‘Sweetheart Swindler’ Captured, Police Say : Crime: The glib charmer allegedly bilked lonely women coast-to-coast. The daughter-in-law of one alerted authorities.

As a dancer, they say, George Perkins wasn’t much. But, heavens, what a charmer.

He didn’t just shake your hand when he met you. He enfolded it warmly and pulled you close. He sent flowers. He called constantly. There were movies, dinners, moonlit strolls.

And he was so good-humored that even the police were struck by it, even though the 56-year-old man is suspected of defrauding at least a dozen elderly women throughout the United States and Canada.

“I call him the Sweetheart Swindler,” said a 69-year-old Florida divorcee whom he wooed and allegedly bilked. “Oh brother, is he smooth, smooth, smooth!”

So smooth, in fact, that when authorities caught up with him this week--dining at a Redondo Beach coffee shop with a widowed grandmother--he reportedly looked up from his spaghetti and quipped, “Gee fellows, this isn’t a very funny joke.”

Indeed, the allegations against him are anything but funny.

Perkins, whose real name is Leslie Joseph Gall, has a criminal history dating back more than 15 years. At the time of his arrest Sunday, he was being sought by authorities ranging from a pair of Florida detectives to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

With nerve, charm and fake IDs, authorities say, he stole tens of thousands of dollars from women he met at senior citizens’ dances. He also has been convicted of defrauding businesses in Canada, police said. In Southern California, police said, he had latched onto at least two grandmothers, one in Pico Rivera and the other in Redondo Beach.

Although neither of the local women is pressing charges, there are at least two cases pending against him in Florida, police said. On Thursday, he was being transported to Los Angeles County Jail pending extradition and was unavailable for comment.

Authorities in Florida say they had been seeking him for more than a year before he was caught because of the suspicions of the daughter-in-law of the Redondo Beach widow he was wooing and the persistence of a Mountie in Niagara Falls.

“I used to read stories like this and think, ‘This couldn’t happen to us,’ ” said the daughter-in-law, a Torrance flight attendant who told the story on the condition the family remain anonymous.

“But it did happen. And this is a story that must be told, because all along, people kept telling us that it was our imagination, that he was a nice guy, that she was in love, let her alone,” the daughter-in-law said. “Well, now she’s heartbroken. And these are supposed to be her golden years! He could have stripped her of everything.”

The case of Leslie Joseph Gall is long and Byzantine. In Ontario, Canada, where police say he began his career embezzling from businesses, there are 11 outstanding warrants for his arrest. He had at least eight identities, police said.

But to the white-haired Redondo Beach woman who met him three years after her husband’s death--and to most of the women he allegedly bilked or tried to bilk--he was George L. Perkins, a man of indeterminate age and wealth, who had smiled beguilingly from across a room full of waltzing single grandparents.

“She met him around Christmas at a dance in Hawthorne for people in their 60s and 70s,” the daughter-in-law said. “Many of the other ladies had their eyes on him. She was so honored because he had picked her.”

Before long, the family noticed, “she was very busy, going to movies, dances, daily excursions.”

One day, early in the relationship, the widow called her son and daughter-in-law and invited them to meet the new man. They had lunch.

“And right then, I got a funny feeling about the guy,” the daughter-in-law said. “He was a real joker. He’d never answer a question straight.” At one point, she said, she asked him what his profession had been.

“He said, ‘Do you mean before or after I was in prison?’ ” the daughter-in-law said. “When I asked him what he was talking about, he said ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ ”

Uncomfortable, the daughter-in-law kept quiet, even though her father-in-law on his death bed “begged us to take care of her.”

“I figured, ‘This guy is too young. It’s too good to be true,’ ” she said. “Well the next thing you know, he’s moved in with her. And when we told her we didn’t like it, she made it clear that she was madly in love with him.”

Soon, she said, her mother-in-law was paying for plane tickets to Florida and weekends in Las Vegas. Most ominous was the joint savings account, opened, the daughter-in-law said, because he had claimed a Canadian couldn’t have an account of his own in this country without a Social Security card.

She began checking up on George. She even put the question to a deejay on a call-in radio show. She enlisted her sister-in-law to collect information: his license plate number, his date of birth.

“Our husbands were going, ‘Let her alone. Let her live her life. She’s having a good time,’ ” she said. “But we both felt something in our stomach about him, and it was making us sick.”

Finally, in May--as the Canadian-born suitor was begging her mother-in-law to marry him--she telephoned Cpl. Tom Hennigar of the Mounties. She read him the license plate number. The plate, Hennigar said, had been stolen.

Hennigar checked further and was referred to the Clearwater, Fla., police, who had two warrants out for Leslie Gall--alias George Perkins--in connection with a divorcee he had allegedly defrauded of $40,000 there and an alleged bigamous marriage to a Ft. Lauderdale widow.

The Clearwater divorcee, a semi-retired beautician who asked that her name not be used, said Gall told her he needed her money for a real estate deal. She had met him, she said, when they locked eyes across a dance floor at the Holiday Park Social Center for Seniors.

“I’m sorry I ever went out for that first cup of coffee. He’s a worm. They don’t come any lower than him,” she said. “I’m still sick over it. But I was a lonely woman, and I was swept off my feet.”

Hennigar alerted the Florida authorities, who called the police in Redondo Beach.

Redondo Beach Police Lt. John Nelson said officers caught Gall with two briefcases full of fake ID. Also in the briefcases, he said, were stock certificates, blank power-of-attorney forms and blank checks linking Gall with at least 10 women--including the Pico Rivera grandmother. Nelson said the woman was stunned when police told her that Gall was carrying several thousand dollars worth of stock certificates that belonged to her.

Also in the briefcase were newspaper clippings detailing con jobs elsewhere and reporting the deaths of rich men, Nelson said. “Love Scam Bilks Lonely,” a clipping said, and “Man Serves Less Than Four Months in $500,000 Swindle.”

Gall was in the holding tank at the Redondo Beach Police Department, awaiting extradition on Wednesday when he got one last lucky break. The jailer mistakenly let him go, believing there were no longer any charges on which to hold him.

At 3 a.m. Wednesday, Gall blithely walked free.

The daughter-in-law said he showed up almost immediately at her mother-in-law’s home, took the car, drove to the home of the woman in Pico Rivera and then returned to Redondo Beach. To disguise himself, he had shaved not only his salt-and-pepper beard but his head as well.

“They picked him up,” she said, “as he was coming out of a bank” where the Redondo Beach widow had secured a safe deposit box in both their names.