Confidence Man : Hal Kaplan Is a Master of the Grifter’s Swindle--and Over and Over, Neither His Numerous Wives nor His Business Connections Ever Saw It Coming

The man calling himself Harold Lansky checked into the Quality Inn in New Haven, Conn., on Aug. 7, 1991. The same day he took a taxi to the 500 Blake Street Cafe, a brick-walled saloon popular with lawyers, politicians and other members of New Haven’s power class. Soon he was chatting amiably with the regulars. Almost offhandedly, he let slip who he was: the nephew of Meyer Lansky, the short, egghead mobster who controlled casinos in Las Vegas, Havana and south Florida during the glory days of American racketeering. But this was the 1990s, and Hal Lansky, as everyone soon knew the gregarious newcomer, carried his gangster lineage lightly. He was a legitimate businessman from Southern California, he said, in town to scout for real estate deals. He said he owned a Los Angeles shopping center, airport limousine fleets and shares in several Las Vegas hotels, the legacy of the original grubstake that Meyer Lansky had famously advanced Bugsy Siegel to build the Flamingo in 1946. One day soon after he materialized at 500 Blake Street, Hal was standing at the oak bar when he spotted a petite woman of 46 with a trim figure and a chic, very short haircut. Lindy Lee Gold was having dinner with three women from her tennis group. The hostess approached and said that “Hal” wished to buy drinks for the table, Lindy refused. But on her way out the door, she stopped to chat with an old friend, and he introduced her to Hal Lansky. “It’s more than obvious you don’t accept drinks from strangers,” Hal said. “But now that we’ve met why don’t you let me buy you one?” Lindy, a gravel-voiced chain smoker who was given to quick repartee, rebuffed him again. “Did it ever occur to you,” she asked, “that if I’d wanted a drink, I would have bought one myself?” The next day he called her at the travel agency where she was marketing director, and this time she relented and agreed to have lunch. Despite their unpromising first meeting, over lunch Lindy found Hal charming and humorous, an old-fashioned suitor who doted on her. One evening, shortly after, while they were deciding where to eat out, Lindy said: “Don’t spread it around, but I can cook.”

“Why? Why should you; you’ve worked all day?”

“There’s no way to put this delicately. Can you really afford to be taking me out to lunch and dinner at all these nice restaurants?”

“Would you like them to open for breakfast, too?” Hal said. Discreetly he told her: “I’m a very wealthy man.”

He explained that he was the illegitimate son of Jake Lansky, Meyer Lansky’s younger brother and lifelong lieutenant. In 1983, Meyer and Jake had died within months of each other; to the FBI and other mob-watchers, it seemed that very little of the Lansky riches, once estimated at $300 million, was passed down to the legitimate heirs. Hal revealed to Lindy that Meyer and Jake had secretly funneled the money to him, because he was the only son the old gangsters approved of.

He certainly spent money like a rich man. When he and Lindy ate out, he paid in cash, peeling off $100 bills. Bartenders and waiters loved him. He said he ran his empire from a big home in Tarzana, where his valet-chauffeur, Ben, attended him. At least, thought Lindy, he isn’t interested in me for my money.

Hal insisted he adored her and began talking of marriage. Lindy, who’d been divorced three times and was in no hurry to try again, found herself in a tizzy. She had to admit that she’d fallen in love with this fun-loving, generous man. He called her ailing mother regularly on the telephone. He took her brother-in-law, Ted Brooks, to lunch. Ted was impressed. They all were impressed. And so on Sept. 13, 1991, Lindy married Hal. It was one month after they first met, five weeks after he’d checked into the Quality Inn.

She didn’t hesitate a week later when he asked for $25,000. The money was to help two women, old friends of his, open a New York restaurant. He couldn’t draw on his own accounts, he explained, because he was having trouble with the IRS and was engaged in sensitive settlement talks. His attorneys had instructed him not to move large sums around. “He was very angry and upset with his advisers because he had made a commitment he wanted to honor,” recalls Lindy.

She liquidated some stock and presented her new husband with the cash. Far from entertaining any suspicions, Lindy felt proud to be helping Hal keep his promise. “He seemed to embrace the same values I do,” she says. “Words like honor and commitment mean something to me. He absolutely knew all the right buttons to press.”

