The Puppet Master: Leçons de manipulation

A number of reviews have suggested this documentary is "suspect" without explaining why. Probably because this is indeed an accurate real-life account that so beggars belief it almost sounds UNreal.

In my opinion the makers of this documentary have created a 2-hour masterpiece of fascinating and memorable viewing. At times I literally gasped in shock, in surprise, in genuine incredulity that such downright evil people actually do exist and that seemingly intelligent victims could be convinced into such extreme situations.

But the documentary treats all the people involved - victims, their siblings, their parents - with the lightest of touches. There's no third party narrative, every word comes from someone affected by this despicable man or from the security forces who finally caught him. It's perfectly paced, and while the timeline is somewhat jumpy it does add dramatic effect because the viewer becomes involved in the puzzle and you yourself start to piece together the story.

I won't say I enjoyed this, because that sounds.. almost trite. I'm hugely glad I did watch it, is a more true statement. I can't remember feeling such growing affinity and sympathy for true-life victims who have had the courage, the fortitude to bare their souls and re-live YEARS of horrendous abuse and utter helplessness to the rest of the world, and for their families who suffered such heartache yet never gave up. Nor can I recall feeling such antipathy, such despisal for Robert Hendy-Freegard, this arrogant, contemptible sociopath who remains at large in the world.

Delicately and empathetically executed, properly-paced, and will leave you with mixed feelings. Completely worth two hours of your time.

Well, it is the first time I have heard of the story so I was pretty intrigued. However, now after finishing it I am left puzzled at how he managed to trick the people into believing all this crap. They just said that he was very convincing but I just don't buy it. And the story fails to give any explaination on how one person manages to do all this by himself, how he could possibly handle different people during the same time while also going to work. It must have been a lot of planning. The whole storytelling is not 'round'. I feel sorry for the victims and I do not want to do victim blaming. However, that is what the whole story fails. It just doesnt give answers. Like the tinder swindler gives a good explaination on how he was able to pull his thing off and make them all fall for him. I mean, of course, the 90ies were different and people didnt have much access to information and maybe people were more gullible back then. But nonetheless. What does it take to be as convincing to make people believe you were actually working for MI5 and hand over all their money??? How can someone not realize after a short time that this was only about money??? I still have no answer. Above all, every little kid knows that nobody really working for an intelligence service would ever disclose this information at any time. Now somebody comes around the corner and keeps on bragging about it. How can you fall for it? I still don't know since I havent got any answer. This documentary is a nice time pass, however, I will now have to look the story up online in order to find out more about it, which is actually a bad sign after just having seen a documentary on it.

I watched this docu-series on con-man Robert Freegard not long after watching a similar exposé on the playboy fraudster Simon Leviev and of course there are both a factual and dramatic series on Anna Delvey also out there at present. It seems it's TV open-season on large-scale tricksters like these and I certainly find them fascinating. The sad thing about this one is that, as the title implies, the perpetrator here, after being caught and freed once hasn't yet been rediscovered, never mind caught again.

I'll call him Freegard although other pseudonyms are available and a nasty piece of work he seems to be. His M. O. seems to see him claim to be in MI5 and use this phony establishment status to coerce his victims into slavishly doing what he wants as well as extorting every last penny he can from them and their families along the way.

Although principally running two parallel story-lines, one present day, the other back in the early 90's, the narrative also draws in two other victims of this "puppet-master" to further bolster the story.

Story one concerns a young male student based in Ireland, who bumps into a young barman who tells him a fantastical tale about him being a British secret-service recruit against the then active I. R. A. So he convinces his prey, plus his then girlfriend and another young girl companion to go with him on a seemingly never-ending road-trip ostensibly to keep them safe from harm as the IRA apparently has a death-threat against the three of them. They return to England but stay on the run, stopping off at dingy "safe-houses" along the way. Astonishingly, this goes on for nine years with the three young people completely convinced of their imminent danger. But this protection comes at a price and soon he's forcing his hostages to go back to their families and get as much money out of them as they can ostensibly for his expenses, to be paid of course, straight back to Freegard.

The programme fast-forwards some fifteen years or so to a simpler but no less bizarrely compelling tale of a handsome stranger preying on a single mother, effectively cuckooing the woman's two children out of the family home and again making her accompany him on a non-stop tour of Europe. The show then shuttles between both stories showing the strenuous efforts of their respective families to rescue the brainwashed victims, as well as the debilitating psychological effect on them all.

We learn that Freegard (what an ironic name that is!) was once a successful car-salesman but even that seems insufficient to explain how he is so successful at controlling and using people. Two other victims are brought forward and with the police's help, a sting is carried out on Freegard which brings him finally to justice and given a life sentence only to see him get off on a technicality, leaving him free to go after his current victim, where, sad to relate, he apparently is working his black magic again preventing the poor woman from seeing her two distraught children.

The show uses actors to speak for some of the key players which I found a little distracting and I also found the time-switch presentation a bit frustrating at times. Nevertheless this was a remarkable, almost unbelievable story, powerfully told. Yes, we the viewer might wonder at the duplicity of the various victims here but I guess it's true what they say that the devil doesn't always appear with a cloven hoof and pointy tail.

I watched the original BBC documentary a while back. That was 1hr long and fit in a lot more crazy facts than this one.

No mention of his secret spy wristwatch, or his what seemed like genuine access to secret government information. Plenty more.

I'd have thought Netflix would use the broader canvas to cover all that and more. No.

This was, for me, like watching a film after finishing the book. The original really was fascinating stuff, this just sounds like another cheap con job.

The series does a great job of showing the damage a conman does by interviewing the relatives of the women he has taken away from them. It is heartbreaking to hear children talk about being abandoned by their mother, and to hear a dad say, "Then I knew it was about the money," (I would have given anything to have Peter Smith for my dad.)

That said, when the conman's preposterous lies are revealed, it's really hard to see how those women could have been that naive. Or, maybe, a better way to say this is that it's hard to understand how a conman knows how to find the women when they are both deeply vulnerable and have money. A conman is a psychopath. A conman who gets a Netflix series is a conman who is a psychopath with good hunting skills.

Always do a background check, and never lend money, folks.

The series isn't perfect, but it's short, always remembers the victims and won't waste your time,