COLUMN ONE : Real Estate Fraud’s Dirty Deeds : Forged documents and phony notary stamps have robbed victims of their homes. One case illustrates how easy it is to steal property and why it often goes unpunished.

When it comes to closing a real estate deal, not even death can stop Kevin Emerson Gillies.

Gillies, a man with quick wits, a smooth tongue and a string of aliases, has been known to reach beyond the grave, performing the amazing feat of acquiring property from people long dead.

This is either a miracle or forgery--and those who have sued Gillies for fraud are sure it is the latter.

Gillies’ story illustrates how easy it is to steal property and how often the crime goes unpunished--even when it threatens victims’ homes and life savings, and even when the scam is as blatant and audacious as contriving a deed from a dead man.

During a recent 18-month period, Gillies allegedly took part in at least five forged deed scams, according to civil and criminal court records and corroborating evidence examined by The Times.

In one case, he obtained title to a home in Van Nuys by filing a deed bearing a fake notary stamp and the apparently forged signature of a woman who had been dead 12 years.

In another instance, he allegedly resurrected a man 10 years dead in a nearly successful attempt to wrest title from his widow. And in a third case, he is accused of faking a deed from an elderly man who is under a court-appointed conservatorship.

Although he was arrested in the most recent of the five cases, police failed to connect him with the four previous episodes. As a result, prosecutors approved a plea bargain that put Gillies on probation without a jail term.

Even so, he failed to pay a $1,000 fine and has been wanted since January.

“You’re much more likely to go to jail for stealing a case of beer than you are for stealing a house worth $200,000,” said Patricia Goldsmith, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles who represents victims of property fraud.

“I think Kevin Gillies is like a lot of people who do these types of frauds,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Don Tamura. They “get away with it for a very long period of time, and partly because you have all these breakdowns in the system.”

Gillies, 38, could not be reached for comment. Attempts to contact him at several addresses and through associates and his former lawyers were unsuccessful.

Although real estate fraud takes many forms, the scheme allegedly favored by Gillies was remarkably simple. A person forges a deed, transferring title from the real owner to himself or a confederate, pays a small filing fee at the county recorder’s office and becomes the new owner of record.

The crook then moves quickly to unload the property at a bargain price, or uses the fake deed to get a loan--sometimes with the help of a dishonest loan broker--and disappears with the money. The real owner may be none the wiser until he faces foreclosure for non-payment of the note.

Title thieves often move in on vacant property, exploiting the owner’s absence. Other times, they target senior citizens who make the best victims because they are most easily confused and intimidated, and may not live long enough to have their day in court.

If the victim succeeds in foiling the scheme, he still pays a high price emotionally and financially, spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to recover what he never deeded away in the first place.

On the other hand, Gillies’ exploits show how property thieves, even when caught, often suffer nothing worse than the loss of what they have stolen. This results partly from society’s desire to save prison space for violent criminals who rob with a gun, not the stroke of a pen.

When it comes to white-collar crime, law enforcement agencies “are understaffed and so only have the personnel to go after people who rip off on a multimillion-dollar level,” said Goldsmith. The repeat small-time crook “will continue to operate with near impunity.”

Experts said the problem also reflects confusion and finger-pointing among law enforcement agencies--as each looks to the others to take the lead.

The district attorney is supposed to prosecute title fraud. But to investigate these crimes, prosecutors rely heavily on local police and sheriff’s detectives who often have little grasp of real estate arcana.

Even the Los Angeles Police Department’s bunco-forgery division, considered more sophisticated than most, “is ill-equipped to get into these things,” said Richard Levos, a detective with the division who once arrested Gillies.

“We don’t know anything about real estate,” Levos said, “except we bought a house or two in our life, just like you.”

Levos and others said the state Department of Real Estate has the most savvy and experience for dealing with these scams. But the agency mainly polices its licensees--real estate brokers and sales people--paying less attention to crooks who don’t bother to get a license.

Although real estate department officials do take administrative action against wayward licensees, they lack authority and training to conduct criminal investigations.

