08. The Impostor (Jimmy Sabatino)

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse, and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

While Coach Smith is a father figure to his boys, his counterpart at Hebert High School is not.

Clifton Ozen is a mountain of a man whose byword is discipline and physical football.

Fire straight ahead on him, real, real hard in there.

Let's go, bud.

Down.

As a builder of pros, Ozen has produced even more NFL players than Smith, and almost all of them are superstars.

His favorite is the Charges tiny Jerry Levias, who serves as an example for Ozen's smaller player.

Jerry Levias was much smaller than the average 1960s football player.

But for what he lacked in size, he made up for with speed.

Jerry had been recognized as an all-star quarterback while playing for his segregated high school in Beaumont, Texas.

Before he graduated, he had received over 100 scholarship offers from schools all across the country.

But because of his size, none of the historically black colleges that he wanted to attend expressed any interest in signing him.

Jerry Levice eventually signed a recruitment letter from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he became the first black scholarship athlete in the Southwest Conference.

during an era of extreme racial turmoil, and he had the hate mail and the death threats to prove it.

During his time there, he faced many off-the-field distractions and he was ostracized by his own teammates.

Later in life, Jerry recalled his days at SMU as a living hell, but he persisted and continued to dominate the game at the collegiate level.

In his freshman year, he led the SMU Mustangs to their first Cotton Bowl appearance in 20 years.

By the time he was a senior, he was a three-time all-star and held every collegiate record for his position.

In 1969, Jerry left college and was drafted by the American Football League's Houston Oilers.

Against all odds, he had achieved his dream.

He was playing professional football and playing quite well,

which is why it took everyone by surprise when in 1970, less than two years into his professional football career, He contacted the Detroit Tigers, a professional baseball team, and asked for a tryout.

Jerry had played baseball when he was younger and he was extremely talented, but the timing of this move just seemed odd.

But maybe he just had a change of heart.

People change careers all the time.

And after studying old scouting reports and realizing just how fast this guy was, the Detroit Tigers agreed to work him out under the condition that the Houston Oilers provide a written release.

The Tigers trained in Lakeland, Florida during the offseason and told Levice to report to camp there in three weeks.

Jerry got in touch with a Tigers player named Gates Brown, whom he had never met, and told him he was leaving football behind and that he would be joining him at Tigers camp in a few weeks.

Levice also told Brown how his luggage, which contained his written release from the Oilers, was lost on his flight to Detroit, and how a marriage to a woman in Atlanta and other business matters in Houston had left him a bit short on cash at the moment.

In other words, Jerry told Gates Brown that if he was going to make it to Florida for his tryout, he needed to borrow $300 for the airfare.

Brown agreed to buy Jerry a plane ticket, and on February 19th, 1970, the two of them flew to Florida together.

Jerry Levias was treated like a star by the Tigers as soon as the plane touched the ground.

The team issued a press release announcing his arrival, and they housed him in the new three-story dormitory that had been built for the players.

But once he put on the uniform and picked up a ball, his star began to fade.

After watching Jerry play or attempt to play baseball, one scout remarked, quote, I wasn't too impressed with the way he threw.

I watched him run and I wasn't at all impressed.

I just couldn't see the speed that I was supposed to see.

Another scout added, something was clearly wrong with all his fundamentals.

This fella just doesn't look like an athlete to me.

Although his baseball career was off to a disappointing start, Levice announced that he still planned to quit football and that he would issue a formal statement about his decision in a few days.

Levice then asked the Tigers for an advance on his salary, you know, just to tide him over.

It was around this time that a reporter from a Detroit newspaper who was working on a story about Levice's career change contacted Jim McLemore, the publicity director for the Houston Oilers, seeking comment about the departure of one of their star players.

McLemore seemed to be blindsided by the question.

He had not heard anything about Jerry Levias quitting football.

In search of answers, McLemore picked up the phone and called Jerry Levias directly.

