He grew up in the backstreets of São Paulo, where his friends knew him simply as José. That’s the story. But when the studious son of a mechanic stumbled across the great works of English and Scottish literature, everything changed.
José Eduardo dos Reis became Edward Albert Lancelot Dodd Canterbury Caterham Wickfield, it is claimed. With a moniker inspired by his favorite author, Charles Dickens, he served as a judge on the Brazilian bench for 23 years while pretending to be the descendant of British aristocrats.
The alleged extraordinary ruse was only exposed when Dodd Canterbury Caterham Wickfield, or Reis, went to renew his ID card last October and prompted the suspicions of a local bureaucrat. Now, as his lawyers prepare a case for his defense against charges of identity fraud and using false documents, the details of the alleged fraud have emerged.
“He dedicated his entire life to the judiciary; he has fulfilled all his obligations,” his lawyer said in a submission. “He never intended to harm anyone.”
Accepted into the São Paulo law school in the 1980s, Reis went on to become a judge in 1995, and settled into his British identity.
Testimonies online by those who said they knew Reis mentioned he had a distinctly British accent when speaking Portuguese. One said he was known for always indulging in a cup of tea at precisely five o’clock in the afternoon.
He also apparently insisted on taking time off at the same time as the April 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, and did not deny his colleague’s speculation that he had an invitation to Westminster Abbey. He even explained his fondness for using public transport, unusual for a judge in Brazil, as a legacy of the fact that he grew up using the Tube in London.
“When I was a teenager, I discovered something about English literature,” Reis told a psychiatrist, according to the doctor’s testimony as relayed in court documents. “I spent hours reading books by Charles Dickens, Robert Stevenson and Walter Scott in the public library. I don’t know where I found this particular taste because no one in my family was interested. But I felt that England ‘was my place’.”
He was determined to move to the land he felt was his natural home, or at least an English-speaking country. In 1980, armed with a few savings he had made as an office boy, he set off to Boston, praised by Dickens in 1867 as a “beautiful” city, with its “handsome” public buildings.
However, his hopes of success in New England did not materialize. Six months later, he returned, dejected, to Brazil. Ashamed, he later explained he “wanted to die and be reborn as another person” — and so he decided to become someone else. A friend, he said, helped him choose his new names, many taken from the books he loved.
In 1995, just after Reis was appointed a judge, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo briefly profiled him as part of a story looking into a trend in the country’s judicial appointments: that many were the children of immigrants. Reis told the paper that although born in Brazil, he had lived for 25 years in England, where he said he studied mathematics and physics. He, in fact, is understood to have spent almost his entire childhood in the then-run-down Vila Mariana area of São Paulo.
In a medical report presented by Reis’s lawyers to the judge overseeing the case, doctors concluded that he had “characteristics compatible with the diagnosis of schizophrenic personality disorder”.
For more than four decades Reis lived as his British alter ego, until late last year when he attempted to renew his ID card in São Paulo and a vigilant officer double-checked his name against birth records — noticing that his birth certificate registration number, fingerprints and its address appeared to match another of a Brazilian man, named Reis.
The allegedly forged certificate names his father as Richard Dodd Canterbury Caterham Wickfield, and his mother as Anne Marie Dubois Vincent Wickfield.
In Brazil, once a birth certificate is obtained, it is possible to use that to obtain other official documents, from a driving license to voting cards. Older birth certificates were very easy to forge, or obtain using false information. That weakness in the system was highlighted this month when it emerged that Russia had, for years, used Brazil to create cover stories and identities for its spies.
The revelation of Reis’s case has already proved costly. The authorities have blocked his judge’s pension. State pensions are notoriously generous in Brazil, and Reis was reported to have been receiving almost $30,000 a month.
Stephen Gibbs is a Venezuela-based writer who covers Latin America and the Caribbean for The Times and The Sunday Times of London
