Herb Stempel, who admitted that the quiz show on which he was a contestant was fixed, died April 7. He was 93.

According to The New York Times account, on Dec. 5, 1956, Mr. Stempel, a City College student from Queens, was in his eighth week on “Twenty-One,” an NBC quiz show, where he posed as a nerdy know-it-all. He had won $49,500. But his new rival was Charles Van Doren, a golden-boy Columbia University instructor, and the uninspiring Mr. Stempel was scripted to take a dive.

While Mr. Van Doren went on to become the most celebrated (and, later, vilified ) contestant of the quiz-show era, Mr. Stempel might have become a forgotten man. Instead, he helped blow the cover off one of the major scandals of the age, telling the news media, prosecutors and congressional investigators that it was all a hoax.

At a 1959 congressional hearing where an episode of “Twenty-One” featuring Mr. Stempel was viewed, he said he had not returned the money he took from the show because he felt he had earned it. “Actually,” he said, “may I say that I was not a quiz contestant in this program, in my opinion. I was an actor.”