{"id":119,"date":"2026-05-29T13:09:58","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:09:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=119"},"modified":"2026-05-29T13:09:58","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:09:58","slug":"how-americas-courts-fell-for-a-con-man-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=119","title":{"rendered":"How America\u2019s Courts Fell for a Con Man"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The first time I saw Pamela Colloff, she was on stage at an overwhelmingly beige convention hall in a New Orleans Marriott. Colloff, a reporter at Propublica<\/em> and staff writer at New York Times Magazine<\/em>, was a headliner in one of the few places journalists are cool enough to headline anything: a professional conference for investigative reporters. In a packed, exquisitely air conditioned room\u2014it was New Orleans in the summer, after all\u2014dozens of media workers sat knee to knee on carpet when the room\u2019s few hundred or so chairs filled just to hear Colloff explain her writing process.<\/p>\n

Colloff has been a criminal justice journalist for decades. She developed her knack for that brand of reporting as a staffer at Texas Monthly<\/em>\u2014a job she landed fresh out of college when Austin rent was still $300 a month. In the years since, her work has focused on the wrongly incarcerated and the myriad institutional failings of the US criminal justice system.<\/p>\n

Read more How America\u2019s Courts Fell for a Con Man<\/a><\/p>\n

Colloff\u2019s first book, Catch The Devil<\/em> follows her reporting for The New York Times <\/em>and ProPublica<\/em> on Paul Skalnik, a jailhouse informant whose false testimony helped prosecutors across the American south secure the convictions of dozens of men, one of whom is still on death row. In exchange for his testimony, detectives and prosecutors awarded Skalnik\u2014whose rap sheet included fraud, grand theft, and an arrest for child sexual abuse\u2014sweetheart deals like sentence reductions, early release, and at one point, an unsanctioned conjugal visit.<\/p>\n

Catch The Devil<\/em> traces Skalnik\u2019s life, as well as those of his victims, who make up a diverse group of scammed ex-wives, molested girls, and incarcerated men. Colloff\u2019s pain-staking, comprehensive reporting is a scathing indictment of a country where prosecutors are so often politically incentivized to get a conviction regardless of a defendant\u2019s actual guilt.<\/p>\n

Colloff sat down with The Nation <\/em>to discuss her new book, the state of journalism, and why she\u2019s fascinated with the decisions people make in the worst moments of their lives. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

\u2014Henry Fernandez<\/em><\/p>\n

Henry Fernandez: After you won the Hillman Prize in 2020 for your initial investigative piece on Paul Skalnik,<\/strong>you said in a video statement<\/strong>, \u201cI\u2019ve come to the conclusion that jailhouse informants simply should not be in American courtrooms.\u201d In the six and a half years since, has your opinion on jailhouse informants stayed the same? If so, can you explain to our readers how your reporting led you to this conclusion?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Pamela Colloff: <\/strong>No, my opinion has not changed. If you look at how jailhouse informants function in the criminal justice system, the fact that they are what we call \u201cincentivized witnesses\u201d makes their use very problematic. Informants come with all sorts of complications and issues. But, I think people are most used to encountering an informant in an organized crime case, where you\u2019re trying to penetrate a group of people and their activities, and there\u2019s one person who flips and works with prosecutors. Obviously, there are issues with this, but at least that person was in the thick of the activity or a witness to the activity that\u2019s at the center of the case.<\/p>\n

A jailhouse informant is someone in jail alongside people in pre-trial detention. They have everything on the line, and they\u2019re about to go to trial or decide whether or not to take a plea. The basic conceit of a jailhouse informant, I think, is very hard to buy. We\u2019re not talking about people who\u2019ve already been convicted and have been living alongside fellow prisoners for years. Jail is not a place where you\u2019re talking openly about your crimes.<\/p>\n

