6 Real People With Secret Identities Nobody Saw Coming
The most unrealistic part of a show like Dexter or even a comic character like Batman is the whole secret identity thing. It really is laughable that you'd be able to live two completely separate lives, often on opposite sides of the law, without someone figuring it out after a few months. Every character with a secret identity seems to be surrounded by nothing but oblivious morons.
Yet real life has given us examples of people who carried on this kind of brazen charade for years. People like ...
Sergio Gutierrez Benitez
The public persona:
Father Sergio Benitez is a secular priest operating a small orphanage in Mexico. He had gotten in trouble with drugs as a kid, so when he was in his early 20s, he went into the priesthood to try to turn his life around.
It totally worked; he became a mild-mannered man helping impoverished and parentless kids, living the quiet life and trying to steer them away from the troubled youth he barely escaped. He taught philosophy. He became the kind of guy you imagine spends a lot of time in quiet rooms reading theological texts for long hours by candlelight.
Prepare to be surprised.
The secret identity:
For 23 years, this mild-mannered man of God would come home at night, take off his collar and put on the flamboyant mask and cape of a lucha libre wrestler.
In the ring, he went by the name of Fray Tormenta (Friar Storm).
Also, he is in amazing shape.
Yes. It's Nacho Libre. That movie was based on a thing that actually happened.
Father Benitez did not break his and other wrestlers' bones for all these years because he craved fame or couldn't find gainful employment with a philosophy degree. The priest did it for the money, which he then blew on kids. And to make that last statement a tad less creepy, we meant that he took up wrestling to finance the orphanage after not receiving any help from the church superiors. This awesome act of kindness was unfortunately punished decades later when he was played by Jack Black.
"Why is a partially shaved monkey playing me ...?"
He kept this a secret for more than two decades. The padre never made a fortune, but he continued grappling sweaty men even after another wrestler finally discovered his true identity. In the end, Fray Tormenta saved the orphanage, which so far has produced dozens of teachers, lawyers and computer technicians. Today, Father Benitez is retired from wrestling but the legend of Fray Tormenta lives on through movies, video game characters and comic books inspired by his wrestling guise. There's also Fray Tormenta Jr., one of Benitez's orphans who wrestles under the priest's old mantle when he's not working as a criminal law specialist for the Mexican state of Hidalgo.
Wait -- does this mean all Jack Black movies are real?
Sean Laurence Waygood
The public persona:
Sean Waygood worked as an occupational health and safety adviser for a Sydney freight company, and by all accounts, his life was even more boring than his job description.
"My entire existence is one long, slow death."
Waygood's co-workers used to jokingly call the tedious and fussy Waygood "Major Pain" due to the man's four-year stretch in the army and the stick made from reinforced diamonds shoved up his ass when it came to workplace safety. While not working or spending time with his girlfriend and two kids, Waygood also helped out at the nonprofit organization Wesley Mission. The man was Ned Flanders.
Like most missions involving Wesley, it didn't end well.
The secret identity:
If based on the Nacho Libre entry you thought these were all going to be heartwarming stories, we want you to brace yourself. See, when Waygood wasn't busy softly hugging orphans to sleep or admonishing his co-workers for smoking in the break room, he performed the duties of a professional hitman for one of the biggest criminal networks in Australia.
According to an eight-year police investigation, he might be responsible for up to nine brutal murders on behalf of known mob boss Tony Perish.
"Remember folks! Safety first, or I'll come to your house at night and stab you!"
Waygood and Perish met in 2000 when Waygood was a bouncer $100,000 in debt to the career criminal. To avoid taking a personal tour of the nearest harbor in cement sneakers, he started doing hits for Perish, which came pretty easy to him, considering Waygood's past experience as a freaking highly trained army commando.
His known contracts include gunning down a man in front of a pub and trying to kill Felix Lyle, a member of the Bandidos outlaw motorcycle club, which later inspired Sons of Anarchy. But the murder that finally got Waygood arrested was that of fellow criminal and Perish's rival Terry Falconer, who in November 2001 was visited at his house by Waygood, Perish and a third person, all dressed as police officers. Falconer's dismembered body was found in seven plastic bags in the Hastings River.
Yeah, basically.
After the arrest, the cops searched Waygood's house and discovered -- hidden right under his family's noses the entire time -- a collection worthy of a small battalion of sociopathic killers, including:
Rubber face masks and wigs,
3,000 rounds of ammunition;
A bolt-action rifle,
A rifle with a silencer,
A Ruger Mini-14 rifle,
A machine pistol,
A .22-caliber pistol,
A Luger pistol,
A .38-caliber pistol,
Bulletproof vests ...