THUS DID HAL, ACCORDING TO THE NEW HAVEN POLICE, SWINDLE THE first $25,000 from Lindy Lee Gold. There is no New York restaurant, nor is Hal the secret heir to Meyer Lansky’s fortune. His real name is Harold Jay Kaplan, and by the time he came to New Haven from California in 1991, he’d already used eight known aliases and been convicted of fraud, theft, forgery and bigamy. He’d left behind a string of bushwhacked victims reaching back nearly 30 years. He’d been married at least nine times, invariably to women like Lindy Gold, who believed that he was a rich man whose fondest desire was to devote himself unstintingly to their happiness. In short order, he’d looted their bank accounts, stolen their cars and jewelry and, usually, their hearts.

Kaplan has made a career out of being a confidence man, and according to police and numerous victims, he is a master of the calling. Women are not his only marks. Hard-headed business executives have invested tens of thousands of dollars in sham deals with him. Invariably, he meets these business types around the tennis court, for in his years as a con artist, Hal has successfully built a second career as a tennis pro. By all accounts, he is a gifted teacher and--more to the point--a champion schmoozer.

Teaching in the Beverly Hills area in the 1980s, Kaplan attracted a rich and famous clientele that included Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia; movie producer John Daly (“Platoon,” “The Terminator”); restaurateur Patrick Terrail, the owner of Ma Maison, and Maureen Reagan, the President’s daughter. He ensnared so many victims through tennis that in 1990, following a prison stint, the terms of his parole enjoined him from going “within 1,000 feet of any tennis court or country club.”

A robber steals by force, but a con man uses only the force of his personality. As a result, Kaplan’s victims get to know him well, and many still can’t bring themselves to despise him. Some grudgingly admire the artfulness of his rip-offs. Some abandoned ex-wives conclude wistfully that the attention he lavished on them compensates, in a perverse way, for their financial losses. Many victims have never pressed charges.

Lindy Gold, however, who claims that in eight months of marriage she was defrauded of $75,000, has not been so forgiving. Kaplan is now in the New Haven Community Correctional Center, awaiting trial on a first-degree larceny charge that’s punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Kaplan’s visitors must pass through a locked door and descend to a basement cubicle. He talks, with his attorney by his side, sitting at a tiny table. Its fixed seats enforce an uncomfortable closeness. But Kaplan can quickly dispel the awkwardness.

“Mind if I smoke?” he kids in a warm, hail-fellow voice, though smoking is forbidden. “Why don’t we just go out for a drink at 500 Blake Street, and we’ll discuss this there?”

Despite Kaplan’s nine marriages, often following courtships lasting only days or a few weeks, he is by no stretch good-looking. He has a walrus-like torso and a too-fleshy face that shows the effects of years of indulgence. He is nearly bald, with a flattened nose, a drooping lower lip and deep grooves running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth--like two parentheses.

What he lacks in physical charisma, however, he more than makes up for in charm. He has the salesman’s habit of using first names liberally, and he is a shameless flatterer. He insists he is really “a pussycat,” not a coolly manipulative swindler who targeted Gold from the moment he saw her. “I had no conception of what Lindy Gold had,” he says. “I didn’t care. I just fell in love with her.”

True, he admitted, the money he “borrowed” was never invested in a restaurant. But he didn’t squirrel it away, either. He spent it taking Gold out as many as six and seven days a week, slipping $100 bills to her college-age son, Josh, and paying for vacations in Miami. In other words, he went through much of the $75,000 (Kaplan claims the total was $60,000) romancing Gold with her own funds. “I never gave a damn about me, when you really get down to it,” he says, his voice all injured innocence. “Because if I did--hell, I’d be a millionaire today.”

Kaplan is a natural. His attempts at fellowship are so eager, his desire to please so sincere, that anyone within earshot feels a need to respond in kind. Which is precisely what his victims felt. Kaplan approached them with a puppy-like friendliness that elicited an instinctive desire to help him out.

Kaplan claims that his victims were as much to blame as he was. He merely offered what they’d always wanted: a windfall business deal for the men, an adoring new husband for the women. “I have not been an angel,” he says. “But I’ll say something right now. It’s a two-way street. Everybody else wanted something, too--money, jewelry, cars, homes, fame, clothes.”

He might as well have added: love, devotion and companionship, which he promised and generally delivered, at least for a while.