For the Kevin Gillieses of the world, this pattern of overlap, underlap and general confusion creates an enticing environment.

Gillies’ escapades show how existing safeguards against property fraud--namely, the notary and county deed recording systems--serve mainly to lull the public into a false sense of security.

Notaries are supposed to deter fraud by serving as witnesses when people deed away their property. Thus a deed includes not only the signature of the seller, but the signature and official stamp of the notary before whom the seller appeared. Then the deed is stamped and recorded at the county recorder’s office--by outward appearance, validating the deed a second time.

But “the notary system is a joke,” one prosecutor said, because crooks often steal notary stamps or have phony ones made. And the recorder’s office accepts all deeds that are legible, signed and notarized, without checking whether seller and notary signatures are authentic.

With the Los Angeles County recorder handling 3,000 deeds per day, said Legal Aid’s Goldsmith, “there’s not enough money on God’s Earth for them to investigate.”

Since fraudulent deeds are never challenged by the recorder’s office, it is as easy to record a phony as a real one. But few people understand this, one prosecutor said. They simply assume “that the person who walks down to the Hall of Records and files a deed is doing something honest.”

*

Curtis Pierson, 50, is under no such illusions.

A retired auto worker, Pierson began looking after his father’s house in Sepulveda after his father moved into a nursing home.

Driving by one day in August, 1989, Pierson was surprised to see construction workers busy in the yard. “I figured it was probably a work crew that got the wrong address,” Pierson recalled.

Not so. Pierson said one of them, Gerald L. Jones, introduced himself as the new owner, saying he had bought the house from Kevin Gillies.

Pierson returned later with documents to show Jones his mistake. This time Jones was not there, but Pierson said in a sworn statement that the work crew surrounded and punched him, threatening to follow him home to Simi Valley “and burn down my house with me and my family in it.”

Pierson learned that a deed recorded Aug. 17, 1989, purportedly transferred the house from his father to Gillies. Gillies deeded the property to a Cheryl Jones--reportedly Gerald Jones’ sister--the next day. What Gillies was paid is uncertain. Neither Gerald nor Cheryl Jones could be reached for comment.

Pierson was sure his father’s signature had been forged. And the deal was curious in other ways.

For one thing, Curtis Pierson was his father’s conservator--the court-appointed guardian of his affairs. The elder Pierson could not deed the property without court approval. This alone made the transfer invalid.

There were other discrepancies. According to the deed, the notary who witnessed Pierson’s signature was William Davis. A check with the notary public division of the secretary of state’s office showed there was no notary of that name who did not use a middle name or initial.

Moreover, the Davis notary stamp was phony on its face. It said his notary commission would expire 4 1/2 years after the date of the sale. In California, notary commissions last four years--never longer.

This, thought Pierson, was unbelievable. He was just as surprised by the response of police to what he considered a blatant fraud.

When Pierson and his lawyer, William Crader, spoke to bunco detectives in Van Nuys, they “just weren’t very interested,” Crader recalled.

“The impression I got was that they had other things that were more pressing,” Crader said. “They kind of felt like it was a dispute between two people.”

Pierson said, “I was trying to get these guys interested in somebody who’s literally stealing the property of the elderly.”

A police spokesman declined comment, saying there was no record of these conversations.

Pierson filed lawsuits against Gillies, the Joneses and the construction contractor. It took a year, but he won a court order granting him possession of the house, which Gerald Jones had been renting out.

Three years, later, however, the damage remains. Among other things, Pierson’s property tax bill soared because the phony sale freed it from Proposition 13 limits and he has been forced to spend more than $13,000 on legal fees and court costs. “It has cost a sizable amount of money,” said Pierson, “just to defend this property from thugs and crooks.”

*

Still, RoseMary Tufts would love to be in Curtis Pierson’s shoes.

When Pierson’s struggles began, Tufts, 72, owned two houses in Van Nuys. She rented rooms in each to bring in income.

During the fall of 1989, Tufts was trying to evict tenants from her home on Firmament Avenue. They were thrilled when Kevin Gillies showed up, proclaimed himself the real owner, and invited them to stay.

