Duking It Out With Peter the Cheater

Lord Peter the Cheater was trying to talk himself out of a prison term stemming from a stolen 350-year-old oil painting when last we heard from him.

The Long Beach man had been exposed as a smooth-talking con artist who set Great Britain on its ear by romancing a string of women while pretending to be a member of the English aristocracy.

He had pleaded guilty to taking a stolen 17th century painting by Flemish master David Teniers the Younger out of the United States and trying to sell it to a London gallery for $150,000. But he had reformed, Charles Lee Crutcher told a federal judge in Los Angeles in 1994. He had changed his ways, he promised.

Now a dispute that is boiling over in Long Beach is focusing new attention on the 57-year-old, who is using the name Charles Decrevecoeur.

A Long Beach woman who contends that she is his latest victim has accused Decrevecoeur of posing as a Long Beach firefighter as he continues his romantic ways. She says she has gone to court to keep him at bay and gone public to “prevent other women from going through what I’m going through.”

Decrevecoeur has retaliated by alleging to the Department of Motor Vehicles that she is an unfit driver, reporting her to the Internal Revenue Service as a tax cheat, telling the college where she takes classes that she made unauthorized use of a school database and accusing her of misrepresenting herself to a healthcare group to get free passes to a trade show, according to court papers.

“He’s trying to ruin my life,” said Jeannie Maxon, a 50-year-old hair products manufacturer and distributor who lives in a beachfront apartment in Belmont Shore. Although she denies each of Decrevecoeur’s assertions, she has been ordered by the DMV to present medical documentation by the end of May to prove she is fit to drive.

“I want people to know about Charles,” she said. “He’s charming, but I feel he’s dangerous.”

These days, Decrevecoeur is far from the upper crust of England. He works at a Starbucks in a Long Beach strip mall and says it’s part of a penance for his past pretend life.

In an interview, he acknowledged that he “went too far” in boasting to people he was a firefighter and said he agonized over reporting Maxon to the DMV and to other places.

But he says that he now is a changed man -- and that this time he means it.

“I know now I have to actually work the rest of my life. I’ve done exemplary work at Starbucks,” he said. “It’s given me an extraordinary opportunity. I’ve cleaned up my act.”

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Charles Crutcher was acting like aristocracy in the 1980s in Great Britain.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in Lakewood, he moved to England in 1977.

His Chelsea neighbors knew him as Lord Peter de Vere Beauclerk, the son of the Duke of St. Albans. He dressed in dignified, well-tailored suits and bowler hats and always carried a neatly furled umbrella when he walked his Labrador named Hussar. He variously described himself as a highly educated investments advisor to the Vatican or as a financial consultant to the city of London who belonged to the same polo club as Prince Charles.

Although authorities said he was married to a British woman and had a 3-year-old daughter, Crutcher swept a string of other unsuspecting women off their feet, including the daughter of the royal jeweler. When he asked her to marry him she said yes.

Oddly, Crutcher placed an announcement of her engagement to Lord Peter de Vere Beauclerk in the London Daily Telegraph. It was immediately spotted by the real Lord Peter’s brother who -- with police in tow -- confronted Crutcher at a pub. As plainclothes officers moved in, the pretend peer jumped into a rented car and sped off, dragging along one policeman who was hanging on to the car’s door handle. He drove through a rhododendron hedgerow to escape.

According to Scotland Yard, Crutcher was being hunted by authorities on charges of “deceit” and shoplifting from Harrod’s when he dropped from sight in the late 1980s. About the same time, a rare oil painting by Teniers called “A Peasant Filling His Pipe” disappeared from a London gallery.

The 8 1/2 -inch-by-6-inch painting reappeared in London in 1993. Crutcher had shipped it to a gallery in hopes of selling it for $150,000. The gallery operator notified police when he discovered that the Teniers painting had been reported stolen in 1987.

