86-year-old Napoleon Gonzalez of Etna, Maine, was recently convicted of one count of identity theft, two counts of passport fraud, two counts of Social Security fraud, and one count of mail fraud after almost 60 years of using his deceased brother's identity.
The ruse started in 1965 when Napoleon Gonzalez first used his brother Guillermo's identity to obtain a second passport, as well as receive double Social Security and veterans benefits.
Guillermo had passed away in infancy almost 30 years earlier, but that didn't stop the U.S. government from paying out retirement benefits to him (or rather, his older brother) for the next 58 years.
Napoleon maintains his innocence, claiming that the Air Force prompted him to go undercover using his brother's identity while he worked for the Office of Special Investigations during the 1960s.
The Air Force, of course, has no records of his ever working in that department. (But that's probably just what they want you to think.)
To make matters more confusing, in 1984 Gonzalez attempted to fake his own death in order to cash in on his life insurance by purchasing a corpse that he tried to pass off as his own while he was living in Puerto Rico.
Puerto Rico records still list Napoleon Gonzalez as deceased that year.
I'm not sure why he didn't try to fake the death of his already-dead identity, but I'm sure he had some sort of plan.
And while his insurance fraud scheme didn't totally pan out, his identity theft did for over half a century until he was eventually outwitted by facial recognition software that identified his photo being used on two separate IDs.
But Mr. Gonzalez's dual-identity scheme began to unravel in January 2020, once the authorities in Maine found two driver's licenses in their system with photographs of the same man. When investigators came to his home that month, he admitted that he had collected benefits under both identities.
And that spring, after the government suspended his dead brother's benefits, he sent a letter to the Social Security Administration signed "Guillermo Gonzalez."
The agents returned to Napoleon's home that summer. They had more questions.
I'll say they had more questions. But at this point, Napoleon Gonzalez had been living with two identities for the majority of his life, and due to his advanced age, he was probably starting to get a little confused by all the back-and-forth himself.
Gonzalez is now facing up to 50 years in prison, but that's still less time than he lived under both identities, so he may have come out on top in the end.
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