For reasons that are unclear, Tufts years before had deeded the Firmament home to a friend in Maine, Beatrice Thebarge. As far as Thebarge was concerned, the house still belonged to Tufts, who went on living there as before. And when Thebarge died, Tufts did not think to get back a deed from Thebarge’s husband.

Gillies evidently did not know that Thebarge had died in 1977. Otherwise, he might not have had her appearing in Los Angeles County a dozen years later to deed him the Firmament house.

According to the document filed with the county recorder, Thebarge deeded the house on Oct. 19, 1989, in the presence of notary Edith Porter.

Porter, who could not be reached, at one time was a notary. But just as Thebarge’s signature had to be a fake, so was Porter’s notary stamp in that it gave the wrong date for her notary commission.

Gillies wasted no time unloading the Firmament house. He sold it to an associate, George Allums, according to a second deed recorded Oct. 23.

Tufts’ counterattack included the filing of a lis pendens . This is a notice, filed with the county recorder, that warns prospective buyers or lenders of a title dispute.

A short time later, someone unknown recorded a withdrawal of lis pendens , forging Tufts’ signature on the document. So Tufts filed a second lis pendens . Within days, a second withdrawal was recorded with Tufts’ forged signature, she said.

Naturally, Tufts was distressed by these events. Still, she was confident of a favorable outcome. After all, she thought, the fraud was transparent. It would not take long to put things right.

Armond Thebarge, Beatrice’s widowed husband, thought the same thing. “These guys are all a bunch of thieves over there,” he said in a telephone interview.

“My God, that’s her property,” Thebarge said. “You do that in Maine, for goodness sake, they’d have you in jail in 10 minutes.”

Three years later, George Allums still has the house.

Gillies may have been sloppy in recording a deed from a woman who was dead when she supposedly signed it. But if he were looking for a victim, he could not have found one better than Tufts.

Over the years, she had had a long run of disputes with her tenants. Police often considered her at fault and were sick of getting caught in the middle.

“They didn’t want anything to do with her,” said attorney Dan Lavery, who spoke to bunco detectives in Van Nuys on Tufts’ behalf.

“They were aware of his (Gillies’) actions,” Lavery recalled. “They actually said, ‘We think she has been defrauded. . . .’ They talk about law and order. Why don’t they do their job?”

Lavery also contacted Tamura of the district attorney’s office. When he asked the Van Nuys detectives what they were doing on the case, Tamura said they cited a jurisdictional snag. The notary, Edith Porter, had been based in the San Gabriel Valley, so the forgery might have occurred outside Los Angeles city limits.

But Tufts’ home was clearly within Los Angeles, as was the recorder’s office where the phony deed was filed.

They were “just finding a reason,” Tamura said. “I don’t think they liked Mrs. Tufts.”

There were “some wires crossed here,” said Detective Paul Geggie, adjutant with the bunco-forgery division. “Just because a person is hard to get along with . . . they can still be the victim of a crime.”

Tufts’ efforts in the civil courts have been just as futile. In three years, she has been unable to get a judge to examine the deeds and the Thebarge death certificate.

Sometimes, she has been her own worst enemy--missing scheduled court appearances, for example. Worst of all, she has been unable to keep a lawyer.

Several lawyers took Tufts’ case on a pro bono basis and then abandoned her. Some described her as headstrong and unwilling to take their advice--all in all, a difficult client.

But what happened to Tufts is a “gross travesty,” said Peter Gordon, one of the lawyers. “She was simply not patient enough to let the system go through its judicial machinations.”

For his part, George Allums said Tufts has harassed him and “has no right to that property.”

But Allums said “I have no idea” when asked if Gillies had forged the Thebarge deed. And he said, “I wish I knew,” when asked where Gillies is.

Tufts remains hopeful, but disbelieving.

“It’s not human,” she said tearfully.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be 72 and have all this grief. . . . I just can’t understand why I can’t get someone to come to my rescue.”

*

Gillies’ next real estate transaction was a few blocks away.