HAL KAPLAN ARRIVED IN BEVERLY HILLS IN AUGUST, 1981. IN A RESTAURANT, the Cafe Swiss on Rodeo Drive, he recognized a woman he’d met a decade earlier in New York City and offered to buy her a drink. Joane Stewart--a blond, 40-something real estate agent--turned him down. But Kaplan persisted, and the two fell to talking. He’d just gotten into town. His only possessions were a small suitcase and three tennis racquets. He invited Stewart to dinner.

JOANE STEWART: “I’d just broken up with the gentleman I was going with. I was just getting started in real estate. And the man was very, very pleasant. He took me out to a very lovely restaurant for dinner, flashed a lot of cash. He had a limousine parked out in front. That’s his M.O.”

Within a week, Kaplan moved into Stewart’s Spanish-style house, and the two became a couple. Stewart helped him get hired as a teaching pro at The Tennis Place, a club on 3rd Street off La Brea Avenue.

STEWART: “He’s the last person you’d look at and say, ‘That’s a tennis pro.’ He’s fat, he’s jowly. He’s not a good-looking man in my opinion. Off the court he would break things. The ice-maker. Every vacuum cleaner in the house. But when he gets on the court, it’s a different story; he still has the feet of a young tennis player. He started with maybe one or two clients, but he built up a clientele you couldn’t believe.”

Using the alias Hal Lawrence, Kaplan became so popular that within a year he left The Tennis Place to teach privately at homes in Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. Among the beautiful people, word spread about the exceptional new coach in town. Maureen Reagan, who took three or four lessons weekly surrounded by Secret Service agents, was so taken with her coach she invited him to her birthday party in 1983 at the Bistro Gardens.

Soon Kaplan and Stewart decided to open a tennis club of their own. They refurbished eight run-down courts on top of the ABC Entertainment Center in Century City and christened their operation The Tennis Club. One of Kaplan’s clients was Martin Fruchtman, a young man who, at the height of the Los Angeles real estate bubble, was earning a mid-six-figure income at a property syndication company and was a board member of a West Los Angeles savings and loan association.

MARTY FRUCHTMAN: “He went out of his way to be extremely friendly to me. He gave me free tennis lessons. He was trying to be a friend, so I reciprocated. One day he contacted me and said he had an opportunity to get involved with a tennis club in the Southwest, and he needed to move quickly, and would I be interested in loaning him some money?”

As Kaplan laid out the scheme, he was investing $33,000 of his own money to upgrade the courts at the club. If Fruchtman contributed $31,000, he’d get his initial investment back in a few days when the club’s owner gave Kaplan a deposit. Shortly thereafter, when Kaplan was paid the balance, plus interest, Fruchtman would earn a windfall profit of $18,000.

FRUCHTMAN: “Everything he said alerted me--he wanted cash, it had to be done quickly. It was absurd. But I said to my wife, ‘For $31,000 is he going to leave the tennis club he’s just opened?’ I went to the bank with Hal and got the cash. He was supposed to meet me a few days later at Harry’s Bar in Century City with my money. I sat at Harry’s for an hour, until it became apparent he wasn’t going to show.

“It was a great business deal on my part; I did everything that an officer of a $1-billion company should do. Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. But I wasn’t looking at it as a business deal. I was doing it as a favor to a friend. He did everything I guess a con man does, and I bit.”

Fruchtman reported Kaplan’s disappearance to the police, who couldn’t locate him. Joane Stewart didn’t know where he was, either. He’d left his clothes and belongings at her house the day Fruchtman paid him, April 19, 1985, and seemingly vanished.

It turned out he hadn’t gone far. Throughout Kaplan’s criminal career, he has employed the same technique: He steals from one victim and uses the money to set up the next. With Fruchtman’s cash, he went on a heroic spending spree in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, passing himself off as a millionaire.

HAL KAPLAN: “I really didn’t go anywhere. I fooled everyone. I was at the Beverly Hills Hotel having a ball. Buying drinks for everyone in the joint. Limousines galore. Women in and out. I probably went through $5,000 to $10,000 the first week. I didn’t know where the hell I was staying half the time, I was so drunk.”

And that’s when he met his next wife. She was tall and striking, in her late ‘40s, and she was sitting alone at a table. Kaplan introduced himself using his Lansky alias, and that turned out to be quite a coincidence. The woman’s late husband had run the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas; at about the same time, “Uncle Meyer” had owned a hidden interest in the Sands.

