Original subtitles

Antique documents worth millions.

Techniques that fool America's greatest experts.

A master plan so profound it takes years to unfold.

And a brilliant mind driven to the absolute edge.

1980, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Home of the Mormon Church and setting for a discovery that sends shockwaves

throughout America.

Mark Hoffman, a first-year medical student, has purchased an old Bible.

Stuck between its pages is a mysterious document.

Unable to see what it is and unable to safely remove it, Hoffman calls on an

expert to help him.

He watches on as Professor Jess Simmons, curator of the University Archives,

unearths the long-lost anthon transcript.

And this was a document with strange characters on it that purportedly was

produced by Joseph Smith as copies of the characters that came from the gold

plates that he translated the Book of Mormon on. So you can see this would be

an astounding document.

They decided this was a real authentic Joseph Smith document.

All of a sudden, he was the young man that came up with one of the great

historical finds of Mormon history.

To the Mormon community, the Anthon transcript is the word of God revealed

to them through the hand of their founder, Joseph Smith.

Hoffman sells his amazing find to the Mormon church for $20,000.

Hoffman becomes a star.

His status in the Mormon community skyrockets.

Church leaders eager to promote Mormon history embrace him. He quits medical

school to search for documents full-time.

Six months later, Hoffman makes another incredible find.

He unearths three Joseph Smith letters that he sells for $95,000.

The money pours in.

When Hoffman offers to give lectures on his many finds, Mormons line up to learn

more about their faith.

I actually remember attending a seminar where Mr. Hoffman spoke about one of his

discoveries, and I found it quite fascinating.

He uses these occasions to build relationships with wealthy collectors

who compete to buy documents from him.

He would come to see us fairly frequently. He would bring material to

sell or trade.

And he did it on a regular basis so that you began to count on it. Obviously, he

was coming up with some remarkable finds, and he seemed to be the

gatekeeper to the documents.

Over the next year, Hoffman makes more apparent discoveries, including

documents of national importance from the hands of Daniel Boone, Abe Lincoln,

George Washington.

and Jack London.

His fame spreads.

The Mormon church believes he is touched by God.

He certainly had more access to the church historical department.

It seemed like they fell all over themselves to allow him to see whatever

he wanted to see.

He was quite a celebrity at that point.

But what they don't know is...

Hoffman is using his celebrity to secretly learn the names, dates, and

handwriting styles on the church's most sensitive documents.

Information he will use to create the world's most astounding series of

forgeries.

Because Mark Hoffman is a fraud, and so is everything he sells.

Starting at 15 years of age when he fooled the U.S. Treasury with a fake

antique coin.

He has created over 600 extraordinary forgeries, including the Anthon

transcript, the Joseph Smith letters, and materials by hundreds of famous

Americans, all of which deceive the world's most discerning experts and net

him millions.

The question is, how does he do it?

Mark Hoffman is a criminal mastermind, making millions with his extraordinary

forgeries.

But what techniques is he using to fool the world's most respected experts?

The paper for Hoffman's forgeries will have to be at least 150 years old. But

you can't just get something this rare off the shelf.

Or can you?

When no one's looking.

He helps himself to the blank pages in the backs of old library books.

Finding old ink, however, is a lot more difficult.

He had found an old recipe for some ink, how it was made in the 1830s. He was

able to make that ink by following this formula.

Hoffman grinds oak nuts and wasp larva, adds it to ferrous sulfate, Then a dash

of gum arabic, and finally water.

He agitates the light brown mixture until it transforms into a rich dark

black.

Perfect period ink, right?

Foolproof.

Wrong. And Hoffman knew it. He went one step further. He knew that probably

there would be a carbon-14 dating of the ink that was used on the document.

Because remember, this was going to be a very, very important national document.

And so he said, how am I going to counter that?

Well, he tore up pieces of that paper that he ripped off down at Brigham Young

University and burned it so that it was now carbonized and mixed that in the ink

that he used.

This brilliantly ensures that the ink will now date from the 1800s.

But to a master forger.

The most difficult hurdle is making the ink look 150 years old.

There's many different ways you can artificially age a document.

You can do it through treating it with oxygen, through treating it with heat,

through treating it with certain chemicals.

Hoffman used all of these.

Hoffman soaks the document in a chemical bath of ammonia, the same substance used

to clean windows.

This has the effect of turning the black ink to a convincing faded brown.

And how could he give it a perfect aged yellow color? He uses a household iron.

What makes Hoffman's forgeries so convincing is their historical accuracy.

The way they perfectly capture both the language and handwriting style of the

period.

But they're also convincing for another reason.

Long before he offers forgeries for sale, he's devised an ingenious ploy.

