High style and base behaviour

For a magazine that has so far published only one issue, the dramas surrounding the men's lifestyle magazine Ampersand have provided those of us who have followed its brief but chequered history with more entertainment than your average soap opera.

There was the last-minute name change enforced by a legal injunction, the false claims about its distribution in The Ivy and Le Caprice, the office tantrums of its publisher and founder, Jonathan Kern, which prompted the magazine's editorial staff to decamp en masse to another building; and now, after just a few months, we hear of Kern's sacking.

The news that Kern has been shown the door following "a dispute over the handling of financial matters" comes as no surprise to those who are acquainted with his colourful past. Indeed, had his history been known to the journalists who contributed to Ampersand's first issue and the advertisers who supported it, one doubts whether the magazine would ever have got off the ground.

What most of them will not have known is that Kern is a legendary conman. Last October, a BBC TV programme hosted by Anne Robinson entitled Britain's Great Pretenders exposed some of his fraudulent activities. Chief among these was his impersonation of the former Formula One racing driver, Jonathan Palmer. Kern enjoys the good life and, in the guise of Palmer, he lived the jet-set existence to which he aspires ­ a world of Monte Carlo, five-star hotels, fast cars and high-class hookers, all charged to the unfortunate Palmer, or to one of the fraudulent credit cards Kern took out in Palmer's name.

It was his habit of taking performance cars on "test drives" and failing to return them that was eventually his undoing. After borrowing a £50,000 Lotus Esprit for a "photo shoot", Kern disappeared to the Costa del Sol. By chance, a holidaying Lotus employee spotted the car outside a Marbella night club and alerted Interpol, who tracked Kern down to a hotel on the French Riviera. They found him in bed with a prostitute and in possession of a fistful of fraudulent credit cards.

For this and his 45 previous convictions, Kern received a three-year jail sentence, and got to share a cell in Brixton with the infamous drugs baron Howard Marks. Alas, the programme only mentioned Kern's association with magazine publishing in passing. So when he surfaced in January this year unveiling plans for a new magazine ­ originally to be called Cream, but later renamed Ampersand after legal threats from the Liverpool night club, Cream ­ an unsuspecting media industry took him at face value.

Kern managed to lure a former Times Saturday magazine editor ­ Andrew Harvey ­ to edit Ampersand and Labour MP Bob Marshall-Andrews, Kirk Originals sunglasses owner Jason Kirk and Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason to write for it. He also managed to dupe the press into giving his magazine large amounts of coverage in the trade press and in national newspapers, including The Times.

But one person who particularly regrets being taken in by Kern is Damion Queva, the managing director of magazine publisher Boston Hannah. Unaware of Kern's jailbird past, Queva hired him last year to manage advertising sales for a the launch of a new magazine ­ an upmarket London lifestyle title called London Passion.

Queva recalls: "He was arrogant but he had tenacity, which is a good thing for a sales manager, and had a history of launching magazines in foreign cities. He told me he had launched a magazine called Now in Amsterdam and even claimed to have started up the American magazine Madison." Kern says he has also launched magazines in Paris and Milan.

Queva subsequently discovered Kern to be "a compulsive liar who is out of touch with reality" and, after a series of aggressive confrontations, he accepted his resignation, which Kern later tried to retract. Queva discovered that, while still a Boston Hannah employee, Kern had registered London Passion as a limited company and as a website address in his own name. He was claiming ownership of the title, and tried to blackmail Queva into reinstating him, under threat of launching a rival London Passion magazine. When this failed, Queva says Kern set about badmouthing London Passion to advertisers, which he claims destabilised the magazine sufficiently to force its suspension.

Kern's activities are also blamed for the delay in publishing the second issue of Ampersand. Aside from the "financial irregularities", insiders say that Kern regularly threatened to resign and close the magazine. The second issue is due out this month, but Ampersand faces an uncertain future. The editor, Harvey, is leaving to edit the BBC's staff magazine, Ariel. The magazine's owner ­ Dolce & Gabbana's UK managing director Margaret Vercelli ­ has dissolved both her business and personal partnerships with Kern, and the magazine is being run by its finance director.

Meanwhile, Kern is said to be off to Paris to launch another magazine called Et Cetera. An unsuspecting Parisian media awaits.