Double Injustice

As repayment of his loans kept being postponed, Jewell chose to believe his surrogate son's lies: that he was due a big settlement from a bonding company; that a judge had imposed a gag order on the affair. Jewell kept his mouth shut and his hopes up. He paid the rent and utilities on a Hillsborough house for the Muellers and their infant daughter. In addition to promising to make good on debts Mueller owed to his "investors," Jewell doled out another $2 million to his son-in-law between 1995 and 1998.

Jewell declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a statement recently submitted to Santa Clara County Superior Court, he portrays himself as a "deluded academic" who fell under the "cult-like influence" of Mueller in a "will-negating relationship." Jewell says he cannot clearly recall why he wrote more than 100 checks to his "cunning, amoral" son-in-law.

In jail, Mueller remembers it this way: "We were friends. We talked every day. He learned to depend on me. I removed his self-control slowly."

According to Jewell, Mueller constructed an elaborate charade, going so far as to e-mail counterfeit court orders to him, convincing the professor that salvation was eminent. But salvation day never came, and Jewell reneged on his promise to pay the victims. In early 1998, a judge awarded $4.8 million of Jewell's money to Mueller's creditors.

Mueller muses: "I guess he failed to apply his risk theories to himself."

After he went bankrupt in 1994, and while Locke was squeezing money from his original victims, Mueller used the funds Jewell continued to loan him as seed money for more scams. This time, Mueller preyed upon friends in the world of flying.

Mueller had been bitten by the flying bug while in college. It is a very expensive hobby, and a lot of Mueller's ill-gotten gains went to supporting it. He flew small aircraft almost every day, commuting between tiny airports all over the west. One of his favorite landing strips was at the Sacramento Municipal Airport, where he hung out in aircraft broker John Didier's spotlessly clean sales hangar with other pilots.

"We knew him as an airman," says Didier, who looks like he just morphed out of a Chivas Regal advertisement. "He'd fly in and stop by for a cold drink. Sometimes he'd sit in the cockpit of one of the $5 million corporate jets we sell and read the manuals. He could easily have been a commercial pilot."

Didier says he declined to invest with Mueller, who was wont to float grand ideas, such as a plastic cards capable of electronically certifying potential lovers as having tested HIV-negative. Didier did, however, broker several planes that Mueller purchased. In fact, Didier may be the only human being (besides Locke) who has actually profited from a long-term relationship with the con man.

Paul Karmouche, one of Mueller's "best friends," was not so lucky. Karmouche pled guilty last year to the felony of using a false Social Security number to obtain a loan to buy an airplane for Mueller, who paid Karmouche $23,000 to act as his front man.

Tom Paroubeck made the mistake of starting a window-washing business with Mueller. One day Paroubeck woke up to find that Mueller had looted the corporation, leaving him only the name: Careful Clean.

Finally, in l998 -- four years after Mueller's Ponzi bubble was popped by bankruptcy -- the federal government accused Mueller of tax evasion and of defrauding 140 investors. Mueller pled guilty to reduced charges of mail fraud and money laundering and was promised a lenient sentence of three years in federal prison in return for cooperating with the federal government as it tried to locate millions of dollars that, it believed, Mueller had hidden, either in foreign banks, or, literally, underground.

Mueller's sentencing was postponed, allowing him to roam free for yet another year. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ross W. Nadel explains the lenient treatment of Mueller by noting that the plea bargain saved the government the cost of a trial.

Society at large got no discount.

Between the time he was convicted and the time the government finally got around to sentencing him to prison, Mueller shamelessly borrowed a credit card from a friend to buy medicine for his wife, but ran up $6,000 in aircraft maintenance charges on the card, leaving the startled friend to pay. Bragging to one of his pals that the IRS had not yet figured out how to track sales made on eBay, the auction Web site, Mueller bought and sold vehicles, art, and various items, racking up tens of thousands in profits, which he kept in cash so that the government and his creditors would not grab it.

By the end of 1999, though, the government finally tired of Mueller's shell game. District Judge Martin J. Jenkins revoked the plea bargain agreement and sentenced Mueller to nine years and one month in prison, and to $26 million in restitution to his victims. Mueller has appealed the severity of the sentence. Even if he loses the appeal, with time off for good behavior, he could walk out of the federal correctional work camp in Sheridan, Ore., sometime in 2007.