The Longest Con
Alleged North Beach Ponzi schemer Giuseppe Viola's biggest victim may be his girlfriend of 18 years (Plus: Slideshow and Audio)
Kathy Pearce and Giuseppe Viola shortly after moving into their house near Candlestick Park, 2002
For 18 years, Giuseppe Viola and Katharine Pearce were in love. With Mr. B, their pet rabbit, and Molly, their cat, they lived as devoted companions in a small, cozy house near Candlestick Park.
Most mornings, Viola prepared Pearce’s breakfast — cereal, milk and a banana — before heading out to what he told her was his top-secret job running a covert operation for the National Security Agency. Her secretarial job for a state administrative agency in San Francisco was more humdrum. Many evenings, Viola prepared a romantic supper. Her Giuseppe, Pearce says, “was the best cook around.”
Given the ill effects of what he said was exposure to anthrax during an NSA mission, Viola had been working a desk job in recent years. As part of his work with a top-secret Afghanistan drone program, Viola told Pearce that he was responsible for monitoring NSA satellites when their orbits took them out of the control of the Chicago command. From Viola’s home office in their tiny house tucked between Highway 101 and the municipal recycling plant, “he sat [and watched] screens and looked at what was going on,” Pearce says. “Every Sunday at 3 p.m., he’d have to call Chicago on his special cell phone to bring the birds to San Francisco.”
Once he even showed Pearce satellite footage on his computer of a successful strike vaporizing al-Qaida forces that day. “He showed me a film of two Arabs burying a bomb, and they’re gone — they’re blown up.” Viola’s demeanor as he showed his girlfriend the footage was pride in “a job well done,” Pearce says.
As everyone now knows — and as a horrified Pearce only recently has permitted herself to believe — Viola’s “job” for all those years had nothing to do with government service. (The NSA as a matter of policy does not confirm or deny employment information, though Viola’s status as a felon and 20-year fugitive from justice in Arizona would presumably preclude him from working there.)
Instead, Viola’s elaborate covert activities were entirely for his own benefit, as he allegedly operated as one of the most baroque and long-tenured con artists San Francisco has ever seen.
For more than a decade, Viola worked out of the cafés and bakeries of North Beach, touting himself as an attorney and investment whiz. Scores of investors gave him money — an estimated $17 million in total, now presumably lost in what investigators dismiss as a Ponzi scheme. One early investor, an elderly dockworker named Ralph Napolitano, entrusted his $220,000 life savings to Viola when the pair opened a Citibank trust account in 1999. Napolitano was never seen again and is now dead, according to court filings that provide no more detail about Napolitano’s fate. Viola selectively used Napolitano’s identity and cashed his pension checks for more than a decade.
Viola’s marks even came to include Kuwaiti diplomats, who advanced Viola $500,000 last year for five kit cars cobbled together from Corvette and Alfa Romeo parts. The Kuwaitis never received their sports cars.
Viola’s North Beach crowd knew absolutely nothing about his personal life, or even where he lived. And Pearce knew nothing of Viola’s North Beach life. Pearce’s appearance at a court hearing shortly after Viola was arrested on a North Beach sidewalk on March 10 set off a tsunami of speculation among the angry investors, many of whom had counted Viola as a close friend for many years. Who was this mysterious, petite blonde woman who was footing Viola’s legal bill? And did she know where Viola might have hidden all their millions?
Today, 59-year-old Viola sits in jail in Phoenix, awaiting trial on 20-year-old fraud charges there. He was arrested in North Beach on March 10 on the old Arizona warrant, and his activities in North Beach came to light once he was already in custody. He was extradited to Arizona in April. Pearce stopped paying his legal fees in mid-April, and he is represented by a court-appointed public defender. Viola was indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco earlier this month on 24 fraud counts for his activities here. A trustee overseeing the forced liquidation of his San Francisco investment fund has sued both Viola and Citibank, his longtime financial institution, alleging that Viola and his Citi banker violated racketeering laws.