Finding himself in the presence of someone with ties to the world he fictitiously claimed membership in, Kaplan didn’t back off. On the contrary, he ardently courted his latest conquest; on May 2, 1985, they were married in a quick Las Vegas ceremony. Soon, Fruchtman’s $31,000 was exhausted, but Kaplan says he persuaded his new wife, who drove a Rolls-Royce, to pick up the bills with no loss of momentum. According to Kaplan, she bought him a $15,000 Rolex and a designer wardrobe.

Inevitably, the new Mrs. Lansky discovered that Kaplan was not related to “Uncle Meyer.” Far from being outraged, she agreed to marry him a second time under his real name. Six weeks after their first wedding, they repeated the ceremony, again in Las Vegas. That night, says Kaplan, he let the other shoe drop: He confessed that he was wanted by police. Now his bride was distraught. Kaplan began thinking that compared to all the craziness in his life, prison might be a relief. The day after his wedding, he drove across the desert and turned himself in to the California Department of Corrections.

Shortly before she annulled their marriage, his wife wrote him this letter: “Dear Hal: . . . The bills alone have come to over $55,000, that’s reality. I’m going to sell my jewelry to pay for those two months of happiness. Yes, they were happy, Hal, and I want you to know that. I’m sorry you conned me, as you could have told me the truth. I would have wanted you in truth, a tennis teacher earning an honest living. . . . Do you have any idea what Nordstroms, Bullocks, Diamonds, etc., came to, totally? I do. And it is my gift to you.”

DESPITE KAPLAN’S SHOW OF VIRTUE IN TURNING HIMSELF IN AT CHINO, he wasn’t wholly truthful with the authorities. He didn’t admit that he was wanted in Beverly Hills. Instead, he turned himself in for skipping parole four years earlier in Northern California. But Kaplan had been running from his past for even longer than that.

By all accounts, Harold Kaplan was born Dec. 29, 1938, in Jersey City to Samuel and Della Kaplan. The Kaplans owned a paint shop and held the paint concession in a chain of variety stores. They lived comfortably, Kaplan says, but his mother gambled away his inheritance playing poker and beat him so severely that he sometimes couldn’t go to school.

It’s hard to know whether to believe such details; in fact, it’s difficult to verify much of anything about Kaplan’s early life. He was an only child, his parents are now dead, and he seems to have told different stories to almost everyone he ever met. What is known, from a 1979 will, is that Samuel Kaplan was so exasperated with his son that he disinherited him, declaring that he had “never been a true son and has caused many a hardship and heartache to myself and his mother.”

According to Kaplan, at age 21, he married the first of his nine wives, in New York City. In letters he has written from jail to Lindy Gold’s friends, he explains that he spent a lifetime defrauding women because of the failure of his first marriage. He claims that wife No. 1 deserted him for another man, taking their infant son with her. Kaplan says he hasn’t seen the boy since.

It was soon after his first marriage that he began having run-ins with the law. According to court and prison records, between 1965 and 1968 he was arrested in New York, Palm Springs, Las Vegas and Miami Beach for passing bad checks or skipping on hotel bills. He received light sentences of probation or short stays in county jail. But in November, 1969, after he was found guilty of grand larceny in New York, Kaplan pulled his first hard time: three years in Sing Sing.

Following his release in 1972, he headed to California, where he evolved from a petty rip-off artist into a more patient practitioner of the long con. He preyed primarily on his wives and tennis partners. As Kaplan tells it, he learned to play tennis at age 6 at a public park. He was good enough as a high school player to compete as a ringer for a college team. In his 20s, he says, he traveled the country as a tennis hustler: “I’d drop a set to you, then drop two more games, then come back and blow you away. Make a few grand if I was lucky.”

The formative years in Kaplan’s career as a con man, when he stole small sums but perfected his game, are documented in a book-thick file in the archives of the California prison system in Vacaville. In 1974, his fourth wife turned him in for forging a $10,000 check from his employer, the Bayside Racquet Club in San Carlos. He was sentenced to up to five years, but after only 11 months as a model prisoner, he was furloughed to a halfway house. A month later, in May, 1976, he ran away, got a job coaching tennis nearby and promptly scammed one of his clients in a phony court-resurfacing deal.

Kaplan fled with the cash to New Jersey, where he was picked up by the FBI. He landed in maximum security San Quentin, where he did 14 months before being paroled in April, 1978.

