Category: Phony soldiers

George Rosario is running for mayor in Groveland, Florida. He claims to be a veteran of 21 years. According to the Orlando Sentinel, he also claimed to have been awarded the Purple Heart and two Bronze Star Medals for his time in Desert Storm on his website (which is mysteriously altered from the Sentinel’s version now).

His Facebook page used to have a picture of him wearing a Purple Heart hat;

Mike Vitale, a veteran himself, busted him on the two Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart;

Vitale requested a meeting with Rosario and asked that he bring paperwork proving his medals.

When Rosario showed up to Vitale’s office recently, he brought paperwork showing he was awarded a National Defense Service Medal, signifying service in the Gulf War. The ribbon has two small bronze stars on it, which Rosario’s campaign manager said was the source of mistaken reference to “Bronze Stars.”

Vitale said Rosario explained the hat was purchased by his wife and his “staff” maintained the website.

Said Vitale: “You’re the vet, your supposed to know this better than this better than anyone …That’s ridiculous.”

Vitale asked Rosario to remove the photos from his Facebook page, which the candidate did.

The statement confirmed that Rosario’s “preliminary” website did say he had achieved a Purple Heart, because Rosario appealed to the military board and figured he would be quickly awarded the medal.

Due to election season, he said he didn’t have time to go through with the appeal and made corrections to his website “when it was brought to my attention.”

He continued, “Now, despite what has been said, I’m a proud veteran who has been awarded many medals, including two bronze stars on my DD 215 [certificate of discharge] for my overseas duty in Southwest Asia.”

The article says that Rosario was going to explain it all last night at a meeting, but I don’t see an explanation on Facebook or on the website.

How many times have we heard the excuse that the valor thief’s wife was confused and that “staff” screwed up a website?

Here’s Rosario’s statement;

“I would like to set the record straight because I have nothing to hide regarding a recent rumor. I have a webpage that describes my achievements. It did contain a Purple Heart in my preliminary webpage.

“I was to appeal to the military board, when I put the Purple Heart on my webpage thinking it would get approved quickly. Because I was busy with my election, I did not have the time to do my appeal, so I wanted to make corrections to my site when it was brought to my attention.

“I will be in the process of appealing to the Army military board to continue to obtain my Purple Heart. Now, despite what has been said, I’m a proud veteran who has been awarded many medals, including two bronze stars on my DD 215 for my overseas duty in Southwest Asia.

Yeah, no one claims a Purple Heart without actually having one and a 21-year veteran that doesn’t know the difference between two bronze service stars on Southwest Asia Service Medal and two Bronze Star Medals Needs to turn over his pension.

We first wrote about Paul Tillson nearly five years ago. Sometimes you don’t need a FOIA to spot a phony. But we got his records a few months later. More than a year ago, he pleaded guilty to defrauding the Veterans’ Affairs Department for 13 years and $150,164 in disability benefits, based on his claims of combat-related injuries.

Last week, he was sentenced according to North Jersey.com. Six months in prison, six months of home confinement, and two years of supervised released.

It looks like he got off pretty easy – I don’t see him paying restitution to the VA.

Someone sent us a link to this Gretchen Evans’ Facebook profile and we found the picture above interesting, so we sent for her records. It turns out that she is indeed a retired sergeant major with a long career in the National Guard and the Reserves as an intelligence specialist and a military police officer. But, what got me interested is the Free Fall wings. According to her records, she didn’t earn those wings;

I also don’t see any Air Assault wings in her records. She did go to the Basic Airborne Course, but she got carried away.

I also don’t see a Combat Action Badge in her records, nor is there an assignment to the 82d Airborne Division. She was assigned to Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan for her only deployment;

She’s wearing overseas bars for three years of deployments, but I’m not seeing it in her records. It’s all pretty low grade pretending, but she’s a sergeant major and she should be held to a higher standard. I guess she figures that she was cheated in the badges department, so she just pinned on some pretty ones.

Wednesday morning we all woke to the news that two Boston cops had been shot by Kirk Figueroa when the police intervened in a domestic dispute. Figueroa was a Boston constable who had passed local background checks for the job – he served papers in civil litigation. According to one police official, he was like a milkman, providing a service and not authorized to carry a weapon.

He also had a security company – Code Blue Protection Corp. According to the Army Times, before that website went belly-up, it claimed that Figueroa had been an Army military policeman for ten years. The Boston Herald wrote about him;

Kirk Figueroa, the 33-year-old man killed in a frenetic Wednesday night firefight, left a paper trail that spanned the East Coast and describes him, in part, as an ex-Army Reservist well-versed in handling guns and private security.

According to the Times, though, he had enlisted in the Army Reserves and that’s as far as he got;

Figueroa, founder of Code Blue Protection Corp., claimed on his company’s website, www.elitepolicing.org, he served nearly a decade as an MP, but he served a mere five months, according to an Army spokesman.

