THIEF OF HEARTS : Crime: He’s been accused of conning elderly women. But ‘Sweetheart Swindler’ Leslie Gall says the women he courted got their money’s worth

Leslie Gall, the middle-aged “Sweetheart Swindler” accused of courting and conning elderly women he had met at seniors dances in California and Florida, said this week in a jailhouse interview that he “never told that many lies” and that the women he was involved with got their money’s worth.

“The payment the ladies received was that I made them very happy,” said the short, plump, 56-year-old Gall, who was convicted last week of stealing $54,000 worth of stock certificates from a Pico Rivera grandmother he had wooed.

“I made them No. 1,” he said, leaning forward in his seat at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in Saugus, a wounded look on his grizzled face. “I sent them flowers. . . . I focused on them. They were wanted.”

He said he chose women as victims because, “put yourself in my position: If you were going to rip somebody off, you’d go opposite sex.”

But he also complained that he was tricked by the South Bay flight attendant who took her suspicions about him to the authorities after he moved in with her widowed mother-in-law in Redondo Beach.

The flight attendant’s tenacity, police said, helped lead to Gall’s arrest on outstanding charges from Ft. Lauderdale and Clearwater, Fla., where he is accused of defrauding one elderly woman of $40,000 and forging fake identification to bigamously marry another.

Police have charged that Gall was setting up the 73-year-old mother-in-law and had already robbed the Pico Rivera woman when he was arrested May 11 on the Florida warrants.

But Gall denies that he was planning to rob the Redondo Beach woman, adding that the daughter-in-law “was just protecting her inheritance” when she turned him in.

“She didn’t care that her mother-in-law was enjoying herself and was the happiest she had ever been in her life,” Gall said. “She was just double-dealing. She was nice to me to my face, but doing all this other stuff behind my back.”

Gall is being held pending sentencing July 5 in Norwalk Superior Court. He faces up to four years in prison on the charges here, and procedures are under way for his extradition to Florida. There also are 11 outstanding warrants for his arrest in Canada, where he is charged with embezzling from businesses.

A Canadian-born printer and sometime hockey referee, Gall spent nearly eight years in prison in Canada during the 1970s for bank fraud, police there said. Gall said he was facing imprisonment again and was fleeing Canadian authorities when he went to Florida about a year and a half ago “to get out of the cold stuff.”

Police in Florida said he left a trail of forged checks and phony businesses and bank accounts. Using the alias George Perkins, he allegedly courted a 69-year-old Ft. Lauderdale divorcee whom he had met at a seniors dance and talked her into giving him money for a real estate investment he never made.

“I call him the Sweetheart Swindler,” the woman later said. “Oh, brother, is he smooth, smooth, smooth!”

Subsequently, police said, Gall was arrested for using a forged I.D. but persuaded a Clearwater woman to bail him out of jail. The woman later told police that she had married Gall, unaware that he had a wife back in Canada.

“I was going to buy and sell a house,” Gall explained. “But I didn’t have any money.” And he didn’t make the investment, he added, because “I had debts I had to pay.” He wouldn’t say how much he owed, or who his creditor was. He added that the bigamous marriage was “a wrongful decision” and said he did it “just to get some money to pay off all those debts.”

Once free, Gall said, he headed for California in a van that belonged to the woman who had bailed him out. “I wanted to see Wayne Gretzky play hockey,” Gall said. “I’ve followed that kid since he was 10.”

But in addition to getting tickets to half a dozen Los Angeles Kings games, he said, he also decided to spend part of his time attending dances. The Pico Rivera woman who later brought charges against him said she had met him at a senior citizens dance in early December. He had arrived flanked by women, she said, and in his van he carried a Thomas Bros. map book with the route to every senior citizens dance in the Greater Los Angeles area highlighted in colored ink.

The two dated for several weeks, she said, but she never quite trusted him.

“Yeah, he sent me flowers, but he was too charming,” she said. It wasn’t until months later, after his arrest, that she discovered he had made extra keys to her house and removed a file folder full of stock certificates and a pile of her blank checks from a cabinet in a spare room.

Gall said he had taken the stocks because the woman had once suggested he take them “for safekeeping.”

“I picked them up, put them in my briefcase and forgot to tell her I took them. It’s the honest truth,” he said.

“He’s full of bull!” the Pico Rivera woman snapped when asked to respond to Gall’s alibi.

“That absolutely is a lie!”

Police found the certificates among Gall’s belongings after he was arrested, along with stacks of fake identification and blank power of attorney forms. Also in his briefcase were newspaper obituaries of wealthy men and clippings detailing notorious con jobs. (“I’ve always read an awful lot,” he said in the interview.)

Gall says now that, if he could, he would apologize to the Pico Rivera woman and to the Ft. Lauderdale divorcee, who, he claims “is the only one I still owe money to.”

He said he loved them all.

And at least one of the women loves him still.

“I don’t intend to tell my children, but I plan to visit him (in jail) this week,” said the Redondo Beach grandmother with whom he was living when he was arrested.

She said he had talked her into buying a $28,000 van the two of them would go touring in, and when he was arrested, she sold it at a loss because she had paid cash for it.

But Gall, she said, had made up the difference with some money from one of his bank accounts--money that, according to Gall, he had gotten from one of the Florida women.

“By the time I’d heard (about Gall’s past), I was so much in love with him, and I still am. You just can’t turn it off,” the woman said. “He was the most friendly person, and was so good to me. Of course,” she laughed wryly, “I was good to him too, and the police tell me he had big plans for me. But I didn’t know that.”

Now, she said, “I try to pick up and go on, but I’m not doing a very good job of it. He asked me, ‘Would you marry me in jail,’ and I think maybe I would. I love him that much. But I don’t know yet what his sentence would be, and it would be a terrible life being apart all the time.”

The woman said her family is “aggravated” with her, and that she has tried seeing other men, but she has been lonely since the death of her husband several years ago.

“I went to a psychiatrist today and I know it sounds like it didn’t do much good, but it didn’t, because he didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear. He said just go on and forget this, and go on with your life, and then he gave me some painkillers,” she said.

Nor has the Pico Rivera woman completely rebounded from her episode with Gall. Not long ago, she said, she went out on a date, only to cut it short when the man began to compliment her car so effusively that she feared he would try to steal it.

“It turned out that he was just poor and didn’t have money,” the woman said. “(But) I just couldn’t trust, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to.”