USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Talented Mr. Khater by Francesca Mari

http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/university-of-texas-grad-versus-international-conman

The Talented Mr. Khater

WHEN 23-YEAR-OLD CALLIE QUINN MOVED FROM TEXAS TO CHILE, SHE COUNTED ON FINDING A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY, MEANINGFUL WORK, AND INTERESTING FRIENDS. SHE HAD NO IDEA SHE'D SET OFF A MANHUNT FOR AN INTERNATIONAL CON ARTIST.  

Long Read: 12 pages:

The first time Callie Quinn met Youssef Khater, she hated him. He was standing in the kitchen of their shared house in Santiago, Chile, carrying on about some extreme marathon in front of her other new roommates. While he smiled easily and was objectively handsome—a tightly coiled five feet six inches or so, with luminous brown eyes and boyish features—he also had tasteless tribal cuff tattoos on both biceps, seemed obsessed with expensive athletic gear, and was talking nonstop about the sponsors who were clamoring to support him as one of the best Palestinian runners in the world. She had just moved in, and already she found him insufferably arrogant. 

...The house was actually one of Santiago's oldest tire shops, Vulcanización Escoda, and after the fire, the facade had been covered up with corrugated metal. When they reached it, Youssef parted the rusted sheets, and he and Callie slipped in. The ceiling had burned away completely, leaving a portal onto the fuzzy midnight sky. Ashes fluttered from every surface like millions of moth wings. Youssef, after looking around for a tool with which to pry the toilet seat off, rustled up a crowbar. He led the way to find the bathroom.

"That's not gold," groaned Callie as soon as they edged into the lavatory. The toilet seat was generic beige plastic. Institutional eggshell. 

Youssef decided to pry it off anyway, working the crowbar around the back edge.

"I've got to go," said Callie. "I have work at seven-thirty." 

Youssef told her to wait; he didn't want the soccer fans who were now spilling out onto the streets to give her trouble. Callie, unconcerned, made her way back toward the entrance. She didn't hear the footsteps in the ash behind her.

"Hey, Callie—" called Youssef, and as she began to turn, she felt the crack of metal across the back of her skull. She fell backward. A knee shunted into her ribs and pinned her to the cold concrete. When she opened her eyes, Callie saw Youssef's face, contorted with rage, inches away from her own. He was straddling her now, his hands grabbing her neck. 

"Why did you tell Sabi that I owed you money?!" he spat, his fingers wringing her windpipe tighter and tighter, his brown eyes fixed on her with an unflinching intensity. "Why!" 

Callie couldn't comprehend. "You're going to kill—" she choked, before the hot ringing pain, the anger, and the ash overtook her. Then she saw nothing at all.

Just who the real Youssef was became a question for the psychologist who visited him at the Santiago Uno jail, where he was sent to await trial without bail. Youssef gamely answered the doctor's queries, sitting for two forensic psychological interviews, a Rorschach test, and a diagnostic exam for personality disorders. Yes, he was born in Beirut, he admitted. His father, who was often drunk and physically abusive, was a welder; his mother worked in a hospital. They'd had five children, one of whom died tragically before the family emigrated around the time of the 1982 Lebanon War. In school, Youssef had been popular in part for his athletic abilities—he ran his first marathon at age eleven—but even more so, he said, for his "long eyelashes and raised brow." He'd joined the infantry at age eighteen, when his parents separated, and then the marines—after which he became one of the few, he boasted, to be selected for the country's special forces. When asked if he considered himself brave, he said, "If swimming with sharks is brave, then I'm brave."

He insisted that he was not a criminal. "I help others or put others before myself," he told the doctor. "I have a lot of goals and focus on them. I'm disciplined and happy." Though his only concern after his arrest had been for the running gear he'd left at Sohad's house—he'd become so agitated that Berríos had a bag of his clothes delivered—now he spoke sentimentally about his girlfriend. She was the most important relationship in his life, he said, beginning to cry. ("I'm a person who shows his emotions.") But when it came to Callie, he was stony. "She drinks, uses drugs, takes one's food without asking," he said. "She is not a friend." When pressed, his account of the night changed several times, and four months into his incarceration, in December, he finally admitted that, yes, he had struck Callie on the head. But he hadn't intended to kill her, he stated, just confuse her into believing that he had returned her condo deposit, money he didn't have. He had buried her to hide her from the night's soccer fans. 

