what did you know about precision machine parts? as much as you do. he is not just bragging, by the way. the scams all really happened, and he never went to jail for them. but then, there was the time that he worked for a company that prints blank government checks. i took them. i put them in my briefcase and cashed one check for $57,000. he got caught that time and was sent to prison. but then, he walked away from his halfway house and into another almost unbelievable scam. you will remember that one of the most consistent elements of jim rowe s various identities was that of an elite military officer, usually a navy s.e.a.l. most of his victims believed him, perhaps because there was a grain of truth in it. rowe did enlist in the army and the navy and even briefly in the marines. though hardly in an elite capacity. i wasn t a wasn t a navy s.e.a.l. i was a cook. wasn t glamorous.
he sold $250,000 of them for $38,000. he kept the money? and kept the money. of course, rowe split town soon enough. leaving his friend and surrogate father bankrupt. very worst thing that s ever happened to me in my life. i about lost my wife and my family. it s devastating. so, when ron nelson saw the man that ruined his life plastered all over the front of the seattle newspaper under the name of steve heitman, he was eager to tell the world the mystery man s real name. and when evelyn heitman heard that name, something finally clicked. i recognized the name. so i got the yearbooks out. she found him there, jim rowe, a classmate of her long lost son steve. to work his big seattle scheme, the con man had stolen the identity of a dead high school buddy. i don t think he feels bad. doesn t have a conscience? i don t think he does. coming up falling in love with the con man.
leaving the business and millionaire partner bankrupt. and for all the world knew, this shady character s name was steve heitman, evelyn s son. you feel violated. it s an invasion of privacy. and for you a sacred memory? yeah. yet evelyn heitman couldn t figure it out? why her son, why her sacred memory? and who was the man staring at her from the front page of the newspaper? a thousand miles away, a man who had also lost a son was staring at the same newspaper brought to him by a relative. and she said this sounds like the guy that scammed you out of your guns and businesses and everything. she handed me the paper. it was jim rowe. so finally, the mystery man was identified. not mike or steve or bob. but jim. jim rowe. james ruben rowe, to be exact.
first place and a girl that has an unfailing love and care for him that is now shattered. that s who i am. and that s why i don t feel very good about me. i hate me. prison has a way of changing your perspective. but could it be that the con man finally found and bared his soul? all for the love of a woman, the woman he almost married? there is a whole lot of lies that i m fessing up to right now that go beyond breaking the law, you know? they go beyond being illegal. they go to immortality. they go to cruelness almost. for my own well being, i have to believe that there is parts of him that are good. that it wasn t all a fake persona. but a woman he did marry says don t kid yourself.
that s correct. you know, it s easier to do it backwards. easier? sure. come on. i had i i had two guys from microsoft investing almost $10 million in four months. but they would have invested it legitimately. i understand that, but i couldn t be legitimate. i didn t know how. maybe he really didn t. jim rowe told us about cons stretching back almost two decades all across the country. in massachusetts, a job driving a truck for a lumberyard turned into an embezzlement scheme. i think the total is $22,000 they came up with. i think it was a lot more than that. in colorado he got a job drilling water wells, and soon his foreman was giving him money. i think bob invested somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000 to $45,000. i don t remember the exact amount. he worked at a machine shop near san diego as head of quality control. quality control of what? precision machine parts.