Did Andrew Breitbart fake his death?

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/business/media/the-life-and-death-of-andrew-breitbart.html

ON the last night of February, Arthur Sando was having a drink at the Brentwood Restaurant and Lounge in Los Angeles when a bearded silver-haired man took a seat next to him, ordered a glass of pinot noir and began typing into his BlackBerry.

Mr. Sando quickly realized he was sitting next to Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger and author, and the two began to chat. As with almost any encounter with Mr. Breitbart, the next 90 minutes between the former strangers was punctuated by laughs, some outrageous political assertions and repeated interruptions as Mr. Breitbart checked his smartphone.

“We talked politics, television, college and living in Los Angeles,” Mr. Sando said, adding that Mr. Breitbart had a single glass of wine during the conversation and seemed to be in both good spirits and good health. “He said that conversations like ours were why he liked to go to bars and talk with people who had different political beliefs.”

Mr. Sando paid his tab and left. Not long after, Mr. Breitbart, 43, settled his own bill and apparently headed to the nearby home he shared with his wife, Susie Bean Breitbart, and their four young children. Minutes after exiting the bar, he collapsed in front of a Starbucks like a “sack of potatoes,” one witness said. Paramedics were unable to revive him. Later, his father-in-law, the actor Orson Bean, said that Mr. Breitbart had a history of heart ailments. (A final coroner’s report, with the official cause of death, is expected this month.)

The following morning, Mr. Sando, a marketing executive from Los Angeles whose encounter with Mr. Breitbart was first reported in The Hollywood Reporter, grabbed his iPhone. The first thing he saw was a headline saying Mr. Breitbart had died.

“I thought it was a prank,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “I thought he might have been in the habit of sending fake headlines to people he had encountered with different political opinions.”

It was a common response, particularly among people who knew him well. After a lifetime of pranks, capers and so many people wishing him dead, it would have been just like Mr. Breitbart to stage his own demise.

“I kept thinking, he is going to pull something off here,” said Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, at a memorial held at the Newseum in Washington three weeks later. “He’s going to find out who hates his guts and who loved him, and I kept wanting to hear back, ‘O.K., the gag’s up.’ ”