Mike McGrady, a decorated newspaper reporter at Newsday, died over the weekend. According to The New York Times, he went to Yale and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He even won an Overseas Press Club Award for a series of columns about Vietnam from the front.

The reason why he's got a substantial obit in the Times today is not for any of that however, but for being the driving force behind an astonishingly successful literary hoax.