Model Inmate Goes Greyhound : Prison Transfer Proves a 1-Way Ticket to Freedom

Ronald J. McIntosh was a model inmate at a minimum-security prison in the San Francisco suburb of Pleasanton, so federal officials decided to transfer him to a less-secure and less-costly prison camp in Lompoc.

That was their first mistake.

When McIntosh’s moving day finally came, prison officials decided that the low-security, well-behaved prisoner qualified to make the trip alone, in what is called an “unsupervised transfer.”

That was their second mistake.

McIntosh, who ran a precious-metals investment fraud from which more than $1 million in cash and 1,754 gold coins are still missing, never arrived in Lompoc.

After guards bought McIntosh a ticket and drove him to the nearby Greyhound bus station, the twice-convicted con man disappeared. That was on Oct. 28, and he has not been seen since.

Prosecutors in San Francisco, one of many communities in California and Texas where McIntosh solicited customers, worry that he may have squirreled away the missing $1.7 million and is on his way to retrieve it and flee the country--if he hasn’t done so already.

“I don’t mean to criticize, but if he is a two-time felon, and both of his convictions are for fraud, can you just take his word?” asked Assistant Dist. Atty. Jerry Coleman, who teamed up with his colleague, Thomas Bogatt, to prosecute McIntosh. “Can you trust anyone to take a bus to his new prison”?

Rob Roberts, warden of the Federal Correctional Institution at Pleasanton, said that unsupervised transfers and furloughs of low-risk inmates have been a “very common practice” at federal prisons “for a number of years.”

“I might add that it’s been very, very successful,” he said, adding that “99.9%” of the unsupervised transfers work as planned.

Last February, McIntosh pleaded no contest--the legal equivalent of guilty in criminal court--to bilking 2,500 investors out of $18 million in 16 months by convincing them to give him money to speculate on gold and silver prices.

McIntosh’s First International Trading Co. was based in San Francisco, with sales offices in Irvine, Mill Valley, Dallas and Houston.

McIntosh was sentenced to three years in federal prison for violating terms of his parole on an earlier fraud conviction in Seattle and four years in state prison for his role in the trading company. The terms were to run concurrently.

Court documents described First International Trading Co. as a “classic boiler-shop operation” using “hard-sell and fraudulent sales techniques” to sell “illegal precious metal futures contracts to investors in violation of the Commodities Exchange Act.”

Investigators found that at least $6.4 million was siphoned off by McIntosh and other trading company employees for their own use--to buy big houses, expensive cars and other luxuries. But at least $1 million in cash and more than $700,000 in gold coins were never accounted for.

Federal marshals in San Francisco said they will find McIntosh, even though some lost paper work in Lompoc delayed the start of their manhunt two days.

“We have some leads we are pursuing, but we cannot talk about them,” said Inspector John Stafford of the U.S. Marshals Service. “He reads newspapers too--and we don’t want him to know where we will be coming from.”