In 1969, Robinson became a systems analyst for Mobil Oil, the best job he’d had thus far. His pleasant appearance and glib manner had once more helped him land the position. No one at Mobil had bothered to look into his background or discover that he was still on probation. His own probation officers were so impressed with his new employment that they believed he’d put his past behind him. While he was working at Mobil, the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole wrote a letter stating that Robinson “does not appear to be an individual who is basically inclined towards criminal activities and is motivated towards achieving middle class values.”
A second officer, this one a female, offered the opinion that Robinson was “responding extremely well to probation.” She encouraged him “to advance as far as possible with Mobil Oil.”
His advancement was soon cut short when he was accused of stealing 6,200 postage stamps from the corporation, worth just under $400. He was fired and charged with theft but ended up paying restitution and again avoiding jail. Because his record in Kansas City was lengthening, he and Nancy made plans to leave the area. In 1970, the Robinsons moved back to Chicago. John took a job as an insurance salesman with a company known as R. B. Jones; he made such a good impression on those interviewing him for this position that no one at the firm thought about running a background check on him (most businesses would normally only do that for those who raised suspicions). Robinson was good at selling insurance policies and had found something he could be successful doing, despite his having violated his parole in Kansas by coming to Illinois. But after working there only a few months, he began stealing from his employer, embezzling $5,586 before he was caught and fired. Once more the police were brought in, but Robinson avoided jail by making another restitution payment, and the charges against him were dismissed. With no prospects in front of him in Chicago, and a hopeless record as a corporate employee, he began thinking of a new career direction: he wanted to form his own business. He had more connections in the Kansas-Missouri region than in Illinois, so perhaps he should resettle in Kansas City. This decision was made easier when a Chicago court told a Kansas circuit court that he’d just broken the law in Illinois. Robinson was ordered back to the Kansas City area and his probation was extended for three more years. The family headed west again and settled in Raytown, Missouri, where he opened a medical consulting firm called Professional Services Association, Inc.
In 1971, as he was trying to establish the company, he was arrested for a parole violation and sent to jail. A Missouri probation officer named Gordon Morris studied Robinson’s recent history of con games and small-time thefts, concluding that he needed some time behind bars. In Gordon’s view, such punishment would serve as a “strong motivation for a complete reversal” in Robinson’s behavior and could only help this chronic offender. In spite of the strong recommendation, the inmate was released after only several weeks. Back on the street, Robinson’s criminal instincts immediately took over, and he created an investment scam designed to steal $30,000 from a retired schoolteacher named Evalee McKnight. His repeated arrests had done nothing to stop him from devising more scams.
An unsettling dance was taking place between Robinson and law enforcement. He kept breaking the law and the system kept giving this white-collar offender second and third and fourth chances. Many people believe that career criminals can be rehabilitated, but the evidence doesn’t support that. Robinson perfectly fit the profile of someone who could not be motivated or forced to change. You can’t rehabilitate a mind that was never “habilitated” or socialized in the first place. You can’t force repeat offenders to feel the pain their actions cause the victims. You can’t instill empathy in people who don’t have this quality. You can’t cure ingrained cruelty or greed. These people rarely get better in their psychological health after going into counseling, but only become worse and more sophisticated in their deviancy. They’re often quite intelligent and quickly learn the buzz words of psychotherapy and the kinds of behavior that are effective in front of prison therapists or other officials. They know how to present themselves as if they’ve been rehabilitated—they know how to talk convincingly. Yet they are constantly becoming more mission-oriented and their mission is not to redeem themselves but to hone their skills. They don’t study the real techniques of healing or of helping themselves; they study their own past errors when committing crimes so they can get better at their work and further their careers, just as any other professional does. And they get more daring.
One day in the early 1970s, Robinson was running Professional Services Association when he asked his secretary, Charlotte Bowersock, to prepare some letters for prospective clients. The letters stated that the Board of Regents of the University of Missouri–Kansas City “had voted [Robinson] the full rights and privileges of professor” at the School of Dentistry. The secretary, a naive young woman who needed this $7-an-hour job, mailed out the letters even though they were filled with lies. For one thing, UMKC had no Board of Regents. If that claim weren’t bold enough, the dental school dean’s signature had been forged on the letters. This scam was imaginative but went nowhere, unlike another one that Robinson had recently launched.
