US national stole Vietnam vet identity - 71 year old American could face deportation
Published: 10 June 2011
by JOSH LOEB
A BUSINESSMAN who stole the identity of a Vietnam War hero has claimed his life could be put at risk if his real name is revealed.
The 71-year-old American, who appeared at Southwark Crown Court on Friday charged with fraud and possessing a false document with intent, was arrested last month after applying to renew his passport at the US Embassy, Grosvenor Square.
He had come to the UK to work with financiers he had met at an energy conference and was travelling under the name of “Michael Rogers Callaway”, a lieutenant posthumously awarded th Se Silver Star after being killed in action in Vietnam in 1968.
He told the court he had assumed the name in 1984 after mobsters had threatened him and his family, adding: “The people pursuing me are powerful.”
Solicitor John Harrison, for the defence, said his client had not changed his name via official means as this would have left a “paper trail”, Mr Harrison said: “The man who sits in the dock accepts that this is an identity he has been using for some time. The reason for using this identity went back to an incident in the early 1980s when an organised criminal gang believed that this man had assisted investigators.”
US passports must be renewed every 10 years and the unnamed man said he had held one under the name of Callaway since 2001.
He said: “I wasn’t sure what would happen when I surfaced. I really was in hiding, and not from my government.”
He added that he had gone to the FBI after receiving threats from unnamed underworld figures but that the authorities had not helped him.
He said: “I just said ‘Enough's enough, I cannot fight this force’. It was up to me to look after myself and my family.
“I needed to get away from it and I needed my kids to get away from it, and they did. They moved out of the state with their mother. I did not see them until they were high school age.”
Judge John Price gave the man, who admitted the charges, a six-month sentence suspended for 15 months, saying his case was “unique”.
He added: “I believe your account.”
The man may now face deportation to the United States.