A Master of the Fine Art of Escape : Courts: He broke hearts and wallets posing as an English lord. Now, after a second hung jury, he may walk away from charges of transporting a stolen painting.

The painting is beautiful, even after 350 years.

But the rare work by Flemish master David Teniers the Younger was not the only reason federal marshals, an FBI agent and a detective from Scotland Yard were especially watchful in a Downtown Los Angeles courtroom the past two weeks.

“Peter the Cheater” was in the room too. And the fine art of escape--not old masters’ portraits--was on some people’s minds.

Twice before when British police caught up with the man calling himself Lord Peter Charles de Vere Beauclerk, he had slipped out of their clutches.

And Thursday in Los Angeles, it appeared that he might have done it again.

But this time, the pretend peer--who is actually Charles Crutcher Jr. of Long Beach--did not have to punch out detectives or drive madly through a hedgerow, among the escapades that won him headlines in the British tabloids.

All he had to do was sit silently in federal court as frustrated U.S. prosecutors twice failed to convict him of illegally transporting stolen property--the painting--out of the country. Two times in the last two weeks juries were unable to reach a verdict on the single count.

U.S. District Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer said she may dismiss charges against Crutcher, 45.

“I think two hung juries are enough,” Pfaelzer said, though emphasizing that she will not make a final decision until this morning.

It’s been a bitter disappointment to British authorities, who twice flew witnesses to Los Angeles in an effort to send Crutcher to federal prison for up to 10 years.

“I would certainly cooperate if they decide to try him again,” Scotland Yard Detective Sgt. Richard Ellis said from England, where he returned when jurors began deliberating.

According to authorities, Crutcher was a middle-class American raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood before he surfaced 15 years ago in London, cultivating a make-believe title and an upper-class lifestyle.

To his Chelsea neighbors, “Lord Peter” was a dignified gentleman who wore bowler hats and impeccable suits and carried a neatly furled umbrella when he took his Labrador, Hussar, for walks.

To his friends, he was either a successful international financier who belonged to the same polo club as Prince Charles or an investments adviser to the Vatican.

But to a long string of women swept off their feet and then jilted by Crutcher, he was a heartbreaker.

In fact, Crutcher was using the name “Charles de Crevecoeur”--which means “broken heart” in French--when he was arrested in October at a Belmont Shore surf shop, where he worked as a $6-per-hour sales clerk.

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During the two trials in Los Angeles, several former girlfriends from England and the United States testified against Crutcher as authorities sought to tie him to the 8 1/2-by-6-inch Teniers oil painting, titled “A Peasant Filling His Pipe,” that disappeared from a British art gallery in 1987.

Authorities said the painting reappeared last year when Crutcher shipped it from his Long Beach home to another London gallery in hopes of selling it for $150,000.

When the gallery owner discovered the Teniers was stolen, he notified police. Investigators from Scotland Yard were stunned to learn that Crutcher was involved.

He was a familiar figure to them--and to readers of British tabloids, which years earlier had headlined the exploits of “Lord Peter the Cheater.”

Crutcher earned that nickname after several women accused him of wooing them and then leaving them and a string of debts. At the time, he was married to a British woman and was the father of a 3-year-old daughter.

His notoriety only increased when he allegedly escaped twice from British police trying to question him.

“Fake Lord Fought His Way Out of Police Clutches,” trumpeted the London Daily Telegraph after he fled the first time in 1978. While London detectives were taking him to a police station, he persuaded them to let him stop first at his flat to change clothes. There, “he assaulted both detectives, knocking one unconscious, and escaped,” according to the Telegraph account.

The second getaway came the next year, when police located him at a pub near Oxford. Crutcher was said to have bolted from the tavern, jumped into a rented car and driven through a rhododendron hedge to avoid police who were blocking the pub’s driveway.

He was eventually caught and jailed for assault and for defrauding one of his girlfriends, according to British records. But several years later, he resurfaced as a British judge’s personal assistant.

Crutcher was back in the news in 1986 when he was hired by Sir Gervase Sheldon, a High Court judge, after claiming to be a London law student. He had “conned his way there” by posing as a graduate of Oxford University, reported the News of the World tabloid.

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According to Ellis, Crutcher was being sought by British authorities on charges of “deceit” and shoplifting from Harrod’s when he dropped out of sight in the late 1980s.

It turned out he had returned to the United States.

Crutcher’s new California friends later described him as an articulate, athletic man.

“He said he’d worked in the financial market in Europe,” said John Griff, a Long Beach real estate agent who became Crutcher’s roommate after they met as competitors at a triathlon. “It struck me as odd he was working as a store clerk, especially for a man of his intelligence.”

Seal Beach resident Pam Endicott, a waitress at a Belmont Shore bistro where Crutcher was a regular, recalled how “he never talked about himself.”

Crutcher was arrested Oct. 19 at the Shore Sports shop, where he had worked for two years, after Scotland Yard enlisted the FBI’s help in the stolen painting case.

Because of his past escapes, Crutcher was held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

British authorities, aware that their charges were too minor to warrant extradition proceedings, did all they could to help U.S. officials convict Crutcher--even locating one witness on a remote island off Wales.

Nevertheless, the first trial ended Jan. 13 with a hung jury, the panel leaning 11 to 1 for conviction, according to one member.

Last week, authorities returned three British witnesses--along with several of Crutcher’s former American girlfriends--to testify in the second trial.

Crutcher did not take the stand either time and his colorful past was not discussed in court. His lawyers, public defenders Neison Marks and Frederick Lacey, also declined to let him be interviewed.

His defense was that his father had given him the painting and that he had no idea it was stolen.

An FBI agent testified that Crutcher, when arrested, insisted that his late father, a former South Gate High School graphic arts instructor, had purchased it for $29,500 in 1986--even though the painting was not reported stolen until the next year.

“I asked him how his father saved enough money as a teacher to buy this fine painting and he said his father ‘hoarded money,’ ” agent Virginia Curry told jurors.

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At each trial, the testimony was over and done with in little more than a day, sticking to the basics of the attempted sale of the 17th-Century painting.

Judge Pfaelzer ordered jurors at the second trial not to discuss their deliberations. But Jack Hooper, a Highland Park resident who served on the first panel, said the one holdout juror was “hung up on the value of the painting and the possibility of others being involved.”

But even the majority, who wanted to convict Crutcher, were puzzled by the lack of the information they got, Hooper said.

“We’d sure like to have known the background of the guy,” he said.