Anyone You Want Me to Be (3 page)

I
n 1969, Robinson became a systems analyst for Mobil Oil, the best job he’d had thus far. His pleasant appearance and glib manner had once more helped him land the position. No one at Mobil had bothered to look into his background or discover that he was still on probation. His own probation officers were so impressed with his new employment that they believed he’d put his past behind him. While he was working at Mobil, the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole wrote a letter stating that Robinson “does not appear to be an individual who is basically inclined towards criminal activities and is motivated towards achieving middle class values.”

A second officer, this one a female, offered the opinion that Robinson was “responding extremely well to probation.” She encouraged him “to advance as far as possible with Mobil Oil.”

His advancement was soon cut short when he was accused of stealing 6,200 postage stamps from the corporation, worth just under $400. He was fired and charged with theft but ended up paying restitution and again avoiding jail. Because his record in Kansas City was lengthening, he and Nancy made plans to leave the area. In 1970, the Robinsons moved back to Chicago. John took a job as an insurance salesman with a company known as R. B. Jones; he made such a good impression on those interviewing him for this position that no one at the firm thought about running a background check on him (most businesses would normally only do that for those who raised suspicions). Robinson was good at selling insurance policies and had found something he could be successful doing, despite his having violated his parole in Kansas by coming to Illinois. But after working there only a few months, he began stealing from his employer, embezzling $5,586 before he was caught and fired. Once more the police were brought in, but Robinson avoided jail by making another restitution payment, and the charges against him were dismissed. With no prospects in front of him in Chicago, and a hopeless record as a corporate employee, he began thinking of a new career direction: he wanted to form his own business. He had more connections in the Kansas-Missouri region than in Illinois, so perhaps he should resettle in Kansas City. This decision was made easier when a Chicago court told a Kansas circuit court that he’d just broken the law in Illinois. Robinson was ordered back to the Kansas City area and his probation was extended for three more years. The family headed west again and settled in Raytown, Missouri, where he opened a medical consulting firm called Professional Services Association, Inc.

In 1971, as he was trying to establish the company, he was arrested for a parole violation and sent to jail. A Missouri probation officer named Gordon Morris studied Robinson’s recent history of con games and small-time thefts, concluding that he needed some time behind bars. In Gordon’s view, such punishment would serve as a “strong motivation for a complete reversal” in Robinson’s behavior and could only help this chronic offender. In spite of the strong recommendation, the inmate was released after only several weeks. Back on the street, Robinson’s criminal instincts immediately took over, and he created an investment scam designed to steal $30,000 from a retired schoolteacher named Evalee McKnight. His repeated arrests had done nothing to stop him from devising more scams.

An unsettling dance was taking place between Robinson and law enforcement. He kept breaking the law and the system kept giving this white-collar offender second and third and fourth chances. Many people believe that career criminals can be rehabilitated, but the evidence doesn’t support that. Robinson perfectly fit the profile of someone who could not be motivated or forced to change. You can’t rehabilitate a mind that was never “habilitated” or socialized in the first place. You can’t force repeat offenders to feel the pain their actions cause the victims. You can’t instill empathy in people who don’t have this quality. You can’t cure ingrained cruelty or greed. These people rarely get better in their psychological health after going into counseling, but only become worse and more sophisticated in their deviancy. They’re often quite intelligent and quickly learn the buzz words of psychotherapy and the kinds of behavior that are effective in front of prison therapists or other officials. They know how to present themselves as if they’ve been rehabilitated—they know how to talk convincingly. Yet they are constantly becoming more mission-oriented and their mission is not to redeem themselves but to hone their skills. They don’t study the real techniques of healing or of helping themselves; they study their own past errors when committing crimes so they can get better at their work and further their careers, just as any other professional does. And they get more daring.

One day in the early 1970s, Robinson was running Professional Services Association when he asked his secretary, Charlotte Bowersock, to prepare some letters for prospective clients. The letters stated that the Board of Regents of the University of Missouri–Kansas City “had voted [Robinson] the full rights and privileges of professor” at the School of Dentistry. The secretary, a naive young woman who needed this $7-an-hour job, mailed out the letters even though they were filled with lies. For one thing, UMKC had no Board of Regents. If that claim weren’t bold enough, the dental school dean’s signature had been forged on the letters. This scam was imaginative but went nowhere, unlike another one that Robinson had recently launched.

