‘Best con man’ in R.I. gets 16 years

Gregory Smith

PROVIDENCE — A Superior Court judge yesterday sentenced “the best con man in the state” to serve 16 years in prison for having swindled 30 people, mostly by pretending he needed to borrow money to fix a broken-down lobster truck.

Seven of his victims, either in court or in letters, said that being fleeced by former lobsterman and Newport native John P. Kluth Jr. had caused them to become mistrustful of others. Some spoke of the acute embarrassment they had suffered.

Judge Netti C. Vogel declared that Kluth, who has made a career of flimflams and passing bad checks, must serve at least 14 of the 16 years before he is eligible for parole — because he is a habitual criminal.

Adopting a quip by Mark L. Smith, Kluth’s defense lawyer, Vogel labeled the defendant “the best con man in the state.” His victims, she noted, included retired business leaders, the state jury commissioner and an official of Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch’s consumer protection unit.

He “ensnarled even the mighty in this fisherman’s web of deceit,” she said.

But in passing sentence Vogel pointedly focused on what she called Kluth’s tendency to pick on the elderly, which she called “financial elder abuse.” And she said the legislature had singled out exploitation of the elderly for extra punishment in the criminal law.

“Just rotten,” “a predator,” “incorrigible” were among the numerous denunciations heaped on Kluth yesterday during his sentencing hearing in a cramped and crowded courtroom in the Licht Judicial Complex downtown.

“So shame on you, John Kluth. Shame on you,” sputtered a weepy Eileen Dropkin, 83, of Warwick, while looking in Kluth’s direction as she gave a victim-impact statement.

Hobbled by a stroke, Dropkin slowly made her way to the witness stand with a cane. Once seated, she told how she cares for her blind husband.

“To you, it was only $100. And you probably frittered it away in an hour of drinking and smoking,” Dropkin said of the “loan” Kluth wheedled from her. She had mistaken the genial Kluth for a former neighbor when Kluth approached her with a story about a disabled lobster truck as she sat in a car outside a supermarket in 2006.

To her, she said yesterday, the money represented food in her refrigerator, oil in her furnace and medicine in her cabinet.

In the current case, Kluth was convicted in a jury trial of 30 counts of obtaining money under false pretenses from 30 individuals ranging in age from 48 to 89, from 2003 through 2007. The sums ranged from $60 to $1,500.

But according to court records and law-enforcement officials, he has been using what officials now call “the lobster truck scam,” or variations on it, in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut since at least 1990.

Kluth would tell someone that he had a disabled refrigerated truck with a perishable load of lobsters and that he needed a quick loan so that he could get the truck fixed and his cargo to market. Usually, according to trial evidence and other sources, he promised his marks that he would make swift repayment and would throw in some free lobsters as a gesture of thanks.

In truth, there was no truck, and he did not repay the money as promised.

It remains unclear how much he studied his marks before he zeroed in on them, but he seemed to know their names; details about their lives, such as where they attended church; and their home neighborhoods. Assistant Attorney General Stephen A. Regine, who prosecuted Kluth along with Special Assistant Attorney General Roger Demers, said yesterday that Kluth had a knack for getting people to talk and then using scraps of information that they divulged, convincing them that they had something in common or were even acquainted.

“P.T. Barnum was one who supposedly said there’s a sucker born every minute,” Vogel said. “… These people were not suckers. They were good and decent people” who tried to give someone a helping hand.

Kluth, 48, whose last address was in Bristol, did not testify during his trial. But he unsuccessfully tried to have it moved to New Hampshire to avoid the effect of pretrial publicity and, at one point, he asked to fire his lawyer but then changed his mind.

Manacled hand and foot, he stood at the defense table yesterday.

“Your honor, I want to own this fully,” he said of his convictions. “I did a terrible thing.”

He said what he has said before, to probation and police officers and in a Providence Journal interview in 2007: His own bad life decisions; “bad luck,” such as losing friends in several tragedies and suffering an on-the-job injury; and his addiction to heroin, which he called “a monkey on my back,” factored into his exploitation of people.

Kluth, his voice now quavering, turned to 10 of his victims sitting in the spectator gallery and said he is “terribly sorry.”

Vogel did not impose a fine but she did order that restitution of $7,930 be made to all but three of the victims, to be drawn from bail money for Kluth that is on deposit with the court. Three had been repaid, apparently by a friend of Kluth’s, after Kluth was caught.

The sentence of 16 years to serve was much more stringent than the punishment recommended by Smith, Kluth’s lawyer, who said, in effect, that his client’s crimes had been exaggerated.

He asked that Kluth be sent to prison for no more than seven years and be left eligible for parole after five. Kluth already is being held in lieu of sufficient bail at the Adult Correctional Institutions.

In addition, he suggested that Kluth be sentenced to perform 1,200 hours of community service at high-rise apartment buildings where the elderly live, by teaching the residents how to avoid being conned.

“Now that is a creative sentence,” he said.

Vogel replied to his community-service proposal, “I would hesitate to place the fox in the chicken coop.”

Regine recommended a sentence of 20 years to serve with parole eligibility withheld for 10 years. After the hearing he said he is satisfied with the “harsh sentence” imposed and that, in effect, with suspended sentences continuing after Kluth’s eventual release from prison, the defendant faces a lifetime of probation.

gsmith@projo.com