Though initially under suspicion as a mysterious woman who might be Viola’s accomplice, Pearce, 62, appears to have been his biggest dupe. She says she has no idea where all the millions Viola allegedly stole might be hidden. The pair lived frugally. Viola bought his trademark Italian suits on the cheap from discount shops. “I don’t know what happened to the money. I’m pretty sure it’s not in my house,” she says. The Federal Bureau of Investigation searched her rented home and carted away Viola’s belongings. After nearly two decades of believing and living within Viola’s incredibly detailed web of falsehoods, Pearce is most certainly Viola’s longest con.
“I’m still stunned. I have no feeling whatsoever,” says Pearce, a vivacious New Englander who graduated from the same Massachusetts boarding school that Waspy poet Anne Sexton attended. “I keep thinking I’m going to wake up, and I know I’m not.”
That Pearce could have been duped so thoroughly and for so long attests to Viola’s rare skills as a dissembler. But it also attests to Pearce’s common, very human need for companionship, affection and financial security. She, like many people, needed to have someone to call her own, even if it turns out she didn’t know his real name. Her tale may well prompt a few readers to look across the breakfast table at a familiar, perhaps beloved face quietly munching Corn Flakes… and wonder.
An e-mail Viola sent to Pearce, dated Aug. 21, 1997:
Every single fact Kathy Pearce thought she knew about the man she lived with for 18 years was a lie. His name (Joe, not “Giuseppe.”). His provenance (suburban Buffalo, not Milan, Italy). His job: not an ex-Marine turned NSA operative, but felon, fugitive and alleged con artist. Instead of never having known his mother, Viola has a large extended family in Colorado and New York. One works for Sesame Street; another is an anesthesiologist. Viola’s relatives declined to speak about him.
Pearce’s attorney, Peter Keane, a dean emeritus of Golden Gate University’s Law School, says that Pearce is not under investigation. John MacConaghy, the attorney representing the trustee sorting out Viola’s financial dealings in bankruptcy court in San Francisco, also says that Pearce is not now suspected of criminal activity, and that she lost the $27,500 inheritance that she gave Viola in the final weeks before his alleged schemes imploded. “I believe she was an innocent victim in this,” MacConaghy says.
Some of Pearce’s money, in fact, went to replenish a business bank account controlled by the two owners of Victoria Pastry Co. on Stockton Street. Viola was not a signatory on the account, according to court records. Since about 2007, Viola had used a windowless room in the basement of Victoria Pastry as his office, and he had a brief romantic relationship with one of the shop’s owners, according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation affidavit filed in court, which does not identify which of the partners was Viola’s lover. To complete the romantic and financial circuit, court filings also show that Viola used some of the money improperly drained from the pastry shop owner’s account to pay the rent on Pearce’s house.
After a prosecutor in Arizona suggested in a court filing in July that Pearce might have access to Viola’s stolen $17 million and help him flee if he were allowed out on bail, Keane advised Pearce to tell her tale with “complete candor” to The Bay Citizen. Their aim is to dispel the perception that Viola is “the Clyde, and she might be the Bonnie,” Keane says.
If anything, Pearce enabled Viola to stop running, providing him an untraceable home and safe haven for nearly twenty years. Viola had skipped bail in Arizona in 1990. Aided by a previous girlfriend, he fled to Milan. Arizona authorities’ efforts to have him extradited from Italy failed.
By spring 1992, Viola was in San Francisco. Wearing his nice tweed jacket with elbow patches, he caught Kathy Pearce’s eye.
Viola frequented the health club in the downtown building where Pearce worked. Pearce liked that Viola would “talk to the guard, instead of treating him like a piece of property.”
She thought he looked distinguished. “And one day I see him going into a coffee shop so I run up and I tap him on the shoulder and go, ‘Mister Man, Mister Man, do you park your car down [near the water] where I do?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I responded ‘Well you must have a boat down there because I see you all the time.’”
“He said ‘no,’ but we talked a bit.” He asked what she liked to do. “I like to sail [and] camp. ‘What do you like to do?’” she asked. “‘I like to go out for dinner,’” he said. “So we did. We went out on June 16 during the day to Jelly’s and then we went to the Haight Street Fair and had crepes.”