It was April, 1990, and O. Henry Lyon, a retired builder, was taking care of a vacant home on Victory Boulevard for an elderly friend.

Every few days, Lyon sent someone to the house to pick up the mail. On April 11, the messenger brought back the surprising news that there were men inside, and a sign offering the house for sale or lease.

Lyon called the police. When they arrived, Gillies and a few others were having drinks in the living room.

Gillies introduced himself as Harold Kevin Howell. According to Lyon, he took the officers aside and explained that he and an associate had just acquired the house.

He was “very glib, very convincing,” Lyon recalled, and above all “quick-witted.” Gillies “had the papers in his hand,” Lyon said. He “took the position that he owned the house” and that “I’m a phony.”

In reality, Lyon’s friend Rosetta Dollert had been the sole owner since the death in 1980 of her husband, Frederick Dollert.

Yet the deed said Frederick Dollert had sold the property on March 26, 1990. According to the deed, Dollert appeared that day before Edith Porter. As before, her notary stamp was a fake.

Lyon had been storing two cars in the Dollert’s garage. Now, one of them--a 1970 Rolls-Royce--was gone. Witnesses said Gillies had broken the lock and that two men had removed the car on a flatbed truck before police arrived.

Big deal, Gillies said. He had bought the house and everything in it and could deal with the car as he wished.

The police were not convinced, and arrested Gillies. But their interest was limited to the missing car. This was at least the third time in less than a year that Gillies allegedly had used fake deeds in an effort to steal a house--and it was the third time his activities were brought to the attention of bunco detectives in Van Nuys. Still, the real estate fraud was ignored. Gillies was charged only with auto theft, and a judge later ruled that there was insufficient cause to hold him for that crime.

Lyon, 77, was grateful when police recovered his Rolls. But he remains angry about their refusal to pursue the property fraud.

Gillies “has never been tried or charged with this,” Lyon fumed. When he urged Van Nuys bunco detectives to act on the forgery, “not only were they not helpful, they were downright abusive,” Lyon said. They “absolutely refused . . . to take one single step.”

Detective Anthony Di Ruscio, supervisor of the bunco-forgery unit in Van Nuys, said auto theft detectives took the lead on the case. He said they, along with prosecutors, decided what charges to file. A detective in the auto theft detail failed to return several phone calls.

*

Gillies next moved on to bigger things.

Garrison Bland, a former business associate dead since 1986, had owned many parcels of vacant land that were scattered about the state.

Bland’s three children did not even know the properties existed until 1990 when a real estate agent contacted one of them, Lorie Leaf, to make an offer on a parcel near Lancaster.

Leaf told the man he was mistaken--that her family had no property there. But the agent had done a title search and knew the owner was Garrison Bland. He also informed her that Bland--from whom the children had been somewhat estranged--had left many more parcels as well.

Surprised but gratified, the Bland children moved quickly to find the properties and pay off the delinquent taxes.

No sooner had they done this than Gillies made his move.

With the taxes paid up, deeds suddenly were recorded in several counties purporting to show that Bland had transferred the properties just before his death to Gillies and several of Gillies’ acquaintances. One parcel was deeded jointly to Gillies and Allums--the man who wound up with Tufts’ house.

Either the deeds were forgeries--as Bland’s family charges--or Gillies, for some reason, had taken four years to record them.

Certainly, the notaries on the deeds were wrong. They included some people who were not notaries, and Gillies’ favorite, Edith Porter, whose notary stamps were fakes.

Bland’s son, Steven, said his father had been in the real estate business with Gillies, but “my father never did trust him.” He said Garrison Bland was no Boy Scout himself, and had taught Gillies some of his tricks.

“One of the few fears he had was that he might have taught Kevin too many things,” Steven Bland said.

Steven Bland said Gillies used to entertain himself by phoning strangers at random to extract odd bits of information, ranging from financial data to “the color of (their) shoes and socks.”

“He was practicing a skill,” Bland said. Manipulating people and winning them over was something “he absolutely loved.”

