Impostor Revealed : Con Artist’s Latest Ploy--Telling Truth

PORT RICHEY, Fla. —  Maybe the truth always does catch up, but sometimes it’s too old and tired to make much difference.

That is what happened here in this retirement town, for 10 years the home of Dr. Robert Lee Gipson, Man of the Year, president of the Chamber of Commerce, member of the local Republican Executive Committee.

When people here recently found out that Bob wasn’t what he said he was, there didn’t seem much to say except: So what the heck. So he’s not a doctor of psychology. So he’s not a graduate of Berkeley. So he’s not even Bob Gipson.

To them, he had already been Bob Gipson so long that he might as well stay Bob Gipson forever. They elected him president of the Kiwanis Club.

And therein lies the peculiar morality tale of the con man whose best con was to change his name and go straight.

“I knew if I was ever discovered, these trusting people would stand behind me,” said Gipson, a plump and white-haired man. “A good liar is a good judge of people.”

Few are more proud of a good lie than Gipson, who has been continuously reinventing himself for most of his 67 years.

As a boy he was Gilbert Elmer Sharby, a chronic runaway who never made it past the eighth grade. He went on to become dozens of other people, most of them petty bunco men and passers of bad checks.

If there is a sucker born every minute, Gipson likes to think he was there to oversee many of the deliveries.

“I’ve got a fantastic memory, which is a must for a con man,” he said, a smile widening beneath his gray mustache. “The mind is like a filing cabinet. You’ve got to train yourself to file away what you’ve said to who about what.”

These days, of course, Gipson is still a bit embarrassed that a local newspaper reporter got wise to him late last year.

“I had an easy cover, a good cover,” he said.

For more than a decade, everyone believed he was just another small businessman, a retired encyclopedia salesman who had come to Port Richey, just north of Tampa, and opened a locksmith store in the shopping village.

Not many questioned his claim to a Ph.D. in psychology. When asked why he ended up selling encyclopedias, he would sadly allude to a hard-won battle with the bottle, which made people respect this sincere and steadfast gentleman in glasses all the more.

He had the two great blessings a con man requires--an honest face and the gift of gab.

Taught Free Courses

As a speaker, Bob Gipson was known across Pasco County, where he often gave free courses in salesmanship and motivation. His soft, friendly face, with its large wrinkled forehead, was familiar wherever a civic group needed a volunteer.

“In Appreciation of a Man Who Gives Too Much Too Often,” read the plaque from the United Chambers of Commerce, when it named him 1983 Man of the Year.

Gipson valued his plaque. Yet he thought there remained an even higher calling for his prevaricating expertise: politics.

Last summer, he announced for the school board.

“That pays $18,000,” he said. “And I thought I could parlay that into the county commission, which is $30,000. Then maybe state rep.”

Instead, reckoning was just around the corner.

Mixing Lies, Facts

One of Gipson’s deepest-felt beliefs is that a good lie ought to be built on a flimsy foundation of fact.

“Always mix in a little truth,” he recommends.

So when candidate Gipson filled out questionnaires for the local newspapers, he wrote down his correct birth date and birthplace along with the usual malarkey about being educated at Berkeley, Harvard and the University of Kansas.

“Who checks in a school board race, anyway?” he reasoned.

The answer to that question, as it turned out, was Diane Rado, a reporter for the Pasco Times. She found no record of Gipson attending the universities.

“I covered it up with cloak and dagger stuff,” Gipson said. “I told her I was in the OSS during World War II and afterward I had sensitive assignments with the CIA in Mexico and South America.

“I’m using a new name from the government, I told her. I can’t divulge my real name. Top secret stuff.”

But Rado also checked his birthplace. Only one baby had been born on March 18, 1918, in St. Albans, Vt. His name was Gilbert Sharby.

While neither Berkeley nor Harvard had records for that student, the University of Kansas did. Gilbert Sharby had taken extension courses from his “home” in Leavenworth, Kan.

Leavenworth--that’s where the federal prison is.

Newspaper Headline

“Pasco civic leader admits living a lie for the past 27 years!” said the headline in one newspaper.

“Imposter!” was the story that led the 6 p.m. news.

The curtain had been yanked open, and the Wizard of Oz was standing there revealed, working his knobs and levers.

