This is a great read. I felt bad laughing at this guy til I realized how lucky he was to get only a couple years for two kilos of coke.
In November 2011, Paul Frampton, a theoretical particle physicist, met Denise Milani, a Czech bikini model, on the online dating site Mate1.com. She was gorgeous — dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a supposedly natural DDD breast size. In some photos, she looked tauntingly steamy; in others, she offered a warm smile. Soon, Frampton and Milani were chatting online nearly every day. Frampton would return home from campus — he’d been a professor in the physics and astronomy department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for 30 years — and his computer would buzz. “Are you there, honey?” They’d chat on Yahoo Messenger for a while, and then he’d go into the other room to take care of something. A half-hour later, there was the familiar buzz. It was always Milani. “What are you doing now?”
[….]On the evening of Jan. 20, nine days after he arrived in Bolivia, a man Frampton describes as Hispanic but whom he didn’t get a good look at handed him a bag out on the dark street in front of his hotel. Frampton was expecting to be given an Hermès or a Louis Vuitton, but the bag was an utterly commonplace black cloth suitcase with wheels. Once he was back in his room, he opened it. It was empty. He wrote to Milani, asking why this particular suitcase was so important. She told him it had “sentimental value.” The next morning, he filled it with his dirty laundry and headed to the airport.
Frampton flew from La Paz to Buenos Aires, crossing the border without incident….
Short Bus Bully
1. Czech bikini models are always on line because they have trouble finding dates.
2. Theoretical particle physicists are sought after mates which is why they’re on line finding dates.
THEREFORE…
You go to jail for hauling kilos of coke around.
Fucking logic, how does it work?
Mark S.
The Grey Lady, always so discreet about such things.
Davis X. Machina
@Short Bus Bully: You can teach logic. Common sense, not so much.
raven
The incredible heat and moisture seeking missile strikes again.
greennotGreen
I read the linked article. The texts from his phone calculating how much they would make from two kilos of coke was pretty incriminating.
Jay in Oregon
I have a hard time feeling sorry for the guy. He’s a guy who thought he was too smart to be taken advantage of, which made him the perfect target for a scam.
He was warned by friends that this exact thing would happen and he ignored them because he wanted to believe a world-class bikini model that he’d only connected with via the internet was hot for him.
I wonder why that could be?
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
Gophers look to set the record for most wins in a season tonight against North Dakota. They’re currently on a stretch of just over 320 minutes without allowing a goal.
All three Kazmeier finalists play for Minnesota.
Amir Khalid
@raven:
This.
Professor Frampton is lucky he wasn’t wooed over the Internet by someone impersonating a beautiful woman from, say, Malaysia. Two kilos of cocaine is miles over the 15-gramme threshold here for a capital drug trafficking charge. And we’re not the only country that makes drug smuggling a capital crime.
Jay in Oregon
@greennotGreen:
Holy shit, I didn’t read far enough.
This guy strikes me as another Hans Reiser, a programmer who worked on a filesystem for the Linux operating system. Reiser was arrested for the murder of his wife, who disappeared after dropping their kids off with Hans.
Investigators found books on criminal process in his house, and during the trial he tried what some people called the “geek defense”: he had the books was because he was a geek and therefore was curious about how a criminal investigation against him would proceed, and was socially awkward enough to not understand that his curiosity would look like attempts to cover up a murder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser
different-church-lady
I mean… I… how is that even… [head explodes]
DougJ, Friend of Hamas
@greennotGreen:
Do you think?
greennotGreen
@DougJ, Friend of Hamas: Yup, little bit.
General Stuck
Wow, that dude is some piece of work. Idiot Savant about covers it . I suspect brilliant guys like him was the reason tenure was created in the first place, so if they wander off and end up joining the foreign legion or something, the genius can pick up where it left off, if they happen to wander back.
General Stuck
@Amir Khalid:
Dada means death
Amir Khalid
@General Stuck:
Tsk, tsk. The correct spelling is dadah.
General Stuck
@Amir Khalid:
oh well
Soonergrunt
Holy shit.
That has to be the dumbest smart person I’ve ever heard of. Or the smartest dumb person I’ve ever heard of.
RSA
This was in the news a few months ago as well, when Professor Frampton, writing from his jail cell in Argentina, asked the UNC provost to double his salary, in light of his past research record.
Yutsano
@Soonergrunt: I know several people who are fucking brilliant in their field who have almost zero intelligence outside of it. I wish it were an uncommon thing.
