Man Given 3 Years for Stealing Stocks : Crime: Judge chides the ‘Sweetheart Swindler’ for showing a ‘complete lack of contrition.’

Leslie Gall, the “Sweetheart Swindler” accused of wooing and bilking elderly women in California and Florida, was sentenced Thursday in Norwalk Superior Court to three years in prison for stealing $54,000 in stock certificates from a Pico Rivera woman he dated.

Gall’s sentence was a year short of the maximum he could have received for the crime. He pleaded guilty last month to grand theft charges. After serving his time here, his lawyer said, he will be extradited to Florida to face charges of forgery and felony theft from a 69-year-old Ft. Lauderdale beautician whom he allegedly defrauded of $42,000. Eleven counts of forgery and fraud are also pending against him in Canada.

Police say the paunchy, 56-year-old, Canadian-born Gall defrauded at least two women in Florida, in addition to the one in Pico Rivera, and was setting up a 73-year-old Redondo Beach woman for another swindle when he was arrested in May on the outstanding Florida warrants.

Upon his arrest in Redondo Beach, detectives found the Pico Rivera woman’s stock certificates in his briefcase, along with stacks of blank checks, stolen and forged identification, blank power-of-attorney forms, obituaries of wealthy men and newspaper clippings about other confidence scams.

The Pico Rivera woman, a 62-year-old who had met Gall at a senior citizens’ dance, said he had apparently made an extra set of keys to her house when she asked him to take her car to a garage for servicing. It wasn’t until police told her they had found her stocks that she realized they were missing, she said. She kept them in a file cabinet in her spare room, she said, and Gall--whom she knew by the alias George Perkins--had apparently let himself into her house while she was out and had taken the papers from her files.

Gall, in a statement to a probation officer--and in interviews with The Times--denied stealing the stocks and claimed that the woman had asked him to keep them for “safekeeping.”

But Judge Robert W. Armstrong called Gall’s explanation “a rather foolish posture” and chided him for his “apparent complete lack of contrition.”

He also noted that when Gall was caught, he was carrying a Thomas Bros. map book with every senior center in the area highlighted in colored ink. The map, Armstrong said, “indicated his ongoing plan to prey on elderly victims.”

However, the judge stopped short of giving Gall the maximum four-year sentence because the certificates were recovered.

“I’m thrilled to death with what he got,” the Pico Rivera woman said. She said a friend called her at her work to tell her about the judge’s decision, “and I just let out a big whoop, right there in the office. I said, ‘Oh, thank God, I’ve been vindicated.’ ”

Meanwhile, the Redondo Beach woman--who disagrees with police speculation that Gall was planning to steal from her too--said she was disappointed at the severity of the sentence.

“Three years is better than four,” she said, “but I feel that at this point he has turned his life around, and three years to me seems like a long time. I feel sorry for women who have lost through him, but he was nothing but kind to me.”