He’d presented himself to the University of Kansas Medical School as a financial consultant for its Family Practice Department. His new business suits, his smooth manner, his ability to speak well, and his general sense of appearing competent had impressed the physicians. Everyone he met at the medical school liked him, so Jack Walker, the department chairman, hired him, believing Robinson to be “an expert as a physicians’ professional consultant,” he once told the
Kansas City Star.
Walker was also the mayor of the respectable Kansas City suburb of Overland Park. He may have been taken in by the man’s people skills, but he wasn’t so impressed when he began hearing stories from the doctors in Orthopedic Surgery about how the new consultant was handling that department’s money. A few months into the job, Robinson was let go after being suspected of theft.

Then he approached John Hartlein, the executive director for Marion Laboratories, a well-known pharmaceutical company in Kansas, and asked the director to invest in PSA. When Hartlein declined the offer, Robinson fabricated a letter from Marion Labs to himself, suggesting that it wanted to acquire PSA. Robinson sent the fake letter out to potential investors and added Hartlein’s signature at the bottom. The letter also referred to the founder of Marion Labs, Ewing M. Kauffman, at that time the owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Baseball was highly popular in Kansas City, and Kauffman was one of the metropolitan area’s most prominent citizens. The letter read:

Robinson misspelled Hartlein’s name the first time he used it and misspelled Kauffman’s name as well, but those were minor problems compared to what was coming. Some of those who got the letter were quite familiar with both Marion Labs and Ewing Kauffman. Mac Cahal, a Prairie Village businessman, received the forgery and took it seriously, committing $2,500 to PSA before deciding that he should phone Kauffman to talk about this investment. The call unleashed outrage.

“Ewing,” Cahal told the
Kansas City Star
some time later, “hit the ceiling.”

Cahal contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission, which sent forth investigators to look into Mr. Robinson and Professional Services Association. Two years later, a Missouri federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment against him for false representation, securities fraud, and mail fraud. Six months after that, Robinson pled out to charges of interstate securities fraud. Three more weeks passed before U.S. district judge John W. Oliver levied a $2,500 fine against the defendant and extended his probation for another three years. Beyond that he received no further punishment. In the last half dozen years, he’d gotten two similar sentences but spent only weeks behind bars.

By pleading no contest to the most recent charges, Robinson was not held liable for money he’d taken from PSA investors; he didn’t have to pay any of it back. In upcoming years, one of the most puzzling questions surrounding Robinson was where he got the money that allowed him not just to support a wife and four children, but to become upwardly mobile and to constantly improve his lifestyle. He never worked at any job for long, and his legal bills were ever present. One part of the answer was that while he made restitution on many of his thefts, law enforcement personnel have speculated that he never gave back all the money he stole from various businesses (he may, for example, have taken as much as a quarter million dollars from Dr. Graham and Fountain Plaza X-Ray and ended up pocketing most of it). Another suggestion is that by pleading guilty in 1976 to the PSA rap, he may have stashed away thousands of dollars that he’d collected from unsuspecting contributors to this business. Also, he occasionally presented himself to people as a money manager who was eager to help them grow their portfolios. He was as convincing in this role as he was in so many others.

“We can only guess how much money he took from people who were too ashamed to come forward to the police and report it,” says one officer. “The problem is that when this happens to someone, they tend not to want to pursue the charges in court or to confess their own role. When you’ve been taken by a con man, you don’t want to look foolish to the whole world.”

U
ntil now, the Robinsons had been living on the Missouri side of the border, but in July 1977 they relocated to an upscale neighborhood across the state line in Kansas, in the town of Stanley. Using money he’d put away and a breezy, confident manner with the local financiers, Robinson was able to buy a $125,000 nine-room home that sat on three handsome acres in an area known as Pleasant Valley Farms. Stanley was in Johnson County, which was on its way, as people moved out from Kansas City to this rural landscape, to becoming one of the wealthiest suburban areas in the United States. In earlier centuries, Native Americans had lived here and left behind their Shawnee names. The wife of an Indian chief had been called Lenexa—today a large town in Johnson County. The county seat is Olathe, which is Shawnee for “beautiful.” Johnson County was steadily growing, but Pleasant Valley Farms was removed from most of the population. The Robinson property, with its ranch-style design and its fashionable wooden shingles, was surrounded by elm and maple groves. It had a horse stable, a corral, a riding path, and a pond filled with fish. Robinson worked hard to fit in with the country gentry around him. He was often seen out in the yard tending his lawn or building a fence or making something for his children to play on.

