Leonore Carol "Lee" Israel was an American author known for committing literary forgery.
14 Facts About Lee Israel
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Lee Israel's parents were Jack and Sylvia Israel; she had a brother, Edward.
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Lee Israel graduated from Midwood High School, and in 1961 from CUNY's Brooklyn College.
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Lee Israel began a career as a freelance writer in the 1960s.
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Lee Israel's book was panned by critics and was a commercial failure.
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Lee Israel had tried and failed to support herself with wage labor.
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Lee Israel's memoir makes clear that her name suddenly became toxic among autograph collectors, dealers and used book merchants no matter exactly how they caught on.
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At this point, the FBI was called in and an investigation showed that Lee Israel had stolen authentic letters, replacing them with forged copies, from several institutional collections.
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Lee Israel describes her encounter with two FBI agents on a sidewalk outside a Manhattan delicatessen where she had waited for Jack Hock to meet her so they could count the cash from a sale he had made.
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Lee Israel immediately returned to her apartment and started to destroy all evidence of her crimes, discarding in public trash cans more than a dozen typewriters she had used to emulate the look of the famous writers' letters.
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In June 1993, Lee Israel pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to transport stolen property, for which she served six months under house arrest and five years of federal probation.
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Lee Israel eventually supported herself copy editing for Scholastic magazines.
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Lee Israel later expressed pride in her criminal accomplishments, especially the forgeries.
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Lee Israel died in New York City on December 24,2014, from myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells.