Retired Superior Court Judge John E. Orton III was leaving a branch office of Citizens Bank in Narragansett with $400, his mind on a trip he would be making the next day.

A burly man with an earnest expression approached. He told Orton that he was a neighbor and that he had tried to get Orton’s attention inside the bank.

Extra

--- Audio slideshow: Hear Kluth talk about what he did with the money

--- Gallery: Kluth and two men who say he fleeced them

“A lot of people say hello to me that I really don’t know,” the 75-year-old Orton said the other day. The men chatted for a few moments, but Orton did not quite catch the stranger’s name. They seemed to have a mutual acquaintance, though, lobsterman Teddy Wheeler, of Warwick.

The stranger said he was a lobsterman whose truck had broken down with a perishable load of lobsters. He had deposited a check in the bank but could not spend the money because the check had not yet cleared, the man said.

He was in a pickle, he explained, because he would need to make partial payment before he could have the truck towed for repairs and save the cargo. Would Orton be able to help him out with a $400 loan? He promised to leave the repayment in Orton’s mailbox the next morning.

Orton handed over two hundreds and four fifties.

He had just swum into a trap, the police allege, set by John P. Kluth Jr.

Kluth, 47, is a heroin-addicted former lobsterman from Newport with an extensive criminal record in three states who has been spinning sob stories for years in order to extract money from the softhearted.

“I’ll tell you, this guy faked me out,” said a rueful Orton.

Kluth has police officers and members of Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch’s office shaking their heads over his audacity as they prepare to prosecute him. As word of Kluth spread through Rhode Island, Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut last year and this year, thanks to police bulletins and publicity, at least 46 pending criminal cases have piled up against him.

Thirty-four people in Rhode Island alone say that he stole from them, according to law enforcement authorities, and all but one say that he tricked them with a phony story about a broken-down truck. All told, Kluth’s alleged victims in the Rhode Island cases that have surfaced last year and this year reported that they lost about $22,580. Over the years he has been convicted at least three times of obtaining money under false pretenses, official records show.

“In the old days, they would have called him a confidence man,” marveled Providence police Sgt. Daniel E. Gannon. “It’s one of the most interesting cases that I’ve worked on in my 19 years” as a police officer. Gannon has presented cases representing the single largest clutch of alleged Kluth victims, 15.

Among those who say Kluth fooled them out of some money are Alan Shawn Feinstein, the philanthropist; Edmund F. Murray Jr., a special assistant attorney general; Ernest L. Meunier, a retired criminal investigator for the Internal Revenue Service; and William F. Powers and Gerald J. Fogarty Jr., veteran bankers and investment advisers.

Kluth, who is being held without bail at the Adult Correctional Institutions, told the attorney general’s office that he might defend himself without a lawyer. But he accepted a public defender in a pretrial conference last week in Superior Court.

Massachusetts and Connecticut both have extradition warrants pending, and they want custody of him as soon as Rhode Island is willing.

KLUTH SAYS his has been a harsh life, pulling lobster pots in fair weather and foul, and weathering tragedy and misfortune.

In an interview at The Providence Journal before he was sent back to prison without bail in March, Kluth said he has been misunderstood. From time to time, he has asked people for money, he acknowledged, but he insisted that it was either for a truck that really was in disrepair or for simple living expenses.

Kluth, a divorced father of one son, Brandon, who plays football at Rogers High School, grew up a self-described “wharf rat” and a member of a family with deep Newport roots. He said he studied fisheries at the University of Rhode Island and earned his captain’s certificate, rated to take the helm of 100-ton boats. But his career on the water ended with little or nothing to show for it.

“When I came out, I didn’t have enough luck going my way,” Kluth said of his training. “I would have made it” in the fishing industry otherwise. He wonders aloud if his failure to come to terms emotionally with the setbacks in his life, and the death of his father, have something to do with his addiction.

His heartache and misfortune, as he tells it, began in November 1987, when the 65-foot lobster boat Reliance, on which he had served as a crewman for three years, went down off Nantucket. His “best friend,” skipper Christopher Dennis, and four others perished. He was with Dennis just three nights before the disaster, he recalled, and had turned down Dennis’ request that he fill a crew vacancy on the ill-fated trip.