When Jim asked Jerry why he hadn't told the team that he was quitting football, Jerry responded with,

Me quit football?

I don't know where a thing like this got started.

Biggest hoax I ever heard of.

Jerry Levias, the real Jerry Levias, was in Texas, and he had no intention of quitting professional football.

And the Jerry Levias in Florida, who was training with the Tigers, had some explaining to do.

He initially doubled down on his claim, insisting that the papers in his lost luggage would prove who he said he was.

But after a few hours with his back against the wall, he gave up the act and confessed that he was not, in fact, Jerry Levias.

He said his name was Gerald Lee Levias and that he was a 23-year-old former soldier from Detroit who had recently married and he just loved baseball and figured that he would have a better shot at making the team if he was somebody famous like Jerry Levias.

Embarrassed by their mistake, the Tigers put Gerald Lee on a plane and sent him back to Detroit where the media was waiting on him.

The story spread throughout the city and the true identity of Gerald Lee Levias was eventually revealed to be William Douglas Street Jr.

William was actually 20 years old and he wasn't ever much of a baseball player.

And he had never served in the armed forces like he had claimed either.

The only thing William had served was a jail sentence for posing as a student at Ferris State College.

There was one thing William Street Jr.

was telling the truth about, however.

and that was his love for baseball.

He was determined to play.

He had even listed baseball as his occupation on his recent marriage certificate.

In fact, before his most recent tryout with the Tigers, he had worked out with the Boston Red Sox in the prior year.

He had posed as a sportswriter for Time magazine and persuaded the team to lend him a uniform so that he could truly immerse himself in the story.

William was kicked out of the camp when he was found warming up in the bullpen and shaving his face in the team dugout.

William Douglas Street eventually ceased trying to hoax himself into baseball, but he never ceased inserting baseball into his hoaxes.

In 1971, he was posing as a player for the Minnesota Twins when he was arrested at an Orlando hotel for paying with a bad check.

He was arrested again a week later in Detroit, this time for attempting to extort a Tigers player named Willie Horton.

Knowing that Horton was still in Florida for training camp, William Street Jr.

drove to Horton's house and delivered a letter to his wife demanding $20,000 in exchange for a briefcase that contained pictures, tapes, tapes, and records of her husband's criminal dealings, as well as a letter warning that if she contacted the police or anyone else, she would be killed, and so would Willie, and so would the children.

Horton's wife ignored the threat and called the police anyway, and William Street Jr.

was promptly arrested and sentenced to 20 years probation.

William was released on parole a few years later, but he wasn't a free man for long.

After violating his parole, he was locked up at a prison in southern Michigan, a prison that he somehow managed to escape.

William Street Jr.

continued to run scams in the following decades using numerous aliases and occupations.

Some days he was a lawyer.

Other days he was a football player for the University of Michigan.

Sometimes he posed as a woman or a medical student at Yale.

One time he was a doctor at an Illinois hospital where he found himself almost performing an appendectomy on an unsuspecting patient.

Even more incredible, Street had actually worked as a surgeon at a Chicago hospital where he had performed at least 36 hysterectomies without any medical training whatsoever.

That gig ended when a colleague witnessed him running back and forth to the men's restroom, where he was frantically referencing medical textbooks that he had stashed there.

By this time, William Street Jr.'s antics had garnered national recognition, and a 1989 independent film, cleverly titled Chameleon Street, was loosely based on his life.

William Douglas Street Jr.

Born in a log cabin in the backwoods of Kentucky, young Douglas soon elevated himself from field hand to tiger, from tiger to reporter, and from reporter to doctor, from doctor to co-ed, from co-ed to attorney, from attorney to

congressman.

From congressman to president.

I could play president.

They know not what I am.

I am

Chameleon Street.

By 2015, William Douglas Street Jr.

had tallied 25 convictions and 11 prison sentences.

In February 2016, at 64 years old, he added another one.

He was sentenced to three years in prison for male fraud and aggravated theft.