Amir Khalid
Is there a well-known guitar player related to this professor guy, by any chance?
cat
These kinds of people don’t have huge egos, they have tiny fragile egos and try to compensate by pretending to act how they think people with huge egos act.
I’m guess someone with a huge ego would have told the fakester to go pound sand after the first eticket turned out to be fake and the having to wait for 4 days for another ticket only to find she’d sent him a ticket to a place she knew she wouldn’t be? Wow…
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
A piece of work, that Frampton. Paul, I mean. My almost neighbor Peter is a fine guy.
The Fat Kate Middleton
I read the article and the comments, too … can’t believe only one person commented that Frampton is clearly Asperger’s. (Note: I’m grandparent of an Asperger’s child.)
schrodinger's cat
Pompous physicists, I know the type. Big egos they has it. Common sense, they lacks it. So many red flags, he didn’t catch on because he did not want to catch on.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@schrodinger’s cat: Though the texts rather suggest that he caught on fine.
Soonergrunt
@Yutsano: I know a server guy and a Unix Admin, neither of whom have any common sense or social grace. Neither of them however would get involved in a mess like this.
And for this particular guy, the biggest indicator of his social inability is his apparently sincere belief that he can BS people into believing that he had no idea at all that this was happening to him.
MattF
So, he’s amoral and not so good at being a criminal. You’ll find many people like that in prisons, all claiming to be innocent, pure as driven snow, etc. I speak from personal experience here, sad to say.
Gretchen
@Mark S.:
That’s what I thought too but I thought it was just because I’m a horrible person.
Elizabelle
A reader comment from the New York Times:
Yutsano
@Soonergrunt: I think Miss Gato de Schrödinger has it nailed. Big ego plus little to no social grace. Quite a deadly combination.
? Martin
What a different world this would be if God hadn’t stuck dicks on half of us.
Mnemosyne
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking — that big ego/few social skills combination led him to believe he could pull the plan off when he was finally told what it was because he was so much smarter than everyone else.
I’m kind of guessing he wasn’t told about the cocaine until he was actually in South America and didn’t have the money to get himself home, which is when the plan was proposed to him, but we probably won’t ever know.
schrodinger's cat
[email protected]
Did you read the NYT story about the Pope’s tailor?
Mnemosyne
Also, too, given the enormous number of lies told along the way and his apparent belief almost to the end that he really was practically engaged to a supermodel, I’m guessing that if he had managed to successfully deliver his package, he probably would have been murdered by the smugglers shortly afterwards. So getting off with four years in prison (most of them under house arrest) is definitely the best case scenario for him here.
kc
She was tired … tired of being admired …
BC
I fell over laughing – “Hispanic” is what most of the population of Bolivia look like!
Yutsano
@schrodinger’s cat: Linkie no work. Fixteth please.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
I’d like to meet his tailor.
schrodinger's cat
@Yutsano: I tries again
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/fashion/when-the-pope-is-chosen-his-tailors-will-be-ready.html
DougJ, Friend of Hamas
@schrodinger’s cat:
Yeah, I liked it.
Tokyokie
@RSA: Well, if his current salary is $0……..
schrodinger's cat
@DougJ, Friend of Hamas: Me too! Why are the bishops and cardinals color coded do you know? I am fascinated by the shoes too.
quannlace
Didn’t this guy ever see “Brokedown Palace”?
shortstop
I couldn’t take my eyes off this train wreck. I give the reporter full cred for her careful prose; she managed to convey the pure pathos while retaining the humanity of someone for whom it’d be easy to feel nothing but scorn. I started out that way, but before I was done I found myself cycling through deep pity, high hilarity and general disbelief. A walking Greek tragedy, this dude is.
Ruckus
@Davis X. Machina:
I hopefully will always remember the one good thing a philosophy prof had to say one day:
“If common sense actually was, more people would have some.”
Ruckus
@? Martin:
It isn’t the dicks, it’s the permanent redirection of the blood flow out of the brain.
eemom
The male commentarians are to be commended for these pithy acknowledgments.
General Stuck
@? Martin:
Yea, but how many Malls wouldn’t get built.
General Stuck
LOL
Gin & Tonic
If he’s a physicist maybe he can explain the physics behind those boobs of hers. “Natural DDD’s” my ass.
dmsilev
@Gin & Tonic: He’s a theoretical physicist. My guess is that he started out by assuming that her breasts were uniform spheres and went on from there.
