Lonely Professor Meets Bikini Cocaine Smuggler, Hijinks Ensue, Film At 11

Maxine Swann’s article “The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble” is very compelling reading. It’s about a 68-year-old physicist who met someone online professing to be a famous 28-year-old bikini model who wanted to quit posing for pictures so she could marry and settle down. Online romance bloomed, one thing led to another, and soon the physicist was arrested in Buenos Aires for trying to smuggle cocaine.

Some stray thoughts:

1) Damn, loneliness makes people terribly vulnerable.

2) I suspect the professor, Paul Frampton, is a misogynist, in a way that some very successful and independent-minded guys tend to be. Mainly because he apparently habitually looks for a new wife among young foreign women on the internet. Another article about Frampton notes:

It is not however the first time that he has pursued love with young foreign women via the Internet in recent years, friends recalled.

Indeed, he once flew to China after meeting a woman in her twenties there online and persuading her to marry him. It took just one encounter for her to back out of the agreement.

If we could question Dr. Frampton, would he say that American women are too independent and liberated to be a good pool of potential mates?

3) To be fair, he seems to be specifically looking for a woman to have children with, and would say that’s why he isn’t looking for women his own age. Although I’m uncomfortable with someone Frampton’s age seeking to become a parent; after age 70, the odds of not being around to be able to raise your children become uncomfortably high.

4) The story makes a lot of how being an absent-minded physicist made Dr. Frampton especially liable to fall for this sort of scam. Maybe, but the very fact that the scam is being pulled suggests that there are other folks out there – folks who aren’t renowned physicists, and who won’t get sympathetic articles in the New York Times about their plights – who are falling for it.

5) The University of North Carolina seems to be taking the opportunity to screw Dr. Frampton over.

6) I pretty much think that all drugs should be legalized, so in my ideal world there’d be no punishment for Dr. Frampton. But as punishments go, house arrest seems much more reasonable and appropriate than prison.

7) I really wonder about the person who pretended to be the bikini model. What does she or he think about all this? Has s/he followed the publicity this case has received? Does s/he feel any affection at all for Frampton, or is it all just a day’s work?

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26 Responses to Lonely Professor Meets Bikini Cocaine Smuggler, Hijinks Ensue, Film At 11

  1. 1
    Ruchama says:

    I’m not entirely convinced that he had no idea what was going on. Those text messages quoted toward the end of the article seem a bit too suspicious to me. It’s possible that he was actually joking, but the whole thing seems weird.

  2. 2
    Copyleft says:

    How does preferring one type of woman to another make him a ‘misogynist’? If he were a misogynist, he obviously wouldn’t be looking for a woman to marry and have kids with.

  3. 3
    Robert says:

    I’m not even slightly convinced, Ruchama. The author of this puff piece deliberately withholds all the information that damns her subject until the very end, giving the reader time to empathize with the professor and see his oh-so-reasonable point of view and cementing the notion that this was all a mistake. Then at the very end she dumps the “oh yeah, and it is bloody obvious that the guy knew exactly what he was doing” bombshell. It’s extremely dishonestly written.

  4. 4
    Myca says:

    How does preferring one type of woman to another make him a ‘misogynist’? If he were a misogynist, he obviously wouldn’t be looking for a woman to marry and have kids with.

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

    —Myca

  5. 5
    Bloix says:

    1) Yes, he’s gullible. He’s also guilty. Given the emails, his defense was utterly unbelievable. It’s clear that he thought that if he smuggled a couple of kilos of cocaine he would get to sleep with a beautiful young woman.
    2) Given his age, it’s possible that he’s got some mild dementia, or some other loss of function that has relaxed his inhibitions. Normally an educated professional person would have been deterred by the extremely high risk that he would be caught.
    3) He’s a convicted criminal serving a sentence. He’s unable to do his job. Why should he get paid?
    4) “Does s/he feel any affection at all for Frampton?” WTF? This is a con artist/drug dealer we’re talking about.
    5) Frampton is going to serve 2 years 4 months under house arrest and then he’ll be deported. This is an extremely mild sentence compared to the ten years to life in a medium security prison that he would have received under US sentencing guidelines.

  6. 6
    Robert says:

    I understand the sympathetic point of view you have, Amp, because you’re a big squishy softie. But do you really think that it’s OK that the Argentinian system is giving someone an extremely soft sentence pretty much explicitly because they’re a white American with enough connections and pull to get media attention and have colleagues rally ’round the flag for them?

