Читать книгу Watch Mommy Die - Michael Benson - Страница 11

OWL-O-REST

For some of the time after Stephen Stanko got out of prison, he had a job, but most of his energy was dedicated toward confidence games. In his heart of hearts, in his innermost psyche, he was a flimflam man. No getting around it.

On December 8, 2004, Stanko—as usual, well kempt and wearing a suit—walked into the Owl-O-Rest Factory Outlet furniture store in a small strip mall between a post office and a suntan place on 17 Business North, in Surfside Beach, South Carolina.

It was a family business, owned by a woman, her ex-husband, and her mom. The woman was Kathleen “Kelly” Crolley, who years later recalled, “The store was started by my stepfather in June of ’83. I originally agreed to help him part-time, while completing college here at the beach. A year later, he passed away.”

The establishment was modestly sized—7,500 square feet.

She was twenty-one at the time. Her mother had four children under eight—and one on the way. The store was no gold mine—not now, and definitely not then— but Kelly played with the cards she was dealt and ran the store to the best of her ability. She made some changes. Now the store stocked a lot of coastal designs and also offered a lot of special orders for people. They worked with about 150 different vendors.

Crolley was one of four people working on the day Stanko came in. He was wearing business attire. Although he was polite enough, he wasn’t relaxed and seemed in a hurry.

“If I was to order a gift for my wife, would it be delivered in time for Christmas?” he asked.

Crolley said it would. All he had to do was say the word and she would place the order immediately. The present would arrive in plenty of time.

“If it doesn’t arrive on time, could you give me a photocopy out of a catalog? You know, so I’ll have something to wrap and put under the tree.”

Crolley remembered saying no problem. The man said he was in the market for a rolltop desk and another one, which would fit into an odd space.

“I think he said four feet. He decided on the one for sure and would think about the other,” she recalled.

Stanko explained that he was building a house on Pawleys Island. As Crolley and Stanko looked at all kinds of desks, discussing the pros and cons of each, he answered his cell phone five times.

“He would walk around the corner, sometimes to accept the call and thank the other party for their contribution, and offer to meet them for lunch,” Crolley recalled. He told them he hoped that he could find people to match their generosity.

She normally would not inquire about a customer’s private conversation, but she couldn’t help herself. She told him that she wasn’t trying to be nosy, but she was curious. “You know, as to what was going on,” Crolley said.

Stanko told Crolley he was a corporate attorney practicing in Texas, but he had taken off work for the past year to a year and a half to begin a charity: the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation.

He was pleased to say it was doing very well. There was to be a big write-up the next day in the Sun News, with all the businesses that were sponsoring the charity. He was giving a plaque to all the businesses that helped. He said he’d raised about $500,000 so far.

His reason for starting the charity couldn’t have been more personal. He had a thirteen-year-old niece stricken with cancer. At that very moment, he said, she was hospitalized at the Medical University of South Carolina.

“My baby girl was born prematurely there. She weighed one pound, twelve ounces, and everyone did a great job,” Crolley said. During that tough time, she’d stayed at the Ronald McDonald House. She couldn’t say enough good about the place, and she was pleased to say that today she had a healthy and happy little girl.

After that brief exchange, the seed planted, Stanko returned to shopping for a desk. There were more phone calls. Crolley left the customer with a couple of catalogs and went to talk to her ex-husband and mom.

“You think it would be okay for me to give one hundred dollars to a very good cause?” she asked them.

She told Stanko that they weren’t able to contribute much, but that the store would like to participate. “He never asked me for a dime!” Crolley remembered, still flabbergasted by Stanko’s acting ability.

He placed the order for one desk, still undecided about the second. As they were doing the paperwork, she noticed the delivery address seemed a little off.

“A lot of my customers are second-home owners or have just moved here and will frequently not know the directions or exact address of their home, so I let it go—but it was a flag,” Crolley explained.

In retrospect—twenty-twenty hindsight—there were other clues that not all was as it seemed. The desk was to be a surprise, Stanko said, a Christmas gift for his wife, so he had to talk with his secretary about how to work out his deposit without the wife knowing about it.

Stanko said he would come back the next day to complete the deal. He wanted to sleep on it before he ordered the second desk.

Before he left, Crolley said, “Wait here, I want to give some money for the cause, and the store does, too.”

Stanko was pleased.