Street had reportedly stolen the identity of a Defense Department contractor to, according to him, obtain a job and pick up women.

In an interview conducted from prison, Street reflected on his life and and how he had gotten away with such preposterous schemes, saying, quote,

I guess you could say I was always a man who believed in shortcuts.

You'd be amazed at what some people will believe.

You just got to tell it right.

That's all.

Many people have described William Douglas Street Jr.

as a man of very high intelligence with an intoxicating charisma, but very little formal education.

And the same could be said of an imposter of similar ilk named Jimmy Sabatino.

Sabatino's gift of gab and use of multiple aliases have led to a lifetime of assorted scams and hustles.

He has spent nearly his entire adult life behind bars, but has still found a way to involve himself in the Super Bowl, the presidential death threat, and the murder investigation of Tupac Shakur, to name a few.

This is the story of Jimmy Sabatino, the corporate executive, the movie studio mogul, the hip-hop impresario, but most accurately, the con man on this episode of Swindled.

They bribed government officials to hide accounting.

Clear violations of

state law and clearly don't pay to play

dollars that were wasted.

Now we have the books and records

responsible for the collapse of the entire system.

I mean, it's full of some god of swindler, et cetera.

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Jimmy Sabatino's childhood is somewhat of a mystery because he rarely tells the truth.

It is known that he was born in Brooklyn in 1976 and that he spent his childhood on Staten Island.

But most additional details of his early life are in dispute, mostly by Jimmy himself.

Jimmy claims to be an only child, but he isn't.

He also claims that his mother died when he was a baby, but that isn't true either.

In fact, his mother, Madeline Sabatino, was was very involved with her children in their early years.

She had propelled Jimmy and his sister Dawn into the child modeling business and served as their manager.

Madeline was in show business herself, or she had been at one time.

As an actress, Madeline had appeared in a few B movies and landed a very minor role in a Gene Hackman movie.

But for the most part, Her career on the big screen had never quite panned out the way she had envisioned.

So, as many stage mothers tend to do, she projected her dreams of fame and fortune onto her children.

The Sabatino children's modeling careers were thriving.

Madeline kept their calendars full and shuffled them from photo shoot to photo shoot.

And right as Jimmy and Don's modeling careers began to peak, Peter Sabatino, the children's father, expressed concern that the constant work was ruining his children's childhoods, and he pulled the plug.

Peter was a no-nonsense kind of guy.

There are federal documents that list him as a liaison to the Gambino crime family, which is likely true because later in life, he became the manager of a restaurant owned by the sons of Big Paul Castellano, the Gambino family boss who was murdered by John Gotti.

The decision to end the children's modeling careers devastated Madeline, and her already existing problem with alcohol worsened.

After I put an end to James's modeling, said Peter Sabatino, Madeline turned inward and withdrew from life and from James.

One day, when Jimmy was 11 years old, he returned home from school to find his mother missing.

He found a letter on the kitchen table that said she was never coming back.

She never called.

She never wrote a letter.

Jimmy never heard from his mother again.

But he was notified a few years later that she had died of cancer.

Being abandoned by his mother had a profound effect on Jimmy Sabatino.

Not externally, because he never never spoke about it.

If anyone asked, he would tell them that she had died in a car accident when he was a baby.

But through his actions, you could tell Jimmy was a kid who was in a great deal of pain.

He would have frequent tantrums in the classroom, resulting in his expulsion from 12 different schools.

His father eventually resorted to essentially bribing the schools with generous donations and gifts to tolerate his son's behavior.

By the time Jimmy reached high school, he had seen multiple therapists and had a 30-day 30-day stint at the Staten Island Psychiatric Facility, where he had been diagnosed with an impulse control disorder.

Not what people would probably think.

I came from a good family, but I don't think like everybody else.

I think different.

Impulse control, I don't think it through.

I don't think the ending through.

Despite the expulsions and therapists, Jimmy claims to have had a wonderful childhood.

He says he had plenty of friends and that he was one of the most popular kids in high school.