But the supposed informant knows that anything helpful they bring forward to the prosecution will be beneficial to them. Jurors don\u2019t know that, on the back end, the understanding is that the informant will be rewarded with a sentence reduction or tried on a lesser charge in exchange for their testimony.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, when you put all those things together, the idea that this has a place in our system just doesn\u2019t make sense to me. If you have a good case, you don\u2019t need a jailhouse informant. When you see that a case has a jailhouse informant, it\u2019s a red flag that something\u2019s wrong with the case and that the evidence isn\u2019t good enough.<\/p>\n

HF: Something I find fascinating about this book is the way it traces the failures of a variety of American systems\u2014whether it be the courts, the American military, the school system or law enforcement. What did writing this book teach you about the systems that govern the US?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC: <\/strong>Skalnik, on his own, was just a small-time con artist. To cause all the damage he did, he had to be enabled by a larger system. That system was law enforcement, which wanted to close cases. It was prosecutors who wanted to secure convictions and get long sentences. It was judges who wanted to move cases through their docket and not ask the questions they should have asked.<\/p>\n

When you see all those things come together and understand that all those people in power benefited from what someone like Paul Skalnik provided them. So they looked the other way about all sorts of things, including crimes he committed that he was not held accountable for. I think we can see that, in the pursuit of justice, it\u2019s sometimes possible to get lost in what real justice looks like.<\/p>\n

In many of these cases, what prosecutors considered justice was getting a conviction, and it didn\u2019t matter what the collateral damage was.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

HF: You came up at a time when journalism was a very different industry. Print journalism was read at a higher rate, newsrooms across the country were growing, and a young person getting their start in journalism had a wide variety of avenues to choose from. What is your advice to those going into the field today?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC: <\/strong>Oh my goodness. I mean, it\u2019s such a completely different landscape than when I started. To be clear, even back in the 90s, everyone felt that this industry was dying. Pay was bad unless you had a Vanity Fair<\/em> contract. There are a lot of problems that still existed then that are with us today.<\/p>\n

Right now, while a lot of legacy organizations have disappeared, and you used to be able to go to newsstands with 100 different magazines on them, it does seem like there are so many different ways to get your voice out there, whether that\u2019s going to work for an organization or whether it\u2019s putting yourself out there on your own through things like Substack.<\/p>\n

I think the challenge right now\u2014especially for investigative work, which takes so much time and so many resources\u2014is how to find a way to make enough money that you can spend many months or even a year on an investigation. My hope is that all of these news nonprofits that are popping up all over the country can do that investigative work. I don\u2019t pretend to know the answer. I feel like I\u2019m always holding my breath, but I have been since I started.<\/p>\n

I think the thing that worries me the most is the attention economy we\u2019re in today. I don\u2019t know what narrative non-fiction looks like in 5 or 10 years. To me, storytelling is the way out of the problems of this attention economy. Deep, immersive storytelling with character-building and twisty plots. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve wanted since the dawn of time.<\/p>\n

HF: You got your start in journalism during your time at Brown University. Can you tell us about your first scoop and the lessons or skills you learned as a college journalist that you used while writing this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC:<\/strong> My first big scoop as a college journalist was a story about a fraternity on campus where there were allegations that women inside that fraternity house were being videotaped in the course of sexual acts. That reporting set a lot of things in motion. There were two lessons that came out of that\u2014one good and one bad. The good one was that writing a story could cause change. Writing a story could make things happen beyond the pages of the newspaper for which I was writing. And that felt really exciting, you know? Things I was writing had the potential to cause change.<\/p>\n

I think the hard lesson was that the administration at that time, one dean in particular, was not supportive of muckraking investigative journalism. I think naively, I was really shocked by that because I went to a college that celebrated the liberal arts and inquiry. To see the institution try to protect itself rather than probing some of the questions I was asking was really disheartening. Discrediting me became a way to protect the institutional priorities.<\/p>\n