“What was the name of the charity again?” she asked.

“You could just make the checks out to me, Stephen Stanko.”

The red flags seemed so obvious to Crolley years later.

“I could do that, but we’ll need a receipt from you for the store—you know, for tax purposes.”

She gave him an Owl-O-Rest check for one hundred dollars, and one for twenty-five dollars from her. On the receipt, Stanko put the name of the research foundation and signed, from Steve Stanko.

After Stanko left the store with the checks, Crolley ran the sequence of events over and over in her mind and came to the conclusion there was something iffy about that guy.

To be safe, she called the Better Business Bureau and asked if they had any record of Stanko’s charity in South Carolina. They said they didn’t.

After hanging up, she remembered that he’d said he practiced corporate law in Texas. Maybe the charity was registered down there, she thought.

Her next call was to the Sun News. The guy she talked to said he had no knowledge of Stanko’s charity, and knew nothing of the big article scheduled for the next day. Afterward, Crolley suspected that she might not have talked to the right person.

When Stanko did not return the next day, as promised, Crolley still didn’t write him off. She thought perhaps he had gotten busy with “all the commotion,” the Sun News thing, and all of those plaques.

The following day, she called him. During the conversation, he said the Sun News event had gone well, and she had to admit that she’d been busy and hadn’t gotten around to buying a copy of the newspaper.

She said she’d already ordered the rolltop, but he had to place the order that day in order to receive the second desk in time. He asked if he could give her his brother’s credit card number.

Crolley said she couldn’t do that without speaking directly with his brother. Stanko said okay, he would visit the store the next day with the cash.

“I never spoke with him again,” she recalled.

Crolley kept an eye on the checks and found that the store check was cashed at a nearby bank. On the same day the check was cashed, a little video store beside the bank was robbed.

“My mom even went to the video store to inquire as to what the robber looked like, which was kind of awkward for her, but we were afraid there might have been a connection,” Crolley said.

She never did get to the proper authorities to find out the information she was after.

“My personal check was held longer and I was actually concerned—not so much for personal safety, but more for identity theft.”

She had a special watch put on her account and asked around if anyone else had heard of Stephen Stanko.

“I really feared he was bad news, but did not know what to do about it. I wasn’t even sure a crime had been committed, since he never asked for the money,” Crolley explained.

Kelly Crolley’s experience with Stephen Stanko was typical of those first months when he needed cash and was busy thinking up new confidence games.

He felt no twinge of guilt. A man had to do what he had to do. Getting a job was Mission: Impossible, so what else was he supposed to do?

He’d have to cast his spells on people.

He always scammed women, and he made thousands of dollars just with his ability to lie effectively. On some, he pulled the “collecting money for sick kids” bit.

For others, he said, “I’m a lawyer,” and offered various legal services for a fee. When he scored, he’d hit a bar or a bookstore or a mall, and begin trolling for a new victim.

Professionally Stephen Stanko might have been struggling, but his personal life couldn’t be beat. Those early days with Laura Ling—romancing, then cohabitating—were about the best times that there ever were, according to him.

He later said, with no apparent sense of irony, that he and Laura shared a love that was straight out of a Harlequin romance novel. It was an unconditional love. They loved each other without question. They never passed judgment.

Removing the rose-colored glasses, we find something less than nirvana in Murrells Inlet. In reality, Stanko sold Laura and Penny Ling a package of lies, and they bought it all.

He said he had an engineering degree from a military college, that he’d worked as a paralegal. He also told them that he’d practiced law without a license—but that turned out to be the truth.

He kept busy doing things, always painting his activities with broad strokes of legitimacy and benevolence. He was charitable and political, always on the side of good.

Stanko suspected the authorities were keeping an eye on him, and he geared some schemes directly toward them. He wanted to send a clear message that he was trying to succeed, trying to be a positive force on society.

To accomplish this, he’d started a program to help juvenile delinquents return to the straight and narrow. Plus, his literary ambitions were rekindled. He couldn’t divulge the details, he said, but he was working on a major literary work.

As time passed, from 2004 to 2005, Stanko wasn’t feeling the upward mobility he had when he first got out of prison. His genius was rendered all but moot.

To those who bothered to observe carefully, Stanko’s activities were a mask covering up his bleak reality. He was just another ex-con who couldn’t get a job.