Gipson was Sharby. He had been to prison in Vermont, Georgia, Kansas and Nebraska. He had lived off bad checks. He had impersonated military officers. Warrants for his arrest had spanned 23 years and 11 states.

“The big laugh is that this man was in charge of our political education committee,” said an angry Mike Fasano, a member of the Pasco Republican Executive Committee. “Here he was under a fictitious name running for the school board.”

Game of Life

But for the resourceful all is never lost. As Bob Gipson would explain, in the game of life, as in the game of golf, you’ve got to play your lie.

The truth had caught up. Yet, in many ways, it made Bob Gipson out to be an even better Bob Gipson than he had been before.

“Bob’s really quite an ad for rehabilitation,” said the Rev. Mike Shannon of the First Christian Church, a brother Kiwanian.

Gipson wholeheartedly agreed.

“Must Robert Lee Gipson be penalized for what Gilbert Elmer Sharby did?” he asked somberly of anyone who would listen.

And listen they did.

One by one, civic groups refused to accept his resignation.

Republican Resolution

Only the Pasco Republicans let him quit. That was because he had never been a properly registered voter. Even then, they passed a resolution, 23 to 19, saying they were willing to forgive.

“I assess Bob Gipson’s genuineness, integrity and devotion to duty to rank right alongside of President Abraham Lincoln . . . “ Merland Conine, the party chairman, wrote in a letter.

Darndest thing, Gipson realized. The worse he had been before, the better he appeared now. The truth he had run from was now proof of how far he had come.

“I want to go public with everything,” he said.

He officially changed his name to Gipson. He applied for pardons that would recover his full rights of citizenship. If all the paper work can be cleaned up by the July filing deadline, he still plans to run for the school board.

“Name recognition is so important to a politician, and more people know my name now than before,” he observed.

So month after month, audience by audience, he has dug up the details of Gilbert Sharby. He denounces the scoundrel.

“Incredible as it sounds, we’re talking about a man I no longer even know,” he is fond of saying.

Then he goes into the details.

Before he was a con man, he was a con boy. He was the kind of kid who would steal a Boy Scout uniform in order to hitchhike. He would tell people he had hit the road to earn a merit badge.

Later, he joined the Army only to desert three weeks into boot camp. Then he masqueraded as a flyer in His British Majesty’s Royal Air Force. He persuaded people he was a hero. They gave him money and honored him with parades.

“Fake War Ace Exposed,” read a headline the day he was caught.

He tried a few stickups, but found that took too much courage. He settled into schemes for passing bad checks, to him as natural an act as writing his name, whichever name was his at the time.

He was Gordon Silke and Mason B. Sax and G. Stephen Charles. He was Adrian Scott and Adrian Scott Wallace. He was G. Edward Hildebrand.

“Easiest thing in the world,” he said of the scams.

For two decades, he dodged across America, a step ahead of the hoodwinked. Along the way, he picked up three wives, three divorces and four children. To this day, he has no idea what happened to any of them.

Hospital Bills

Some things he does remember well. When daughter Princilla Anne was born in El Paso, he paid the hospital with a bum check. He did the same on the blessed day Pamela Sue came into this world in Chattanooga. For William Paul, born in Atlanta, he pawned some hot sewing machines.

“It was quite a treadmill,” he recalled.

But in 1958 all that changed. He was a year out of Leavenworth when he met barmaid Beulah Jane Osborne in Long Beach. He thought she looked like movie star Ava Gardner. He confessed his sins and proposed marriage. She told him he’d have to straighten out.

“The past was the past,” said Jane, for all these years wife number four, the only one who stuck.

The name Gipson, in fact, was her idea. She had been a Mrs. Gipson once before, with her first husband. The name lent their marriage the kind of flimsy foundation of fact Bob appreciated.

In the following years, they connived a future together. Her new Gipson kept his promises. He used that gift of gab to sell the Encyclopedia Britannica. He even became a district manager.

Then in 1975, the Gipsons moved to Port Richey. Bob had an idea he could sell dead-bolt locks to retirees. He could become a civic leader.

“People liked this Bob Gipson,” he reflected, smugly proud of his final invention.

They liked him so much they didn’t even care he wasn’t him, which makes an old con man predict happily:

“I can run with this for years.”