Scotland Yard investigators asked for the FBI’s help. When Crutcher was arrested at a Belmont Shore sports shop where he worked as a $6-per-hour clerk, he said his late father, a former South Gate High School graphic arts teacher, had hoarded money and purchased the Teniers painting for $29,500 in 1986 -- a year prior to its reported theft.

Several former girlfriends from England and the United States testified during two Los Angeles trials. One jury could not reach a verdict and a mistrial seemed to be looming in the second trial as Crutcher unexpectedly pleaded no contest to illegally taking the stolen painting out of the U.S.

He was sentenced to a year in federal prison.

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Jeannie Maxon says that when she became acquainted with Charles Decrevecoeur about seven years ago, he was an athletic, articulate and affectionate man who claimed to be a Long Beach firefighter and paramedic.

“I’d run into him on the beach. One day he asked me for my phone number. At the time he was dating a neighbor and living with her. He claimed to be interested in one of my hair care products,” she said. “I started occasionally dating him.”

It wasn’t until later that Maxon learned of Decrevecoeur’s exploits in England. “One day a woman knocked on my door and said she had heard about me and was worried,” she said. The woman was one of Decrevecoeur’s local ex-girlfriends.

Maxon surreptitiously photocopied Decrevecoeur’s firefighter photo identification card and took it to Long Beach Fire Department Stations 1 and 14, where she said he claimed to go each day dressed in a Fire Department uniform. “They said they’d never seen him before,” she said.

Fire officials confirmed that Decrevecoeur has never worked for the department. The fake identification card even misspells the fire chief’s name, said Annette Hough, manager of the department’s administration bureau.

According to Maxon, she repeatedly tried to sever relations with Decrevecoeur, only to have him try to sweet-talk himself back into her life. She said she ordered him out of her ocean-facing residence after she discovered he used her computer to make unauthorized purchases on her credit card. When she called police to evict him, she said he claimed joint tenancy in the apartment.

Decrevecoeur denies using her credit card or her computer. But in an interview he said his relationship with Maxon qualified as a domestic partnership at the apartment and at Starbucks -- where he enrolled Maxon for medical benefits.

Maxon said their relationship was over and she had locked Decrevecoeur out of the apartment when in March he smashed a window trying to get in.

“I called the police and when they got here he faked a heart attack,” she said. “Instead of taking him to jail they took him to the hospital. He had the ambulance bill sent to me. The next day I went to court and got a temporary restraining order against him.”

That stay-away, no-contact order by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kenneth Black was later made permanent through 2011.

It is similar to restraining orders sought in 1990 and 1997 against Decrevecoeur by two other local women, according to records.

In an interview, Decrevecoeur blamed the window-smashing on an accident caused by shortness of breath. “I basically collapsed on the front porch hyperventilating and was lying there, sort of flailing toward the window,” which had already been weakened by its rusty, damaged frame, he said.

But he acknowledged regret over his past.

His impersonation of English aristocrat Peter de Vere Beauclerk “was a joke, a prank” that stemmed from “a 500-pound bet with friends that I wouldn’t be able to pass myself off as a British lord,” he said. “It was a very bad, stupid idea. I paid the price.”

He never collected on the bet -- which he claims was earmarked for charity. “I was in jail,” he explained.

As for pretending to be a Long Beach firefighter, Decrevecoeur said he had completed emergency medical technician training when he joined a citizens community emergency response team and participated in several drills with real firefighters. “It kind of made me feel good to be one of the good guys, and unfortunately, I took it a step further,” he said.

His relationship with Maxon and his eventual real, paying job at Starbucks convinced him it was necessary to finally change his life, he said.

“It was time to step away from my past and move forward. I’m getting older. Time is running out to make amends,” Decrevecoeur said. “I am deeply saddened by the way events unfolded and unraveled our lives.”

Maxon is unswayed, however.

Decrevecoeur’s Lord Peter the Cheater nickname may be have faded away, but his new name is appropriate, she said.

“Decrevecoeur” loosely means “heartbreaker” in French.