Right off, I should say something about my minor role in helping send old Nick to prison. As Oregon deputy district attorney Stacey Borgman told me last week, “Your article has come in very handy for me over the last year! I attached it to the back of several court documents! Thank you.”
She had just successfully prosecuted 74-year-old Nick Kasemehas, likely America’s most incurable con man, whom I wrote about four years back (“The Wrath of Con,” May 4, 2010). “That guy in the movie Catch Me If You Can,” one of Kasemehas’ relatives told me, “he’s a piker compared to Nick.”
San Francisco Police Inspector Greg Ovanessian, who chased Kasemehas for more than two decades, told me he wasn’t ready to rank Nick alongside legendary impostor Frank Abagnale Jr. But “Nick is good, very good,” he said. And while Abagnale was a one-decade flash-in-the-pan, Kasemehas has been an artful dodger for more than half a century. He once slid five stories down an elevator shaft while fleeing the cops. Another time he successfully leapt from a jet plane taxiing for takeoff. (A U.S. Marshal pursuing him also jumped, and broke his leg.)
Kasemehas even worked the con from prison, which he’s been revolving through since the 1960s, aggregating 20 years behind bars. He once bunked with a wealthy pornographer who bragged he secretly donated to Jimmy Carter’s election campaign in hopes of getting out of prison. Kasemehas, working a deal, ratted out the pornographer, leading to a 1970s White House payoff scandal.
So what I’d like to say about Kasemehas going back to prison with my small help is that it was sad to see a picture of him in The Oregonian, head in handcuffed hand, after a judge sentenced him to 15 years. Due to his age and heart condition, that’s a death sentence, said his attorney.
But, just as the dozens of women Kasemehas courted and then fleeced loved him, he loved the con and it took him for everything, too. If he dies in prison, some will cheer. As one victim put it, “If the police catch him, they can keep the money. I just want to go down there and kick him in the balls.”
From Seattle to Los Angeles and points east, police detectives called Kasemehas “the Casanova Con,” since he typically wooed and swindled single ladies. Investors were his second favorite target. A Seattle hotel concierge gave him $48,000 and an Idaho farmer forked over $2 million, only to have Kasemehas disappear.
This “charming, grandfatherly” poseur, said prosecutor Borgman last week in Clackamas County Circuit Court, “will not change; he knows no other way of life.” When he left prison last time, in 2012 at age 72, Kasemehas went back to the con, as before. In less than a year, he used loan and gold-coin schemes to hook four investors, then disappeared with $181,000 of their money.
He was older but no less bold. When arrested in Chicago this year, Nick was passing himself off again as tycoon Alex Spanos, a fellow Greek and owner of the San Diego Chargers. “He’s charismatic and consistent,” Ovanessian had said. “He develops a line and sticks with it.”
No one was certain why Kasemehas wasn’t held for Seattle authorities after his latest prison release, although there was little chance he could pay back the $48,000 conned in 2007 from the hotel concierge. Likewise, Kasemehas has not paid back the wealthy Idaho produce farmer. With interest, that tab has soared past $5 million.
“Nick is a career criminal, as you well know,” assistant DA Borgman wrote in an e-mail last week. “And he knows no other life, but I don’t think this is simply a case of an old dog using old tricks. He has been at this for far too long. There is really something missing in him. It is really quite astonishing how he is able to feign such compassion, friendship, and generosity for his marks while he is working a con, but at the same time lack any sort of empathy.”
Likely least surprised by Kasemehas’ recidivism is Ovanessian, who predicted that when Kasemehas got out of stir the previous time, he’d quickly resume his act. Why, “his ‘old man’ routine will be even better!” the detective exclaimed.
Borgman agrees. “I have seen Nick act like a decrepit old man in court in front of the judge and then 10 minutes later pace back and forth in a holding cell for 25 minutes like a 25-year-old,” she stated last week. “He has been faking heart attacks for years in order to escape or get released from jail for medical reasons. So it would not surprise me to see him walking down the street one day as a 90-year-old man, unfortunately.”
Maybe he will finally have a valid defense: “But your honor, I am an old man!”
randerson@seattleweekly.com
Rick Anderson writes about sex, crime, money, and politics, which tend to be the same thing. His latest book is Floating Feet: Irregular Dispatches From the Emerald City.
