In November 2011, 68-year-old physicist Paul Frampton was feeling lonely and despondent. Years of chasing top-dog status among Nobel laureates in elementary particle physics had left him without a family, and languishing in the emptiness of a life devoid of relationships. Since his divorce 3 years earlier from Anne-Marie, his only connections to the outer world were his communications with colleagues on shared research interests. As a tenured professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a salary of $106,835, his future income seemed secure, and joint publications with 3 Nobel laureates prompted him to estimate his chances of winning a Nobel Prize at 55%.
Yet, a deep primordial itch, increasingly pervaded his consciousness. It was a persistent itch that eventually impelled him to seek solace and companionship in an on-line dating site, where he might meet a woman who would offer her passion and sexuality to share in his intelligence and celebrity in the intellectual community.
To his delight, he made contact with a woman who introduced herself as Denise Milani. Through their communication on Yahoo Messenger, he learned that she was a fashion model who had won the 2007 Miss Bikini World contest. Pictures he received in his e-mail confirmed that she was, as he expressed it mathematically, “in the top 1 percentile of how women look.” His new 35-year-old acquaintance was precisely what he needed to fill the void in his emotionally vacant life. During their communication that spanned a period of several weeks, the couple became increasingly close. She would contact him on Yahoo Messenger and they would converse, sometimes for hours. The conversations would be about her family and modeling jobs and often she would inquire about his work in physics, explaining that she “longed to be with someone who was serious about their work.” She was tired of posing in her bikini on a beach surrounded by ogling males indulging their fantasies. When Professor Frampton suggested that they communicate by telephone, Denise explained that her mobile phone would not accept incoming calls–a measure she had taken to avoid the unwelcome attention of men who sought her out. Eager to move the relationship to the next level, Paul contacted Denise on January 4, 2012, to arrange for a meeting. Denise invited him to join her in LaPaz, Bolivia on January 14 where she was on a photo shoot. Describing her stint as very lucrative, she promised to send him an airline e-ticket.
The ticket routed Frampton to LaPaz through a circuitous route via Toronto and Santiago, Chile, causing him to arrive in Bolivia 3 days later than originally planned. On his arrival, Professor Frampton was disappointed to receive a message from Denise indicating that she had left for a photo shoot in Brussels, but would send him a ticket so that he could join her there. On January 20, the day before his departure from Bolivia, Frampton received a text from Denise, asking him to bring with him to Belgium an empty suitcase that she needed. He also received an e-ticket to Buenos Aires and the promise that a ticket to Brussels would be available to him when he arrived in Argentina. Later that night, a nondescript middle-aged Hispanic man brought the suitcase to him outside his hotel–a suitcase that Paul subsequently filled with his dirty laundry.
Around 2 p.m. the next day, Paul Frampton reached the Ezeiza airport in Buenos Aires. There he checked his baggage, along with Denise’s suitcase, and awaited the arrival of his e-ticket for a midnight departure to Brussels. When no e-ticket had arrived by boarding time, he resolved to abandon his plans for Belgium and obtained a ticket for departure later that morning for his home in North Carolina.
Shortly before boarding time, the troubled professor heard his name on the loudspeaker, summoning him to the check-in counter. Expecting a possible upgrade to business class, he arrived, ticket in hand, where he was confronted by police asking him to identify his bags. Upon confirmation, they opened Denise’s suitcase and cut into its lining, revealing a bag containing 2 kg of cocaine. Frampton was immediately placed under arrest.
After 8 hours of tortuous interrogation, the bewildered physicist found himself in a holding cell at the airport. Following an overnight stay in another detention center, he was transported to the decaying 85-year-old Devoto Prison, described as one of the most dangerous in Latin America. He was housed, not in a single cell, but in a group pavilion that he shared with 80 other inmates–mainly drug dealers and addicts from South and Central America. The dismal communal cell was a large room containing 40 steel double bunk beds bolted to the concrete floor. The communal bathroom had two functioning shower stalls and 8 open holes that served as toilets. It was in this hellhole that the Hi-Q Oxford graduate and illustrious professor would languish while awaiting trial, as public defender, Cecilia Guemes, prepared his defence.
Shortly after his incarceration, the media learned of Frampton’s arrest, sensationalizing it in world-wide television broadcasts that transcended the prison walls. As photos of Frampton, placed alongside those of Denise Milani in sensuous poses, were flashed across the expansive screen, Paul’s fellow inmates would hoot and holler their unanimous approval. Knowing that one of the world’s most eminent scholars was sharing their wretched fate seemed to bring them an elevated status, and Framption became somewhat of a celebrity.
Though admired for his brains, he was ridiculed for his naïveté. His incredulous cellmates wondered how he could possibly believe that such a sought-after woman might have an interest in him. Some taunted him saying, “Wise up Prof, … you’ve been scammed.” But Paul clung to his belief that Denise was in love with him, and that she had been used by a drug cartel, unbeknownst to her.
To convince a skeptical inmate, Paul borrowed his cell phone and messaged Denise, asking, “What is your birthplace?” When the return text answered “Ankara, Turkey,” Paul was horrified. He realized he had been duped, because an earlier on-line search had revealed that Denise Milani was born in the Czech Republic. Recalling the pain of that revelation, he later stated:
This small but significant fact convinced me where nothing else had. It dawned on me, with a horrible sense of dread, that I had been completely and utterly conned by a drugsmuggling gang which had recruited me as an innocent mule, posing as Denise to lure me to South America. I was horrified and saddened. And even then, despite the evidence to the contrary, I still found it hard to believe that for eleven weeks, from November 7, 2011 to January 23, 2012, I had been chatting with a scammer.
It was later revealed that Denise Milani’s name and photos had been co-opted in the scheme without her knowledge. The famous model, living in California with her husband and 12-year-old son, was astounded when she learned of the scam, and expressed sympathy for the duped professor.
In September 2012, about 9 months after his arrest, while still awaiting trial, Paul Frampton was interviewed by New York Times reporter Maxine Swann. As Frampton made his way to the interview room, the reporter heard an inmate call out, “Hey Professor, have you won the Nobel yet?” prompting Paul to confess with some pride, “I’m a bit of a celebrity here.” Swann reported that Frampton’s defence team chose to present him as a “brilliant man out of touch with day-to-day life”–a view supported by a psychologist who deemed him unusually gullible, though not suffering from mental illness. Another psychologist acknowledged that his extreme narcissism, manifesting in an exaggerated sense of his own importance, had distorted his perception of reality.
On November 19, a year after Frampton met the Denise-imposter on line, and almost 11 months after his arrest, Professor Paul Frampton MA, DPhil, DSc, FAAAS, and APS Fellow, was found guilty of drug smuggling and sentenced to 4 years and 8 months in prison.
Since Argentinian law permits the expulsion of foreign prisoners after serving half their sentence, Frampton was only required to serve 2 years and 4 months. And so, on June 18, 2014, after several weeks in an Argentinian hospital to treat his chronic diverticulitis, Paul Frampton became a free man and returned to Chapel Hill. Having been fired the previous month from his tenured position at the University of North Carolina, he had no livelihood, and would be required to begin life anew at the age of 70. He later won a settlement in a wrong dismissal lawsuit against the University.
During his interview with Maxine Swann, Professor Frampton recalled that his friend John Dixon, had cautioned him about transporting Denise’s suitcase across the border, warning that it might contain cocaine. When Swann asked why he had dismissed Dixon’s warning, the flamboyant professor said that he rarely paid attention to the opinions of others. Clearly Paul Frampton, while ensnared in a honey trap, was also immersed in an intelligence trap, believing that his excellent instincts in physics would transfer across domains. Whether aware or not that the suitcase contained cocaine, Paul Frampton displayed poor judgment throughout this entire affair, lapsing into a confirmation bias where he could avoid challenging what he wanted to believe.
However, Professor Frampton’s high intelligence has enabled him to learn from this agonizing ordeal. Reflecting, at age 71, on this experience he said, “Prison has definitely made me wiser, more empathetic, less arrogant, more sympathetic…I met some very good people and also some very cruel and despicable people. I am much less naïve now. And I won’t be trying Internet dating ever again.”
Paul Frampton is currently Professor of Physics at the University of Salento, Italy. The details of his ordeal came from his self-published book titled, Tricked!: The Story of an Internet Scam.