    Bloix, I agree with most of your points, but drug dealers and con artists are human beings, too, and some of them are fairly decent. I had a heroin-addicted friend in Washington State who contracted terminal cancer. Her network of dealers provided her with smack to kill the pain for the months prior to her demise, gratis because she could no longer work. They worked out a delivery rota and everything. It was rather heartwarming, in a completely fucked-up way.

    Con artists running “love” games like this cannot be cold, sociopathic, androids. They develop a genuine connection to their victim, or a very workable approximation of one, because that mutual connection is how they work the con. They steel themselves to betray the person with whom they’ve built up an intimacy; they don’t wall themselves off from all intimacy and try to do it all from the forebrain. That doesn’t work. (OK, it might work in the case of someone like Frampton, who seems emotionally extremely juvenile. But the supply of Framptons is very limited.)

    The employment issue is a complex one. He’s a tenured professor, which is a little bit different than being the line cook at a bar and grill (no work, no pay). Whether he’s being screwed or not is to me a little bit unclear; I’d have to see what his tenure agreement says. But I will venture a guess that it has a clause about moral turpitude and getting your ass arrested for smuggling coke like a dumbshit, and that clause gives the university the power to do pretty much whatever they want.

    If so, the university is being very mild with him. They’re holding his job open until he gets home, instead of canceling his tenure (as I bet they have every right to do) and expelling him from the faculty. This may be self-serving; he IS a heavyweight, even if not quite the world-straddler he imagines himself to be, and they might not want to lose him. But not paying him, since he isn’t teaching, if it isn’t a violation of his contract, doesn’t seem out of line.

  7. 7
    EJ says:

    I still think the strangest part of the article is that a renowned physicist apparently needs a pencil and paper to multiply 200 x 2000.

  8. 8
    Ben Lehman says:

    EJ: you have clearly never seen a theoretician try to do arithmetic. It ain’t pretty.

  9. 9
    Grace Annam says:

    Working out a product isn’t Physics. That’s merely engineering.

    Grace

  10. 10
    Grace Annam says:

    1) Yes. It does.

    2) Yes. And extremely egotistical in an entitled, coddled way which I’ve only really encountered in academia, though you also get a flavor of it from some people who are accustomed to significant wealth. It’s the indignant anger or the pitying scorn, where they explain to you just how much trouble you’re going to be in when they explain to your supervisor what you did, and it’s really a pity that you’re too dim to understand how you shouldn’t have arrested them. (They often adopt the same attitude toward the judge during the trial, and some exceptional few even manage to hang on to it through sentencing.)

    3) I share your reservations about being around to raise your children at an old age. However, this is one of many places where the rubber meets the road on reproductive rights. You can have all the reservations you want, but they don’t mean nothin’ until you can prevent him, and then where do you find yourself?

    4) Scams get pulled all the time, and plenty of people fall for them. In my little jurisdiction, we take scam calls every week, mostly aimed at the elderly, and we often catch them as they’re on their way to someplace which will wire money. Sometimes we get the report after they’ve sent the money. Biggest bite in recent memory was a bit over $20,000.

    5) And after all the nifty publicity he’s gotten them, too. (Okay, this is just snark; I have no opinion on whether he’s getting screwed.)

    6) This is a man who, demonstrably, can practice his profession in an outdated South American prison. House arrest would be almost no punishment at all. I’m reminded of Lewis Carroll: “If only I could manage, without annoyance to my family, to get imprisoned for 10 years, without hard labor, and with the use of books and writing materials, it would be simply delightful!” If the penalty for others is years in prison, how on earth can you justify house arrest for him?

    7) I’m sure he or she feels the amount of empathy necessary to carry out the con, and no more. Also, the amount necessary to carry out this con is not much. It’s IRC, not a phone conversation. You can be laughing hysterically as you type. I’m not going to provide details, but I have been the typist during chats with criminals (non-drug crime, if it makes you feel any better) with two of my colleagues looking over my shoulder and providing advice and running commentary. The amount of sympathy necessary was minimal. To run a con in a consistent voice across months takes more involvement, but not as much as, oh, providing sex to get information, and that’s certainly been done plenty of times.

