‘I Made Them Very Happy,’ Sweetheart Swindler Declares

Leslie Gall, the middle-aged “Sweetheart Swindler” accused of courting and conning elderly women he had met at senior citizens 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 whom he had wooed under an alias.

“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 airline flight attendant who took her suspicions about him to the authorities after he moved in with her widowed mother-in-law in Redondo Beach.

Her 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 Redondo Beach woman and had already robbed the Pico Rivera woman when a detective interrupted his spaghetti dinner May 11 to arrest him on the Florida warrants.

But Gall denies that there was any setup, 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 scheduled to be sentenced July 5 in Norwalk Superior Court. He faces a maximum of four years in prison on the charges here, and, in addition to the Florida warrants, there are 11 outstanding warrants for his arrest in Canada, where he is charged with embezzling from businesses. Extradition procedures are under way to have Gall returned to Florida.

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. He said he was facing imprisonment again and was fleeing the Canadian authorities when he went to Florida about 1 1/2 years ago “to get out of the cold stuff.”

Police there said he left a trail of forged checks and phony businesses and bank accounts. Using the name George Perkins, he courted a 69-year-old Ft. Lauderdale divorcee whom he had met at a senior citizens dance and talked her into giving him money for a real estate investment he never made. The woman later dubbed him “the Sweetheart Swindler,” adding, “I was a lonely woman and I was swept off my feet.”

Weeks later, police said, he was caught using a forged identification card to cash stolen checks, but persuaded a Clearwater woman to bail him out of jail. The woman told police that she had married Gall, unaware that he had a wife 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 would not say how much he owed or name his creditor. He added that the bigamous marriage was “a wrongful decision,” and he said he did it “just to get some money to pay off all those debts.”

Once free, Gall said, he headed straight for California in a van that belonged to the woman who had bailed him out. Once here, Gall decided to spend part of his time dancing.

The Pico Rivera woman who later brought charges against him said she 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 map book with the route to every senior citizens dance in the 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 her spare room.

Gall said he had taken the stocks because he had recalled that 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 version of the events.

Police found the certificates among Gall’s belongings upon his arrest, along with reams 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.)

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 added that he loved them all.

At least one of the women loves him still.

“By the time I’d heard (about Gall’s past), I was so much in love with him, and I still am--you can’t just turn it off,” said the Redondo Beach mother-in-law, her voice quavering with emotion.

“I try to pick up and go on, but I’m not doing a very good job of it.”