Category: Phony soldiers

Earlier this summer, we highlighted the work of Bulldog and the boys at Guardian of Valor on Hans Rudolph Gresham who served on the board of the worst rated charity National Vietnam Veterans Foundation with J. Thomas Burch. Gresham had claimed to be a Special Forces Captain in Vietnam, but his records say that he was a PFC clerk typist in Germany with no time spent in Vietnam.

GoV has updated their research – they’re getting push back from Gresham’s friends.

So again they tried to show me the letter from General Yarborough, and again I tell them that this holds no water as it was written in the 90’s.

They also showed me photos of Mr. Gresham with the director of the CIA, trying to also convince me that he was also some type of secret agent for the Government. I had to just shake my head. We left the meeting with a promise to meet with Mr. Gresham the following Friday in Charelston, S.C. I awaited the phone call for the meeting but it never happened.

These investigations aren’t the result of pulling a name out of a hat and concocting a case against someone. We approach them as if we’re presenting a case in court – because all too often, lately, that’s what we end up doing. In fact, I try to exonerate the subject before I write a word.

I had a case like that this week. The NPRC said the guy had no service, but I had a feeling that they were wrong, when I emailed the subject, he presented me with proof that he was exactly who he claimed he is – so you didn’t read about him.

Bulldog is just as diligent when he makes these busts as me – as far as I know, he’s never been wrong.

In regards to Gresham, a PFC chaplain’s assistant in the 82d is a long ways from being a Special Forces Captain in Vietnam.

Promising a meeting and then not meeting doesn’t help your case.

Someone sent us their work on this Thomas Magnum Reister fellow. He also goes by the name Thomas Riester. He’s in San Antonio, Texas, and he somehow convinced Service Dog Express to give him a service dog named “Connor”. This post used to quote from an article that the dog people wrote in which they claimed that Reister suffered “unimaginable things that only other Wounded Warriors could comprehend”. When we highlighted that, the dog people decided that they’d take the blame for it and they said that Thomas hadn’t told them that he was a combat veteran, that they made it up for their organization. OK.

But they haven’t been able to explain how he wears this fugly Desert Storm Veteran cap everywhere, you know, seein’s how he’s not a veteran of Desert Storm;

He’s been homeless at times since he left the Navy and he blames PTSD for his bad behavior, but I don’t know how much PTSD he has or which “unimaginable things that only other Wounded Warriors could comprehend” he’s seen. He spent three years in the US Navy from 1985 to 1988 (he left the service more than two years before Desert Storm) and another nine years in the Navy Reserves. He has no awards for any deployments to combat;

The way I understand it, he does have some disabilities in regards to his legs and knees and he’s being treated by the VA, but those are not service-connected injuries.

The folks at Military Phonies sent us their work on this character Thomas Wayne Hudson. He’s walking across America to shed light on an unresponsive Veterans’ Affairs Department – an admirable endeavor. The problem comes when he calls himself a disabled Vietnam veteran. From Military Phonies;

[I]t appears that Thomas Wayne Hudson may have deceived the General Public into believing that he is a disabled US Air Force Vietnam Veteran. One or two media mishaps are understandable. Multiple media outlet mishaps without any retractions can only mean one thing — that the media has been misinformed about Thomas Wayne Hudson’s military service record. The wearing of the two AF Vietnam Ball caps are a prime example of the deception. There is not a law against wearing the hats but he does so when being interviewed so has to be aware that people are making that association.

His FOIA says that he spent two years and a couple of months in the Air Force, he didn’t spend anytime in Vietnam, evidenced by his lack of any service awards. His only award is the National Defense Service Medal;

Hudson claims that he was mistreated by the VA for whatever disability he’s being treated, but he also admits under scrutiny that it’s not a service-connected disability. So, he’s not a “disabled Vietnam veteran” the way that most of us would understand the phrase. He’s one of the 9 million Americans who served during the Vietnam War – a Vietnam Era veteran who is also disabled. But I guess that’s too much to put on one of those fugly caps.

This is the Reader’s Digest condensed version of Mr Hudson – there’s much more at the Military Phonies website.

About a year and a half ago, we talked about Darryl Lee Wright, a fellow in Idaho that bullied the government into awarding him a Purple Heart and a Combat Action Badge for the time he heard an explosion once during his tour of Iraq in 2005.

He bullied the US government into about $751,400 worth of benefits, including payments to his sister for being a caregiver – a caregiver he didn’t need. The woman who busted him for his fraud, CJ Jackson lost her job and racked up about $20,000 in legal bills fighting her own employer.

Wright is looking at five years in prison this morning at his sentencing according to KOMO News;

For taking benefits he wasn’t owed, Wright, now 48, could spend the next five years in prison. That’s the sentence federal prosecutors have asked U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle to impose Thursday.

Wright previously pleaded guilty to two felony counts related to the scheme. His sister Karen Wright was sentenced to probation on Aug. 17 for her role in the long-running fraud; prosecutors claim Darryl Wright enlisted friends and family in Snoqualmie area to help in the scheme he led.

[…]

To sell the lie, Wright concocted documents, pressured government workers and forced his way into benefits meant to help Americans who’ve sacrificed dearly serving the nation.

[…]

While claiming to be housebound by his disabilities, Wright coached basketball, dated and worked. He served on the Snoqualmie Planning Commission, serving as chairman while claiming he couldn’t ride the bus or go out in public because of crushing PTSD.

