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, Unwell., into believing that he would make the town the hub of an in a single day package deal supply service.
It was 1983. Unemployment was excessive in Springfield, which wanted the financial enhance that Mr. Celani was promising. In a whirlwind few months, he employed 100 employees, together with pilots; leased vehicles; and rented workplace house and an airplane hangar.
On March 1, about 1,000 folks gathered on the hangar to rejoice Kayport Bundle Specific’s first day in enterprise. Champagne was served. A highschool band performed.
But it surely was over in 4 days. All the staff have been laid off.
And Mr. Celani skipped city for Los Angeles, in accordance with an account in a three-part sequence about him in The Customary Journal-Register of Springfield, which started in 2007.
The Kayport scheme — a part of a broader fraud that concerned bilking a whole lot of buyers across the nation out of almost $4 million for phony tax shelters and firm inventory — led to indictments towards Mr. Celani (pronounced CHELL-ah-nee) and his associate, Aaron Binder, for racketeering, conspiracy, and 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 informed 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 believed was odd,” Bruce Rushton, who wrote the three-part sequence, stated 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, in accordance with a list on the Nationwide Lacking and Unidentified Individuals System that features a postmortem {photograph} of his face. The New York Metropolis health worker’s workplace stated the reason for demise was heart problems. He was 75.
Frederick George Celani was born on Aug. 26, 1948, in Buffalo, to Joseph and Grace Celani. His father was a bus driver. The federal choose sentencing Mr. Celani in an actual property scheme in 2013 cited a presentencing report saying that he had been overwhelmed 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 out there.
By his personal account, Mr. Celani by no means held a official paying job. And whereas he took programs at Canisius Faculty (now College) in Buffalo from 1976 to 1977, 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., stated: “Robert Redford and Paul Newman obtained 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 good, shrewd, an awesome talker with a child face, pleasant however by no means slick,” Mr. Rushton wrote within the Journal-Register sequence.
“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 after serving time for the Kayport scheme, Mr. Celani turned up in North Hollywood, Calif., as Fred Sebastian, the founding father of a civil rights regulation agency that he known as the Middle for Constitutional Legislation and Justice. He was not a lawyer, however he employed 5 attorneys to signify federal inmates, a few of whom paid the middle 1000’s of {dollars}, hoping to overturn their convictions or get them early launch.
It was additionally a rip-off.
“He might promote ice to Alaskans and shampoo to the bald,” Alaleh Kamran, one of many heart’s legal professionals, informed The San Francisco Examiner in 1993. “If you happen to didn’t know he wasn’t an legal professional, and I didn’t, he might actually idiot you.”
The middle collapsed after Mr. Celani was arrested in 1992 for promising an inmate’s spouse that he might get her husband launched from jail if she gave him $50,000 to bribe the prosecutor in Little Rock, Ark. She informed the F.B.I. in regards to the supply and recorded a dialog with Mr. Celani in regards to 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 known as him a “human tragedy.”
In 2000, he was free once more. Below 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 providers to federal inmates. An estimated 150 inmates have been defrauded of almost $200,000, in accordance with courtroom paperwork.
“For sure,” Mr. Celani stated on the 2013 listening to, “there’s a complete bunch of sad inmates coast to coast who want to see me as quickly as attainable.”
He additionally began a congregation in East Peoria, Unwell., the place he as soon as delivered a sermon known 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 at the very least two companions, cheated buyers out of $8 million that the companions stated they might use to purchase, construct and refurbish assisted residing services, guaranteeing a 25 % 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 informed 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 listing 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 stated: “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 submit that requested for donations to a GoFundMe marketing campaign.
