February 24, 2010

Holt to correct — not recall — Hiroshima book based on fraud

by Dennis Johnson

Henry Holt announced Monday that “it will correct all future editions of the Last Train from Hiroshima” by Charles Pellgrino after it was discovered that one of Pellegrino’s key sources for the book, Joseph Fucco, was a fraud, according to a Publishers Weekly report.

As in this earlier MobyLives report, Fucco had told Pellegrino he was a last minute substitute for an engineer named James R. Corliss on one of the planes accompanying the Enola Gay when it dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in August, 1945. Fucco also claimed to have witnessed a mishap with the bomb before the flight in which radiation was released, killing an American soldier.

Pellegrino apparently did not check the story with surviving witnesses or against numerous historical documents.

According to the PW report,

To make the corrections, Holt said Pellegrino is interviewing the family of Corliss and surviving service men from the mission. When those interviews are completed, Holt will release a list of corrections. All future editions–hardcover, paperback or electronic–will include the corrections and an author’s note explaining what has occurred. References to Fucco will be eliminated. There are no plans to recall the book; Holt has shipped about 18,000 copies. The total changes will amount to less than five pages of text and one illustration, said Holt president Steve Rubin.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

2 Comments

David Brennan at 11:03 am on February 26, 2010

Dennis,

First off, I contacted the college where Pellegrino supposedly got his PhD. He’s lying: he never graduated from there. He has no PhD. (This should’ve been noted previously because he’s claimed to have a PhD in multiple fields throughout his career.)

As far as the NY Times article on ‘Last Train from Hiroshima’, Pellegrino’s attempts to attribute the lies to WW2 veteran Fuoco are patently bogus. Just days before the New York Times story, Pellegrino was on Amazon.com bragging, “I already did know” about the non-existent accident that Fuoco supposedly verified. (Note that the dead victim of the supposed accident is “unnamed”.) Since this incident never took place, and since Pellegrino is stating that he already knew of it BEFORE Fuoco mentioned it….the fraud is on the part of Pellegrino.

What are the odds that Fuoco would independently make up the very same story that Pellegrino had already made up in his own mind? Very small. Therefore, there’s a strong possibility that Pellegrino is attributing quotes to Fuoco that he never said.

Pellegrino is a serial fraudster and a pathological liar. The NY Times article – as you kind of suggested in a previous post – was naive, at best, in their assumption that it was Fuoco, not Pellegrino, who was the liar.

Anyway, I’ve written a detailed article about Pellegrino’s frauds going back at least to the early 1990’s (not even counting his non-existing PhD). The article is at my blog, JamesCameron.Blogspot.com.
David Brennan at 11:03 am on February 26, 2010

Dennis,

First off, I contacted the college where Pellegrino supposedly got his PhD. He’s lying: he never graduated from there. He has no PhD. (This should’ve been noted previously because he’s claimed to have a PhD in multiple fields throughout his career.)

As far as the NY Times article on ‘Last Train from Hiroshima’, Pellegrino’s attempts to attribute the lies to WW2 veteran Fuoco are patently bogus. Just days before the New York Times story, Pellegrino was on Amazon.com bragging, “I already did know” about the non-existent accident that Fuoco supposedly verified. (Note that the dead victim of the supposed accident is “unnamed”.) Since this incident never took place, and since Pellegrino is stating that he already knew of it BEFORE Fuoco mentioned it….the fraud is on the part of Pellegrino.

What are the odds that Fuoco would independently make up the very same story that Pellegrino had already made up in his own mind? Very small. Therefore, there’s a strong possibility that Pellegrino is attributing quotes to Fuoco that he never said.

Pellegrino is a serial fraudster and a pathological liar. The NY Times article – as you kind of suggested in a previous post – was naive, at best, in their assumption that it was Fuoco, not Pellegrino, who was the liar.

Anyway, I’ve written a detailed article about Pellegrino’s frauds going back at least to the early 1990’s (not even counting his non-existing PhD). The article is at my blog, JamesCameron.Blogspot.com.