Ugly Americans

There was an article on CNN about the movie "21", which is based on the Ben Mezrich book "Ugly Americans". (I read the book some time ago and posted about it on my main blog.) The CNN bit led me on a kick where I checked out the Wikipedia article, which mentioned a possible true identity for the protagonist. A blog post had some more information and pointed to a Boston Globe article along the same lines. Is the reality as interesting as the book? It'd be interesting to find out for sure.