... one piranha gun ...
And creepiest of all, loads of police uniforms and fake badges that enabled Waygood to pose as a member of any police force in Australia (state or federal). We don't even want to know where he got those.
Shigeo Tokuda
The public persona:
Shigeo Tokuda is an average 76-year-old retired travel agent, currently living with his wife and daughter in Tokyo. Like many retirees, he continues working part-time to keep himself busy. In America, he'd probably wind up working as a door greeter at Walmart. Or maybe work the register at a quiet bed and breakfast out in the country. Something to pass the time in your golden years.
The secret identity:
Tokuda had a better idea. His part-time job is being one of the biggest porn actors in Japan. Described as a "superstar of the elder porn genre," Tokuda has appeared in over 350 smut films, putting his penis into hundreds of women between the ages of 20 and 70. Oh, and he says his family has absolutely no idea about any of this.
"Where're you going?"
"I told you, I have to work at the hardware store tonight. Is this my only clean kimono?"
It all started when Tokuda wanted to watch a porn movie but could not bring himself to meet the criticizing gaze of the apathetic teen employees at the video store. He then decided to buy it directly from the production company and somehow became friends with a director there. One day he was offered a chance to star in some of the studio's senior-themed movies. Surprisingly, the ex-businessman who was too shy to buy porn the regular way eventually agreed to show his erection on camera. Then he did it again. And again. More than 350 times.
"Shigeo Tokuda" is not his real name (we're assuming the Japanese translates to something like "Dick Cockrod"), and the septuagenarian smut cowboy has been hiding under that pseudonym for 14 years.
Although his face is clearly visible in his movies (when not buried between a pair of 20-year-old boobs), there's no serious risk of Tokuda's loved-ones finding out his secret because, to our surprise, watching weird porn is not a government-enforced pastime in Japan (we're going to take a wild guess and say that they don't read Cracked either). Hence Tokuda plans to keep getting paid to nail women a quarter his age until he's 80 and beyond. We're thinking that makes even Bill Gates' retirement plan look like a big pile of shit.
Someday his family will be surprised by how many people at his funeral have boob jobs.
Hal Turner
The public persona:
Hal Turner is an ultra-right-wing radio talk show host and blogger. And we're not throwing out "ultra right wing" to mean "anyone to the right of Barack Obama" -- Hal Turner is so far to the fringe that he was actually banned from calling Sean Hannity's radio show for being too crazy. He eventually became a host himself but was so far out there that by the time his radio career ended, he was buying time on a shortwave radio station just to have a mic to yell into.
"The Jews control Wall Street. Over."
He also denies the Holocaust, and therefore is a favorite of white supremacists and similar all-around horrible human beings.
The secret identity:
To the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, however, Hal Turner was "Valhalla" -- a government spy tasked with gathering information on potential domestic terrorist threats, like the Aryan Nation or the KKK (aka, the bulk of Turner's audience). The FBI admitted that "Valhalla" provided vital information on multiple subversive organizations, helped with numerous arrests and prevented more than 10 planned acts of violence.
"Next on the show: 'Undermining the liberal government by sharing your secret terrorist plots on-air.' "
Turner was recruited in 2003, and his first assignment was to infiltrate the meetings and leadership conference of the National Alliance, a West Virginia white supremacist group. In 2005, aided by the FBI and other agencies, he even traveled to Brazil to meet up with a supporter of the NA willing to donate $1 million to the organization. Later, Turner also uncovered a plot by the Brazilian Arab Society to sell U.S. consumer goods to the Iraqi resistance.
"The name's Turner. Hal Turner. And incidentally, the Holocaust never happened."
In later years, Turner reported on the activities of other white supremacist groups, secure in the belief that as long as he enticed violence against minorities on his show, no one would suspect that he was a government informant.
In 2007, though, he finally went too far with the radio demagoguery, and the FBI cut ties with him. And that brings us to the strangest part of our story, which is the fact that it's not at all clear how much of his racist rants were real and how much were part of his cover.
It's like the Inception of racist talk shows.
To this day, Turner claims his radio antics were just an act, but the incident that made the FBI cut ties involved Turner making on-air threats toward federal judges. He also posted their photos and phone numbers and a map of the courthouse they worked at on his website, pointing out the "anti-truck bomb barriers" around the place. That's, uh, some fine acting there, Hal.
The line between a great undercover agent and dangerous nutcase is very thin.