At the time that that happened, an English professor of mine asked me to stay after class. I thought I was in trouble. But instead, she read me John Milton\u2019s Areopagitica<\/em>, <\/em>which is a defense of the free press. She read it to me and said, \u201cI just wanted you to hear that.\u201d<\/p>\n

HF: In this book, you write that there is a \u201cFundamental, irresistible human need to invest ourselves in narratives that we want to be true.\u201d Do you believe prosecutors and law enforcement officials across the US truly believed Skalnik\u2019s testimony, or was the truth second to their goal of convicting a defendant?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC:<\/strong> I can\u2019t say with certainty what was in their hearts and minds. I do think some people believed or wanted to believe what he was saying\u2014especially early on, before the full scope of who Skalnik was was clear. I start the book by telling a story about how he got me to believe a story that wasn\u2019t true. I did that intentionally because I think whenever you encounter a con man story, it\u2019s easy to believe that you would never be so gullible as the people who fell for whatever the story is about.<\/p>\n

I wanted to write about the fact that here I was, an investigative reporter, going to visit someone who I know is a career con artist and fabulist in federal prison. And still, when he promises that he has this incredible story to tell and that I\u2019m the person to tell it before he dies and that he is going to entrust me with it and work with me and tell me all the details that he\u2019s never told anybody else, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. I very excitedly told my editor that I had this great story! Of course, he never intended to tell me anything, but he was very good at reading people, and he could see what I wanted and what was important to promise me.<\/p>\n

Read more Indivisible Is Working Hard to Live Up to Its Name<\/a><\/p>\n

I put that at the front of the book as a way of saying that, while I certainly think that law enforcement and prosecutors and judges should have been far more skeptical of him,\u00a0 I fell for that too.<\/p>\n

That was also the impetus for the article and then the book. He\u2019s not going to tell me anything, so I have to go find it all out myself.<\/p>\n

HF: Your book touches on the women Paul Skalnik victimized outside of the courtroom. Ex-wives who were physically abused, women who were defrauded, and young girls Skalnik molested. What was your process in finding and gaining the trust of these women, and why did you find it important to include their stories in this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC: <\/strong>To me, the people who are the most interesting were the people who were left in his wake. This is different from a con man story, where the focus is entirely on the con artist himself. To me, what was so fascinating was that these younger girls, teenagers in the 80s, saw through Skalnik when their mothers and others in authority didn\u2019t. They had a radar for him.<\/p>\n

The kind of damage that he did by gaining the girls\u2019 trust and then exploiting them is important to recall because they had not necessarily been believed or treated well when they came forward with their own stories. They had not initially been believed. I think the most important and interesting reporting that I did was finding those girls, now grown women.<\/p>\n

HF: There\u2019s a cultural obsession and romanticization that Americans have with con men. Bernie Madoff, Jordan Belfort, Elizabeth Holmes. What is your book\u2019s relationship to this longstanding obsession? And why do you think we gravitate so much to these kinds of characters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC:<\/strong> We often like to root for the underdog or the person who\u2019s getting away with things. In so many con artist stories, we\u2019re celebrating the con artist. We\u2019re celebrating what they\u2019re able to get away with. We\u2019re rooting for them!<\/p>\n

A lot of those stories can come off as victimless; they\u2019re told more like capers. And I think it\u2019s worth spending some time to think about the people who are left behind in these stories and whose story gets told and whose don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

For people who are ripped off of their life savings or people who are manipulated in various ways, the consequences can be so devastating.<\/p>\n

So I tried with this book to turn that narrative on its head while also showing that the dark, crazy misadventures this man had are almost like fiction. It\u2019s almost hard to believe what he did and what he got away with.\u00a0<\/p>\n

HF: Your book ends in an unexpected way. Following the epilogue and acknowledgments, you do what a lot of journalists would not: you list in rather great detail your reporting process for each chapter. Why did you decide to do this?\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC:<\/strong> It\u2019s always what I want to know. When I read a great work of narrative non-fiction, I think, \u2018wow, how did they get that?\u2019 Whatever the great detail is, whatever the story is.<\/p>\n

