Sunday’s Charlotte Observer presented the story of David Race Bannon (left), who claimed in his memoir, Race Against Evil, that he’d been killing international child pornographers for Interpol…whereas in real life he was a community college computer instructor in North Carolina. Now he’s about to be sentenced after pleading guilty to criminal impersonation after he was arrested in January in a sting operation where he was expecting to get paid $3,000 to lecture Colorado’s anti-human trafficking task force about his “expertise.”
As it happens, Interpol’s been telling people for years that he’s a phony; he in turn would tell people who called him on it that it was just a standard denial. Surprisingly, it took people years to realize he had the same name as the silver-haired bodyguard on Johnny Quest—especially when you realize his story, as published by true-cime specialty house New Horizons Press, sounds like James Frey meets John Perkins (although the latter has never really been pushed hard on the frankly implausible conspiracy theory he spins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man).
Back when Bannon was arrested, Dan Radosh took Boulder Weekly to task for having taken the fake executioner at his word in a 2004 profile. Oops! The other significant reporting on Bannon’s Fake Writerdom comes from a massive article on Bullshido.net, a site that specializes in exposing fake martial arts experts; Bannon claimed he was a 3rd degree black belt.