Jimmy's cousin Joyce remembers differently, recollecting that Jimmy was an outcast who was constantly bullied.

And it didn't help matters that Jimmy's childhood model good looks were a thing of the past.

He was now overweight and had developed a lazy eye.

It's tough to find a silver lining in anything to do with bullying.

But in Jimmy's case, it made him tough.

He became street smart.

He learned how to talk.

He was charming and easygoing, arrogant, but self-deprecating.

He seemed trustworthy and intelligent, and he craved the attention.

Sabatino's ability to talk was a defense mechanism that he developed to get himself out of many dicey situations and to gain the respect of his peers.

And he would use this skill in the future to create many dicey situations of his own.

Cousin Joyce tells a story about how Jimmy was finally finally able to get the bullies to leave him alone.

He somehow talked some business into giving him 100 pagers, and he distributed them to all the kids in the neighborhood as a peace offering, and it worked.

It was that moment where a switch was flipped in Jimmy's brain that altered the course of his life.

As a teenager, Jimmy Sabatino spent hours in front of the TV watching hip-hop music videos and movies and TV shows.

It's how he developed one of his very first cons.

He would wait for the credits on these shows and write the names of the producers and actors in a notebook.

He would then film restaurants and hotels and other businesses posing as these people from TV, and would often receive anything he wanted: free dinners, free rooms, whatever.

Jimmy realized that people will go through great lengths to be associated with power.

In one scheme, Sabatino called an electronics store pretending to be the nephew of Tommy Mottola, the president of Sony Music.

Jimmy convinced the store to give him $60,000 worth of laptop computers, which he sold and pocketed the profits.

In another scheme, he would write a letter to a major company such as Disney, asking a simple question to which he knew he would receive a response.

The company would always respond on official letterhead, and Jimmy would make blank copies of that letterhead and use it to write his own letters announcing the arrival of a Disney executive named Jimmy Sabatino to the hotel of his choosing.

The letter also stated that nothing would be paid for in person and that all charges should be billed directly to the company.

According to Jimmy, The hotels would often write back, thank you for the opportunity to serve you.

Jimmy would arrive at the hotels with an entourage in tow, many of them aspiring rappers who Sabatino had promised fame and fortune.

Pretending to be a major player in the hip-hop scene was one of Jimmy's favorite pastimes.

Sabatino and his guests would check in and live rent-free for weeks at a time in multiple rooms.

to conceal the thousands of dollars in charges for room service and special requests.

He stayed at the Waldorf Astoria in New York where he spent $16,000.

He racked up another $16,000 at the Ritz-Carlton in Los Angeles, another $20,000 at the Marriott Marquee in New York.

And before these companies became aware that someone was living large on their dime, Jimmy would have already moved on to the next hotel.

And he would almost always use his real name when checking in.

It became somewhat of his calling card.

Sabatino left New York in the early 90s and moved to Florida to live with his uncle.

It was in Florida where the law began to catch up with him.

By 1994, Jimmy had been arrested in Florida, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico for running the same hotel scam he had been using in New York, this time posing as an executive for Coca-Cola.

And if there's one thing that Jimmy consistently does every time he gets out of jail, it's that he goes right back in.

In 1995, Jimmy Sabatino, 18 years old and fresh out of jail, pulled off perhaps the most famous scheme of his career as a con artist.

It is the World Championship of Professional Football.

Super Bowl 29.

The kickoff is moments away.

Sabatino wrote a letter to the Miami Dolphins posing as an executive for Blockbuster Video, which was significant because the founder of Blockbuster Video had purchased the Miami Dolphins a few years earlier, so the relationship between the two organizations had already been established.

In the letter, Jimmy requested tickets for Blockbuster employees to the Super Bowl, which was to be held in Miami at the end of January.

The Miami Dolphins team president wrote him back, letting him know the date that he would be shipping the tickets to Blockbuster headquarters.