Viola told Pearce that he “was an NSA agent, a colonel, just assigned here to San Francisco,” she says. “It was a secret. He said he couldn’t talk about it. I thought it was kind of interesting.”
Viola said he had come to the United States from Italy as a 19-year-old, that he had been a U.S. Marine, and that the NSA had recruited him based on his military background and his skills as a “mathematician, a physicist, his language skills and his ability to lead,” Pearce recalls Viola telling her. Still referring to Viola’s bona fides in the present tense, Pearce explains: “He is a warrior.”
The two had little in common. But Pearce, childless and divorced from a Vietnam veteran debilitated by Agent Orange, was hooked. “Oh, I thought he was impossible. He was a very right-wing Republican. And I’m not a Republican.” But soon, Viola moved in with Pearce in her house in Bernal Heights. (They moved to the house near Candlestick Park in 2001.) “He was very entertaining and very smart,” Pearce explains. “That isn’t something I’ve been around a lot in California, especially on a date or in a relationship,” she says. “He was very tidy and always on time… different than other people I knew. A gentleman. ”
Pearce’s family and friends were impressed with her dynamic, dapper new beau, she says. Oddly, Pearce still speaks of Viola as if he were the more meritorious half of the couple. “He would come and be the star of the show,” she recalls, still marveling at his charisma. “Everybody thought he was great, [wondering] ‘How can you two be together? You are so different. He’s so nice. He’s so smart.’”
Everything in the Viola/Pearce household was in her name — the lease, the car, the bills. He would buy groceries, always with cash. She would give Viola half of the rent — $850, in cash — and he would wire the total rent payment to their landlord, a San Francisco Police Department officer. Since Viola said he was in the NSA, Pearce thought it completely natural that he would use a post-office box for his personal mail and never pay in anything but cash. “It’s so you don’t get tracked. He’s an NSA guy, so he’s hurt people in the past and he doesn’t want people finding him.”
The pair lived very modestly the entirety of their time together. Vacations were generally road trips in Pearce’s recreational vehicle, twice to visit her family in Massachusetts. “That was our life,” Pearce says. “Nothing fancy.”
“I didn’t ask his personal business and he didn’t ask mine. And we sort of agreed that our relationship was about enjoying each other’s company and having a good time and not dwelling on our jobs, ‘cause I thought he had a very stressful job and I didn’t have a stressful job — I had a wonderful job. And so I didn’t want to talk about how wonderful my job was when he has such a terrible one.”
But Viola did evidently tell Pearce quite a bit about what he was supposedly doing for the NSA over the years.
Viola matter-of-factly told Pearce that had killed so many people — silently, with a knife or his bare hands — that he expected to be liquidated by the agency at any time. Pearce, who describes herself as a lefty and “an old hippie,” recalls being alternately repelled and entranced by Viola’s tough talk of “ol’ fashioned ass-kickin’” and his heading out to “rock ‘n’ roll,” which meant killing somebody at the NSA’s behest. “He was like [notoriously tough U.S. Gen. George S.] Patton. He thought like Patton. ‘If this has to be done, I’ll do it.’ And off he’d go and do it. He’s not saying, ‘I want to go assassinate so-and-so.’ [The NSA] needed somebody to do it, and he was the best, and he was proud of that.”
In September 1992, shortly after their relationship began, Viola told Pearce that his NSA duties would take him out of town for a few days. “He was called on an assignment and he couldn’t tell me what it was, and he went away for about four days. And he called me from Walter Reed [military] hospital [in Washington, D.C.] saying he had anthrax poisoning and they said he wasn’t going to live.”
Details flowed. “What happened is, there were three or four raids where terrorists had stored anthrax in Walgreen’s aspirin. So [Viola and his purported NSA colleagues] went down together at four in the morning jumping from helicopters. He was the commander of the squad in Washington or Virginia. They broke into these warehouses that had the aspirin and a guard. This guard threw the box at him and the box broke and the anthrax went into his lungs. So he came home sick and they took him off active duty, and he could no longer do missions.”
Pearce was deeply moved by Viola’s plight. “Oh, this poor wounded vet, and he has all this anthrax in his body. The poor guy. I’ll take care of him!”