“Mr. Figueroa never attended basic training or advanced individual training. He did enlist in the U.S. Army Reserve in February 2003, but received a hardship discharge five months later,” Wayne Hall said in a statement.

So he was an Army reservist in the most remote sense of the term – he’d never spent a day in any kind of training beyond a little drill and ceremony.

He injured two police officers, but despite his body armor, other officers were able to put him down. I heard reports yesterday that claimed that he used an “assault rifle” against the police, but, it turns out that he had a shotgun, not a rifle.

Reportage on the incident wasn’t the media’s finest hour.

One of our Canadian friends send the news of a bust they made up there recently; Daniel Roy was a homeless bum on the street claiming to be a member of the Canadian Airborne Regiment in Somalia during the 1990s, that he suffers from PTSD and that he’s collecting money on the street to pay for his medication to treat his stomach cancer.

The Department of National Defence could not confirm or deny that Roy served with the Canadian Armed Forces based on the information he had provided to the Star. Rob Prouse, a veteran of the Airborne Regiment, was unable to find a record of a man under the name in the nominal roll that listed those deployed to Somalia in the early 1990s.

Prouse listed many issues with the uniform Roy was seen wearing: the badge above the medal ribbons would not be worn on a Canadian uniform; the badge on the maroon cap is not from any unit that was authorized to wear the beret in Canada; the jump wings aren’t Canadian, and the flags on the lapels should be unit insignia.

Toronto police say that he’s been arrested for unlawfully wearing the uniform of “a Captain in the Canadian Army, contrary to Section 419 (a) of the Criminal Code”.

A picture our friend sent us;

Someone sent us their work on this fellow, Clarence “Mac” Evans, a native of Clarksburg, West Virginia now living in the New Orleans area, who has been claiming for years that he was part of the 29th Division’s assault on Omaha beach in Normandy on June 6, 1944. He claimed that he was with “G” company, 2d Battalion, 116th Infantry in the first wave of the assault on Fortress Europe. For example there’s this account in NOLA.com;

He was 17 on June 6, 1944, when as a 135-pound soldier in G Company, 2nd Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment of the 29th Infantry Division, he stormed ashore in the first wave at Omaha Beach in a LCVP, a New Orleans-built Higgins Boat. His 11 months of fighting across Europe began at 6:30 a.m., that day.

“It was a slaughter,” Evans said. “Company A and Company B went in right on target, and within 30 minutes, both companies were gone.”

His G Company was supposed to land with A and B companies but was forced to go ashore about 3/4-mile away. There, Nazi bunkers were invisible to the Navy destroyers miles offshore that were supposed to remain in an area already swept for mines. But unable to effectively target the Nazi bunkers, the destroyer squadron’s commander ordered the group to leave the safe waters and to move closer to shore.

“Then the five-inch guns, they could see where they were shooting,” Evans said. “And those five-inch guns were firing flat trajectories, and that’s when things started to break loose. So we really owe our debt of holding the beach to the destroyers of the Navy and to the paratroopers inland that kept the enemy from sending in reinforcements.”

And another NOLA.com link;

But on D-Day, June 6, 1944, that made Evans and his fellow soldiers easy targets for German troops as soon as the front went down. When he saw his buddies being picked off, Evans said he cut off all his equipment and climbed over the side, leaving his rifle behind as he dropped into the chilly water that was becoming bloody.

“I crossed the beach with nothing but wet clothes,” he said. “I didn’t even have a slingshot.”

Several hundred people sitting on white folding chairs in the museum’s U.S. Freedom Pavilion: The Boeing Center grew quiet as Evans described the carnage he saw on Omaha Beach and his reaction to it.

His dominant memory was of a soldier “trying to put his entrails back in” his uniform after he had suffered what turned out to be a mortal wound, Evans said. “For 71 years, there hasn’t been one solitary day that has passed when I haven’t seen that boy.”

Because of what Evans experienced on D-Day, “It doesn’t take long to develop hatred in combat when you see your friends fall,” he said. “You lose your humanity, and it’s hard to get that humanity back because there’s so much hatred in you.”

Nevertheless, he said he kept on fighting, advancing to the Ruhr River until he was sent home in February 1945 after being hit with a mortar shell. In addition to that physical wound, Evans said he returned to the United States with what has since been called post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I carried that war home with me,” said Evans, who said he started drinking heavily.