Since Jimmy had no way of accessing the mail at Blockbuster headquarters, he devised a plan to intercept the package.

He adopted the alias of the Miami Dolphins president and called a FedEx facility in Broward County, Florida, where he knew the package would be routed.

He was able to convince them that the package had been sent by mistake and needed to be recalled immediately.

FedEx obliged and Sabatino sent a friend to retrieve the goods.

Jimmy Sabatino had successfully heisted 262 tickets to Super Bowl 29 that carried a street value of about $268,000.

He sold each ticket for $900 to $1,000 and collected $235,000 in profits.

Not a bad haul, but he was arrested before he could spend it.

Jimmy pleaded guilty to three counts of dealing in stolen property.

Not only for the Super Bowl tickets, but also for an earlier offense for sealing 55 pagers using his nephew of Tommy Matola Schick.

Jimmy claims that the earlier charge was the only thing they could get on him since they had willingly given him the tickets.

He was sentenced to two years in prison in order to pay $100,000 in restitution.

After serving the entire two-year sentence, 21-year-old Jimmy Sabatino walked out of jail and threw himself a welcome back party at the Marriart Marquee in Times Square.

The bill totaled $55,000 and Sabatino refused to pay, and so he was arrested again.

He He was out on bail a year later in 1998 and flew to London for a change of scenery.

And before you know it, Jimmy was back to his old tricks, scamming hotels for free rooms.

Authorities arrested Sabatino at a hotel where he was impersonating a movie studio executive and he was sentenced to several months in prison.

Sabatino suffered mightily in the English prison, not due to poor treatment or violence of any kind, but rather the food.

He hated the food and decided he would do anything to get deported back to the United States to get away from it.

He didn't know exactly what he would have to do, but he did know it would have to be drastic.

From prison, Jimmy called the offices of the FBI in Miami.

When someone answered on the other end, He proceeded to threaten to kill President Clinton and revealed his plan to bomb a federal courthouse.

He also also threatened to murder a federal prosecutor named Paul Schwartz, saying,

You old skinny fuck, I'm going to cut your head off.

And he threw in some racial slurs for good measure.

Jimmy hung up the phone, satisfied with the job well done.

Surely they would deport him for that.

But his plan backfired, and he was forced to serve his full sentence in the British prison before being shipped back to the States, where he had new charges waiting on him.

Within Within 24 hours of landing on American soil at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, Sabatino assaulted a prison guard, which added some additional time to the four-year sentence he received for pleading guilty to the telephone threats.

Almost four years later, in 2002, mere months away from his release date, Jimmy Sabatino met a woman named Marcy Lee Vega.

Jimmy contends that she was a real looker back then and that he fell in love with her through their brief encounters.

Marcy Lee confided in Jimmy that she needed money, and Jimmy was so infatuated with Marcy Lee that he decided to hatch a plan to help.

He transformed his prison cell into a makeshift office, complete with a desk and a chair and a telephone.

He began calling cell phone companies pretending to be an executive from Sony.

and attempting to talk the companies into providing him with free cell phones for a movie shoot, which he would then have someone on the outside cell and collect the money.

Surveillance videos revealed that Jimmy was making these calls for up to eight hours a day, and he wasn't doing it for the money.

Jimmy never kept a dime from the scam, which baffled his attorneys.

Why would someone go through great lengths to run this elaborate scheme out of a prison cell if they weren't motivated by greed?

According to Sabatino, he did it all for Marcy Lee.

Just to see her smile.

Jimmy was eventually caught after defrauding Nextel out of more than $3 million worth of phones and services.

He pleaded guilty to fraud and identity theft and was sentenced to an additional 11 years in prison.

At a sentencing hearing, Jimmy tried to explain himself to a judge, saying,

I think everyone regrets what they do after they get caught.

I know this may sound strange, but there is a part of me that just does these things, and I can't control it.

My family thinks I lack it in prison.

They look at me and think that I like it in prison.

And the truth is, I don't, Your Honor.