In the alternate reality Viola painted for his devoted girlfriend, his inability to perform his old duties at the NSA led to a Dilbert-worthy angst over his diminished role. The NSA said “‘you can’t do the field work, but you can take over the administration of the office,’” Pearce says. “He felt demoted. He didn’t have the clearance he used to have. He felt marginalized.”
After that mysterious four-day trip that resulted in Viola saying he had been benched by the NSA, Viola never failed to come home at night. For the next 17 1/2 years, he came home to Pearce every evening — until the night of his March 2010 arrest in North Beach.
Though Viola would grow jealous and possessive if Pearce spoke to another man, the couple’s sexual relationship fizzled after the first year or so. “He was a boyfriend, but we weren’t really lovers. That didn’t work out for us physically. Both of us have, you know, problems. So we kind of put that aside,” Pearce says. “He was affectionate. He would take me to dinner and we would always have candles and that kind of thing. [But] it wasn’t… I’d get a hug in the morning and a hug at night and a peck on the cheek at breakfast. I felt appreciated,” she says. “We were best friends and companions. And time just flew. It’s 18 years we were together, if you can imagine such a thing. I thought we’d be together forever.”
In tender e-mails she has saved for years, he addressed her as “Cuddly Bear,” and told her “I will always love you.” One e-mail, from 1997, shows how deeply Viola wove his persona of NSA operative with mundane household matters and pledges of affection:
Thank you for all the wonderful things you are, and how much those things enhance my life. You are a treasure.
Briefly, early this morning, on standard orbit, a KH-1 passed over North Korea and detected the deployment of ten Rodong I class, intermediate range guided missiles. The Rodong class can carry a multiplicity of warheads, including biological payloads, and have a range of 1300 miles, which could include Tokyo.
More importantly, I have managed to pull both the phone numbers and addresses for the factory and US distributor for Pleasure-Way [the manufacturer of Pearce’s RV]. They appear to not want the general public to have access to these numbers, as they are quite hidden, and intended only for their dealers. I will call them, and inform you of all availabilities later.
Meanwhile, be good and eat your lunch.
The Smoking Man
Pearce says she can recall only one major gift that she received from Viola in all their time together. About five years ago, he presented her with “a DTS Cadillac, a top-of-the-line beautiful car. He put $26,000 down for it, and then somehow I ended up having to pay the note.” Though she recognized that the fancy car wasn’t a gift in the traditional sense — since Viola did not drive, Pearce often chauffeured him around — Pearce said nothing, because the payment was “only $180 a month. I thought, ‘Is that worth arguing about?’ You can sort of tell I’m a pushover, a wimp. I take the easy road.”
Viola schooled Pearce in tactics to avoid being overtaken by someone out to get him — a rogue NSA agent, he warned. His tutoring seems heavily influenced by deep familiarity with Mob movies. “He used to talk about how if you were an older NSA agent, your best friend in the NSA would drive the town car, and then they would pull you in and kill you and take you away. He thought that was about to happen to him. He said if a town car gets too close, especially if there are two, to step on it. Get out of their way because they were probably there to get him. He didn’t say he was being followed. But obviously he was and he knew it. I looked out for town cars, I’ll tell you that!”
Viola’s downfall may well have been his 2009 foray into the SV 9 sports car he developed and marketed as having American heart and Italian style. The venture raised his profile — dangerous for a fugitive, especially one who had changed only his first name — and proved to be an enormous cash drain.
He funneled millions from his North Beach investors into the car venture, court records show, and he showed the prototype at the San Francisco International Auto Show in 2009 and the Concorso Italiano in Pebble Beach. He even garnered a feature in Urban Moto magazine, which is published out of North Beach. “San Francisco’s Giuseppe Viola is a former U.S. Marine and makes his living as a financial expert,” the magazine reported in its Dec. 11, 2009 issue. “Mr. Viola can now add exotic sports car manufacturer to his resume. He has created a new car and it is officially a critical hit.” The article noted that Viola would limit production to 1,000, and that each SV 9 would sell for $99,995 apiece.
