John P. Kluth Jr., charged with cheating eight more victims, is arraigned yesterday.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — More prominent Rhode Islanders have stepped forward to acknowledge that they fell victim to a con game run by former lobsterman John P. Kluth Jr., including the state jury commissioner and an investigator for the attorney general’s consumer-protection division, according to allegations made in Superior Court.

Kluth, 47, a native Newporter whose last known address was in Bristol, was brought to court yesterday from the Adult Correctional Institutions, where he is awaiting trial on previous charges, and arraigned in eight new cases of alleged fraud.

Assistant public defender Joseph Dwyer entered a not-guilty plea on behalf of Kluth, who spoke only to identify himself to Judge Daniel Procaccini.

Kluth is charged in the new cases with pretending to need money to fix a truck carrying a perishable load of lobsters, or a variation on that tale, in order to flim-flam:

Alan Shawn Feinstein, the widely known philanthropist; Eugene McMahon, state jury commissioner; John Sullivan, an investigator for the attorney general’s consumer-protection division; Kevin M. Doyle, a retired Marine Corps colonel and provost marshal, which is an officer assigned a police function; Thomas Hichar, a certified public accountant; Nathan W. Chace and William V. Devine Jr., both lawyers; and Edward W. Reardon, a retiree.

The defendant is charged with eight counts of obtaining money under false pretenses for allegedly tricking the new crop of alleged victims into giving him sums ranging from $25 to $3,620. According to the attorney general’s office, which filed the charges against Kluth, the new cases bring to 40 the total number of Rhode Islanders defrauded or otherwise victimized by Kluth, and to $27,195 the total sum lost by his victims.

Hichar was especially generous to Kluth in April 2005, according to the new charges. Six times that month, Kluth persuaded Hichar to write checks to him for purposes such as repairing a broken-down lobster truck or boat or to pay dock fees for the boat, and the CPA paid out $3,620 all told. The truck, the boat and the dock allegedly were all fictitious.

Kluth already faces charges that he allegedly flim-flammed a retired Superior Court judge, a special assistant attorney general, a retired criminal investigator for the Internal Revenue Service, and two executives in the financial-services industry, among many others.

According to law enforcement authorities, the defendant generally used the same tactics in recent years to dupe people: he would strike up a conversation on the street or in a public place and persuade a person that they were neighbors or somehow acquainted.

Once the ice was broken, he would tell them of a load of lobsters in a disabled refrigerated truck. He needed a loan right away in order to get his truck fixed and to salvage the cargo, he would say.

When he repaid the loan, according to the old and new charges, he would generally promise his prospective benefactor that he would drop off some free lobsters, too. But his alleged victims and the attorney general’s office said the cargo did not exist, and that he did not make good on his offer.

The alleged con man often knew something about the person he was targeting, such as where the person lived, the church where he worshipped, or the name of his wife, and that was crucial in establishing the familiarity necessary to coax money from his target, according to the authorities. They have said they do not know for sure how Kluth learned the information.

“He’s a smooth talker,” Smithfield police Detective Douglas Cerce has said of Kluth.

Kluth often used an alias, but in some cases he acknowledged his real name to people who gave him money, according to affidavits filed in court that were made out by his alleged victims.

Kluth said in an interview with The Providence Journal this year that he suffered a series of personal setbacks, including a back injury that left him disabled for a time, and that he became a heroin addict. He insisted, however, that he often obtained money for legitimate purposes such as his living expenses.

He has a considerable criminal record, court and police records show, and his crimes have varied from obstructing police and resisting arrest to receiving stolen goods and passing bad checks. In 2000, he was convicted of having used a fraudulent check to pay fines in state traffic court. In 1995, records show, he was caught buying heroin in South Providence with his 4-year-old son in the car.

Judge Procaccini yesterday ordered that Kluth be held on $50,000 bail with surety on the eight new charges. There is a Massachusetts governor’s warrant and a detainer from Connecticut indicating that authorities in those states want to prosecute Kluth on similar charges.

And there is an accumulation of so much surety and cash bail set in pending Rhode Island cases that setting new bail is virtually an academic exercise because Kluth cannot raise the existing sums as it is, Assistant Attorney General Stephen A. Regine told the judge in court yesterday.

gsmith@projo.com