Once out, he moved in with a 66-year-old woman he’d met two years earlier at a roadhouse and wed in San Quentin. “I remember meeting him a couple of times, and I was shocked he was my age,” says the woman’s son-in-law. “Here he was with somebody a lot older. You had to figure out what the heck he was doing.” His new wife helped Kaplan get back on his feet, and he was hired by yet another tennis club, this time in Turlock.

There he sweet-talked one of his students into taking advantage of an opportunity to buy and resell 50 dozen tennis balls and two carpet-like indoor-court surfaces. He got a check for $6,875, which he promised to return, plus profit, the next day. He immediately absconded. One month later he was found by New York City police at Abe’s Steak House on Third Avenue, a chauffeured limo idling outside.

This time he served about two years in prison and was released in January, 1981. His San Quentin wife, who by then had twice seen her husband imprisoned as a swindler, took him back anyway. “My opinion is she was lonely,” says her son-in-law. “Plus, you know how a lot of women are--’I can change him.’ ” Three months later, Kaplan’s probation officer recorded a complaint. Mrs. Kaplan charged that her husband had run off with her paycheck and a diamond ring valued at $7,500. Not long afterward, she returned to the probation department, accompanied by Kaplan. All was forgiven--it had been “a terrible misunderstanding.”

In the summer of 1981, Kaplan was again teaching tennis and taking people’s money. He persuaded a client to give him $1,400 to make a killing in artificial court surfaces. He also persuaded a humble custodian at his apartment complex to put up $1,300 for the same deal. Pocketing the cash, along with two of his wife’s rings valued at $8,180, he fled on Aug. 18, 1981. This time, he had apparently left Northern California for good and was declared a parolee-at-large.

Within a day or two, Kaplan was on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills with his three tennis racquets and his one small suitcase, reacquainting himself with Joane Stewart.

IN THE ANNALS OF CHICANERY, Kaplan does not rank as a major-league player. There are con artists who have looted far vaster sums and employed more devious and, for their victims, more shattering rip-offs. Robert Trippet’s Home-Stake oil company was a 15-year Ponzi scheme that bilked celebrities and others of $102 million until 1973. A woman named Cassie Chadwick passed herself off as the wild-oats daughter of Andrew Carnegie and embezzled $2 million at the turn of the century. By comparison, Kaplan has been a skillful but essentially small-time grifter.

Yet in many ways, he is more fascinating than criminals who make off with millions. That’s because he seems driven less by avarice than by much more complex motives.

Despite his highly developed skills extracting cash, he invariably nets very little. The grand paradox of his criminal career is that he could have made a better living playing it straight, as a tennis pro. Over the years, he has most often swindled $10,000, $20,000 or $30,000, only to be forced to drop from sight, forfeiting an income that by most accounts could have approached six figures. And whatever the amount of his ill-gotten gains, they become losses soon enough. Kaplan blows the loot as quickly as he comes into it--partying hard at the Polo Lounge, for instance, or wining and dining Lindy Gold.

In the end, it seems, Kaplan craves the thrill of the con more than the money it could generate. Like a gambling addict who returns again and again for the high he gets from the action, no matter his losses, Kaplan seems to get high on the excitement of a swindle. “He plays Mr. Big Shot on other people’s money,” Joane Stewart has said. “He spends everything he steals on wine, women and song. It’s like he wants to say, ‘Hey, you fools. Look at me.’ ”

Although Kaplan recognizes the self-defeating nature of his cons, he is unable to explain much about his motives. Often he goes for a year or more as a law-abiding citizen, only to feel the urge to defraud come on as insistently as a migraine. “There’s a constant saying: ‘Do it, do it, do it and get it over with,’ ” he says. “I’m just hyper. I’m strung out, stressed out, overworked. I have a good life, a Mercedes-Benz, the restaurants. Big deal. What’s the point? I get bored. I see no future. When I get bored, I rip.”

Dr. Ronald Markman, a prominent Los Angeles forensic psychiatrist, offers additional insight into Kaplan’s psyche. Based on a detailed description of Kaplan’s history, Markman says Kaplan is likely “a sociopath or anti-social personality, lacking a conscience.” But Markman also points out a unique pattern in Kaplan’s M.O. “A lot of sociopaths are dumb and they get caught,” Markman says. “This guy seems smart enough that he wouldn’t leave clues. But he does leave clues.”