Urban Moto editor Danny Molina says that he had known Viola as a North Beach character, and had heard rumors for years that the man known in the neighborhood as an investment adviser and attorney planned to start a sports-car company. When the SV 9 actually debuted at the car show at Moscone Center in late 2009, “we were stunned,” Molina says. “It takes an unbelievable amount of money to do anything in the auto world.” After the story appeared on the Urban Moto website, Viola approached Molina in Caffe Roma in January 2010, as Viola distributed checks and statements to his investors. Viola asked Molina to take his name out of the story. “I like to be the man behind the scenes,” Molina recalls Viola telling him. (The story continued to mention Viola by name.)
The SV 9 was one venture that Viola did not keep secret from Pearce. Since she thought Viola was a midlevel employee of a federal agency, she wondered how he could fund this new venture. “I said, ‘Where are you going to get that money? It takes a couple of million to start any business.’ He said, ‘Since I’ve been with the NSA and I’ve done some pretty nasty stuff, they said, ‘Why don’t you use NSA money?’” This sounded plausible to Pearce.
But the very real financial demands of the vendors and fabricators working on the SV 9s evidently were placing Viola in a bind. Meanwhile, in summer 2009, Citibank noticed some unusual activity in the Ralph Napolitano trust account that Viola had used for years to funnel funds from his North Beach investors. A Citi attorney told Viola that the account would be closed.
Viola started to use a credit card and complain to Pearce that he was strapped for funds. He grew increasingly irritable. One day, he discovered that Pearce had ventured into his room to empty the wastebasket. It was dark, and Pearce inadvertently knocked over a stack of magazines.
“He was furious. He backed me up against the refrigerator and scared me,” Pearce says. She was so frightened that she cannot recall exactly what he said. It was “just … this fury,” Pearce says. “He was saying not to go in his room, that he doesn’t care what I do, just leave him alone. His room was off-limits.”
“He didn’t punch me or anything, but he had me up against the refrigerator as if he were going to. He’s very strong. He always did his killings with a knife or breaking their neck. I thought, ‘What if he misses and I’m not dead and I have this mashed face?’”
“I realized I shouldn’t be with him. I left the house in my little RV and went to an RV park.” Pearce thought about breaking up with Viola. “Then I did the finances and looked for a place I could afford. And I couldn’t. I just couldn’t afford a place [alone]. And we had a cat.”
So Pearce returned home.
And soon Viola was at work, trying to separate her from the money she had recently inherited from her parents. On Jan. 3, “he says, ‘Could you loan me some money? I’ve got to pay the guys back East for the car.’ He said he was tapped out. He needed to sell cars, and he couldn’t sell cars unless they were being built.”
Pearce agreed. “I said, ‘Well, I could give you what’s in my checking account, and I think it may be $30,000, but that’s all. By then, both my parents had died and I inherited a fair sum of money.”
The next day, when the banks opened, Pearce saw a different side of Viola as he intently led her through multiple banks to empty her checking accounts. “That was a weird experience, walking up to the teller with him and his [fancy] suit. They were sort of looking [askance] because Golden Gate Credit Union knows me. ‘Who is this guy? You’ve never brought a guy before and he wants all this money.’ They said, ‘We can cash up to $10,000.’ We went to Chase, and they wouldn’t do it. But he wanted the money that day, so we went back. He was abrupt. He seemed so businesslike. ‘Huh,’ I thought. ‘This is funny.’ He’s not treating me like a friend. He’s treating me like this puppet. Come along, sign this, sign that, make it out to SV Motor Company. He wanted money orders.”
After that, things seemed to settle down in the Pearce/Viola household, and the pair began making vacation plans. “We were supposed to drive across the country in May for family events,” says Pearce, “which we were both really looking forward to.”
But all of Viola’s machinations with the SV 9 venture began to draw unwanted attention. A disagreement with an auto dealer in the East Bay led to Viola being arrested for writing a bad check, and that led to his being identified as the Joseph Viola who had fled fraud charges in Arizona in 1990.
So on Wednesday, March 10, the night of his arrest in front of Victoria Pastry on Stockton Street, Viola failed to come home for the first time in 17 1/2 years.
