ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607300056
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL AND SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITERS
NOTE: Below
JACK SWINT began forging checks at age 11. Writing bad checks, or counterfeiting them, has grown into an obsession over the years.
When he was 11, Jack Swint says, he took his dad's checks and wrote one to himself, adding a notation - "graduation." He thinks it was for $10. He cashed it at a neighborhood restaurant in Charleston, W.Va.
That was the beginning of an obsession with writing bad checks. After a two-year stint in a juvenile detention center where he learned to run a printing press, he added counterfeiting checks to his skills.
Swint's growing-up years were sprinkled with ventures paid for by bad checks - and a number of encounters with the authorities.
As a teen-ager, he stole a car in Charleston and drove it to Marion, Va., where he stayed in a motel for several days, paying with bad checks.
He's been writing bad checks - or counterfeiting them - ever since.
Swint, 42 and now living in the Roanoke Valley, has a passion for deception and recognition that has victimized his parents, wives and employers. It also led him to become an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration and a subject for the television show "A Current Affair."
He swears the only thing that will stop him is for "everyone to know my face," which is what he hopes this article will help do.
So take a good look at the photograph with this story. |n n| Swint says writing bad checks on his own accounts and designing fake payroll checks and cashing them at supermarkets and convenience stores helps him get over depression, handle boredom or get a mental high.
He says he has cashed checks in at least 17 states and in more than 30 company names, including many prominent Roanoke Valley businesses: Grand Piano and Furniture Co., Appalachian Power Co., Papa John's, USAir, UPS.
Swint hasn't been caught passing his checks locally. But a Grand Piano official confirmed that someone counterfeited checks in the company's name about the time Swint said he was doing it. And police in Bedford County are holding counterfeit checks that, they say, they want to discuss with Swint.
Local police have linked only one counterfeit check to him - and he maintains he didn't write it. It was for $165, drawn on a fake Orkin account and cashed at the Blue Ridge Minute Market in Botetourt County. Although the check was made out to "John Swint," he says it was created and cashed by someone who merely looked like him.
Swint repaid the store for its losses, but included a note with the payment saying, "I did not pass this check to this store."
But is that the truth?
Swint's accounts of his exploits seem to check out, but Roanoke psychiatrist Tom Wilson, who once evaluated Swint, called him a potential liar in a report Swint gave to The Roanoke Times. Even Swint's mother worries that she never gets the entire truth.
`Hidden in the house'
John Joseph "Jack" Swint was born in St. Francis Hospital in Charleston, W.Va., and adopted shortly after birth by John Swint, a chemist, and Mary Ann Swint, a school teacher. He has a brother and sister, also adopted.
Mary Ann Swint remembers her son as a sickly infant who made funny noises and rocked his head. He was never a happy baby, and he had problems in school, she says.
She and her husband bailed young Jack out a lot when he was growing up, she says.
First, there were the forged checks he wrote on his father's account. Then he stole checks from an uncle. By the time he was 14, he was a habitual runaway. A year later, he was in a juvenile center working in a print shop and practicing making fake IDs.
When he got out, he joined the Army using the name "Stephen P. Gill," to avoid problems with previous criminal charges, he says. He still uses the names Gill and Swint. When he left the military, he landed a police job in East Bank, a town of 1,500 near Charleston. He lost the job just a year later, when he found the town's checkbook and wrote out two payroll checks. One was for $327.70, the other $403.46. He forged the mayor's signature on the checks and cashed them.
He was charged with forgery and embezzlement and served a year in jail.
Swint's first wife - he's had two and has two children by each - describes Swint as someone who'd "give you the shirt off his back," but who made her life terrible when they were married.
His fascination with checks plagued their relationship, says the former Sharon Swint, who is remarried and lives near Charleston.
"I used to find checks hidden in the house," she says. "I couldn't even have a checking account. I never got any peace."
She believes Swint liked being in jail because then he didn't have any responsibility.
"He had many good jobs, but he didn't seem to be able to hold onto them. He never did seem to be able to concentrate on any one thing," she says.
Swint says he was drawn to dangerous jobs, including checking for radiation for a Houston lab. He later set up a commuter airline for private clients in west Texas and through that became a Drug Enforcement Agency undercover pilot, leasing his planes for DEA use. That vocation eventually earned him a summons to the drug trial of former Panamanian president Manuel Noriega. He didn't testify.