    Amp, I think your reaction to this is naive. I have tremendous respect for scientists, of whom there are many in my family. I once planned to be a physicist. But my sympathy and respect have limits, because a lot of my job is picking up the pieces and assigning fault when someone does something criminally stupid. This guy is like the driver who thinks that the accident isn’t his fault because his brakes failed, and offers as evidence that there was a grinding noise, but then the brakes test out perfectly – including the ABS, which produces a sort of grinding noise. Or the guy who thinks the accident isn’t his fault when he overtakes a turning tractor-trailer on the inside, because the tractor-trailer “ran [him] off the road”, when in fact tractor-trailers turn like that, and if you don’t know that then you shouldn’t drive near one. Or the guy who says the gun “just went off” and doesn’t think it’s significant that his finger was on the trigger. Or the guy who parks his car on a hill without setting the parking brake, putting the transmission in gear, and turning the wheels.

    One of the basic rules of travel, especially travel by aircraft, is “don’t accept packages from strangers”. You can put enough explosive to blow a hole in the side of an airplane in an envelope, let alone in the lining of a suitcase. He’s lucky it was just cocaine. So are the people he was travelling among.

    Expertise in one area of life does not automagically confer expertise in other areas, and the more highly specialized someone is, the more this is true. If we say that this guy isn’t responsible for a set-up like this one, then it’s hard to hold anyone responsible for anything.

    Grace

  11. 11
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    In re having children late in life: how would you feel about a younger person having children who had a disease which gave the roughly same expected lifespan that the older person has?

  12. 12
    Ampersand says:

    Grace:

    If the penalty for others is years in prison, how on earth can you justify house arrest for him?

    Imagine that a judge puts 15 candy-bar-shoplifters into prison for 20 years each. Then the judge gives the 16th candy-bar-shoplifter a fifty-dollar fine.

    Would you respond by objecting to the injustice of the fifty-dollar fine?

    The primary injustice here is that those first 15 shoplifters got years in prison, not that the 16th shoplifter got a more reasonable sentence.

    Regarding the wrongness of trying to have children you probably won’t be around to raise, I’m not willing to do anything about it. Some injustices are, or should be, beyond the scope of what we try to punish with laws.

    I really liked your whole comment, thanks for writing it.

  13. 13
    Ampersand says:

    Nancy:

    In re having children late in life: how would you feel about a younger person having children who had a disease which gave the roughly same expected lifespan that the older person has?

    If the younger person knew that s/he had that disease, I think I’d feel the same way – that it’s a somewhat irresponsible thing to do.

    (Generally speaking, anyway. I could imagine individual exceptions to this general rule.)

  14. 14
    Ampersand says:

    Robert:

    But do you really think that it’s OK that the Argentinian system is giving someone an extremely soft sentence pretty much explicitly because they’re a white American with enough connections and pull to get media attention and have colleagues rally ’round the flag for them?

    No, it’s not okay. But see my response to Grace, above.

  15. 15
    Ampersand says:

    3) He’s a convicted criminal serving a sentence. He’s unable to do his job. Why should he get paid?

    But he is able to do his job (or major parts of it, anyway); and the pay was cut off before he was convicted, and in fact, before he was even given a trial. Plus, they don’t seem to have followed the agreed-upon procedures.

  16. 16
    Robert says:

    Amp (or as I now think of you, Professor Squishy McCokehead):

    I would agree that if people were getting 20-year sentences for shoplifting a candybar, that injustice is much worse, at least in practical terms, than the injustice of one person being almost-immune from such sentences.

    But I don’t think the analogy holds up. I disagree with the war on drugs at least as much as you do; probably more so, since my objections are rooted in good libertarian principles about keeping the state toothless, whereas you want a powerful state that just happens to leave drugs alone. But with our nation and others having decided to pursue a policy of stupidity about drugs, then (presuming a legitimate system of governance is in place) the decisions of that government about things like its border control policies in terms of commodities that allowed for import and export become legitimate law, even if I disagree with the law.

    Stealing candybars is against legitimate law, too. But candybars are of trivial value and whether or not they are stolen in retail quantities has only mild effects on a small number of retailers, and no measurable effects on the population. Cocaine, on the other hand, though demonized almost to absurdity by the lawful types, is an economically major commodity, over which people routinely die in gang warfare for territory. Arguably a lot of that mortality is the fault of prohibition itself; I’d make that argument, though I’d want to be high first, for energy. The US market for cocaine is about $40 billion annually.