Indeed, although Kaplan is skillful at conning, he is inept at evading the law. He returns to the neighborhoods where he committed his crimes, hanging out until he finally gets noticed by police. The behavior suggests to Markman that Kaplan may have an unconscious need to get caught. “Something has perhaps created a guilt in this guy that requires he be punished. It’s an unconscious need he indirectly fulfills by going out and swindling people.”

If punishment is Kaplan’s deep-seated and unconscious desire, then California’s criminal justice system has let him down. The courts and prisons seemed to have regarded him with a bemused frustration, as if he was an incorrigible but relatively harmless nuisance. He has been repeatedly handed long sentences, only to be paroled after serving a small fraction of his time. It’s no surprise: He was a nonviolent offender in a sea of more vicious criminals. Once behind bars he was reliable, courteous, eager to please. He charmed his jailers as easily as he did the outside world.

BY 1987, KAPLAN WAS ONCE again out of jail, and Joane Stewart had taken him back. Despite the Fruchtman con, his other wives and other cons, she moved with him to a Granada Hills house, where both continued to coach tennis. Stewart says “it was a good business arrangement.” She gave Kaplan his own bedroom, she says, in exchange for help with the rent. Yet a diary Kaplan kept makes clear that they were lovers. Their 10-year relationship between 1981 and 1991 seems to have been a prickly tango of affection and mutual exploitation.

The Tennis Club had gone out of business, and though still coaching, Kaplan drove a limousine to try to make ends meet. He threw himself into chauffeuring and won loyal customers with the same aplomb he showed on the tennis court. “What Harold is is a student of human moves,” says Todd Bernstein, who owned the limousine company that Kaplan worked for. “He reads people very very well. The celebrity accounts really liked him and requested him. He drove Bruce Willis and Howie Mandel religiously.”

One day, Kaplan picked up Denny Torchia, a record producer, and his wife at their home in Hidden Hills and drove them to the airport on their way to a second home in Santa Fe. When Kaplan learned that Torchia had just gotten out of the studio with Barbra Streisand, he immediately claimed to have walked Streisand to school as a boy in Brooklyn.

DENNY TORCHIA: “He knew quite a bit about her. We hit it off. The conversation went from Barbra to tennis to Santa Fe. He actually knew all about Santa Fe, too. He certainly knew how to schmooze. He being very New York Jewish and me being very California Italian, within 10 minutes I went from Mr. Denny Torchia to Dennyla. Being in the record business, I come across a lot of pretty sharp people. I gotta tell you, I never saw this guy coming.”

After a single limo ride, the Torchias introduced Kaplan to the exclusive Hidden Hills Tennis Assn., where he taught a ladies’ clinic in the spring of 1988. He was an instant hit and was hired as resident pro. Kaplan was back in business.

In daily life, the wealthy clients he swindled were socially inaccessible to someone like Kaplan. But in the relaxed and clubby setting of the tennis court, they let down their guard. He became their confidant, enjoying a position similar to Warren Beatty’s hairdresser in the movie “Shampoo.”

KAPLAN: “When you’re on the tennis court, you’re like a psychiatrist. Everybody tells you their problems. I had a woman in Bel-Air tell me she was going to bed with another broad, and little did she know the broad she was making I was giving lessons to. I had one woman who took lessons in the nude. Just with her tennis shoes on. She was a sun freak. She said, ‘Do I turn you on?’ I said, ‘No, you don’t.’ I feel very sorry for a lot of these people, because deep down inside they’re really very lonely, and they have no one to talk to.”

Of course, it’s only a short step to exploiting their vulnerabilities in a swindle.

KAPLAN: “You get to know them and they get to know you, and all of a sudden they like you and you see they have a few bucks, and you put the whammer on them.”

At Hidden Hills, the “whammer” was once again the sale and promised resale of tennis court surfaces, and the mark was Richard Somers, founder of a successful cellular-phone company. Somers, who had already run through three or four tennis instructors who’d failed to advance him beyond a beginner, can’t resist calling Kaplan the “best teacher in the business,” at the same time he tells the story of how Kaplan took him for $12,000.

Kaplan promised to double the money, and as a reference, he suggested that Somers call another resident of Hidden Hills. For days he nagged Somers, asking, “Did you call him yet?” But Somers, a self-made businessman, figured there was no reason to call the people Kaplan used as references--of course they’d vouch for him. Interestingly, if Somers had called the man, as he did much later, he’d have learned that Kaplan had conned him out of money, too.