He’d presented himself to the University of Kansas Medical School as a financial consultant for its Family Practice Department. His new business suits, his smooth manner, his ability to speak well, and his general sense of appearing competent had impressed the physicians. Everyone he met at the medical school liked him, so Jack Walker, the department chairman, hired him, believing Robinson to be “an expert as a physicians’ professional consultant,” he once told the Kansas City Star. Walker was also the mayor of the respectable Kansas City suburb of Overland Park. He may have been taken in by the man’s people skills, but he wasn’t so impressed when he began hearing stories from the doctors in Orthopedic Surgery about how the new consultant was handling that department’s money. A few months into the job, Robinson was let go after being suspected of theft.
Then he approached John Hartlein, the executive director for Marion Laboratories, a well-known pharmaceutical company in Kansas, and asked the director to invest in PSA. When Hartlein declined the offer, Robinson fabricated a letter from Marion Labs to himself, suggesting that it wanted to acquire PSA. Robinson sent the fake letter out to potential investors and added Hartlein’s signature at the bottom. The letter also referred to the founder of Marion Labs, Ewing M. Kauffman, at that time the owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. Baseball was highly popular in Kansas City, and Kauffman was one of the metropolitan area’s most prominent citizens. The letter read:
Dear Mr. Robinson,
At Mr. Kaufman’s request, I have received the material you submitted on November 15, 1973. It is the decision of the executive committee that we continue discussions toward making Professional Services Association, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Marion Laboratories, Inc.
We will begin discussions for your training manuals at $364,000. Of course, you will be a necessary part of our overall plan, if we can reach an agreement in the near future.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Yours very truly,
S/John E. Hartlin
John E. Hartlein
Group Executive
Robinson misspelled Hartlein’s name the first time he used it and misspelled Kauffman’s name as well, but those were minor problems compared to what was coming. Some of those who got the letter were quite familiar with both Marion Labs and Ewing Kauffman. Mac Cahal, a Prairie Village businessman, received the forgery and took it seriously, committing $2,500 to PSA before deciding that he should phone Kauffman to talk about this investment. The call unleashed outrage.
“Ewing,” Cahal told the Kansas City Star some time later, “hit the ceiling.”
Cahal contacted the Securities and Exchange Commission, which sent forth investigators to look into Mr. Robinson and Professional Services Association. Two years later, a Missouri federal grand jury returned a four-count indictment against him for false representation, securities fraud, and mail fraud. Six months after that, Robinson pled out to charges of interstate securities fraud. Three more weeks passed before U.S. district judge John W. Oliver levied a $2,500 fine against the defendant and extended his probation for another three years. Beyond that he received no further punishment. In the last half dozen years, he’d gotten two similar sentences but spent only weeks behind bars.
By pleading no contest to the most recent charges, Robinson was not held liable for money he’d taken from PSA investors; he didn’t have to pay any of it back. In upcoming years, one of the most puzzling questions surrounding Robinson was where he got the money that allowed him not just to support a wife and four children, but to become upwardly mobile and to constantly improve his lifestyle. He never worked at any job for long, and his legal bills were ever present. One part of the answer was that while he made restitution on many of his thefts, law enforcement personnel have speculated that he never gave back all the money he stole from various businesses (he may, for example, have taken as much as a quarter million dollars from Dr. Graham and Fountain Plaza X-Ray and ended up pocketing most of it). Another suggestion is that by pleading guilty in 1976 to the PSA rap, he may have stashed away thousands of dollars that he’d collected from unsuspecting contributors to this business. Also, he occasionally presented himself to people as a money manager who was eager to help them grow their portfolios. He was as convincing in this role as he was in so many others.
“We can only guess how much money he took from people who were too ashamed to come forward to the police and report it,” says one officer. “The problem is that when this happens to someone, they tend not to want to pursue the charges in court or to confess their own role. When you’ve been taken by a con man, you don’t want to look foolish to the whole world.”