I—THE LOCKER

How did a twenty-nine-year-old drifter, petty thief, and ex-con turn himself into a nineteen-year-old freshman at Princeton? Illustration by Mark Ulriksen

On the morning of March 30, 1988, a police detective named Matt Jacobson arrived at the Secure Storage facility in St. George, Utah, with a warrant to search for high-end racing bicycles and tools that had been stolen from a bicycle-maker in California several months before. Raising the corrugated steel door of Locker No. 100, the detective flicked a switch to illuminate a sixty-square-foot space with aluminum walls, no windows, and a bare concrete floor. Inside, he saw bicycle frames, a row of athletic trophies, papers, letters, a sleeping bag, and other personal effects. The detective guessed that the thief had been living in the shed, perhaps for months.

Standing next to Jacobson in the locker, the bicycle-maker, Dave Tesch, stepped forward to identify his stolen goods. A short, stocky olive-skinned man, he was expert at his craft. The Tesch Bicycle Company, in San Marcos, California, produced approximately five hundred bicycles a year for a growing community of avid cyclists who preferred American-made bikes to those produced by better-known European racing houses like Bottechia and Colnago.

The competitors that worried Tesch most were local. In towns such as San Marcos, the manufacture of high-end racing cycles had grown into a thriving cottage industry, boosted by the surprise gold-medal victory of the American cyclist Alexi Grewal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. In La Verne, California, a company called Santana made tandem bikes, and had captured more than half of that specialized market. Yet, even in the best of times, manufacturing high-end bicycles was a difficult business. When Tesch opened the door of his shop one morning in October, 1987, to find that someone had kicked over a rooftop turbine vent, jumped down the hole, and made off with more than twenty thousand dollars’ worth of frames, parts, and tools, his anger at the theft was compounded by the knowledge that he could ill afford the loss. A similar break-in had been reported at another bicycle firm in the area, Masi, and Tesch leaped with characteristic but misplaced certainty to the conclusion that a rival had burglarized his shop.

In fact, the thief was someone he knew quite well. For the previous few summers, Tesch had worked as an instructor at Jim Davis’s Vail Cross-Training Camp, which offered people the chance to enjoy a week in Vail, Colorado, training with athletes like the distance runner Frank Shorter, and the champion triathlete Scott (the Terminator) Molina. The instructors also included a young man named James Hogue, a miler who, according to the camp’s promotional literature, had earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he was a professor. With his diffident manner and his youthful face, though, he looked less like a professor than like an undergraduate. His training methods were unorthodox. He drank a mixture of mustard and Perrier during races; he lit a cigarette after crossing the finish line, as the other runners looked on in horror. In the summer of ’87, Hogue started showing up in San Marcos, sleeping in his truck, helping Tesch out around the shop, and otherwise leading a life that might have seemed atypical for a Stanford professor.

The theft remained unsolved until the following March, when a bicycle enthusiast from Utah named Bruce Stucky stopped by to visit Dave Tesch at his shop. One of his friends had recently been at a party in St. George, Utah, where an acquaintance named Jim Hogue had whipped out a Mitutoyo metric dial caliper engraved with Tesch’s name.

What disturbed Matt Jacobson most about the thief’s locker was the collection of athletic trophies he found. “They were obviously meant for an eighteen-year-old,” the detective recalled. Jacobson, who later specialized in crimes against children, looked at the dates and concluded that Hogue had been entering races under a false name, thus depriving younger runners of the places they had rightfully won. Within minutes of Jacobson’s and Tesch’s arrival, Hogue appeared. Jacobson placed him in handcuffs and read him his rights. “I remember telling him how appalled I was that someone would do this,” the detective said. “And it didn’t seem to shake him or faze him at all.”

The only hints of Hogue’s state of mind survive in the form of two photographs taken at the time of his arrest. A growth of beard obscures his features. Sleeplessness, fear, and nervous exhaustion have settled in the hollows beneath his eyes.

As it turned out, Hogue’s theft from the Tesch Bicycle Company was only the beginning of a far more intricate deception, the clues to which were neatly laid out in the locker in St. George. The correspondence there showed that James Hogue had been occupied with a larger, more imaginative goal than disposing of the stolen bikes. He had been dreaming of a better life, to be led by a person who was no longer James Hogue. The product of careful research and planning, this new identity would be backed up by newspaper clippings and trophies that bore the name Alexi Santana—a self-educated Nevada cowboy who could run a mile in just over four minutes and, according to the correspondence found in the shed, had applied for admission to some of America’s finest universities, including Stanford, Princeton, and Brown.

“It was a weird, unbelievable story,” Tesch recalled. “Like ‘I was born a poor black child,’ the old Steve Martin routine.” The name Alexi Santana also rang a bell: a combination of the first name of Alexi Grewal, the cycling gold medallist, and the surname Santana, the tandem-bike manufacturer.

With Hogue in custody, Detective Jacobson called Stanford to inform the university that Alexi Santana was actually a twenty-eight-year-old drifter named James Hogue, who was on his way to jail in Utah. Hogue pleaded guilty to the theft and was given a sentence of one to five years in prison. A story appeared in the April 17, 1988, San Jose Mercury News, which noted that police had also “found evidence that Hogue, using the name ‘Alexi Santana,’ was corresponding with Ivy League universities about athletic scholarships.” Years later, Detective Jacobson simply did not remember whether he had called all the universities on Hogue’s list or not.

II—THE LOTTERY

Alexi Santana’s application to Princeton was one of nearly fourteen thousand for twelve hundred places in the Class of 1992. Once, when Fred Hargadon, the head of the Princeton admissions office, was asked to describe the perfect candidate for admission, he answered with the name of a fictional character, Huck Finn. Most students selected for admission probably have less in common with the illiterate son of a violent alcoholic than with his diplomatic young friend Tom Sawyer. Still, Hargadon’s answer does neatly summarize the virtues that Princeton looks for in at least some of its applicants—originality, self-reliance, and the kind of “diverse life experiences” that might keep the school’s Tom Sawyers entertained. Santana’s score of 1410 on the S.A.T.s was well above the average of students admitted to Princeton, and his Hispanic-sounding surname likely recommended him for special consideration as a minority applicant. But his personal essay, the story of a self-educated ranch hand who read Plato under the stars, was what lifted his application to the top of the pile. Santana, the admissions office reported, had “trained on his own in the Mojave desert, where he herds cattle for a living (mostly in a canyon called ‘Little Purgatory’). On a visit to campus in March, he slept indoors for the first time in ten years.”