RICHARD SOMERS: “Is that amazing? Is that gall? By the way he insisted that I call, I had no reason to. I’m not an easy target for a con man. I grew up on the streets. Started in business with nothing. But all I can say is, if you remember ‘The Sting,’ that’s kindergarten stuff. This was better.”

On Feb. 19, 1989, Somers wrote Kaplan the $12,000 check. One more time, Kaplan vanished, and one more time, with funds in his pocket, he became Hal Lansky. He even felt the urge to get married again. This time he set his sights on a 47-year-old cocktail waitress at a North Hollywood restaurant.

Just 10 days after swindling Somers and leaving Stewart, Kaplan married again in Las Vegas. He and his new wife stayed together briefly before the money ran out, and shortly afterward Kaplan was arrested in Van Nuys, not far from Hidden Hills, and charged with grand theft in the Somers sting. He pleaded guilty and was given two years in prison.

It was when he was paroled 10 months later that the state of California finally barred Kaplan from tennis courts and country clubs. But California is a big state, with few probation officers and innumerable tennis courts.

In the spring of 1991, Kaplan sought and easily won a job at the Northridge Tennis Club. He even gave an interview to The Times promoting the 13-court facility. He became the club’s most popular instructor, and soon Northridge promoted him to director of tennis. There was talk of another imminent promotion to club manager with a salary of $80,000.

About that time, Kaplan approached Bob Ennis, a well-to-do businessman and a member of the Northridge club, explaining that a dentist he knew near San Jose was expanding his office and needed a quickie loan. Ennis so liked his coach that he volunteered to put up the money with no thought of even sharing the profit. On Aug. 1, 1991, during his regular Saturday morning lesson, Ennis handed Kaplan $11,000 cash--and never heard from Kaplan again.

BOB ENNIS: “I still have no bad feelings toward Hal, I’ll say that truthfully. I was unhappy about the situation; but after I thought about it, I said it was my own dumb fault. The sad thing is I liked the man very much. He’s a great coach. Fabulous. If he was still out here in California and went into teaching, I would still take lessons from him.”

SIX DAYS LATER, KAPLAN turned up in New Haven, making an instantly favorable impression on the regulars at 500 Blake Street and, ultimately, on Lindy Gold. His New Haven con and his performance as Hal Lansky there would turn out to be the subtlest and richest to date. “There wasn’t any item too small to have an elaborate story to go with it,” says Gold.

In the fall of 1991, the newlyweds vacationed at Turnberry Isle Resort in north Miami, and Hal refused to leave the grounds for fear, he said, of being recognized by enemies of Jake and Meyer Lansky still living in the area. The brothers had maintained homes there when they had interests in illegal casinos just over the Dade County line.

Kaplan’s detailed knowledge of Lansky history was derived from no other source than the newspapers. His identification with Meyer Lansky, one of the century’s most powerful mobsters, can be seen as comic and even pathetic. Yet the choice makes sense psychologically. Kaplan identified with the master of the soft touch, a Jewish gangster who used brains and finesse to amass riches, in contrast to many in the crudely violent Mafia.

Hal’s ongoing cultivation of Gold was as masterful as his Lansky portrayal. Lindy was politically prominent in New Haven. She sat on the city zoning board and the Democratic state finance committee. She also moved in the old-line, cliquish social circles of the city. She drove a red, two-seat Mercedes-Benz, and she liked to drop the names of her friends in local government and law enforcement. Hal perceived that she was vain about her small-city prominence, and he exploited her desire for visibility, escorting her to an endless round of restaurants.

Two evenings before Christmas, he met her at 500 Blake Street, which was packed with a festive holiday crowd, and insisted she step outside. Grinning like a naughty child, he presented her with a black Mercedes 500 SL, the top of the line. Kaplan and Ted Brooks, Gold’s brother-in-law, had visited a dealer, traded in Gold’s old car and bought her and Ted’s wife, Laurie, matching Benzes, with list prices of $105,000. Gold thought Kaplan was nuts to spend so much on a car, but more than ever she believed that she had found herself a generous and devoted mensch .

The next day, he asked her for a second loan: $40,000. Once again the money was for his friends’ New York restaurant. Gold no more hesitated than when he’d asked for the first $25,000 the week after the wedding. Obviously, Kaplan, who’d just laid out a fortune on a new car, was good for it. She went to the bank and took out a note for $40,000, and later she increased the loan to him by $10,000 more.

