For over half a century, data appeared to indicate that there have been two brothers by the title of Gonzalez who had been born two years aside in Puerto Rico. They later lived at adjoining addresses in a small city in Maine. Both had been 5-foot-7 and 190 kilos, with brown eyes.
In reality, the youthful brother, Guillermo Gonzalez, had been lifeless since 1939, prosecutors say. And his older brother Napoleon not solely used his id for many years to assert additional retirement and veterans advantages, but additionally faked his personal loss of life in 1984 as a part of tried life insurance coverage fraud.
All of that got here to gentle after an official from the Maine Bureau of Motor Vehicles used facial recognition software program three years in the past to find out that the images on the 2 males’s driver’s licenses confirmed the identical particular person. That led to an investigation and a jury trial that led to a federal courthouse final week with Napoleon Gonzalez’s conviction on costs of id theft, passport fraud, mail fraud and Social Security fraud.
Mr. Gonzalez might withstand 50 years in jail when he’s sentenced, the Justice Department mentioned on Monday.
Harris A. Mattson, a lawyer for Mr. Gonzalez, mentioned in an announcement that he and his shopper deliberate to attraction, saying that the proof was not ample.
A sentencing date has not been set, and Mr. Gonzalez was not taken into custody after his conviction, Mr. Mattson mentioned.
At the time of his arrest, Mr. Gonzalez was a resident of Etna, a small city about 20 miles west of Bangor.
He was born in Puerto Rico in 1937, two years earlier than his brother Guillermo, prosecutors mentioned in a trial temporary. Guillermo died as an toddler. Mr. Gonzalez’s ruse started within the mid-Nineteen Sixties and later allowed him to gather additional advantages and to journey to Canada on a pretend passport.
Mr. Gonzalez advised investigators that his mom had taken him to get a passport utilizing his lifeless brother’s id in 1965, in keeping with the trial temporary. He mentioned he had used that id whereas engaged on an undercover investigation throughout his employment with the Air Force within the Nineteen Sixties and to enlist within the U.S. Army as a reservist in 1979 or 1980.
The department of the Air Force the place Mr. Gonzalez claimed to have labored, the Office of Special Investigations, advised investigators that whereas it was troublesome to say with certainty as a result of a lot time had handed, it had not discovered any document of him working there, in keeping with the trial temporary. Representatives for the Air Force weren’t instantly in a position to say whether or not Mr. Gonzalez had labored for the department.
Mr. Gonzalez’s scheme took a dramatic flip in 1984. Prosecutors say he “purchased a corpse” of an individual who had died in a automobile accident in Puerto Rico, and unsuccessfully tried to cross the physique off as his personal in an effort to falsely declare a life insurance coverage profit — despite the fact that he was residing on the opposite facet of the island along with his spouse and two kids on the time.
That explains why Puerto Rican data nonetheless checklist Mr. Gonzalez as having died in 1984. Investigators from the Social Security Administration requested him about that in 2010, however closed their case and restored his advantages after he signed a sworn assertion confirming that he was the truth is nonetheless alive.
But Mr. Gonzalez’s dual-identity scheme started to unravel in January 2020, as soon as the authorities in Maine discovered two driver’s licenses of their system with pictures of the identical man. When investigators got here to his residence that month, he admitted that he had collected advantages beneath each identities.
And that spring, after the federal government suspended his lifeless brother’s advantages, he despatched a letter to the Social Security Administration signed “Guillermo Gonzalez.”
The brokers returned to Napoleon’s residence that summer season. They had extra questions.
Rebecca Carballo contributed reporting.
Source: www.nytimes.com