Sometimes, the bigger the crime, the less likely the culprit will be punished – or as one Polish proverb puts it, “If you steal a chicken, you’re a chicken thief; if you steal a kingdom, you’re a king”.
That principle, though, didn’t work out for Yupeng Deng. He’s just been convicted for an unprecedented crime which involved counterfeiting an entire US Army unit.
Deng, from El Monte in Southern California, established the US Army/Military Special Forces Reserve Unit” and opened a recruiting office in Los Angeles. He then recruited and trained 200 people, telling them their military status would enable them to avoid traffic tickets and earn airfare discounts. He even told Chinese immigrants that joining would improve their chances of gaining full US citizenship.
The recruits were charged $300 to $450 to enlist and up to $120 each time their membership required renewal. They were also allowed to pay extra fees to Deng to gain a higher military rank (Deng wore an auspicious military uniform and assumed the rank of “Supreme Commander”).
His military office in Temple City was decorated as a real army recruiting station, and had a large rug featuring a US Army seal. Recruits were issued with bogus ID cards and trained using mock weapons. They were drilled in public places.
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A local US Army veteran became suspicious when he saw Deng’s unit at civic events. At a flag-raising ceremony he asked to see the military ID of a soldier and noticed it included several typos.
Deng’s recruits also aroused suspicion when they began offering their ID cards to police to try to get gain immunity for traffic violations.
Deng was prosecuted for offences of theft, manufacturing deceptive government documents, and counterfeiting an official government seal.
He pleaded guilty to three charges and has just been sentenced by Judge Jack Hunt at Pomona Superior Court in Los Angels County to three years in prison. Deng was also ordered to pay $200,000 in restitution to those he defrauded.
Historically, all types of fraud were severely punished by the law as a deterrent because of the crime’s illicit nature.
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An English statute of 1562 stated that the punishment for forgery was for the forger to be put in a pillory, have both his ears cut off, his nostrils split, and to be seared with a hot iron to mark him for life.
In England, no-one has tried to impersonate an army supreme commander. The cases of conman Paul Bint, though, are audacious.
Bint isn’t a master criminal. He has spent 28 of the past 31 years in prison or mental hospitals. He has been convicted 155 times for various frauds in which he has impersonated a variety of characters including doctors and lawyers.
In his most recent spree, for which he was convicted at Southwark Crown Court and sentenced to three years in prison, Bint tricked two women into believing he was rich and famous.
He began relationships with them and took advantage of them financially.
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In a complex charade in which he used stolen barristers’ wigs and gowns, and bundles of ribbon-bound documents, Bint told one woman he was Jonathan Reese QC.
To the other woman he said that he had a fleet of luxury cars, including the original BMW Z3 used in the James Bond film GoldenEye, and that he was friends with Pierce Brosnan and Robbie Williams.
The lawyer’s name Bint adopted, however, was an odd choice to reflect a film star lifestyle and a car with heat-seeking Stinger missiles behind the headlights: he told the woman he was Keir Starmer QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Gary Slapper is Professor of Law, and Director of the Law School at The Open University. His book Weird Cases is published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill.
You can follow him on Twitter @garyslapper