Frederick Celani was greater than a decade right into a rollicking, relentless profession as a con man when he bamboozled metropolis officers and staff in Springfield, In poor health., into believing that he would make town the hub of an in a single day bundle supply service.
It was 1983. Unemployment was excessive in Springfield, which wanted the financial increase that Mr. Celani was promising. In a whirlwind few months, he employed 100 staff, together with pilots; leased automobiles; and rented workplace area and an airplane hangar.
On March 1, about 1,000 folks gathered on the hangar to have fun Kayport Package deal Specific’s first day in enterprise. Champagne was served. A highschool band performed.
But it surely was over in 4 days. All the workers have been laid off.
And Mr. Celani skipped city for Los Angeles, based on an account in a three-part collection about him in The Commonplace Journal-Register of Springfield, which started in 2007.
The Kayport scheme — which was a part of a broader fraud that concerned bilking tons of of buyers across the nation out of almost $4 million for phony tax shelters and firm inventory — led to indictments in opposition to Mr. Celani (pronounced CHE-lah-nee) and his associate, Aaron Binder, for racketeering, conspiracy, mail and wire fraud fees.
Mr. Celani defended himself at his trial, with help from a lawyer, Jon Noll.
“To him, the trial was an amazing quantity of enjoyable,” Mr. Noll instructed The Journal-Register. “It was a brand new journey for him.”
Mr. Celani was sentenced to fifteen years in jail — he served six — and Mr. Binder to 10 years.
The cons would proceed after Mr. Celani was launched.
“The factor that I assumed was odd,” Bruce Rushton, who wrote the three-part collection, mentioned in a cellphone interview, “is that of all of the folks I talked to, no person was mad on the man.”
“They noticed the humor in it.”
Mr. Celani’s physique was discovered on Feb. 7 in Queens, based on an inventory on the Nationwide Lacking and Unidentified Individuals System that features a postmortem {photograph} of his face. New York Metropolis’s medical expert workplace mentioned the reason for loss of life was heart problems. He was 75.
Frederick George Celani was born on Aug. 26, 1948, in Buffalo, to Joseph, a bus driver, and Grace Celani. The federal choose sentencing Mr. Celani in an actual property scheme in 2013 cited a presentencing report saying that Mr. Celani had been crushed by his father and brother when he was younger.
Mr. Celani and his first spouse, Anita Celani — they married in 1971 — finally divorced. In 1991, she was convicted of second-degree homicide for hiring successful man to kill a later husband, Robert DiGiulio. Mr. Celani later married Mary Rudolph. (Details about his survivors was not instantly obtainable.)
By his personal account, Mr. Celani by no means held a professional, paying job. And whereas he took programs at Canisius Faculty (now College) in Buffalo from 1976-77, he didn’t matriculate.
His historical past of hoaxes started in his hometown. In 1974, he was sentenced to a 12 months in jail for being the mastermind of a bogus plan to construct a $100 million waterfront improvement — all whereas being held within the Attica Correctional Facility for an additional case that concerned taking $2,000 from a pair for a home that he didn’t intend to construct.
At his sentencing for the waterfront fraud, the choose, Robert F. Kiener of West Seneca, N.Y., mentioned: “Robert Redford and Paul Newman acquired recognition for his or her roles as con males in ‘The Sting.’ However you, Mr. Celani, in your efforts, have been stung.”
Stung, maybe, however unbowed. He loved what he was doing an excessive amount of to cease.
“He was sensible, shrewd, an ideal talker with a child face, pleasant however by no means slick,” Mr. Rushton wrote within the collection in The Journal-Register.
“You count on a con artist to be suave. He wasn’t,” Thomas Glascott, a retired Buffalo police lieutenant and district legal professional’s investigator, was quoted as saying.
Quickly after being launched from jail in 1991 for the Kayport scheme, Mr. Celani turned up in North Hollywood, Calif., as Fred Sebastian, the founding father of a civil rights legislation agency that he referred to as the Middle for Constitutional Legislation and Justice. He was not a lawyer however employed 5 attorneys to signify federal inmates, a few of whom paid the middle hundreds of {dollars}, hoping to overturn their convictions or get them early launch.
It was additionally a rip-off.
“He may promote ice to Alaskans and shampoo to the bald,” Alaleh Kamran, one of many middle’s attorneys, instructed The San Francisco Examiner in 1993. “If you happen to didn’t know he wasn’t an legal professional, and I didn’t, he may actually idiot you.”
The middle collapsed after Mr. Celani was arrested in 1992 for promising an inmate’s spouse that he may get her husband launched from jail if she gave him $50,000 to bribe the prosecutor in Little Rock, Ark. She instructed the F.B.I. concerning the provide and recorded a dialog with him concerning the bribe. He was convicted of eight counts of fraud and sentenced to seven years in jail.
At his sentencing, Mr. Celani claimed that his troubled life had its roots in his alcoholic dad and mom’ kicking him out of their home, turning him right into a “child on the road.”
The choose referred to as him a “human tragedy.”
In 2000, he was free once more. Beneath the identify the Rev. Bob Hunt, he reprised his earlier authorized rip-off. Posing as a lawyer and likewise as a minister, he provided authorized companies to federal inmates. An estimated 150 inmates have been defrauded of almost $200,000, based on courtroom paperwork.
“Evidently,” Mr. Celani mentioned within the 2013 listening to, “there’s an entire bunch of sad inmates coast-to-coast who wish to see me as quickly as potential.”
He additionally began a congregation in East Peoria, In poor health., the place he as soon as delivered a sermon referred to as “Honesty.”
In 2004, he moved on to an actual property scheme on Lengthy Island. Over the course of a 12 months, he operated as a lawyer named Sidney Levine who, with no less than two companions, cheated buyers out of $8 million that the companions mentioned they might use to purchase, construct and refurbish assisted dwelling services, guaranteeing a 25 p.c annual return. They paid about half the cash to themselves and solely $850,000 in curiosity to buyers.
When F.B.I. brokers confronted Mr. Celani at his workplace in 2005, he instructed them that he was a diabetic and wanted his insulin. He left and didn’t return. 4 years later, he was arrested close to his workplace in Oakdale, N.Y., on Lengthy Island — he had been on the F.B.I. most-wanted record as Sidney Levine — and revealed in a courtroom look that he was Frederick Celani.
He spent the following 9 years in jail and pleaded responsible to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and cash laundering. Whereas incarcerated, he had three strokes and misplaced imaginative and prescient in a single eye.
At his sentencing listening to in 2013, he mentioned: “The primary 64 years of my life is nothing to be happy with. What I did, I did. And I apologize to the courtroom and to these I’ve harmed.”
Two months after his launch in 2018, he described himself as a “homeless man” on a Fb publish that requested for donations to a GoFundMe marketing campaign.
