It was a measure of Michael "Rocky" Ryan's success as a media hoaxer that the first reaction to news of his death, aged 66, was one of disbelief; no one would have enjoyed more than Ryan reports of his death being exaggerated.
And no one on any British - or Irish - newsdesk would be entirely surprised if the big, bulky, pugnacious figure in his trademark baseball cap was to re-emerge, claiming in his gruff and truculent voice to have pulled off the biggest stunt in his long career of fooling journalists.
"Always tell them what they want to hear" was Ryan's golden rule. Thus he told the Sun that the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was being allowed out of Broadmoor to attend discos, and the Daily Telegraph that a British businessman called Rocco Salvatore was behind the Seychelles coup.
The stories might be nonsense, but they came into that seductive category of "too good to check".
Famous Ryan hoaxes included the suggestion that the Irish racehorse, Shergar, kidnapped for ransom in the 1980s by, it is believed, republican paramilitaries, was alive and well in Jersey.
Ryan warmed enthusiastically to the Shergar story, a drama that bewitched some British and Irish journalists for years. He contacted this newspaper with, he promised, valuable information about the kidnapping. A young reporter was dispatched to London but returned to tell the editor, Douglas Gageby, of his doubts, despite several meetings in dark recesses of East End pubs.
When no story appeared, Ryan telephoned Gageby several times, on one occasion threatening to "nail his foot to the floor" if his story was not used. It never appeared: Gageby, right as ever, was made of sterner stuff.
Another staple hoax for Ryan was the whereabouts of Lord Lucan. Notoriously, he also claimed to have been the intelligence source for Iraq that led to the execution of the Observer journalist Farzad Bazoft in 1990. This was supposedly an act of revenge because Ryan had been arrested and bound over after Bazoft called the police following threats from Ryan over a previous story.
When a disgraced Irish cleric was on the run, he rang television news desks claiming that the man was hiding out with a sympathetic parishioner, whose telephone number he helpfully provided. Sceptical reporters who rang to check were confronted with a startled voice saying: "Who told you that? No, no, he's not here."
The panicky denial, of course, confirmed the story, and the hoax was under way. What no one knew was that the telephone was at Ryan's home.
Ryan had a repertoire of accents, personas and aliases to beguile and confuse reporters. His other trick was to offer a tempting story and then threaten to give it to a rival paper if there seemed to be a lack of interest. He knew there was no surer way to get a reporter's attention than the possibility of turning down a scoop that a rival would splash the following day.
Although, like everything about him, personal details have to be qualified with an "allegedly", Ryan is believed to have been born in Tipperary and been in minor trouble with the police from his arrival in London.
He often claimed to have been in the Parachute Regiment or the SAS and to have been an army boxing champion.
A stuntman in the 1970s, he also worked in clubs and as a bouncer. He would visit Ronnie Kray in Broadmoor, where he also met Sutcliffe, whose "paintings" were the subject of another long-running tale.
Although there might be money to be made from his hoaxes, his main interest lay in tricking the press.
He was always surprised at how easy it was, though, in later years, he found that other pranksters were outdoing him and that, increasingly, much of the news anyway came under the category of "you couldn't make it up".
He also alienated some reporters with his aggressive and threatening telephone manner.
Following a stroke, Ryan lived very modestly alone in Neasden, north London. He had a daughter by an early marriage.
Michael "Rocky" Ryan: born December 30th, 1937; died January 15th, 2004