“I don’t want you to have the impression I was happy to be a clueless airhead about his business,” Gold says. She regularly pressed Kaplan for details about his work, and he offered what seemed consistent and plausible explanations. Almost daily he reported talking to “the boys”--his employees--in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. He regularly took limousines to Manhattan “on business.”

In December, Kaplan promised to arrange a meeting with his lawyers to lay everything out for Gold. But the big sit-down had to be canceled, he said, when negotiations between his people and the IRS moved into a critical phase. He promised everything would be resolved by April 15. Then he’d fly Gold to California to tour his properties. She bought tickets for April 25.

Inevitably, the elaborate house of cards began to tumble. Three days before they were due to fly west, Kaplan took a limo to New York. Late in the day he called to say he was tied up and had to stay over. Gold asked if he had a hotel. “Oh, don’t worry, the boys will take care of it,” he assured her. She didn’t hear from him all day Thursday. By Friday she was distraught. She called her sister and brother-in-law, who insisted that she meet them for lunch.

At a downtown restaurant Ted Brooks delivered astounding news: “It’s about the car. I put up the money for it. Hal asked me not to say anything.” Kaplan was supposed to pay Brooks back on Wednesday, the day he had vanished. Gold’s face turned ashen. She made her way unsteadily to a pay phone to cancel the joint credit cards she’d given her husband. Later that day she had a well-connected friend run a computer check of a Social Security number he’d given her. The number was nonexistent.

On Saturday Kaplan telephoned. “The feds seized everything--the businesses, the house, the cars,” he moaned. He told her he’d run away because he was too embarrassed to tell his wife he was suddenly broke. He asked to come home. Gold, who was angry but also curious to know how deep his deception ran, allowed him back. Over the next two weeks she asked her law enforcement contacts to investigate his background.

Eleven days after his return, on May 6, Kaplan fled again. This time he cleaned out all his possessions except some dress shirts monogrammed H. J. L. By then Gold knew that the man she’d married was really Harold Jay Kaplan, with a rap sheet dating back to 1965.

She was furious. She didn’t find what he’d done amusing or forgivable. She swore out a police complaint, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Two days later, Kaplan mysteriously returned to New Haven. Dropping his bags with a friend, he called his wife and said he wanted to come home. She refused. Instead, she contacted Sgt. Billy White of the New Haven police. Sgt. White found Kaplan at the bar of 500 Blake Street, where he’d whiled away so many convivial hours. White asked him to step outside and placed him under arrest.

JAILED ON A $110,000 BOND, Kaplan is being prosecuted by the career criminal unit of the Connecticut state attorney’s office, a signal to the court that he should be dealt with harshly, unlike the turnstile treatment he received in California. He faces felony charges of first-degree larceny and second-degree forgery, the latter for lying on his marriage certificate. No trial date has been set. From jail Kaplan has written Gold, confessing his undying love, but she has not replied, and in January she had the marriage annulled. He still insists that he loves her.

“There’s been only one other woman, outside of the first woman I married when I was a kid--one woman I have loved with all my heart and soul,” he says forcefully. “She’s everything in the world to me. She’s the epitome of a woman. And she is Lindy Gold. I’m not saying that because we’re sitting here in this room in New Haven Correctional Center. Lindy Gold is the only woman I ever truly, really loved.”

On the one hand, Kaplan’s declaration is patently self-serving. His attorney has decided not to move for a speedy trial in the hope that given enough time, Gold will have a change of heart and agree to a deal in which Kaplan will pay restitution rather than go to prison long-term. In this scenario, eternal love is Kaplan’s best defense.

On the other hand, his strenuous declaration has the ring of emotional truth. He might indeed love Gold. After all, once he fled New Haven for the second time, why was he self-defeatingly drawn back? Couldn’t true love be the answer?

It may well be that the final story of Harold J. Kaplan is one of delicious irony, of a con man conned by his own scam. But there is this: During March and April, when he traveled to New York ostensibly on business, he was instead making new friends in new bars, including one Maria Santos, a 45-year-old Brazilian-born immigrant. It was to Santos’ apartment that Kaplan repaired after he took off from New Haven the second time; it was after Santos got suspicious of him that Kaplan returned again to Connecticut.

When he first met her, in a piano bar on Third Avenue, he said he was a California businessman in partnership with Donald Trump.

“Are you married?” Santos asked.

“I’m not,” Kaplan replied, “but I want to find a nice girl.”