Of course, he has a Discharge to support his claims;

Remember that serial number 35847110, that will be important later on. All of the dates have been changed so that he could be in Europe for D-Day. His actual birthdate, according to records was November 14, 1926, he joined when he was 17 in December 1943 – that wouldn’t have put him in Europe for the invasion, though, so he altered those dates by one year on his discharge;

The Army doesn’t know that he was with G Company 2/116th infantry like he says. They think he was with Company C, 723rd Railway Operations Battalion and that he was stationed at Lincoln Army Airfield in Lincoln, Nebraska. At least that’s where he was when he went on leave to get married on June 7th, 1944;

He was married on June 12th, that year, just six days after the Normandy invasion;

Then to celebrate his nuptials and the invasion of France, he went AWOL on June 14th;

He returned to duty on June 18th;

He did finally make it to Utah Beach on D-Day+136, October 22d, 1944 with “A” company of the 743rd Railway Operations Battalion. His arrival doesn’t seem as eventful as he made it sound though;

Evans spent the remainder of the war in Antwerp with his railway operations unit. It’s easy to keep track of him in Antwerp because he was on sick call several times during his tour there, so he shows up in the morning reports of the company;

He really didn’t get an opportunity to earn a Combat Infantry Badge or a Purple Heart. He reenlisted in Munich, Germany as a PFC on November 29, 1945, and he did make his sergeant stripes eventually, but not until a few years after the war. So much for his claim that he was sent home with shrapnel wounds in February, 1945;

You can also note in the photos above, the lack of a Purple Heart, no 29th Division patch, no CIB, no Bronze Star in the earlier picture. If you think that there might be two Clarence Evans, you’re probably right, but the serial numbers in the morning reports, 35847110, all match the one on the bogus discharge.

Evans has reaped the benefits of his wild-ass stories, the Légion d’honneur was awarded to him from the French government in recent years;

He got free trips to Normandy pretending to be a D-Day survivor. Folks tell us that he was a guide on the Stephen Ambrose tours of Normandy until someone put a bug in their collective ear about his lies;

If you’re wondering why there is no FOIA, it looks like his records were completely destroyed in the 1973 National Archives fire and Evans took advantage of that by manufacturing his own version of his military career. But his constant appearance in the company morning reports tracks his career pretty well during the war.

A number of journalists in Louisiana have been alerted to this story, but they probably need a little shove to get it told to a wider audience.

Someone sent us their work on this Henry Stephan Marks, who is known around the Beechmont Racquet and Fitness Club as Steve Marks, or “The General”;

They got the idea that he was a general because of this DD214 that he flashes around;

When I look at a DD214, the first thing I look at is the document version. This one is the 1966 iteration. That’s strange because the document was supposed to be for service as late as 2014. I retired in 1993 and my DD214 version was 1988 and there have been at least two versions since then.

Nothing about Marks’ discharge is correct. It’s supposed to record his service from the rank of private soldier E-1 to flag officer Brigadier general. That would never happen. There would be a DD214 when he finished OCS and went from being an enlisted soldier to an officer.

I could go through the DD214 point-by-point, but why – the National Personnel Records Center says “Who?”;

On the date that Marks claim he was promoted (August 1, 2014), the Pentagon had no record of him being on active duty;

He told folks that he’s been called back to active duty this year, but the Pentagon doesn’t remember asking;

Just another old liar

An article has been circulating on social media about Democrat Frederick John Lavergne who is running for a seat in New Jersey’s 3rd Congressional District. Lavergne and his brother think that if he wins the seat in Congress it will relieve some of his debts, I suppose. But the stolen valor aspect cropped up when someone looked into the background of his veteran healthcare advisor, William Devereaux, who was appointed director of veterans programs for the New Jersey Department of Military and Veterans Affairs by Gov. Jim McGreevey several years ago.

It was discovered that Devereaux falsified his military records and used those records to get himself some VA benefits, according to Philly.com back in 2011, he avoided prison because he told the judge that his wartime experiences in Vietnam made him falsify his military records and get seven years of tax breaks as a phony 100% disabled veteran, saving himself $54,132 in taxes;

At his sentencing, the Vietnam War veteran acknowledged it was a “horrible mistake” to embellish his service record, but insisted that his war experiences left him 100 percent disabled.

[…]

Although Devereaux claimed he was 100 percent disabled, the military said he was only temporarily disabled.

Authorities said Devereaux also lied about being in combat and receiving combat medals, including a Purple Heart, the Soldiers Medal, and the Bronze Star with “V” device.

Devereaux claimed he was a paratrooper and artilleryman, exchanged fire with enemy combatants, was involved in a friendly fire incident, and was injured multiple times, authorities said.

Investigators found that Devereaux was never a paratrooper or artilleryman. He served as a finance clerk in South Vietnam for four months and 11 days in 1968. Authorities said they found no record of combat medals or combat injuries.

Yeah, he didn’t need to be a wounded veteran for his job helping veterans, but he couldn’t resist. So that makes it only natural that he’d be a good veteran advisor for a congressman.