At Pleasant Valley Farms, people knew Robinson as a devoted father and scoutmaster. Like his dad, John Jr. was well on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout. Robinson was very visible in the community, teaching Sunday school as an elder in the local Presbyterian church (although he’d been raised a Catholic); at Christmas, he dressed up like Santa Claus and gave treats to all the kids. As president of a group of volleyball officials, he assigned referees to games at area schools and was regarded as a good official himself. The license plate on his new Fiat read
REFEREE
. He’d also stepped forward and served as the “unofficial caretaker” at Pleasant Valley Farms, cleaning up the neighborhood pond and horse trails. He took over the Pleasant Valley Homeowners Association and even went so far as to haul a neighbor into court for failing to use wood shake shingles to reroof her house after it was hit by lightning. In Stanley, he was scaling the ladder of social responsibility and respectability. He bought a couple of horses so he could join the local equine groups. People at Pleasant Valley Farms knew nothing about his criminal past or brief periods in jail.

The move from Missouri to Kansas perfectly symbolized Robinson’s rising fortunes. The Kansas side of the border, if you were living in Johnson County, was a more prestigious address, although some Missourians might argue the point. The 1,200-mile Santa Fe Trail had gone through the heart of Johnson County and helped make Kansas City a prosperous town. The patch of land connecting Kansas and Missouri had seen a lot of rivalry and a lot of American history—much of it bloody. Back in 1838, the federal government had forced a tribe of Potawatomi to leave their home in Indiana, and their route west became known as the Trail of Death. After sixty-one days of hardship and thirty-nine fatalities, their journey ended just to the south of Johnson County. Prior to the Civil War, the antislavery leader John Brown had roamed this part of Kansas spreading his message of freeing blacks from white ownership. In 1859, he was seized at Harpers Ferry in what is now West Virginia and executed.

Kansas was a free state and Missouri was not. Raiders from both sides crossed the border, burned property, and killed their fellow citizens. In Linn County (where John Robinson would eventually buy a farm), a pro-slavery leader named Charles Hamilton and his followers lined up eleven Free State citizens and shot them dead. In October 1864, the largest cavalry battle west of the Mississippi River also took place in Linn County; once the carnage ended, Americans began using the phrase “Bleeding Kansas.” In 1892, the infamous Dalton gang was shot to death not far from Linn County, in the village of Coffeyville, after they were caught robbing a bank. Frank and Jesse James, the Ma Barker gang, and Pretty Boy Floyd terrorized the region as well. And in the mid–twentieth century, two of the world’s best-known killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, had started out on their murderous trek to western Kansas from the latter’s home in Olathe. Their savage killing of all four members of the Clutter family was immortalized in Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood.
The Kansas side of the border had produced legendary lawmen as well, including Wild Bill Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody.

Nearly a century and a half after the Civil War had ended, the old rivalry between Missouri and Kansas lived on in their politics, their sports competitions, and their views of one another across the state line, which ran through the center of Kansas City. The athletic teams at Kansas University in Lawrence were named the Jayhawks, after the pro-abolitionist Jayhawkers during the War Between the States, while the teams at Missouri University in Columbia were called the Tigers, after a home guard unit in the Civil War. In his own peculiar way, John Robinson would eventually rekindle the rivalry that had always existed along the border, but this time it would erupt inside the legal system. The residue of the Civil War still lingered around this landscape, and it didn’t take much to set loose the old bad blood.

At Pleasant Valley Farms, Robinson introduced his newest business venture. Hydro-Gro, Inc., was a company based on the principle of hydroponics, a way of growing vegetables indoors within a nutrient rich environment. He created a sixty-four-page booklet entitled
Fun with Home Hobby Hydroponics
and promoted the enterprise by boasting, “If It Grows, It Grows Better Hydroponically.” He also promoted himself. As you read this booklet, he hoped that you would “form an acquaintance with John Robinson as a sensitive and stimulating human being. John Robinson’s lifetime goal in hydroponics is as far reaching as his imagination.” The book described water-based home gardening products that allowed families to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and other vegetables “in a minimum space, in the corner of your home.” The literature featured a photograph of Robinson’s five-year-old twins, Christopher and Christine, wearing their
GROW YOUR OWN
T-shirts and smiling into the camera. The Hydro-Gro literature claimed that Robinson was one of America’s hydroponics pioneers and a “sought after lecturer, consultant and author.”

