Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [51]
The police did a little checking around, realized Frank was selling phony advertising all over the place for a nonexistent publication. This was worse than simply passing a bad check; the charge was bumped up to running a confidence game. At the trial—held three days before Christmas—the prosecutor managed to produce a copy of Frank’s criminal record, insofar as it was known. Bessie was surprised by what she learned that afternoon, as the district attorney detailed her husband’s previous offenses. The record began in May 1914, when Frank had been arrested as Harry Sevilla, in Fresno, California, on charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor; he had served ninety days in the county jail. The next known crime occurred in August 1919, when, as Frank Gilmore, he had been arrested in Sacramento, on a charge of embezzlement. The judge asked for clarification. “Apparently,” said the prosecutor, “the accused managed to steal a truckload of fur coats from a place where he was employed.” Frank somehow finagled probation on the embezzlement charges (Fay, Bessie learned later, had hired a well-connected lawyer) and was ordered to remain in the state. But he didn’t. Less than two years later he was picked up under the name Walter Saville in Seattle as a fugitive from justice, and returned to Sacramento. Once he was back in California, the sentencing judge revoked his probation and gave him ten years in San Quentin. He was paroled after two years of hard labor.
“We believe,” the prosecutor said, “that there may be other records for Mr. Laffo under other names in different jurisdictions. It is also likely that this defendant has committed other confidence game and embezzlement crimes—and perhaps crimes of a more serious nature—elsewhere in this state or country without being detected, or perhaps has fled proper arrest. He is obviously a man adept at wielding numerous aliases. We, in fact, are not certain of his real name, even at this time. We recommend a lengthy sentence. Though this was not a terribly serious crime, Harry Laffo is a man clearly given to criminal behavior, and if nothing else, we would like to hold him long enough for other states to run a record on the names that we have and see if he’s wanted under any other charges.”
Judge H. E. Munson sentenced Harry R Laffo to five years in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Seeing the devastated look on her husband’s face, Bessie found herself feeling more pity for him than anger. He looked like a crushed man, and for the first time she saw that he was already an old man. “This is outrageous,” she thought. “He has already paid for his other crimes, and these small-town nobodies are railroading him to puff up their own measly feathers.”
After a few days, Bessie came to the difficult decision that she could not stay in Colorado while Frank served his sentence at the penitentiary at Canon City. She didn’t feel equipped to support herself in a strange place and take care of two small children at the same time. She took Frankie and Gary and, right after the New Year, headed back to her parents’ farm in Provo to wait for her husband while he did his time in prison.
I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION A COPY OF MY FATHER’s Colorado Department of Corrections records. There isn’t much to the file, though the little that is there tells a fair amount, at least as far as my father is concerned. For example, the file