work to ferret out what exactly was going on between Irving and Hughes. Inspectors were sent out to the various locales where Hughes and Irving purportedly met, as well as to Zurich, Switzerland to talk to the banks, and Spain to talk to Irving’s researcher, Richard Suskind. The American Express office in Manhattan where Irving had gone on February 10, 1971, supposedly to pick up plane tickets from Hughes, showed instead that Irving had placed a request for hotel reservations in Mexico City and Oaxaca for Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Irving, with Mrs. Irving noted as Baroness Nina van Pallandt. Van Pallandt was tracked down in the Bahamas on February 2, 1972, where she told an inspector that Irving had barely left her side while they had been vacationing in Mexico, and therefore could not possibly have interviewed Howard Hughes.

Other tales of Irving’s meetings with Hughes also failed to reconcile with what inspectors uncovered. According to Irving, he met with Hughes in Florida in December, 1971. Irving’s story spoke of renting a car at the airport in Miami, and leaving it in a parking before being blindfolded and then driven by an associate of Hughes to the man’s location to conduct an interview. Irving claimed to have been driven at 80 miles per hour; at that time of day, at that time of year, in that area of Florida, it was simply not possible. Additionally, Irving rented his car at 2:34 P.M., and checked into the Newport Beach Hotel at 4:51 P.M. If Irving had been taken to interview Hughes at the location indicated 90 minutes away from the airport, he could not have possibly checked into a hotel at the time that his credit card bills said that he had, so this meeting obviously had not taken place either. Tales of a Hughes-hired guard watching Irving and Suskind’s room at another hotel also were disproved. Even much of what Irving wrote was not his own work; a camera store in Beverly Hills had records of Irving processing 14 rolls of 35 mm film, which purportedly contained photographs of a manuscript about Hughes written by Noah Dietrich and James Phelan. “Facts” that Dietrich had included that he had latter found out to be inaccurate appeared in Irving’s work, adding to the suspicion that he had borrowed heavily from the earlier work.

The Postal Inspection Service’s handwriting expert declared upon comparison to known Hughes signatures that Hughes had not written any of the documents supposedly from him in Irving’s possession. According to the expert, the endorsements on McGraw-Hill’s checks were in the hand of Edith Irving, while the documents that Irving claimed to have been written by Hughes had in fact been written by Irving’s own hand. With all of the evidence accumulated against him, Irving admitted on March 3, 1972 that he had manufactured the entire business. Clifford Irving pleaded guilty and was sentenced on July 16, 1972.