    Cocaine is also a highly psychoactive substance. It has major uses in medicine, and – like all drugs with actual pharmacological effects – it has risks as well, and non-trivial amounts of people die on the stuff. (Not the thousands or millions that prohibitionists might try to claim, but hundreds at the least.) There are fairly serious health concerns, too, though usually they aren’t lethal.

    It ain’t candybars, in other words. And even if it were, we come up against another issue: what about respecting other countries’ rights to decide their own laws and to control their own borders? I think the Canadian restrictions on guns entering the country are stupid – does that mean that if I try to bring a few dozen handguns into Vancouver (“I need those to shoot at moose, officer.”) I should get a slap on the wrist? No – whether I believe everyone should have ten guns or that nobody should have even one, I believe that Canada is a separate nation from mine, and has its own right to self-determination.

    So if the Argentinians have decided that people trying to bring in a milion dollars worth of cocaine should face real jail time – OK. It’s their country and it isn’t a trivial issue like stealing a candybar. And I think you should value that country’s right to set its own laws, over the valuation that you would place on the law, for good or for ill.

  17. 17
    Robert says:

    Man, forty paragraphs of blather and I left out the conclusion.

    In your analogy, the injustice of the harsh sentence to the majority of offenders outweighs the injustice of the differential sentence for the minority. In the case of high-value border-busting international drug smugglers, the sentence is not particularly unjust in the context of sentences imposed for other drug crimes. That being the case, the injustice inherent in fact that a nice Caucasian American guy with a smart-people job, and apparently some kind of mind-control power over New York journalists and Portland cartoonists. gets a slap on the wrist while others do hard time, outweighs the injustice of the sentencing structure itself.

    Nobody in that jail, including the physicist, was surprised to see a heavy sentence looming for their cocaine-smuggling endeavors. Everyone in the world would be shocked by 20 years for a candy bar.

  18. 18
    Ampersand says:

    Robert, a lot of your argument shows that years of snorting powdered copies of The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress through a rolled-up glossy 8×10 nude photo of Ludwig von Mises off the back cover of your tattered copy of Capitalism and Freedom have worn away not only your sense of smell, but also your grasp of logic, and ew you’ve got Harsh Mistress dripping out your nostrils wipe your nose for gods sake that just looks gross no one wants to see that I can’t even go on.

    For instance, you go on about “respecting other countries’ rights to decide their own laws and to control their own borders,” which has no relevance at all. I questioned the wisdom and justice of anti-drug laws, true, but so what? If an umpire calls “strike!” and I, watching it on TV, say “I think that was a ball,” it’s illogical to act as if I said the umpire didn’t have the right to make the call.

    You reiterate that it’s unfair that dude got a light punishment when so many others get heavy punishments. But I already agreed with you about that.

    You point out that my analogy is not exactly like cocaine. Yes, that’s true. It was an analogy.

    You say that you don’t think cocaine should be illegal, but you then spend paragraphs explaining why harsh punishments for those arrested for coke crimes are appropriate. I don’t think you can hold those two positions simultaneously. If you’re arguing that it’s reasonable to harshly punish folks for cocaine crimes, then I don’t think you can reasonably claim to be against the drug war. (At least, not while being consistent.)

    I agree with you that it’s unjust that the professor’s class and race and nationality status bought him special treatment. But the most just solution to that inequality wouldn’t be equalizing things by punishing the professor more harshly, but equalizing things by giving all the other non-violent drug offenders similarly light sentences (or even lighter sentences, or no sentences).

  19. 19
    Robert says:

    Not appropriate, necessarily, but justifiable or at least defensible if one accepts the proposition that the state should control drugs. Since most people do accept that proposition, and even those who don’t are very easy to tempt into it when the drug does Bad Stuff, it’s not like I’m trying to defend the proposition that Glenn Beck is the smartest man on earth.

    I don’t have to approve of things for them to be legitimate. I think the drug laws are mostly stupid. But if a stranger shows up at my door saying that they are a fugitive on drug charges, won’t I hide them please….no. I won’t call the sheriff, but I’m not lying to the cops for you either. The state has been empowered by the citizens to have these laws (idiots) and the people have generally voted for the politicians who pledge to harshly enforce them (toolknobs), so live with it, fellow humans.

    You seem to think that your disapproval does delegitimize the law, so that we need not be concerned overmuch with injustice in its application because the law itself is so much worse. Am I wrong on that? If you don’t think that, then why is your disapproval of the coke smuggling law material?

