Lawyer/journalist/professor David Bodney perpetrated a 1992 hoax that caused several hundred people to descend on an Arizona shopping mall bent on finding gold.
No, not the gold items sold in jewelry stores, but in a vein of gold that Bodney, then editor of a free newspaper, the New Times, reported having been found beneath the floor of the Galleria mall in Scottsdale. The hoax story said that illegal alien worker Sergio Alonzo had struck gold while repairing floor tiles there.
To lend credence to what sounds like a transparently fraudulent tale, the newspaper account added that the mall was on federal land and that the mall owners did not hold mineral rights. The Bureau of Mines had supposedly set up a registry in the mall where gold miners could file claim stakes. The story included a photo of someone posing as Alonzo happily holding in his palm a large gold nugget.
As implausible as it sounds, many hopefuls were taken in by the hoax.
Bodney said he did it to alert people not to believe everything they see in print. He has since been managing partner of a Phoenix law firm and an adnjuct professor of journalism at Arizona State University.
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