Swint's airline was almost as deceptive as his checks. When the planes weren't hauling the lawyers who made up his clientele, Swint said, they were rented by the DEA to haul drugs and money from a little town near Bogota, Colombia, to the States.
Swint says he was never on a drug run, but that he got paid $20,000 to $25,000 every time one of the planes was used for that. He tells stories of living high, even leasing a Citation Two plane to bring his ex-wife Sharon and their two children back to Charleston for a visit.
"I came back showboating," he says. "I wanted my parents to think for the first time in their life, their son had straightened up."
His ex-wife recalls the time they returned to Charleston by chartered plane, but she says life with Swint was "anything but fancy." If he was paid $25,000 a flight to make runs to Central and South America for the DEA in Texas, she says, she never saw any of it.
The time they spent in Texas was "just terrible," she says. "We had no money, no car."
By the time they borrowed money from her family to return to West Virginia, the Swints had been living in a motel for weeks. Swint had insisted on moving from their apartment because of the "DEA stuff," his former wife says. "We lost all of our furniture, everything."
The former Sharon Swint says she didn't want to know too much about her husband's activities because she feared what they were.
"I didn't want to get involved. I didn't want my name on anything. He told me later that the DEA taught him flying, and he seemed to know about flying." Then she raises the same concern about his truthfulness that others have:
``He can lead you to believe he knows what he is talking about."
`Always role-playing'
When she and Swint returned to West Virginia from Texas, he got a job at Precision Pump in Nitro. An owner of the company - who didn't want his name used - says Swint was an excellent worker, "a good man other than the stealing."
Swint stole the company's checks.
Swint says he was working by himself in the Precision Pump office, saw the checks and, "out of the blue," decided to write them out to himself and leave town. He cashed $1,800 worth of checks and used a company credit card to drive to Florida and Texas, according to a report written by counselors at a mental health center when he was charged in the case.
That event made him "very unemployable," he says, and after it was settled, he came to Roanoke, where he periodically had lived in the past. His first marriage had ended and he had remarried. His second wife, from whom he also is divorced, has an unlisted telephone number and could not be reached for comment.
In Roanoke, Swint used the names Steve Gill and Jack Swint interchangeably. Bedford County real estate records show that the family's Montvale house was once in the name of Steve Gill. But divorce papers filed there indicate that his second wife's last name had been Swint.
"I was always role-playing somebody else," Swint says.
He says that was why he was good at undercover work.
"I've always seemed to want a job with an extra thrill to it," Swint says.
A September 1987 story in The Charleston Daily Mail newspaper said Swint was a government witness in the federal trial of a businessman convicted of distributing cocaine and that he was involved in an inquiry that led to charges against 43 people, including the mayor of Charleston.
"He's been kind of an ordeal over the years," Mary Ann Swint says. She and her husband still live in Charleston. "We love him; we just don't understand him.
``But, he's always welcome at home," she adds.
Like others close to Swint, his mother says she has never known whether he was telling the truth.
"I think he told me what he wants me to know," she says. "He tells me now that he's working for some lawyers and some plumbers."
Swint actually did work for one Roanoke lawyer on one case in 1994. He sent the lawyer a resume on the letterhead of Expert Services America, a division of Tell-America, which was described as a legal consulting company. It had a Salem post office box address.
Among other claims, the resume identified Swint as an expert in helping attorneys find ways to defend clients who were set up or entrapped. It also said he had six years' experience as an undercover operative for the "DEA, FBI, ATF and CIA."
The business card he sent with the resume was printed on glossy navy stock with the word "Jack" centered on it in gold script. In the upper right-hand corner was a gold scales of justice. The scales logo wasn't meant to be a joke, he says. It was merely related to his work as a legal consultant.
The cards cost him $140, which he says was paid with money he got from cashing a bogus check.
Swint also has used bad checks to make down payments on cars.
He loves cars and trades them almost as impulsively - and almost as often - as he says he passes checks. Credit histories of Swint and Gill, obtained with his permission, show a long list of inquiries from car dealers.