He had acquired his own 40-foot wooden lobster boat that year, he said, graduating from fiberglass skiffs and pulling traps by hand in his pre-Reliance days to a vessel that allowed him, with a crew of two, to lay and haul many more traps.

Some years later, he said, he lost that boat in Newport Harbor when it was rammed by a yacht that broke loose in a storm. Kluth said looters stole many of his traps and a lawsuit yielded him only a fraction of the value of his sunken vessel.

It was about that time that he took a job at the former Robert E. Derecktor Shipyard in Middletown, where, he said, he suffered a serious back injury when he was struck by a falling 5-gallon bucket of waste oil. He lived on federal disability payments for several years, by his recollection, until they were taken away in the late 1990s.

Despite the injury and what he said was his resultant addiction to prescription painkillers and then heroin, which he said he turned to when he could no longer get the painkillers, Kluth resumed lobstering with another boat of his own, a 24 footer.

In July 1997, he was on the boat with helper Tyrone “Bill” Josey, under the Newport Bridge, when the boat began taking on water. Kluth swam to safety but Josey drowned.

Only three weeks later, Kluth was driving with a buddy, Paul B. LaChance Jr., when he lost control of his pickup truck and crashed on a highway in Maine. He suffered eight broken ribs and LaChance died.

He had the 24-footer raised, but he sold it and never returned to lobstering. Since then, by his account, he has done odd jobs.

“I came from a hard life. And I never, ever, put it on anybody,” Kluth said. “… Anything I’ve had, I’ve worked for. Everything that I’ve done, I’ve done on my own. Any causes, I’ve caused it.”

In District Court in May, he admitted to pulling the lobster truck scam on 66-year-old Clifton Comery, of Coventry, on April Fool’s Day last year, walking away with $200. He pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of obtaining money under false pretenses — no contest is the equivalent of guilty under state law — and was given a one-year suspended prison sentence and probation and ordered to make restitution.

“I have learned my lesson,” Kluth said.

OVER THE YEARS Americans have lost billions of dollars in flimflams, varying from large-scale stock swindles to the small-scale con games of a Kluth, according to lawyer Michael L. Deppe, a former policeman from Indiana and a spokesman for the international organization Professionals Against Confidence Crime.

“They’re career criminals. They make their living doing this, and they know their chance of apprehension is very slight,” Deppe said of con artists who work the street the way Kluth allegedly has. “We tend to romanticize them, as in The Sting and The Grifters. They’re nothing but common street thugs.”

“People have been swindling others for thousands of years,” said Jon Grow, executive director of the National Association of Bunco Investigators and a detective sergeant on the Baltimore city police. Bunco is an old-fashioned word that means swindle.

Grow recalled a scam in Baltimore that played on people’s greed. A guy had a crab truck and would visit bars, he said. The crook would offer to sell people what he intimated was hot merchandise at a discount. He would arrange to meet his mark later, at a particular street corner, but he would collect his money for the seafood up front. Then he never showed up for the appointment.

“None of these con games are a new idea. They just rehash them,” Grow said. Asking for money to fix a fictional broken-down vehicle is one of the many variations, he said.

“If there’s a way to take advantage of human nature, there’s always going to be somebody that’s going to do it,” Grow said.

ON SEPT. 7, 2005, Rhode Island Special Assistant Attorney General Edmund F. Murray Jr. was in his car, stopped at a red light on Dyer Street in Providence. A man called to him by name and came up to the car. The man began chatting, saying that he knew Murray from a pub in Pawtucket that they both frequented and that he was a cousin of a friend of Murray’s.

Murray told the police that he let him into the car. The man said he had a broken-down truck containing several hundred pounds of lobster and that he needed $275 to pay the balance of the repair bill.

They went together to Citizens Bank, and Murray told the police that he withdrew $275 and gave it to the man. They agreed to meet at the pub at 7 p.m., when the man would repay the loan. Murray arrived at the pub, learned that his friend did not have a cousin, and realized that he had been hustled.

The hustler? Murray identified a photograph of Kluth, who is now charged with obtaining money from Murray under false pretenses.

A mystery lingers over some of the Kluth cases. While the police say that he apparently winged it most of the time, he seemed to have researched some of his alleged victims. How did he recognize them, know their names, something about the neighborhoods where they lived, the places they frequented?