He donated many documents to the libraries, to the LDS church, at no

charge. And then later on would come back with quite a controversial document

and maybe charge him $20,000, $30,000, $40,000.

As they would seek to authenticate the document, the first thing they would

look at was the writing.

Well, they would be comparing the writing that Mark Hoffman forged to

writing in their archives, and that writing was donated by Mark Hoffman, and

that was also forged. So, in fact, they were comparing forged writing to forged

writing. And this was the downfall of many of the laboratories, including the

FBI.

But forgery isn't just about technique.

It's also about psychology.

He never wanted to find a document himself.

He always had somebody else do it for him. That way the suspicion would never

be on him.

That was exactly what happened when Hoffman allowed the professor to

discover the anthon transcript.

As you look back on that, it was a piece of brilliance on Hoffman's part of

someone of that caliber, you know, discover that, quote-unquote, in his

presence, and then for Mark to act so surprised, you know, like the rest of

them, at what they'd found.

But Hoffman's forgery goes deeper.

He creates a false history for the Bible that ties it to Joseph Smith.

Hoffman claimed that he had bought a really old Bible back in...

Carthage, Illinois, where Joseph Smith had been killed, and he claimed that he

had bought this from the descendants of Joseph Smith.

Then, to put the finishing touch to his masterful con, he perfectly forges

Smith's signature in the Bible.

He had this ability to understand what people wanted, and he was able to

deliver it.

And when someone delivers what you really want, you're not as skeptic about

it. Hoffman's documents are so convincing that Brent Ashworth spent

$300,000 on them. He was coming up with what I wanted. Maybe his greed to that

extent. He's coming up with something you want, and you've got to beat out

other collectors for it.

One of Hoffman's most successful techniques to avoid detection is to

never tell one buyer what he's selling to another.

He was really adept at keeping people separate without us

knowing that.

Had we been able to get together and discuss different transactions and

things he had said, we could have uncovered the deception.

Two years after selling the anthem, Hoffman ups the ante.

Realizing the church will pay a fortune to protect the image of its founder,

Joseph Smith, he creates the Salamander Letter, the first in a series of

controversial documents that threatens the very foundation of the Mormon faith.

This was a letter that was written by Martin Harris, who was a close friend of

Joseph Smith.

So it gave the impression that Joseph Smith was kind of a charlatan,

practicing in black magic and things like that. It was kind of an

embarrassment to the church.

People didn't want to see those documents come to light to protect the

church. People wanted to use these documents to expose the church. You have

people pulling those documents different ways.

to use them for their own purposes.

That drove up the price.

That drove up his status.

That made his persona in Salt Lake City.

Hoffman now travels east, craving the thrill of bigger prey.

But he knows he'll need a new technique for dealing with such sophisticated

experts. He creates an entirely new persona for himself.

He became acquainted with two very sophisticated book merchants.

back east. I mean, these were guys that were really into the trade. And it was

interesting. They kind of looked at Mark Hoffman as kind of a pigeon.

He had actually bought books from them at an inflated prices.

And so they looked upon Hoffman as just this little bumpkin from Utah that they

could kind of lead around.

And he made those people think that they were smarter than they were.

And he made those people think that he was dumber than they were.

And as soon as they thought they were pulling one over on Mark Hoffman, that

they were pulling one over on this country bumpkin from Utah, he had them

hooked.

Hoffman uses these East Coast dealers to launch his boldest forgery yet, a

document that will literally rewrite American history.

The Oath of a Free Man was supposed to be the very first document that was ever

printed in the colonies.

And many people thought it was the precursor to the Declaration of

Independence and the Constitution.

To create it, Hoffman now masters a completely new technique.

This is a printed document rather than a handwritten document.

Hoffman poses as an innocent history buff and cons a commercial engraver into

creating a zinc printing plate.

At the bottom of this is a little disclaimer.

This is a replica of the Oath of the Freeman.

But when he was ready to use it, he would cut off the bottom portion of

this, run some ink that he had made through using his own chemical

composition, and then find a piece of paper, place the plate on top of the

paper, and by exerting pressure on it, he would then have a document which we

now call the Oath of a Freeman.

People believed it was out there.

And so he created the document. He filled the hole.

And now the scholars are ecstatic because it proves their idea or their

theory that the document existed.

This had been authenticated by the FBI, the Library of Congress, the American

Antiquarian Society, the McCrone Institute, the University of California,

and two other independent labs.

Every one of them said this was a genuine document.

The Library of Congress tells Hoffman it is seeking authorization for his asking

price of $1.5 million.

He has reached the pinnacle of the forger's art.

But nine years of criminal activity have changed Hoffman's character.

He started staying in very nice hotels, flew first class.

He started buying things.

He put down money on a big new house.