"He displays narcissist, paranoid, and asocial traits," wrote the psychologist in the final report. "He lacks empathy, and his relationship with others is instrumental." It was unclear what parts of Youssef's biography were true, and the interviews revealed what Berríos and others had already suspected: Youssef was most likely a psychopath. Though the term wasn't applied officially—a formal diagnosis is given only after a thorough assessment most commonly involving the licensed twenty-item Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R)—he exhibited many classic traits. He was charismatic, egotistical, thrill-seeking, deceitful, and glib; prone to boredom and promiscuity; parasitic in his exchanges with others. Most important, he appeared to have no conscience. 

First observed in 1801 by a French psychiatrist who described it as "insanity without delusion," psychopathy has captured the public imagination since 1941, when the American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley chronicled his interactions with psychopaths in a Georgia hospital in the classic The Mask of Sanity. The condition appears to have a genetic component: some experts, like neuroscientist Kent Kiehl, believe it arises from a general deficit in the brain's paralimbic region—which regulates emotion, inhibition, and attention control—while others have theorized that it results more specifically from a defective amygdala, the part of the brain most responsible for fear conditioning. (Studies show that amygdalas in psychopaths are on average 18 percent smaller.) Whatever the cause, it creates the most disturbing kind of criminal: the expert manipulator who conceals "a grossly disabled and irresponsible personality," wrote Cleckley, behind "a perfect mimicry of normal emotion, fine intelligence, and social responsibility." 

Many psychopaths feign behaviors and use "pity plays"—stories of personal tragedy or trauma—to distract others from their own lack of feeling and conscience. Incapable of love and numb to the emotions that spring from it, namely, empathy and guilt, psychopaths focus on short-term pleasures, a fact that often makes them careless about plans or consequences. This certainly seemed true of Youssef, with his spontaneous generosities and his many conflicting lies. In particular, his assault on Callie had been oddly careless. Why hadn't he actually killed her? Could he not bring himself to, or was he simply sloppy?The term "psychopath," coined in Germany in the 1880's, literally means "suffering soul." It's a beautiful characterization, but the term is a misnomer, because psychopaths, unlike victims of other mental disorders, do not feel discomfort or distress on account of their condition. "Psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and why," writes Robert Hare, who devised the Psychopathy Checklist, in his book Without Conscience. "Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised." 

In fact, if a psychopath feels any degree of misery, it is because of others. "If he gets angry because he doesn't want you to go out," says Elizabeth Leon Mayer, a psychopathy researcher in Chile and a protégé of Hare's, "he'll say, 'You make me angry because you want to go out.' Not 'I get angry because I don't want you to go out.' So if he does not accept responsibility for what he feels or does, he doesn't feel guilty for his selfish actions, and he doesn't feel there's any reason to change his behavior."

This moral vacuum presents an unusual challenge for the medical and legal fields. It is estimated that between 12 and 22 percent of the world's criminals now sitting in prison are psychopaths. If these prisoners are genetically incapable of change, what can they be held responsible for, and what should be their treatment or punishment? "You can't teach a psychopath to become empathetic," says Mayer. "So really it's about intervention." If a psychopath can be persuaded that inflicting harm isn't in his best interest, in other words, then maybe he'll stop. 

Sitting in her apartment this past April, beneath a Chilean woodcut poster, Callie imagined that Youssef was likely still walking the streets of San José, chatting up strangers and proposing deals. The newspapers in Costa Rica had dubbed him "the lady charmer." She knew by now that she would probably never feel closure. "He needs to be institutionalized," she said, after a few moments. "I acknowledge that what he does is basically out of his control, but he needs to be under supervision for the rest of his life in some capacity." She closed her eyes. "And if that's in jail, and it's a horrible condition for him, that's fine by me," she continued. "I want him to have a horrible, difficult life. I don't feel bad saying that." 

She shuddered. Almost four years since the attack, she was still haunted by the last time she had seen Youssef in person, at his trial in Chile. As the judge read his sentence, Youssef had stared straight ahead, listening impassively. Then, just before the guards ushered him out, Youssef had twisted around, looked at her with his luminous brown eyes, and winked. 

Funmi Tofowomo Okelola

-In the absence of greatness, mediocrity thrives. 

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