“I called all the hospitals because I thought he’d had a heart attack,” Pearce recalls. Once certain Viola was not in the hospital, Pearce reasoned that he must be busy with NSA business. “I thought he must be at work. They have lockdowns. You can’t call when they’re on lockdown. So Thursday came and he still wasn’t there. And I thought, well, it must be really serious. Maybe they sent him on a mission. He’d be so excited” to be back in the field.
“Then came Friday morning. And I got a collect call from the county jail: ‘Mr. Viola would like to talk to you, will you accept the charges?’” Pearce then reasoned that Viola must have infiltrated the jail as part of his undercover work for the NSA, likely pursuing a terrorist. “He’s very calm [on the phone]. When he’s really stressed he goes very calm. He said, ‘Hello, how are you?’ And I said, ‘Fine. Why are you there?’ He said it was a mix-up in identity.” (In court documents, Viola still maintains that he is not the Joseph Viola facing charges in Arizona.)
“I went to see him that Sunday [March 14], and that was hard. He’s behind glass and I’m there. He’s wearing an orange sweatshirt and it’s noisy. There’s all these 17-year-old mothers and babies. You get 15 minutes.”
“I need $10,000” for bail, Viola told Pearce. “I said, ‘I already gave you the money I have available. I’m not giving you another cent.’” Pearce “thought he was in jail for his job and it was going to get straightened out. The NSA was going to come [and explain Viola] is watching that terrorist on the seventh floor.”
What was taking the NSA so long to free him? Pearce asked Viola. “He said, ‘It’s more complicated than that. They’re working on it.’”
Pearce visited Viola in the San Francisco County Jail for the last time on Sunday, March 21. That Thursday, she entered the hospital to have a pacemaker implanted in her heart. In April, Viola was extradited to Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix. “I never saw him again,” she says.
It took Pearce a considerable period of time to accept that the reality Viola had woven so elaborately for her was false. Even when she was interviewed for five hours on April 22 by an assistant U.S. Attorney and two FBI agents investigating Viola’s activities in San Francisco, she kept Viola’s NSA stories secret because she still thought that he was in jail on an undercover assignment for the agency. “The FBI, I couldn’t tell them all the NSA stuff. Because I still thought it was a secret. I thought he was with them and [the FBI] hadn’t gotten the memo. Agencies don’t talk. I just expected some day they’ll get this memo, and I didn’t want to tell any of the [NSA secrets] I told” to The Bay Citizen. “I still have a hard time believing” that Viola’s life as an NSA operative was a lie.
As astonished as Pearce is that she was so taken in by Viola, she is even more incredulous that Viola, operating out of North Beach cafés and a windowless office in the basement of a pastry shop, was able to con so many investors out millions of dollars.
“I can’t believe what he did to those people. I can’t believe they gave him this money,” marvels Pearce. “If he talked to me in a coffee shop, I don’t think I would give him any money. What did he do that he could get money from them? How did he do it?” Larger-scale fraudster Bernie Madoff had the outward trappings of financial success, Pearce notes — and a proper office, “not the bottom of a bakery.”
Viola called Pearce collect from jail as recently as July 9. Keane, her attorney, has cautioned her to not tell him anything about what is going on in the outside world. Shortly after his arrest, Viola had instructed Pearce to go into his closet, remove a file that contained personal information about Ralph Napolitano, whose name Pearce had never heard, and deliver it to the UPS mail drop on Bush Street that Viola had used for years. Pearce refused.
Pearce only began to believe that the criminal allegations facing Viola were true when she read about him in The Bay Citizen and the Bay Area pages of The New York Times in mid-June. “I read it, and it was shocking,” she says. “I finally had to turn my head around and think that by now the NSA would have gotten him out of there. It would have been straightened out, and that hasn’t happened. It’s still hard to believe. It’s just too weird that this could happen to me. It’s so absurd.”
“He doesn’t think he has done anything wrong,” Pearce says. “He still thinks he will be out.” Keane smiles slightly and shakes his head, indicating that Viola will likely never be free again. After he is tried in Arizona, he will be tried on the fraud charges in San Francisco. “He’s very clever. If he ever breaks out…” Pearce is clearly frightened. “I hope he has the sense to never come here. It’s a nightmare. The locks are changed.”
