Ardley and Maureen Hanemann of New Orleans were not very surprised last December when they heard about the fits their old friend Spiro Pavlovich III was giving all those people up at Harvard. Sure, he was charged with twice bluffing his way into the Law School, but then, "Spiro always did want to see how much he could get away with," Ardley Hanemann says.

Come January, though, the Hanemanns were in for a big shock. Spiro's wife Monette--who was attending the Business School after allegedly faking transcripts--was also arrested by the FBI for falsifying applications for government-insured loans.

The Hanemanns just could not believe Monette was involved. Maureen Hanemann had bumped into Monette at a real estate agency in New Orleans in the summer of 1972. Monette, who was working for the firm, told Maureen she was married to a Tulane medical school student and that her teenage romance with Spiro was a part of her life "she'd rather forget."

It was about that time that Spiro and Monette Pavlovich celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

The Thunderbird Kid And His Girl

Judging from their undergraduate days in the mid-sixties, the match seemed inevitable. Friends remember how Monette, then in a Catholic girls academy, idolized the Loyola College stud. The pair were considered very fast--Maureen Hanemann remembers being shocked when a number of friends found Spiro and Monette out on a levee, zipped up in a sleeping bag together. "At that time [1965] you just didn't do that," she recalls.

Spiro had "a certain aura of being cool," says Emile Lafourcade, secretary of Spiro's fraternity. "Anyone who could drive around in a new T-Bird when everybody else was going around in '59 junk-heaps had something up on the rest of us."

Friends recall being a bit surprised, however, when they saw his house in Plaquemines parish, adjacent to New Orleans. He had told people his father had left him millions and he did have a nice car and lots of spending money, but the house was so . . . modest.

What people remember about Monette was that she was "one hell of a looker"; what they remember about Spiro are the pranks. While at Loyola, he sponsored an expensive formal, and tried to pass off an unknown nightclub singer as Aretha Franklin. The fraud was exposed, but when Hanemann saw Spiro after he transferred to Tulane, there were signs in Spiro's car promoting another Aretha dance. "Spiro, what are these signs?" asked Hanemann. "No, no," Pavlovich assured him, "this time she really is coming."

Act I: Mr. Pavlovich Goes to Cambridge

No one is quite sure how long it was after the second Franklin hoax that Spiro decided to move on to bigger things, even though he had not graduated from Tulane. But in the fall of 1968 he showed up at Harvard Law School, where he spent the next two and a half years. If the swagger and braggadocio were showing then, no one recalls it--in general, he didn't leave enough of a mark for professors to recognize him when he came back as Jason Cord.

George H. Lanier '66 of the King and Spaulding law firm in Louisiana, is proud to have been the first to trip Spiro up. Besides the now-famous lies about turning down the Law Review and writing a thesis on Einstein, Lanier says Pavlovich made other, equally outrageous claims. Spiro said he was the great grand-nephew of Czar Nicholas of Russia, the nephew of a man who "owned most of lower Louisiana," and the godson of Leander Perez, a notoriously powerful and corrupt Plaquemines parish politician. Lanier began to get suspicious, but it was Spiro's statement that he was an avid scuba diver that really destroyed his credibility. One of Lanier's partners was a scuba enthusiast, and fooled Spiro into expanding on the subject, about which Pavlovich knew nothing. The firm contacted Tulane University, then Harvard Law. Harvard asked King and Spaulding if it wished to press charges, but the firm declined--Spiro hadn't even sent them a bill for the hotel. But for the time being the jig was up.

Pavlovich left Harvard with very little fanfare. "We got the impression that he was in psychologically unstable state of mind," Detlev Vagts '49, professor of Law, who had taught Pavlovich, says, and another source remembers Harvard administrators confiding that Spiro was in an institution and that the case would not be pursued.

Act II: Cord and Cabot, Inc.

But Spiro bounced back quickly. That fall he enrolled at the University of New Orleans (formerly Louisiana State University at New Orleans) as a transfer student from Tulane, with an allegedly false transcript. Equipped with a new name, Jason Scott Cord, he completed a very successful stint at UNO. And then it was off to Cambridge again for Round II--this time with Uncle Sam guaranteeing repayment of Harvard's loans.