The jig is up for Josef Meyer of Michigan—an undercover F.B.I. informant who posed as an Austrian prince while pursuing a wildly eccentric second life in New York City's SoHo neighborhood. According to reports, the fake royal, who claimed the title "Prince Josef Habsburg Lothringen of Austria," is a real-life deadbeat dad who allegedly skipped out on his child-support payments. The name he adopted (and is still using, according to his lawyer's statements), Habsburg-Lothringen, is the German variation of what anglophones would call Habsburg-Lorraine. Interestingly, the head of that family, the recently widowed Otto von Habsburg (formerly Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), has spent most of his life dedicated to civilian, not aristocratic, pursuits. The true royal, a descendant of the last Holy Roman Emperor, refers to himself as Dr. Otto von Habsburg, eschewing royal titles and renouncing claim to the Austrian throne. In 2000, the doctor transferred...
- 7/12/2010
- Vanity Fair
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