Police Seek Rapist Who Uses Phone Scam

Police are looking for an ex-convict who has allegedly stolen $18,000, sexually assaulted two women and raped another in Los Angeles since June.

Richard Alan Minsky, a Massachusetts native, may have been last seen in the lobby of the Radisson Valley Center Hotel in Sherman Oaks on Monday calling women listed in the phone book from a pay phone and impersonating relatives in peril, police said.

“He goes to a hotel in a large metropolitan area--usually a large hotel--a place with a lot of background noise,” said Det. John Metcalf with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Financial Crimes Division.

Then in a hoarse, urgent whisper camouflaged by the din of a loud lobby, he will tell the woman he is in trouble with the law or being held hostage by criminals.

“If they ask him to identify himself he’ll say, ‘You know who this is,’ and they’ll offer the name up,” Metcalf said. “Then he tells them he’s putting a lawyer on and he says, ‘Do what the attorney says if you love me.’ ” Then Minsky allegedly impersonates a lawyer by the name of Miller or Schwartz and tells the woman to meet with a witness of the bogus crime or with one of the imaginary hostage takers to rescue the loved one.

“He’ll continue to build on concern: ‘You need to do whatever you can to convince a witness not to come forward. Are you willing to flirt with him? Will you wear [suggestive clothing]?’

Usually Minsky lures the women to the hotels to proposition them for money and sex.

“He’s very good at this,” Metcalf said. “He’s probably done it thousands of times, and I’m sure he’s succeeded hundreds of times.”

This is not the first time Minsky, 54, has worked his con in the San Fernando Valley, Metcalf said. Ironically, Metcalf’s first case as a Van Nuys detective trainee 26 years ago was a man impersonating relatives from a bank of phones at the Valley Hilton--now the Radisson Valley Center Hotel. It was Minsky, Metcalf said, but before the detective could catch him he had fled to Florida and was arrested and prosecuted. Georgia also convicted him of the same kind of crimes.

In 1996 Boston police saw Minsky calling women from pay phones in a hotel lobby and arrested him. His pockets were full of dimes.

Minsky was imprisoned in Massachusetts until June, when he allegedly headed straight for Los Angeles after failing to register with Massachusetts’ sex offender database, Metcalf said.

Three days after Metcalf was transferred from the LAPD’s Special Fraud section to the Financial Crimes Division, he noticed a police report with a familiar set of facts.

“I had no doubt who it was--I could take today’s victims and put their names on those old reports,” said Metcalf, adding that Minsky used the same Los Angeles hotels--the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills and the Holiday Inn in Santa Monica--for his alleged crimes more than two decades ago.

“This guy is a real creature of habit,” said Metcalf.