    That’s what distinguishes it from your analogy. Your analogy deliberately presents a trivial crime, to enhance the reader’s understanding of your point about the punishment for the crime being the real injustice. But most people don’t think its a trivial crime; most people aren’t teary for Professor Dumbass.

    A better analogy would be a bunch of people get arrested for insider trading, and one of them (the young urban Hispanic gay guy) gets a super-light sentence and the others get 5 years hard Federal time. Most people think that’s a bad crime, a few people think it’s not a crime at all. Nobody thinks candybar theft is a bad crime.

  20. 20
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Robert,

    “But if a stranger shows up at my door saying that they are a fugitive on drug charges, won’t I hide them please….no. I won’t call the sheriff, but I’m not lying to the cops for you either.”

    If the cops show up and ask for a detailed description, what do you do?

  21. 21
    Robert says:

    “I was deliberately trying not to look at him, or possibly her, officer. I did not want the person to feel threatened by me as a witness. Those drug people are all crazy dangerous, you know.”

    Failing that, describe Amp.

  22. 22
    Ampersand says:

    You seem to think that your disapproval does delegitimize the law, so that we need not be concerned overmuch with injustice in its application because the law itself is so much worse. Am I wrong on that? If you don’t think that, then why is your disapproval of the coke smuggling law material?

    I simultaneously believe two things:

    1) That the unequal sentencing is unjust.

    2) That harsh sentencing for nonviolent drug law violations are unjust.

    These two beliefs are not contradictory in any way.

    I’ve said that I think 1) is unjust at least 2 or 3 times in this discussion. But no matter how many times I say it, you refuse to acknowledge it, and keep on claiming that I’ve said “we need not be concerned overmuch with injustice in its application.” I’ve never said that. I’ve made it clear I don’t believe that.

    Anyhow, there are some nice cops at the door who say that an eyewitness places an almost impossibly handsome man with cartoonists elbow at a drug crime scene.

  23. 23
    Robert says:

    I get that you think they’re both unjust and I agree that there is not a contradiction between those two things.

    I’m not saying that you’re unconcerned with injustice in the application. I’m saying that your candybar theft analogy is a good model for explaining why you (and a very sadly, relatively small number of us libertines) aren’t OVERLY concerned with it in this instance. But it’s a terrible analogy for persuading most anyone else, because they think cocaine trafficking is heinous.

    It does just strike me that it’s possible I’m being really stupid, and your analogy is meant only to explain your own view, and not to be rhetorically persuasive.

    I don’t know about ‘eyewitness’. All I provided was a few DNA swabs, your address, a database of incriminating emails collected painstakingly over decades, and a lovingly Photoshopped picture of you going face-deep into a pile of blow the size of an ottoman while strangling a DEA official.

  24. 24
    David Schraub says:

    Online romance bloomed, one thing led to another, and soon the physicist was arrested in Buenos Aires for trying to smuggle cocaine.

    I have no comment other than that this is a wonderful, wonderful sentence.

  25. 25
    Veronica Porter says:

    This is all sad mostly because there is no Denise Milani. She never came from the Chech Republic and has no accent. She has a thick Southern accent and has grant illusions of being a princess or aristocrat. Her private Facebook is Rachel Abrams in Tulsa. Her wacky posts, usually 50+ a day, are more twisted than any of this professor stuff. I think she probably was involved because her aliases, delusions and being attention crazy to be the victim all make sense.

  26. 26
    Hector_St_Clare says:

    Re: How does preferring one type of woman to another make him a ‘misogynist’? If he were a misogynist, he obviously wouldn’t be looking for a woman to marry and have kids with.

    Yeah, this.

    Re: If we could question Dr. Frampton, would he say that American women are too independent and liberated to be a good pool of potential mates?

    If Dr. Frampton doesn’t want a ‘liberated’ wife/girlfriend, then I don’t see anything wrong with that, and he absolutely should look overseas for someone who looks for more traditional gender roles if that’s what he wants. Likewise if he’s looking for someone much younger. (Though of course there are plenty of American women who also believe in traditional gender roles, and some, though a minority, who like older men: America and Argentina are both big places with lots of people with different personality types).

    I’d consider it misogynist to believe ‘all women should be expected to take on subordinate/dependent roles in marriage/relationships, regardless of what they would prefer’. I don’t consider it problematic to say ‘this is what I want for myself’, or ‘subordinate/dependent gender roles are what whill make *most* women happy’, as long as you’re allowing women (and men) the freedom to choose.