Alfred Deakin
The public persona:
Imagine finding out that Glenn Beck's last book was entirely ghostwritten by Barack Obama. And that there was in fact no Glenn Beck -- the whole operation was just the president trashing himself in public for some bizarre reason.
Above: Whiteface.
Well, for years, an anonymous source posted scathing articles in the London newspaper The Morning Post, commenting on, among other things, the political scene in Australia and what a dumbass the Australian prime minister was. This was back in the early 20th century, but just like now, people mainly read about politics so they could hear about how stupid politicians were. This source posted weekly for 11 years.
The secret identity:
The anonymous journalist dishing dirt on Australian politics was in fact the freaking prime minister of Australia.
The beard was a fake.
Alfred Deakin was the Australian prime minister from 1903 to 1910 and a Morning Post employee hired to basically write about himself. Shockingly, Deakin's editorials almost never included passages about the magnificent size and firmness of his penis, and they were often extremely critical about the decisions (and personal hygiene, we assume) of the Australian PM, aka himself. And you think people on the Internet know how to troll?
"Alfred Deakin is SO smelly even dogs won't sniff his crotch. Continues on Page 8."
For example, in 1905 he called himself "a bookish theorist recklessly pursuing impossible dreams." And in 1906, while on the PM campaign trail, he even accused himself of bullying his opponents.
It all started in 1899, while he was still just representing Australia at the U.K. Parliament. The owner of The Morning Post offered him a job as a foreign correspondent. He agreed and continued writing one long report a week for 11 years, seriously risking his political career but wanting to keep the British Empire updated with what was happening in Australia beyond the massive swarms of poisonous animals.
And the teeming hordes of bunny rabbits.
Incredibly, only a few people knew about this, including his editor, friends, family and ... the taxation official to whom Deakin declared every cent he made from ripping on his own policies. We guess he ... just needed the second paycheck?
William Leasure
The public persona:
Bill Leasure was a traffic cop in Los Angeles, one so unremarkable that he never got promoted out of what is basically the entry-level shit work of law enforcement. He worked nights, writing tickets and tedious accident reports (and he wasn't even very good at that). Day after day, year after year, working terrible hours for even worse pay.
After about six hours of this, the business end of a Taser starts to look pretty good.
He showed no real ambition to improve either in skills or status (he actually turned down promotions that would have given him more responsibility). He seemed like the kind of schlub who fell into the job and just resigned himself to grinding it out until he could retire, sit in the park and feed pigeons full time.
The secret identity:
He was a goddamned criminal mastermind.
The man broke laws that they probably hadn't even thought to write yet. We could use up the rest of your day going through all of his scams (from murder for hire to insurance fraud to car theft), but really, there's one crime that seems to sum Leasure up best:
Ask yourself, if you were a flamboyant Batman villain-style criminal, what's the biggest, most brazen and ridiculous thing you could steal?
Think smaller, but easier to sell.
How about freaking luxury yachts? Because that was just one branch of Leasure's criminal empire -- he and a partner stole million-dollar yachts, somehow got away with it and then resold them, somehow getting away with that part, too, for years. Seriously, how does that even work? How do you get them out of the water? Don't tell us. We're imagining him lifting them right out of the ocean using a giant zeppelin while he cackles and shouts taunts from a window.
It was also known in the criminal underworld that if you needed somebody dead, Leasure would make it happen for $50,000 (one job involved blowing up a guy's car). He ran a stolen-car ring (he had more than a dozen Corvettes at his house, which investigators are pretty sure he didn't buy off a lot). He claimed to have millions stashed in a secret bank account in the Caymans and boasted that he intended to buy his own island in Central America one day. We believe him.
"... And all the people will have to wear leasure suits."
Did we mention that he kept this up without his friends in the department knowing for 10 years?
Or that he was married to a city prosecutor and that not even she knew? Yeah, there's a whole book about this guy. He finally went to jail back in the early 90s, but to this day, every account you read shows that authorities still have no idea how far Leasure's criminal empire spread. They man was Keyser Soze. They probably imprisoned a lookalike, and the real Leasure is off on his island in Central America right now.
Artist's representation.
Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is a freelance online journalist and Japanese-English-Polish translator. Contact him at c.j.strusiewicz@gmail.com
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For more amazing stories of hidden identities, check out The 6 Biggest Badasses Who Lived as the Opposite Sex. Or learn about some folks that failed miserably and this sort of stuff, in The 6 Most Impressive Cases of Identity Theft Ever Pulled Off.
And stop by Linkstorm (Updated Today!) to learn which columnist is really George W. Bush and his father.