(Google ‘spherical cow’ if you don’t recognize the joke)
Seanly
What a maroon! Of course he wasn’t speaking to Denise Milani as she’s my secret lover. We haven’t been able to meet yet, but I just know things will work out for us.
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev: Do you think he would have behaved any better if he was an experimental physicist instead?
Hagiographer
This dude reminded me a bit of Matt Damon in ‘The Informant!’ He was so narcissistic that he really believed he could outsmart everyone.
FlipYrWhig
I’m surprised this guy didn’t cross paths with Manti Te’o at some point.
Suzanne
The ego that would delude a very average-looking 68-some-odd-year-old dude into thinking a bikini model would want to have his babies is…..remarkable. Bigger than his intellect, that is for sure.
If he really is that clueless, I wonder how he managed to stay married to his first wife for more than three months.
Citizen_X
Come on, DougJ,, you couldn’t work a reference to Julie’s Been Working For the Drug Squad into the title? You coulda been a physicist, but now you’re/locked in a cell that smells like piss.
Well, at least he has his Czech bikini model waiting for him when he gets out, right?
minutemaid
How can someone so smart be so dumb? Zero street smarts.
minutemaid
This will make a good banged up abroad episode. I feel sorry for those people because a lot of times they really do seem ignorant to the fact they are being used.
To add insult to injury, most of the time they are not the actual courier, but the decoy that is being set up to be caught so the bigger package gets through.
Tom Levenson
@schrodinger’s cat: “Better” – I don’t know.
With more practical effectiveness. Without doubt.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: Experimentalists tend to be slightly more grounded in reality. Slightly, mind you.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Seanly: How was your threeway with her and Manti Te’o?
Mandalay
@Amir Khalid:
Interesting. I was in Malaysia several times in the 80’s and my recollection is that the spelling was “dada” wherever I saw it, which was very often as a tourist.
It was often mentioned in conjunction with the image of a skull and crossbones. Or am I mixing up Malaysia with Indonesia?…
WereBear
There are few things more powerful than the lie someone wants to believe.
Cygil
@The Fat Kate Middleton: I thought exactly the same thing. We might be laughing at a guy that literally can’t process or understand the motivations of the people around him.
Patternmaker
@Gin & Tonic:
Mine are natural DDDs. There’s nothing that defies the laws of physics, and also they don’t really look that big, even on my not-large frame.
Craigo
@Cygil: Why would you think that? He displays almost no symptoms of autism, while two of the three clinicians who have actually examined him diagnosed narcissistic personality disorder.
The internet has only two things in inappropriately greater quantities than Asperger’s – porn, and cats.
duckbilledplacelot
@Cygil: Oh, please, he’s socially conscious enough to have thought about what his colleagues would say when he introduced them to his ’18-35 year old’ brood mare. He’s an f-ing misogynist asshole, and the bumbling professor bullshit is just that. I feel for the people who are housing him (for the next year, I guess? ugh, imagine that) and of course for the Czech bikini model, who must be wondering how many other people are being scammed with her image and whether any of them are unhinged enough to blame the real her, etc….
AHH onna Droid
@schrodinger’s cat: Yes.
/former physics student
schrodinger's cat
@AHH onna Droid: I is a former physics kitteh too and frankly I never saw any difference in the egotism of theoretical or experimental physicists. I mostly worked in nuclear/atomic and then solid state though, not astro or particle physics. My work in solid state was a cross between theory and experiment (computer simulations) and mostly theoretical in nuclear/atomic physics.
ETA: As a woman in physics I certainly recognize this professor’s type, unfortunately not that uncommon in physics.
jlredford
I looked up his papers on the physics website http://arxiv.org/, and a fair number of them look real. He had collaborators, the subjects looked like genuine topics, and they were published in peer-reviewed journals. However, a number of them were just by him, were unpublished, and had such grandiose titles that they looked like the work of a crank.
His text messages were damning, and showed he knew just what he doing. His defense of being an idiot savant was ridiculous, but it was his only hope. He’s close to retirement and probably broke. He was probably hoping to get support from the NYT reporter and his US collaborators. When he gets back to UNC, they should pension him off and get rid of him.
General Stuck
@jlredford:
That phrase was coined by his friends and family, and no doubt evidence of such was presented at trial. He may have known what he was doing, in some abstract way, but I don’t think he cared about it other than it pleased his new web sweetheart. All the other doodling and math puzzles after arrest attest to that, as well.