Gillies, said Bland, “was quite disarming. He was a con man.”

At the time of Garrison Bland’s death, Gillies was pressing him for money, according to Bland’s sister, Sylvia Stead. Afterward, she said, Gillies demanded money from her, and when she refused, vowed to “get it one way or the other.”

Bland’s children have sued Gillies and others who got the properties in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. They said they will soon file similar lawsuits over parcels in Kern and Tehama counties. Like other litigants, they have been unable to find Gillies to serve him with complaints.

Sheriff’s detectives have had no better luck. They conducted a criminal investigation of the Bland case, but closed it without filing any charges.

Ann Melbourn, a detective with the Los Angeles County sheriff’s forgery-fraud detail, said she spent more than nine months on the case but ran into a dead end. She was unable to interview Gillies or Edith Porter. Melbourn said a relative told her that Porter had been in a mental institution. The bottom line, said Melbourn, was that she couldn’t prove Bland didn’t sign the deeds.

But in an interview, Melbourn said she was unaware that the case fit a pattern.

She did not recognize its similarity to the Pierson, Tufts and Lyon cases. That’s because she had never heard of those cases nor discussed Gillies with her counterparts in the LAPD.

According to Melbourn, this was not surprising. “There’s no central place where everyone’s open cases go to.”

*

Melbourn also knew nothing of a fifth case that began at the time of her inquiry. In this one, Gillies was caught trying to use a forged deed to obtain a $100,000 loan.

Acting on a tip, Detective Levos of the Los Angeles bunco-forgery division arrested Gillies on Jan. 24, 1991, outside a loan office near Los Angeles International Airport where he had gone to sign the loan papers.

Gillies, who was using the name Keith Gillis, purportedly had acquired a house on Deering Avenue in Chatsworth.

That certainly was news to the brother and sister who owned the house. They said they did not know Gillies and hadn’t signed the deed. The notary on the deed later said his signature had been forged and his stamp stolen.

From his jail cell, Gillies signed a quit-claim deed giving the property back.

He was charged with one count of forgery. The charge, known as a “wobbler,” could have been prosecuted as a felony by the district attorney, or as a misdemeanor by the city attorney.

It was filed as a misdemeanor. According to the reasoning, Gillies had returned the property, resulting in no loss to the victims. And it was seen as an isolated case.

As a result, Gillies was allowed to plead no contest and avoid a term in jail. He got 36 months probation and was ordered to pay $500 restitution, $500 investigation costs and a $1,000 fine and penalty assessment.

Fay Chu, the deputy city attorney who negotiated the plea, said she knew nothing of Gillies’ history. “I don’t remember any of that information (being) provided to me.”

Levos said he, too, was in the dark, despite the complaints to his colleagues in Van Nuys.

Gillies “was a brand new thing to me,” Levos said. “He was a lot more prolific than I knew.”

Gillies’ failure to pay the fine resulted in a bench warrant being issued last January.

Levos said he hopes to pick Gillies up--but that may be easier said than done.

Said another detective: “With the number of a.k.a.’s that this individual has, it’s a life’s work, almost, to find him.”

A Questionable Deed

Property theft is disturbingly common. In the simplest scam, a title to a piece of property is forged, then quickly unloaded at a bargain price or the deed is used to obtain a loan. In one case, Kevin Gillies is alleged to have used a suspicious deed to take over a house in Van Nuys.

How It Worked

A) Gillies supposedly acquired the property Oct. 19, 1989, when, according to the deed, it was signed over to him by “B. Thebarge” who appeared that day before notary public Edith Porter. But Beatrice J. Thebarge--as her gravestone, below, and death certificate attest--had died in Maine in August, 1977.

B) Although there is a notary named Edith Porter, it is questionable whether she signed the deed. Her notary stamp on the deed is fake, stating that her commission would expire on April 19, 1990, instead of May 18 as state records show. Porter could not be reached for comment.

C) Despite these discrepancies, Gillies had no trouble recording the deed with the Los Angeles County recorder’s office, which does not validate the thousands of deeds filed each day.