Con artist's eye for eBay fraud

With the law on his trail, Fetterman fled from California to Kansas, where his nearly two-year run as a fugitive ended this year with a routine traffic stop on his way to a Frisbee disc golf match.

Fetterman, 35, is now in the Sacramento County Jail facing mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering allegations of orchestrating a scheme with two partners to inflate auction prices artificially on the eBay Web site from 1998 to 2000.

The case, which highlights the hazards of buying art on the Internet and the difficulty of policing the Web sales, forced eBay, an online marketplace with 12 million items for sale, to crack down on so-called shill bidding.

It also cast a spotlight on Fetterman, a murky figure with a history of trying to make a fortune on faux masterpieces, using false names along the way and leaving heartbroken women in his wake.

Fetterman is the alleged ringleader in the plot. His partners, Kenneth Walton, 35, of Sacramento and Scott Beach, 32, of Colorado, have pleaded guilty and are expected to testify against him in a deal that could spare them incarceration.

The trio hosted about 1,000 auctions, selling items they combed from rummage sales and antique shops, according to court documents. Winning bids on the items totaled $450,000, but two-thirds of the bidding was done by the three using more than 40 different user names obtained from e-mail providers using false information. Fetterman faces more than 20 years in prison if convicted.

The scheme created a scandal in the art world in 2000 after Walton, using his online moniker "golfpoorly," posted a red, orange and pink canvas on eBay that he called "GREAT BIG Wild Abstract Art Painting," doctored to look like the work of abstract artist Richard Diebenkorn.

Walton spun a folksy yarn about finding the piece at a garage sale in Berkeley, where Diebenkorn lived in the 1950s, and how his wife wouldn't let him display it. The bachelor later admitted buying the painting with Fetterman at a junk shop in Southern California.

Speculation over whether it was a real Diebenkorn escalated bidding from 25 cents to $135,805 by a Dutch man. The New York Times wrote a front-page story about the frenzy, prompting eBay to uncover the shill bidding, much of it from Fetterman's "howdyhi" account.

A federal investigation revealed numerous paintings doctored to appear to be by Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti, Frenchman Maurice Utrillo, and Americans John Califano, Clyfford Still and Edward Hopper.

Nearly a decade earlier, Fetterman tried to sell a $20 million painting he claimed to have authenticated as the work of Renaissance master Raphael. Despite duping an art critic at the Seattle Times, the newspaper wrote a follow-up exposing Fetterman as a dabbler whose sole credential as an expert seemed to be a 10-week high school art class.

FBI spokesman Nick Rossi said Fetterman was a longtime con man who claimed to appraise art as a teenager.

Walton and Fetterman met at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Wash., in 1987, according to court papers. In 1989, Fetterman spent nearly a year in a military prison in Kansas for possessing the hallucinogenic drug LSD, the Seattle Times reported. He was demoted and given a bad-conduct discharge.

He resurfaced in Seattle, delivering pizzas and coaching volleyball. He tried to peddle totem poles and paintings in newspaper classified ads and to gallery owners.

A former fiancee, who lives in near Seattle with their 9 1/2-year-old daughter and asked not to be named, said she met Fetterman at a boarding house. He said his name was "Repo" and would not reveal much about his past.

"He said he fought in Grenada and that he had a bunch of classified information," said the woman, now a 32-year-old college student. Fetterman would have been too young to serve during the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983.

The relationship ended bitterly, with the woman obtaining a restraining order against him. She hasn't heard from him since.

"It took me a couple of years to piece together who I was engaged to," she said, becoming emotional during a phone interview Wednesday. "It turned out it was somebody I didn't know."

Fetterman arrived in Sacramento in 1995. In November 1998, he hatched the eBay plot with Walton, who was working as a downtown lawyer, and Beach, a friend of Fetterman's, according to the plea deal signed by the co-defendants.

Fetterman was living with a girlfriend in Placerville, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. With word of an FBI investigation into shill bidding in June 2000, Fetterman took his girlfriend's computer and headed for the casino-dotted south shore of Lake Tahoe.

Fetterman claimed to be a guitarist for the rock band Pearl Jam when he met Terri Lee Galipeaux, a divorced mother of two studying art at a community college, said her lawyer Shari Rusk.

Galipeaux, 12 years his senior and accustomed to abusive relationships, was charmed by the man calling himself "Landon Gossard."

Fetterman eventually told Galipeaux he was being unfairly targeted in an art scandal.

After his indictment in March 2001, the couple shuffled between motels in Nevada, Utah, Texas and Arizona. Fetterman trolled for art on the Internet at libraries during the day, Rusk said. They partied at night.

After three months on the run, Galipeaux returned to California and was arrested at a truck stop for harboring a fugitive.

Convinced of Fetterman's innocence, Galipeaux refused to cooperate in exchange for her freedom and spent 10 months in prison after her conviction.

Fetterman eventually turned up in Wichita with a sketchy story about dealing art online, said Iqbal Jehan, who met him playing Frisbee golf. Fetterman called himself "Flood Peters" and said he chose the city because it was in the center of the country.

"I thought the strangest thing was that he showed up in the middle of nowhere," Jehan said. His Frisbee friends learned his real name when he was stopped Jan. 11 for a cracked windshield and an officer found marijuana in the car. Fetterman tried to hide behind a fake name, but his fingerprints gave him away as a wanted man.<