Although the police have interviewed Kluth repeatedly, no answers have been made public.

Experts say there are plenty of ways that a con man can come up with a few facts about potential marks, including Internet databases and city directories showing who lives next to whom. Or he could just eavesdrop in a public place, such as a pub.

A con man’s object is to establish a sense of familiarity with his target as quickly as possible, according to Deppe, and he will suggest something that they have in common.

THE AUTHORITIES say many victims are too embarrassed to press charges, and if not for that reluctance, there would be more charges pending against Kluth.

That’s what con men count on, according to Deppe.

“If there were two [victims], there probably were 10 more who haven’t reported it,” he said. “Nobody likes to admit he was duped.”

Bob Fricker, of East Providence, a 74-year-old antiques dealer, is an object lesson. He complained to the police that a man who he later identified as Kluth flimflammed him out of $80 on Forbes Street in East Providence in 2003. As Fricker recalls it, the smiling man fed him a tale of a disabled fish truck, coaxed the money from him and had him convinced that he would repay the money later that afternoon and, as a thank you, give him a five-pound bag of scallops and several lobsters.

Fricker called his friends and announced a seafood party for 6 o’clock that night. By 5:30 p.m., the man had not arrived and Fricker called everyone to cancel.

“Needless to say, I didn’t see or hear from [Kluth] ever,” lamented Fricker, who was so taken in that for the next week he kept expecting the man to ring his doorbell.

“He was a well-mannered person, just a nice soft-spoken person, and you’d never believe he was a con artist. Never,” Fricker declared.

“…I have four friends who are very nasty people, actually five,” Fricker said lightly. “They have never let me forget this.”

Kluth appeared on Feinstein’s doorstep in Cranston one day in late January or early February.

“It seemed he had a lobster truck that was broken down, disabled, and he desperately needed to get the lobsters to market. It would cost him a thousand dollars. He looked to be in an extremely undesirable situation; pale, shaking, helpless,” Feinstein related.

Kluth gave his real name, and Feinstein wrote him a personal check for $450 with the understanding that Kluth’s church would cover the rest.

“…In situations like that, my heart overrules my head,” said the philanthropist, who admitted that he has been conned out of money before. “It makes me realize all the more that when people come to the door unannounced, I should be prepared to say, sorry, no. … I just do not have the time to analyze these [requests] and determine who’s telling the truth.”

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE has charged Kluth with 16 counts of obtaining money under false pretenses and 14 counts of forgery and counterfeiting, all but one felonies.

“He worked the state from one end to the other,” said Assistant Attorney General Stephen Regine, who is prosecuting Kluth. “From Tiverton, to Lincoln Park, to Narragansett, to Westerly. He would be outside hospitals, restaurants, chapels, banks.” One man who was on jury duty in downtown Providence was fleeced when he stepped outside during a recess, said Regine.

A con man strikes out much more than he succeeds, experts say, but he can still prosper.

“You turn him off, he just keeps going,” said Grow. If he gets $200 or $300 a day, tax-free, he is doing well, they say.

And a con man calculates that he won’t suffer much punish-ment, the experts say, especially if he limits the sum that he shoots for. In addition to their embarrassment, Grow explained, victims rarely complain because they figure the police won’t catch the culprit and because it is too much trouble for the amount lost.

KLUTH HAS BEEN convicted of 54 crimes in the three states, according to police and court records and the Rhode Island attorney general’s office, including a 1991 case in which he pleaded guilty in New Bedford District Court to 20 larcenies for passing bad checks.

And that does not count other times when he pleaded no contest to charges and received probation — a combined plea and disposition that in most circumstances is not considered a criminal conviction under Rhode Island law.

His crimes have varied from obstructing police and resisting arrest to receiving stolen goods and passing bad checks.

His record as an adult stretches back to 1979, when he was 19 years old and the Newport police charged him with breaking and entering. He pleaded no contest to unlawful entry and was given three years’ probation.

One of his bigger scores came in 1995-’96 at the expense of John S. Kesson, a 92-year-old retired dairy farmer in Middletown. Police and court records show that Kluth told Kesson that he used to come to his farm as a young member of a 4-H program with the children of a man whom Kesson knew. Kesson did not remember Kluth, but he took his word for it.

gsmith@projo.com