A lengthy prison stay would put an end to most people's conniving ways.

But this is Jimmy Sabatino we're talking about.

In October 2007, from prison, Sabatino filed a lawsuit for $20 million against Sean Puff Daddy Combs and Bad Boy Records for unpaid royalties.

Jimmy claims that in 1994, he had flown Biggie Smalls, the rapper, down to Miami from Brooklyn to record some songs.

He said he then sold the tracks to Badboard Records for $200,000, but never received the money.

The lawsuit was dismissed almost immediately, but there were some interesting results to follow.

In the discovery phase of the lawsuit, there were multiple FBI reports entered into evidence that described Jimmy Sabatino as a huge player in the music industry.

The reports detailed how he had launched the careers of Puff Daddy, Biggie Smalls, Method Man from the Wu-Tang clan, and Mark Wahlberg?

What?

Okay,

one of these things is not like the others, but I digress.

The documents also place Sabatino at the scene where Tupac was shot for the first time at a New York recording studio on November 30th, 1994, even though police reports from the scene do not corroborate this information.

Not to mention, Jimmy was only 17 years old at the time and living in Florida.

The documents also pointed to Sabatino as a person person of interest in the murder of Biggie Smalls in L.A.

in 1997, despite the fact that Jimmy was imprisoned in Miami at the time, 2,400 miles away.

These newly discovered FBI documents were sent anonymously to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the LA Times named Chuck Phillips, who was investigating the bi-coastal rap war that culminated in the murders of Tupac in 96 and Biggie Smalls in 97.

Chuck Phillips was thrilled to discover that these documents confirmed much of his independent research.

The LA Times published Phillips' article along with the FBI reports it heavily sourced on its website in 2008.

The article pointed to an associate of Puff Daddy's named James Rosemond as having orchestrated the feud with Tupac and the West Coast.

Puff Daddy denounced the story as beyond ridiculous, because it was.

A week after the article's publication, the website The Smoking Gun published revelations that the FBI documents were frauds.

The reports were written on a typewriter, which the FBI had not used in decades.

And they contained acronyms that the FBI had never used.

And they were written with typos and misspelled words, the same words that were often misspelled in court filings that Jimmy Sabatino had prepared for himself.

The LA Times retracted the story.

issued an apology, and fired Chuck Phillips.

And Jimmy Sabatino added another item to his resume, although he denies any involvement.

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11 years had passed since Jimmy's present cell Next Tel Con.

In May 2013, he was back out on the streets as a free man.

Two months later, to the surprise of absolutely no one, he was arrested again.

5:30 now, we have new information about the long list of scams this career con man is responsible for.

Prosecutors say Jimmy Sabatino ran up huge bills at high-end hotels before he was finally caught.

From July to September of 2013, Jimmy had been posing as a record label executive while amassing over $600,000 in unpaid bills at multiple hotels in the Miami area.

Word spread of Sabatino's current bender due to a bulletin sent out by the Greater Miami and the Beaches Hotel Association and the U.S.

Marshals.

A manager at the Hyatt Regency in Coral Gables alerted authorities that he recognized the man in the bulletin.

He had checked into his hotel last Friday.

The scheme he was using hadn't changed much over the years.

The only difference is that he would request the hotel reservation managers to bill the companies directly using email rather than sending a fax.

It's not as complicated as one might think it was.

The reservation manager will receive a phone call.

The conversation will be something along the lines of, this is so-and-so from Sony Music.

I have a party coming into Miami.

We're going to need to reserve X amount of rooms.

In the case of all the hotels in Miami Beach, it was from a Gmail account.

I would literally scratch my head in amazement that it worked, that it happened.

It defied logic.

Officers arrested Jimmy at 2 a.m.

on September 27th, 2013.

They found hotel keys and pawn shop receipts in the room he was staying in.

They also found $50,000 worth of champagne stashed in his car.

You don't think I was drinking 500 bottles of champagne, do you?

I don't drink selling them.

