Narcissists in the news: Paul Frampton

In the NY Times Magazine, headlined "The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble," a hilarious profile of a raging narcissist getting "catfished" into being a drug mule and stuck in an Argentinian prison. It is one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in the past year or two, maybe. Great pacing! Worth reading in its entirety! But just in case you're lazy, here are the selections that scream narcissist to me:

• Well, you’re going to be killed, Paul, so whom should I contact when you disappear?’ And he said, ‘You can contact my brother and my former wife.’ ” Frampton later told me that he shrugged off Dixon’s warnings about drugs as melodramatic, adding that he rarely pays attention to the opinions of others.
• Soon he heard his name called over the loudspeaker. He thought it must be for an upgrade to first class, but when he arrived at the airline counter, he was greeted by several policemen. Asked to identify his luggage — “That’s my bag,” he said, “the other one’s not my bag, but I checked it in” — he waited while the police tested the contents of a package found in the “Milani” suitcase. Within hours, he was under arrest.
• “I’m a bit of a celebrity in here,” Frampton said.
• Frampton closed our interview half-seriously, half-impishly, with another kind of calculation: “I’ve co-authored with three Nobel laureates. Only 11 theoretical physicists have done that. Six out of those 11 have won Nobel Prizes themselves. Following this logic, I have a 55 percent chance of getting the Nobel.”
• Shortly after his divorce, Frampton, then 64, expressed concern about finding a wife between the ages of 18 and 35, which Frampton understood to be the period when women are most fertile. . . . “He told me to look her up on the Internet,” Dixon recalled. “I thought he was out of his mind, and I told him that. ‘You’re not talking to the real girl. Why would a young woman like that be interested in an old guy like you?’ But he really believed that he had a pretty young woman who wanted to marry him.” When I later asked Frampton what made him think that Milani was interested, he replied, “Well, I have been accused of having a huge ego.”
• “There could be retribution. I could be assassinated.”
• Frampton is prone to seeing himself as the center of the action whatever the milieu. When he was growing up in Worcestershire, England, in what he describes as a “lower-middle-class family,” his mother encouraged him to report his stellar grades to all the neighbors, a practice that may have led the young Frampton to confuse worldly laurels with love. 
• In what a fellow physicist described as a “very vain, very inappropriate” talk delivered on the 80th birthday of Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, Frampton veered into autobiography, recounting how his ability to multiply numbers in his head at 4 led him to see himself as “cleverer than Newton.” This line became a refrain throughout the talk. Interspersed with the calculations and hypotheses were his Oxford grades, which, he said, showed that he, like Newton, was in the top 1 percentile for intelligence. Frampton insists that he was merely joking and that his sense of humor was misinterpreted as self-regard. Yet in many of my conversations with him, he seemed to cling to the idea of his own exceptionalism. During our first meeting, when I asked him what attracted him to Milani, he said, “Not to offend present company,” referring to me and the representative from the penitentiary service, “but, to start with, she’s in the top 1 percentile of how women look.”
• When I asked Frampton if he had slept in, he said he spent half the night on the Internet, reading through all the latest discoveries in his field, checking to see what his “competitors” had been working on, and beginning to answer the thousands of e-mails he received. He reported that he had more citations than ever.
• "This sounds a bit egomaniacal, but to understand dark energy, I think we have to be open-minded about Einstein’s general relativity."