Mystery Man Gets 3 Years : 28 Identities Not Enough to Avoid Prison

A Brentwood man, who authorities claim maintained portions of 28 separate identities, was sentenced Monday to three years in prison for grand theft and filing false documents to secure loans.

Before sentencing, the mystery man, Thomas Townsend Stancil, 38, weaved a bizarre portrait in court concerning his background.

In memos and in a brief statement to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert T. Altman, Stancil revealed that he was the son of an unnamed, high-ranking Nazi Germany military officer and was spirited to North America in a U.S. troop ship in the mid-1950s to live with foster parents in Ontario, Canada, and Colorado.

“I remember growing up in Germany,” Stancil wrote in his memo. “I remember the house in the country and playing in a ruined castle. I remember everyone being frightened, and I remember hungry people coming to our door.”

Shameful Past

Stancil, who had been asked by Altman to explain his propensity for using fake identifications so that the judge “would not assume the worst about this stuff,” said he took on his first alias more than 15 years ago to remove all traces of what he regarded as a shameful past.

“He was ashamed of his parents, because they were involved in the war,” defense counsel Leonard Levine said. “But, obviously, I can’t prove that.”

Altman responded that Stancil’s story “reads like a Robert Ludlum novel.” However, unlike an espionage mystery, in which innocent men are frequently caught up in a web of intrigue, Stancil was caught by authorities spinning his own web of fraud, Altman emphasized.

The judge added that Stancil appears to have “created a false existence.”

“And he’s living it,” he said.

Stancil pleaded guilty in January to a grand theft charge involving the use of false documents to obtain a $1.25-million loan under the name Brian T. Hardy from First Interstate Bank. He used the funds to purchase, at a lesser cost, four small, stripped-down airplanes that he eventually leased to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He also pleaded guilty to a second grand theft count in falsely securing a $100,000 line of credit from First Pacific Bank in 1984.

Trust Deed

A third count concerned his filing false documents to obtain a second trust deed on a home in Brentwood. Stancil used the deed, according to authorities, to obtain a $250,000 loan from the Bank of San Pedro.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Adalbert T. Botello, who argued that Stancil “suffers from delusions of grandeur,” said First Interstate Bank lost about $200,000 as a result of its loan transaction with the defendant. Stancil was using the funds to “create a big (financial) empire, (rather than to) take the money and run,” Botello said.

Levine, who asserted that his client possessed no more than a handful of identifications, said the bank would have been repaid if Stancil had not been arrested last year.

“We aren’t saying this man is harmless, that this man is faultless,” Levine said. “But what harm has he done?”

Under the conditions of his plea, Stancil will begin serving his three-year state sentence in federal prison, where he is currently serving an 18-month sentence for filing false passport documents. When the federal sentence is concluded, Stancil will be transported to a state prison to serve the remainder of his state time.