I know some of the best clubs and high-end liquor stores in Miami.

We're buying them at discounted prices.

Police also accused Sabatino of having sex with a minor and being in possession of child pornography.

because he had naked pictures of some girl on his phone.

Jimmy denies these charges and they were dropped at a later date.

Jimmy Sabatino pleaded guilty to grand theft and organized fraud and was sentenced to five years plus probation.

You owe $16,000 to the SLS Hotel here in Wii Beach, $174,000 to the Hilton Bentley Hotel on Ocean Drive, $400,000 to the Resort World Omni Hotel on Biscayne.

I get it.

The judge also ordered him to pay $594,000 in restitution, to which Sabatino responded, they'll have to get in line.

Jimmy already owed more than seven figures from prior convictions.

A year into his prison sentence in 2014, Jimmy Sabatino made his way back into the news.

James Sabatino, always the charmer, and always with an eye on something.

With this con man's latest caper, well, it's an eye-opener.

If it wasn't obvious by the use of multiple cheesy eye puns in that local news report, Jimmy's latest scam had something to do with his vision.

Sabatino claimed that his lazy eye was giving him persistent headaches that he could not prevent.

He told the Corrections Health Service that his lazy eye had resulted from a stroke in 2013, which wasn't true.

He's had it since he was a kid.

as evidenced by its presence in his collection of mugshots throughout the years.

Nevertheless, the procedure to repair his eye was approved, and $247,000 of taxpayer money was used to pay for it.

Jimmy, who now weighs over 300 pounds, has joked that he will try to convince them to pay for lap band surgery next time.

Or maybe he had plans to pay for it himself because later that year, Jimmy put in motion a scam that might prove to be his final one.

While incarcerated, Sabatino and his cellmate, George DeQuinn, contacted a litany of luxury retailers posing as employees for for Sony Music and Rock Nation, an entertainment company founded by Jay-Z.

They would ask the stores to send products such as jewelry, handbags, and watches for use in music videos which were to be filmed in the Miami area.

Two female co-conspirators on the outside would collect the merchandise and sell it and deposit Jimmy and George's portion of the proceeds into their commissary accounts.

Sabatino would send emails to the stores using aliases he had created, and he made phone calls using cell phones that he had convinced two federal corrections officers to smuggle in for him.

The scheme ran from October 2014 until July 2015 before someone ratted him out and he was caught.

In total, Jimmy and his crew managed to rip off $10 million worth of merchandise from brands and designers such as Alexander Wayne, Jimmy Chu, Nautica, Tiffany and Company, amongst others.

Jimmy pleaded guilty and he threatened to kill the informants who had snitched on him.

And he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

And in a rare request by a defendant, Sabatino asked to serve his sentence in solitary confinement, telling the judge, I don't know what the answer is, but I know incarceration is not helping me.

I want to change.

I'm being honest with you.

The Supermax Federal Penitentiary in Colorado is home to the Unibomber Ted Kaczynski, the Boston Marathon bomber, Terry Terry Nichols, a conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing, and now Jimmy Sabatino, the guy who likes to rip off hotels.

Jimmy is not allowed contact with other prisoners.

He cannot write letters or have access to a telephone.

The only people he's permitted to communicate with are his lawyers and his stepmother.

And those restrictions will remain in place, according to the judge, until Jimmy Sabatino can demonstrate that his communications no longer pose any any kind of threat.

I kept going until I get caught, and as intelligent as I am, it's common sense that I'm gonna be caught.

But I don't stop in my entire career of being a con artist, I've never stolen anyone's pensions, took anyone's personal money.

My victims have always been companies, corporations.

I'm not justifying it, but I'm saying

in my mind, there was some integrity to what I've done.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen.

For more information about the show, check out swindledpodcast.com or find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at swindledpodcasts.

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And that's only the beginning.

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We celebrated the launch of the store by giving all the current patrons free posters and stickers and stuff.

And we plan to keep doing things like that because we like you.

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