Cygil
@Craigo: The two conditions are not exclusive. Most men with NPD manage to score with women for the first time at a younger age than 52, for example.
schrodinger's cat
@jlredford: One of his frequent collaborators is Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize winner in physics. He has an endowed chair at UNC, so I don’t think his physics credentials are in any doubt.
Tyro
I used to want to be like Frampton– being a physics professor at a flagship state university was a teenage dream of mine. (I got over it)
I don’t understand how someone could be so reckless and stupid (those text messages were completely damning) but also so naive and stupid to get duped in the first place. That said, being a professor requires such intense focus that being totally unaware of social norms and well-known scams is probably fairly common
kuvasz
As a graduate of NC State University I shall let pass without comment that such an idiot teaches at Carolina.
Tyro
I used to want to be like Frampton– being a physics professor at someplace like a flagship state university was a teenage dream of mine (I got over it).
I don’t understand how someone could be so reckless and stupid (those text messages were completely damning) but also so naive and stupid to get duped in the first place.That said, being a professor requires such intense focus that being totally unaware of social norms and well-known scams (he probably had no idea how common it is for “Czech bikini models” to contact possible targets, and he probably had never heard of how common it is to get caught as a drug mule with drugs sewn into luggage) is fairly common.
opie jeanne
@Mnemosyne: I have a worrying question about who paid for those pricey lawyers who had Mate` with the judge.
That part of it really smells, since he doesn’t have any money.
opie jeanne
@quannlace: Or even Bridge Jones’s Diary, Part Two.
HI
@schrodinger’s cat:
As you probably know, Erwin Schrodinger had a colorful sex life.
“He kept a detailed log of his numerous sexual escapades, included a teen-aged girl he seduced and impregnated while acting as her math tutor.”
schrodinger's cat
@HI: I did not know, eewwww.
evodevo
I guess he should just be glad this didn’t take place in Turkey….
Evolving Deep Southerner
@kuvasz: I work at NCSU, and I’ll just say that nobody’s ever accused the man of “teaching” classes that never actually met.
mai naem
This is what I don’t understand/what I think smells a wee bit fishy. Ok, you’re a fucking tenured professor at a halfway decent state school which means you are making very decent money with very good benefits. He married late and sounds like it was a short marriage so chances are his ex didn’t make off with half of his property.He doesn’t have kids. He lives in an apartment so it’s not like he was spending his money on some McMansion. So, where’s his money? Why did this supposed bikini model need to send him the plane tickets? He didn’t have money to buy the tickets? I would think any man would say,”Hell, yeah, I will be there sweetie and, no, you don’t need to pay for my ticket, I’ll pay for it myself.” Also, how much could a private attorney cost him in Argentina? I mean,hell, I don’t think an American lawyer would cost you more than a hundred grand for this – probably a whole lot less. An Argentinian lawyer’s got to be cheaper. He’s freaking 68 and a professor. Wouldn’t you think he would have half a mil stashed away by now? Me thinks, he’s got a gambling problem. I have a friend whose Dad was a retired tenured professor and blew all his money/cashed out his retirement at the casino. Crrrazzzy.
mai naem
I’m in moderation.
Tyro
@mai naem: he should have been grandfathered in to the university pension system, as well.
the Conster
He’s clueless and brilliant. If I were pitching the movie, it’s A Beautiful Mind meets Being John Malkovich meets Brokedown Palace, and Richard Gere is Paul Frampton, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman. Chris Cooper is the defense attorney.
priscianus jr
@<a @cat: href=”#comment-4273040″>cat: These kinds of people don’t have huge egos, they have tiny fragile egos and try to compensate by pretending to act how they think people with huge egos act.
No, they really do have a huge ego.
I think you may be confusing “ego” with “common sense”.
kuvasz
@Evolving Deep Southerner:
Since I tutored Valvano’s teams for years it comes as no surprize. Once I heard a freshman tell me that the word “of” was spelled “ove” because he had seen the word “love” spelled and recognized the letter “l.”
moderateindy
It seems ridiculous that anyone would believe that a model he met on the internet wanted him….that is of course until you consider all the other ridiculous things that people accept as truth every day. For instance, there is a supreme being that allows really crappy things happen to good people all the time as part of some great grand plan that should never be questioned. Or perhaps my favorite, tax cuts will actually raise revenue.
The sh*t people will believe because they want to believe it has no end.
Bob h
This guy is very consequential scientist indeed. Why he didn’t just go the Appalachian Trail route and go find himself a real chica in BA is beyond me.