Hoffman at that time was getting caught up in the lifestyle.

And sometimes crooks begin to believe that what is deception is actual

reality. The mild-mannered Utah bumpkin starts acting like a Wild West gangster,

racing his new car into the desert to shoot his Uzi submachine gun.

But this bold new lifestyle is about to bring his carefully constructed world

crashing down around him.

For the last nine years, Mark Hoffman has been conning the experts with his

perfect forgeries.

But his extravagant new lifestyle is a real problem.

He owes a fortune.

He's like a lot of con men who get involved in these kinds of things. They

go through money. They don't make a lot of money. They go through money.

There were several deals that weren't working out for him.

He was trying to sell that oath of a free man to the Library of Congress.

Demanding more time to test the oath.

the Library of Congress refuses to pay Hoffman. He is now so desperate for

cash, he decides to forge an entire collection of letters, diaries, and

affidavits written by William McClellan, a bitter critic of Joseph Smith.

This was a collection that was supposedly coming out of Texas that

would have been very detrimental to the image of the church.

Hoffman was promising to produce it. He cons Steve Christensen, a representative

of the church.

in defronting him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So now Hoffman's got money, but what he doesn't have is time.

If it was one or two documents, he could sit down at night and put it together.

But if it's hundreds of documents, there's no way he had the time to put

that type of collection together.

He didn't produce the collection like he was supposed to.

There was a lot of pressure to produce that because a lot of money was tied up

in it.

As Hoffman struggles to complete the collection, he sinks deeper into debt

and is forced to borrow more money.

He was paying earlier investors with later investors' money.

And as you know, at some point in time, somebody has to pay the piper. There was

hundreds of thousands of dollars that were floating out there.

Mark came into my store to try to raise money.

and was very distraught, visibly shaken, pale.

I'd never seen him like that.

He would have been under tremendous pressure.

There were certain people that were after him for money.

And it isn't long before some of his disgruntled investors get ugly.

And he was trying to juggle a whole lot of balls in the air. And at one moment,

I think those balls came down. And that's when he became desperate.

Hoffman is now over a million dollars in debt.

All his brilliant forging skills can't help him.

He panics and resorts to violence.

A pipe bomb concealed in a package addressed to Stephen Christensen

explodes outside Christensen's office in downtown Salt Lake.

Christensen dies in a hail of shrapnel.

Hoffman targets Christensen because he was about to expose Hoffman's financial

dealings.

11.20 a.m. Another pipe bomb explodes in Suburban Holiday.

The second bomb was intended for Christensen's business partner, but

mistakenly kills an innocent bystander.

Hoffman then builds a third bomb.

There's a lot of speculation as to who the third bomb was for.

I think the bomb was intended for Brent Ashworth.

They had met on that day of the week for a long period of time. Brent was

expected to be at that location, and I really think that Mark had planned to go

to that location and set that bomb off in the vicinity of Brent Ashworth.

We would have just walked up to his car like we normally did, and he'd invite me

to get in the car and whammo, I probably would have been killed.

But Brent Ashworth didn't come to town.

So now Hoffman has a live bomb sitting on his seat.

October 16th, 2.40 p.m. A third bomb explodes in the sports car of historic

documents dealer Mark Hoffman.

Hoffman suffers burns and multiple fractures.

His injuries were not life-threatening, but they were very serious.

When he gives his account of where he was sitting as the bomb exploded, he

contradicts the forensic evidence found at the scene.

Well, we decided we had to do a very concerted, extremely in-depth

investigation of Mark Hoffman and all of his document dealings. As investigators

circle closer to Hoffman as their killer, the case throws a cloud of doubt

on the church's documents and on others Hoffman has sold from coast to coast.

Once we learned that they were forgeries, once we learned that his old

reputation was built upon his seed, we understood why he killed these two

people. Finally, prosecutors make their move.

R.W. Hoffman has been charged with two counts of first-degree homicide, a

capital offense.

Hoffman pleads guilty to second-degree murder and theft by deception.

In January 1988, he appears in court to face sentencing.

Do you think you should ever be free again?

Obviously, I want to be free.

By a majority vote, the board has decided that you should serve natural

life in prison.

I've never met a person that was so amoral.

Everything was about him, about his ability to fool people.

His great desire in life was to fool the experts.

That's where everything was pointed toward, creating a document and daring

the experts to disprove it. And that's what drove him on.

He admitted later that he actually was trying to change church history because

he said that he had become an atheist when he was a teenager.

He wanted to embarrass the church. He wanted to show that it was false.

He wanted to literally change history.

But he did it in such a genius way that it was all very plausible.

After 10 years, 800 documents, and two murders, the master forger's reign

has finally come to an end.

Thank you.