[…]

“Wright is such a prodigious liar that it is impossible to know the truth,” [Assistant U.S. Attorney David Reese Jennings] said in court papers. “The number of lies, false documents, and the extensiveness of his scheme are without comparison.”

UPDATE: The judge says that the sentencing hearing will take more than a day because he wants to put a number on restitution, according to Fox News.

The folks at Military Phonies send us their work on this fellow Gary Erdman. Apparently, he did have four years in Marine Corps, but that wasn’t good enough for him. Here’s what he claims to have earned in his claimed ten years of service;

From a really sad copy of his DD214 that the NPRC sent, through all of the smudges, we can sort out what does and doesn’t track;

He spent four years on active duty, he was an ammunition storage specialist, not a sniper, not Recon, unless he reconned the snackbar for his fellow POGs.

He may be home from a lot of places, but Iraq isn’t one of those places. No scuba training, no airborne training, no combat action ribbon. No valor medals.

I’ve been sitting on this one for more than three years, He’s a slippery one, this Colt Kelly Lee Vernon Albert Bulot fellow. Those are names that he uses. The first time I talked to him, he was on Facebook and he sent me DD214s;

He sent me four photos of the same document with the same handwritten scrawl in places and that made me wonder – I’ve never written on an original copy of my DD214 so I don’t know what would motivate someone to do that. I asked him about his class dates – the Ranger Tab and Special Forces Tab were in many of his photos. He merely said that he didn’t want to give those dates to me. The folks at Green Beret Poser Patrol asked him and he gave them the same answers – that he wanted to keep that information private.

The problem is that the information isn’t private. I checked with the Ranger Training Brigade and I couldn’t find a class number for him. Our friends at Green Beret Poser Patrol couldn’t find a record of Bulot attending SFQC either. His FOIA which also list the tabs, don’t make mention of his training;

According to his DD214, his last assignment was to the 1/221st Armored Cavalry in the Nevada National Guard which is part of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The period of active duty on his FOIA that lasted from 2005 – 2007 was when 1st Squadron of the 11th ACR was in Iraq and 1/221st covered their duties as aggressors at the National Training Center. The 1/221st had a deployment to Afghanistan, but I can’t find a record of him being on active duty during that time frame.

The only training in his FOIA and his DD214 is Drill Sergeant School and what looks like 11B training.

His 2-1 is a mess but it shows that he had some time in the 82nd Airborne Division briefly, but there’s no training like Ranger or Special Forces;

He has a son who looks like he’s a totally legit soldier, but this Colt Bulot has had several chances to come clean and he just won’t.

Back in 2012, we first wrote about John Spodofora, the mayor of Stafford, New Jersey, when he pretended to be a secret squirrel Vietnam veteran. A few days later we published his records. Earl Galloway, one of Spodofora’s critics, started spoofing Spodofora on a Facebook page that he created. The mayor got upset and sent the full weight of his police force against a citizen critic. They used the same technology that police have available to track real internet criminals.

Ultimately, it was determined that Galloway had done nothing illegal. So he sued Spodofora and the town for using the police to conduct a baseless investigation of him that almost cost him his job. He settled in court the other day for $34,000, according to the Ashbury Park Press;

Spodofora had told police from the outset that he suspected Galloway was behind the Facebook page. Galloway had been an ardent critic of Spodofora’s military claims and had confronted him about it during public comment time at Stafford Township Council meetings, over which the mayor presides.

The “fraudulent Facebook profile,” as it is referred to in police documents, was photographed and stored as evidence. A Stafford police detective then contacted the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, where an assistant prosecutor advised that there was indeed sufficient evidence for a wrongful impersonation investigation, according to the police report.

I wonder how the citizens of Stafford feel about their taxes paying for an investigation and now to settle a lawsuit so John Spodofora can continue to be a phony secret squirrel Navy special warfare Vietnam veteran.

Andy11M sends us a link about Roy Lee Ross Jr., a.k.a. Daniel Alfred Sullivan Jr., 64, of Morganton, North Carolina, who was a deserter from the Army in Hawaii in 1978. He was given an OTH discharge (under conditions other than honorable) in lieu of a court martial after he was apprehended. I guess he lived to regret that discharge – he represented himself to the VA as Daniel Alfred Sullivan, a special forces Vietnam veteran who had been wounded and suffered from PTSD.

Ross was diagnosed in 2007 with service-related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and began receiving health benefits from the VA.

In 2012, based on the PTSD diagnosis and his numerous false claims about war wounds and military honors, Ross filed for and received disability-based compensation at a rate of 60 percent and a retroactive lump sum of $18,349, according to the indictment. He also began receiving a monthly tax-free compensation of $1,026.

In 2014, he filed for more compensation, claiming he suffered pain from being shot in the neck during combat.

His disability rating was increased, reflecting an increase in his monthly tax-free compensation to $1,743.

In 2015, still falsely claiming to be Daniel Sullivan, he filed a third claim for “increased evaluation,” claiming he was suffering from neck pain due to wounds he received on active duty, according to the indictment. He was awarded $3,490 in back payment, and his monthly disability payment was increased to $2,906.

He also scammed about $60,000 of medical care and another $10,000 in travel vouchers, and another 10 grand for vocational rehab.

It looks like the only reason that he got caught was because he got greedy not because anyone thought he was lying. I’ll bet there’s a doctor out there who will still defend him because he described symptoms of PTSD.