There are many books that have these exhaustive footnotes at the end of them. If you\u2019re writing an academic work, obviously that\u2019s very important. But when you\u2019re writing something like this where you\u2019re trying to reach a really wide cross-section of people, people who may never have thought about the criminal justice system in a critical way before, who are just interested in a good story, having a list of citations in the back doesn\u2019t really do it justice.<\/p>\n

It was so much work to unearth all of this. I\u2019m proud of that work. Also, some of it\u2019s so unbelievable that I want people to know that every sentence of the book is grounded in fact and has been exhaustively researched and fact-checked.<\/p>\n

Some of my favorite narratives are those in which the reporter takes me along on their journey, and I do that in the last quarter of the book when I go into the first person. Patrick Radden Keefe does that really beautifully in his new book, London Falling, where he sort of sets everything up and then switches into the first person as he uncovers the answers. So, for anyone who wants to take the time to read the source notes of the book, there are a lot of little Easter eggs in there.<\/p>\n

HF: Though you have been a journalist for decades, this is your first book. You\u2019ve covered a number of fascinating topics:<\/strong>survivors of the first modern American school shooting<\/strong>,<\/strong>women on death row for killing their abusive spouses<\/strong>,<\/strong>the unreality of bloodstain analysis in forensic science<\/strong>. What about Paul Skalnik made him the right subject for your first book? And why, in a climate where long-form journalism is getting increasingly sidelined, did you choose to write this book at all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC: <\/strong>Paul Skalnik was the way into a world that I want people to think more deeply about. But through him, I could tell a really engaging, immersive and, at times, sort of rollicking story.<\/p>\n

If the issues that I\u2019m dealing with in the story didn\u2019t have the benefit of character development and plot and storytelling, then it would just be a lot harder to not only reach readers but to get them to think deeply about these issues and react on an emotional level to them, which I want them to do.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that I haven\u2019t thought about writing a book before, but this was the first time I could see a story where there was so much to build out. There was a whole world. There were all these characters. It had the sort of epic sweep that I think I was always waiting for for a book.<\/p>\n

HF: In a PBS interview with your former Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, you said \u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in what people do in the worst moments of their lives.\u201d Why does this interest you, and has this interest evolved or changed as you wrote <\/strong>Catch The Devil<\/em><\/strong>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PC: <\/strong>I typically write about the criminal justice system in one way or another. If you think about each person in that system\u2014whether they\u2019re victims of crimes, perpetrators,\u00a0 witnesses, investigators, or prosecutors\u2014 they are undergoing this sort of unimaginable stress test, right? Especially in a murder case, we\u2019re talking about the highest stakes there are. In that stress test, some people make good choices, and some don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

That has always fascinated me narratively. One of the main characters of my book is a man named Jim Dailey who\u2019s currently on Florida\u2019s Death Row. And he\u2019s been there since 1987. How do you keep living decade after decade, sitting in a windowless cell, knowing that you\u2019re never going to get out? How do you find meaning? How do you find human connection? That\u2019s always fascinated me.<\/p>\n

Read more Looking Backward: James Campbell Reviews His Own 1982 \u2018Nation\u2019 Essay on Leaving Scotland<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","category-studentnation"],"yoast_head":"\nHow America\u2019s Courts Fell for a Con Man - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=119\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How America\u2019s Courts Fell for a Con Man - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=119\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-29T13:09:58+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"15 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=119#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=119\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"How America\u2019s Courts Fell for a Con Man\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-29T13:09:58+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=119\"},\"wordCount\":3074,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=119#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/06f60e07d7e5a020b80756684bd85f8e.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Society\",\"StudentNation\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=119#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=119\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=119\",\"name\":\"How America\u2019s Courts Fell for a Con Man - 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