Music Scam Put Squeeze on Parents

Like most parents, Rafael and Rosa Delgado had big dreams for their kids. So when they received a phone call from the Children’s Academy of North Hollywood with offers of free accordion lessons for their 7-year-old son, the parents jumped at the opportunity.

Delgado said his excitement grew a few weeks later when one of the school’s owners told him and Rosa that their son had a bright future in music, provided he worked hard and took more lessons, and they invested in a refundable $10,000 bond.

But instead of creating a protege, the school left the 45-year-old truck driver from San Fernando and his family $38,000 poorer and a target of creditors demanding payment on three maxed-out credit cards.

As it turned out, Delgado was one of hundreds of working-class Latino parents from Riverside to the San Fernando Valley who authorities say were victimized over the last four years by three alleged grifters who preyed on their financial naivete and age-old parental yearning to provide a better life for their children, police said.

As the parents fended off debt collectors, Delia Milagros Leon, Omar Adalberto Arroyo and Juan Manuel Rocha took the illegal proceeds from their accordion schools to live the high life, Los Angeles Police Det. Juan Baello said.

There were trips to Miami Beach, Milan, Amsterdam and Puerto Rico, a $2,700-a-month rental home in Woodland Hills and luxury vehicles--a Mercedes-Benz, a Lexus and a Lincoln Navigator, Baello said.

Arroyo, an actor and salsa singer who used the stage name Luis Omar, allegedly spent more than $100,000 of the stolen money to record and promote his debut salsa album, “Asi, Asi.”

Leon, formerly Mario Alberto Yunis, used $33,000 to pay for a sex-change operation and was listed as the executive producer on the Omar CD under the alias Maryleen Spielberg, detectives said.

Her attorney, Bradley William Brunon, declined to comment Friday. Leon, who was arrested Oct. 26, faces 46 felony charges, including identity theft and credit card fraud. She is being held at Twin Towers jail in downtown Los Angeles.

Authorities were still looking for Arroyo, who is believed to have fled to his native Puerto Rico. He faces 45 felony charges filed by Los Angeles County prosecutors.

Together with Rocha, who also was arrested Oct. 26 and faces nine felony charges, the alleged con artists stole more than $1 million, detectives said.

They established schools in Van Nuys, Glendora, North Hollywood, Long Beach, Panorama City, Pico Rivera, Montclair, Toluca Lake, Riverside and Mission Hills, according to detectives. Parents were lured with promises of free accordion lessons for their children, who were administered a phony test that showed they were musically gifted. That determination often was enough to motivate parents to sign up for more classes.

In reality, the classes were as overcrowded as the instruction was limited, said Jack Miller, a former employee who taught at one of the Van Nuys schools for about a year beginning in 1997.

He described classrooms packed with 7- to 14-year-olds, none who could read music and some who could not fit their arms around accordions their parents had purchased from the alleged swindlers.

“The telephone solicitors would bring in 100 to 200 new kids every week,” Miller said. “I can still visualize the sweetest little girl with an oversized, used 120-bass accordion. Her mother had paid over $2,000 for that instrument and it was only worth, at the most, $200.”

The parents’ financial information provided the biggest boon to the suspects, detectives said. The constant flow of credit cards, Social Security numbers and driver’s licenses allowed them to obtain cash advances and open new lines of credit.

When it seemed as if parents or authorities might be on to the scam, the trio would close up shop and move to a new location, police said.

Victim Lourdes Alcala, 22, said the operation charged more than $2,000 on her mother’s credit card after her 7-year-old sister began taking classes in June at the Kid’s Musical Kingdom in Mission Hills.

The school hired Alcala to recruit students by handing out “‘music scholarships,” but within a couple of weeks she began hearing stories of rip-offs from disgruntled parents.

“When they found out I knew, they threw me out,” she said.

Although Leon had an earlier grand theft conviction for stealing $40,000 from a North Hollywood parent under her previous name of Mario Yunis, detectives said she had become brazen. She bragged of being “untouchable” and “a ghost” following her sex-change operation, police said. But she did not count on Sara Cerretti.

Six weeks ago, the 28-year-old former university professor from Mexico landed a job as a secretary for a music school but became suspicious when a man she identified as Omar asked her to open a bank account in her name and oversee the music school’s payroll.

She opened an account at a Wells Fargo branch in Sherman Oaks the next day with help from one of Omar’s assistants, she said. But she became even more nervous when she noticed her name on incorporation papers as president, vice president and secretary. What made it even worse, she said, was the man who accompanied her was a co-signer on the documents but did not seem to know his own Social Security number.

“He had to open a folder to read the number,” she said. Later that day, she visited the music school in Mission Hills and noticed parents were upset because they had not received accordions. The next day, she closed the bank account and notified police.

At the time of their arrests, Leon, Arroyo and Rocha were trying to obtain $40 million in financing for a feature film project, detectives said.

“They had their dreams,” Baello said. “Unfortunately, fulfilling that [dream] meant destroying everybody else’s.”