An e-mail from Viola to Pearce dated Aug. 20, 1997:
Pearce in recent weeks has had to contemplate more intensely than most people the meaning of companionship and solitude, and how to go forward after discovering she gave a third of her life and lost her inheritance to a noted fraudster.
“I thought we’d live as companions for the rest of our lives,” she says. “I’d have my little retirement check, he’d have his retirement check, and I’d have Social Security and we have this teeny house and we’d be fine. Was it a pitty-patty love? No. It was the love of a best friend.” She says she thought that they would be together until they died, “and that would be that. I’m too old. He took the very few remaining years I had to catch [a partner]. That was it. Now I have zero interest. Molly [the cat] died. I have the rabbit. Mr. B. Mr. B is my buddy.”
Marie McIntosh
As always, Elizabeth, I'm left speechless. He is worse than any good-for-nothing shyster my grandmother warned me about.
Elizabeth Lesly Stevens
Grandma didn't know the half of it, it seems. A faithful reader emailed me the following today about GV's Internet-dating activities:
Needless to say, Viola was simultaneously cruising internet dating
sites, such as millionairematch.com.
To Barbara --"The lack of a woman in my life has permitted the
flexibility to have accomplished some things outside the norm, but the
lack of another soul with whom deep thought is shared is often a void.
But your background and your picture gave me a smile." To Kimberly --
"Next, please have a look at Milano, where I grew up, showing...the
statue of Leonardo da Vinci, born five hundred years to the day before
me....Perhaps you could take a moment to reciprocate and send me in
return some pictures of you that are not seen on your site, and in
this way we can at least begin to open ourselves in anticipation of a
meeting. But of this I am certain, you are an exceptional woman. Ti
voglio bene, Giuseppe."
Lep Herr
It may be good to get this story publicized but this reads like just another biased story written by a reporter that did not do the homework or is just plain naive. The sensational explanation as reported from this woman reads like a PR piece for her defense or an agreement that did not allow any specified questions (true?).
This story may launch this reporter (NY Times now and who knows maybe film later), so it would be appropriate to check all the facts and keep a weary reporters eye. There may be many inaccuracies stated by this Mr. Viola "schooled" girlfriend who has already admitted lying to the FBI. With the high priced defense lawyer sitting in on the interview, maybe the first question should have been around how she manage to afford retaining him. From there basic reporting would have probably lead to black holes in her "victim" story.
At least the story (stress story) had some entertainment value with NSA spy, Hand Killing assassination, Anthrax poisoning stories that only a young child would believe (but not for 18 years).
Marie McIntosh
This story by no means launched Elizabeth's career- she's written for numerous nationally circulated publications. We also have the highest confidence in both the factual accuracy and nonpartisan voice of the reporting from our entire editorial staff.
Kathy Gado
My family and I have known Kathy Pearce for about 40 years and she is a very honest and caring person. I was her roommate for a time when I first moved to San Francisco, before she knew Viola, Kathy's one fault may be that she is too trusting, and that like other fraud victims, she tends to see in others what she sees in herself. She kind and honest herself, and assumes others are too. Experienced con artists like Viola are experts at finding innocent victims Kathy and all the others and duping them. That's how they work
You said that she lied to the FBI, but that is not what the reporter stated, which is a second-hand version of what Kathy said anyway. The reporter wrote that Kathy didn't relate all of Viola's far-fetched stories about the NSA, not that she lied about anything. Anyway, I'm sure FBI agents have much more experience and training in dealing with con artists and victims of crime than you do. Don't you think they would be able to tell if she were innocent or not after their exhaustive investigation.?
Kim
Man this guy has a trail of wreckage behind him that is miles long.
Good to know he is in Judge Joe's jail...lol
Investors gave their money to this guy without doing any research
at all.
Viola is clearly insane. I feel sorry for his girlfriend, she should have done research too.
Kim
I think you should remove the affair with Victoria pastry owners. A quick google has their daughter a high school student, can't imagine how hard that is on a kid that age.