The credit report also reveals a personal bankruptcy filing by Gill in 1994 and a list of overdue bills at area medical facilities, a cellular telephone company, a jewelry store and a food store. Two banks and two furniture retailers have obtained judgments totalling more than $10,000 against Swint or Gill since last summer.
He says he hasn't paid taxes in 10 years.
"I don't see myself as a bad guy," he says. "I'm not out here robbing banks. I'm not out here sticking people up. I took something I learned and tried to support my family."
Swint estimates he has cashed more than half a million dollars worth of counterfeit checks. He says he lives simply, though, and that his biggest expenses are car rentals and hotel rooms, which, he says, average $900 a month each.
Swint claims to have given away much of the money he obtained illegally. He is known as a generous man at The Salvation Army in Roanoke.
Rachel Blankenship, a social worker at the Salvation Army, says Swint has donated diapers, cigarettes, laundry detergent and various other supplies for almost two years.
The donations were items he bought when he was passing fake checks, Swint says.
"He's a very nice man," says Blankenship, who is unaware of how Swint gets his money. "I can call him and tell him what I need, and he'll bring it."
Swint never wanted to be recognized for his charity, she says. He didn't even want receipts for tax write-offs.
A part of Swint considered the check-writing a game and enjoyed knowing about its consequences.
One day, he says, while eating lunch at a restaurant at Towers Shopping Center, he decided he wanted to know whether UPS checks he'd made and cashed had had any effect on the local UPS business. He approached a fellow diner wearing a UPS uniform, identified himself as an investigator for Fox television and asked if UPS was having any trouble with counterfeit checks.
According to Swint, the men said there had been so many counterfeit UPS checks cashed at one Kroger supermarket that the store wouldn't cash a legitimate UPS check.
Sometimes, too, Swint says, he left clues for the authorities.
Walter Andrews, general manager of Bob Huff Chevrolet in Wytheville - one of the companies whose payroll checks Swint faked - says whoever passed the counterfeit Huff checks dropped a bunch of blank checks and fake IDs on the ground.
Swint says he did it on purpose, to see whether anybody would figure out who he was and come after him. No one did.
Swint makes all his IDs and checks by hand. He cuts and pastes company logos from books. Most of the big-time counterfeiters use computer scanners and desktop publishing software to create bogus checks. Swint prefers the handcrafted method.
One last spree?
In October 1994, Swint - as Gill - called a psychiatric referral service and said he was concerned that he had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He was sent to Roanoke Neurological Associates Inc., where he was evaluated by Tom Wilson.
Wilson concluded that Swint suffered from ADHD, but Wilson also said he didn't think Swint wanted to change.
"I appreciate the opportunity to evaluate this very fascinating, complex and potentially prevaricating gentleman. His impulsive and self-serving background will be kept in mind as he is followed along," Wilson said in his report.
Swint did not continue to see Wilson.
He began taking Ritalin this spring. The drug, commonly used for ADHD, helped calm his whirling mind, he says, but it also had an unexpected - and sometimes unpleasant - side effect: In the past, he would think about the consequences of his actions in fleeting bits. Under the influence of the Ritalin, he found himself dwelling on his crimes, and he says his depression deepened.
He decided he had to end his check-writing madness.
Swint says he went on his final interstate spree one weekend in July, cashing checks worth $4,000.
He left Roanoke early Friday, heading toward West Virginia. He stopped for a while in Big Chimney, near Charleston, and cashed a $180 Papa John's check at Smith's Grocery. Farther down the road, in Louisville, Ky., he stopped at a Kinko's to make a couple of Mississippi driver's licenses for a "James Critzer" and a "Carter."
He drove on, through Nashville, Tenn., and arrived in Huntsville, Ala., about 5 p.m. He checked into a Holiday Inn, picked up dinner at Steak Out - "a great sandwich place," he says - , marking grocery store locations.
He started his rounds at a Kroger with checks for less than $300 and worked his way up to almost $500. When the customer service booths closed at 10 p.m., he went back to the Holiday Inn and watched TV for a few hours.
"I don't lead an exciting life," he says.
LENGTH: Long : 260 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. JACK SWINT used his printing expertiseby CNB- first developed in a juvenile detention center - to create
counterfeit checks and driver's licenses
such as these. 2. (headshot) Jack Swint\His alias is Stephen Gill.
color.