“Don’t be alarmed if my main character calls you after the publication, saying that you should have interviewed him instead of me.” It was the strangest warning I ever received for conducting an author interview. Above the final piece would be an equally bizarre headline announcing a conversation with the author of an ink-fresh book: “This novel was the stupidest decision of my life.”
Maarten Inghels devoted several precious years of his life to the well-known ‘master con artist’ Piet Van Haut, who has been defrauding citizens, banks and companies by assuming false identities for more than thirty years. He took over his life during that period. The book Het mirakel van België was at least as much about the master swindler as it was about how the writer allowed himself to be swept up in the megalomania of his main character. Hence the regret about the book. But once entangled in the web of Piet Van Haut, Inghels could not go back.
Most of his meetings and conversations with the criminal, the writer recorded with a camera. It immediately answers the question: why then another documentary if the – otherwise excellent – book was such a quest to accomplish? In six episodes of about ten minutes each, The World’s Largest Master Swindler shows why Piet Van Haut is still a danger to society today.
Piet Van Haut has not stopped scamming. In addition to ex-victims such as actress Martine Jonckheere, Inghels looks for victims who are still the target of the narcissistic and criminal nature of the mentally ill swindler today. In front of the cameras, Van Haut calls two Dutchmen from whom he extorted 150,000 euros. He bursts out with pleasure. Inghels also visited a ‘sugar aunt’ in the Netherlands, clearly the master con artist’s favorite hunting ground. They talk about his irresistible urge to pretend to be someone else. Together they set off in Amsterdam, where Van Haut promises careless passers-by golden mountains as so-called CEO of Johnson & Johnson.
“I have stopped, but now I do it smarter so that I don’t leave any traces,” says Piet Van Haut somewhere. Then explain how it works. That’s not very smart, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. You behold a man who has been getting away with the most heinous criminal acts for three decades. A victim explains why: “Scam is hurting the mind. There is no blood involved.”
In the book, the novel character Piet Van Haut aroused a sense of sympathy in a way. Here there is only aversion for the real Piet Van Haut: a psychopath who visibly enjoys cheating and cheating. He didn’t call me after the interview and he certainly shouldn’t try to after this new exposure.
Now on VTM GO.
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2023-08-15 15:00:22
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