NEW YORK -- A man was found guilty Friday of selling salacious but forged documents claiming President Kennedy paid hush money to keep secret an affair with Marilyn Monroe.
Lawrence X. Cusack III, who made a fortune selling hundreds of Kennedy-linked documents he claimed came from his father, was convicted on 13 mail and wire fraud charges.Cusack, 48, of Fairfield, Conn., faces up to five years in prison on each of the 13 fraud counts, and a maximum $250,000 fine on each count when he is sentenced in July.
When Judge Denise Cote announced the guilty verdict on each charge, Cusack's jaw dropped. He stared, eyes narrowed, at the jurors, then he shook his head repeatedly and dropped his face into his hands.
The case caused a furor in 1997 after Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh deleted material based on the documents from his book, "The Dark Side of Camelot."
Cusack produced letters that he said were written between his late father, who helped handle the Monroe estate, and the slain president. The documents appeared to prove rumors about Kennedy and Monroe, the Mafia and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
According to the papers, Kennedy had set up a trust for Monroe's mother to buy silence about the rumored affair between the president and the actress.
Prosecutors said Cusack swindled investors out of about $7 million between 1993 and 1997 by selling the phony documents.