Not everyone who knew Robinson at Pleasant Valley Farms remembered him as a sensitive human being. Some neighbors felt that he was condescending and abrupt when they queried him about the business or refused to invest in it. Others heard Robinson screaming at his family members inside their spacious home, with its two large stone fireplaces and well-kept grounds, or noticed him barking orders at his wife and kids. Still others heard stories about how Robinson raised his hand to his wife, and people could see for themselves that he fed his horses so little they seemed in danger of starving.

Those who decided to invest in Hydro-Gro came away from the experience with a very different view of Robinson from the one he promoted in the company literature. Nancy Rickard first met him after her father, Brooks, put up $25,000 for the new business. Nancy’s mother, Beth, was dying of cancer and her father was under pressure to pay the mounting bills; he thought Hydro-Gro could bail him out. Robinson won over Nancy Rickard by hiring her to illustrate his how-to gardening booklet. The Rickards didn’t see any return on their investment. In fact, they lost every penny of the $25,000. No one knows how many other investors suffered similar losses.

One thing in Robinson’s promotional literature was accurate. He did have a “far reaching” imagination. This was evident when he tried to use Hydro-Gro in a grand publicity scheme designed to help finance his business. On December 8, 1977, the
Kansas City Times
carried an article stating that John Robinson, the president of an innovative hydroponics company, had been named the Man of the Year. The honor was bestowed on him for employing disabled people and was presented at a luncheon sponsored by a local sheltered workshop association. The previous year he’d been a consultant at Kansas City’s Blue Valley Sheltered Workshop. When Robert G. O’Bryant, the president of the workshop, resigned, Robinson was elected to take his place. From this position, he’d sent out a letter to Kansas City mayor Charles Wheeler on behalf of the Kansas City Area Association of Sheltered Workshops. The letter asked His Honor to attend a luncheon where awards would be presented to those who’d most generously helped these workshops.

“We would like,” the official-looking document read, “to invite you or a representative from your office to be present for a small keynote speech.”

Robinson wanted the mayor to be there so he could personally hand out the Kansas City Area Association of Sheltered Workshops’ Man of the Year award.

Within two weeks, the mayor’s office had gotten another letter that appeared to be signed by former Blue Valley Sheltered Workshop director Paul Reiff, who was described as the chairman of the Business Recognition Luncheon. This letter mentioned Mildred Quinnett, the mayor’s secretary, and said that Wheeler had approved “a proclamation and commendation or a combination of the two” for the upcoming event. After sending out this letter, Robinson, to make certain that everything was on track for the luncheon, called Quinnett and impersonated Reiff. The trick worked. Robinson was scheduled to receive the proclamation from the mayor at City Hall on December 5, 1977, and two days later the luncheon went off as planned. State senator Mary Gant presented Robinson with a Man of the Year plaque and praised him in a speech that had been written by the honoree himself. He’d also put together a six-page press release about his accomplishments, which he distributed to the media. He claimed to have been a medical consultant for more than 165 clinics or other facilities; the press release quoted numerous medical people about his achievements, all of whom would later deny saying these things.

Nancy Robinson and her four children, along with about fifty local businessmen, came to the event. They all watched as her husband stood up and acted surprised to receive the plaque, then graciously thanked everyone for honoring him in this unexpected way. The
Kansas City Times
covered the story and its headline stated, “Group for Disabled Honors Area Man.” As soon as the article went into print, the phones started ringing at the
Times
with howls of indignation from those who’d seemingly supported Robinson for this award.

The paper quickly discovered that the “honoree” had created the plaque himself, had done the writing promoting himself as a friend of the handicapped, and was behind the entire luncheon and the proclamation from the mayor. Robinson had fabricated everything. The mayor’s office, after learning what had happened, was extremely embarrassed, and the group that had “given” Robinson the award demanded that he cease all contact with them. The
Kansas City Times
ran a scalding story on Robinson, entitled “Man-of-the-Year Ploy Backfires on ‘Honoree.’” It exposed both his shameless exploitation of the sheltered workshops and his extensive criminal background. It was the first time Robinson had received any widespread publicity that began to hint at who he really was.

“I thought, this guy is bad news,” Paul Reiff later told the
Kansas City Times.
“If he’ll use an organization that’s trying to help the disabled to his personal advantage, he’ll stop at nothing.”

Yet most people, including those in law enforcement, still thought of him as nothing more than a small-time con man, a chiseler.