True Crime Campfire - Can't Buy Me Love: Master Con Man Steven J. Russell

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

In every great love story, there’s some degree of risk. We risk our hearts, at the very least. We risk getting hurt. But one thing we DON’T usually risk is prison time. This is the story of one of America’s tricksiest con men. An ingenious thief, a master impersonator, and the most prolific prison escapee in U.S. history. One of the fascinating things about him is the motivation behind his many crimes and escapes. Not so much money…but love. Or so he claims. Join us for a made-for-Hollywood tale of obsessive love and intricate fraud--the subject of the movie "I Love You, Phillip Morris" with Jim Carrey and Ewan MacGregor.Sources:I Love You, Phillip Morris by Steve McVickerEsquire Magazine, The Great Escapee by Alex HannafordThe Guardian, Elizabeth Day: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/sep/06/steven-russell-elizabeth-day-jim-carreyTodayIFoundOut.com, Karl Smallwood: King Con: The Con Man Who Simply Walked Out of Prison Four TimesFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In every great love story, there's some degree of risk. We risk our hearts at the very least. We risk getting hurt. But one thing we don't usually risk is prison time. This is the story of one of America's trickseous con men,

an ingenious thief, a master impersonator, and the most prolific prison escapie in U.S. history. One of the fascinating things about him is the motivation behind his many crimes and escapes. Not so much money, but love. Or so he claims. Join us for a Made for Hollywood tale of obsessive love and intricate fraud. This is Can't Buy Me Love, Master con men, Stephen J. Russell.

So, campers, for this one, we're in Houston, Texas, summer 1996, the offices of the North American Medical Management Company, or NAM. NAM represented all kinds of doctors groups and individual physicians, helping them process insurance payouts and manage their money. Jeff Rothenberger, the company's CEO, was having an ordinary day until the phone rang. It was an official from the bank where they did most of their business. Think we may have a problem, he said, there are some things I need you to look at with me. So the CEO gathered a couple of other execs and sat down for a meeting with the official from the bank, and within the first few minutes of that meeting, it became sickeningly clear. Over the past six

months, NAM had been taken for nearly a million dollars. It had been done so methodically, so cleverly, that it knocked the wind out of everybody at the table. But the worst part of the whole thing was the identity of the embezzler. None other than NAM's new chief financial officer, Stephen J. Russell, the guy who'd made NAM more money in the past six months than any other CFO in its history, all while charming the pain off the walls in the process. Everybody loved this guy, invited him to golf games and after-work cocktails and daughters bought mitzvahs. Stephen was a great guy. But it was clear now, Stephen had been stealing from the company since the day he set foot in the door. Clearly, Stephen's fabulous home in Clear Lake, the Mercedes

and the BMW, the Rolex and Cartier watches, the lavish lifestyle he'd been living for the past six months had all been paid for on Nam's dime's dime. And the way he'd done it was evilly ingenious. Nams founder, a former astronaut named Don Holmquest, explained how Russell's scheme worked. Quote, we had a lot of money flowing through our company. We may bring in $10 million and pay out $9 million of it, but for a period of time, you've got $10 million sitting in a bank account. Stephen Russell opened all these short-term bank accounts, all of which earned interest, and started investing large amounts of the company's money in the stock market. He did really well, earning millions of dollars, but he siphoned off at least half of that for himself. It was a win-win for Russell. The company thought,

this guy's this shit, he's making us so much money. And they had no idea he was stealing half of it for himself. The only reason he was caught now was because he made the mistake of going to the bank for a refinance on his big old ostentatious mansion trying to score a better rate, which is hilarious to me, but I guess greedy asshole's going to greed. He just happened to get an especially astute banker who went over his paperwork with a fine-tooth comb and started wondering how in the hell does this guy have this much money? That was the little pebble that started the avalanche that was now poised to come crashing down on Stephen Russell, and oh boy, were the people at NAM about to get an education about who they'd really been working with the past six months.

They got their first inkling when Don Holmquest gave Stephen a call. Strangely, he seemed to have left work early that day, some reason, and now that they had this. disturbing evidence in front of him, they needed him to explain himself. Don later described the phone conversation. He was kind of surprised when Stephen actually picked up the phone, and even more surprised by how casual and friendly he sounded. Hey, Don, how you doing? I'm doing all right, Steve, but some things have come up that we don't understand and we

really need you to come back to the office and talk to us right away. Stephen didn't miss a beat. In that same cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, he said, nope, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm out of here. And then it was just, click. Stephen Russell was gone with the wind. You know, a heist movie wishes it had that snappy of repartee. You see, our boy already knew they were onto him.

Earlier in the day, he just happened to be walking past his boss's office when he overheard part of that phone call with the bank. He didn't know it was the bank. He could only hear his boss's side of the conversation, but it included words like financial irregularities. And that got Stephen's antennae twitching. One of the marks of a good con artist is a kind of sixth sense about when consequences are starting to close in. It's almost like they smell it in the wind, or maybe they feel the ground like in spaghetti westerns,

feeling the vibration of the incoming stampede of justice. In this case, Stephen had a big stroke of good luck in overhearing that phone conversation, and he wasn't going to waste it. So he hung around and waited until his boss, left the office for lunch, and then he snuck in and did a little rummaging around. During the phone call, he'd watched his boss write down a phone number on a notepad. The boss had taken this piece of paper with him when he left, but Stephen Russell had a trick up his sleeve for this. He took a pencil and lightly colored the blank page that it

directly under the one his boss wrote the number on. It's an old detective's trick, and it worked. It brought up an indentation of the number, faint but clear enough for Stephen to look up. And when he did, he realized that the boss had been talking to the same bank that was handling his home refinance. Uh-oh, SpaghettiOs. Mm-hmm. Stephen was in full bugout mode now, headed to withdraw as much cash from the secret bank accounts as he could before the company could find and freeze them all, and headed home to try and explain all this to the love of his life, his boyfriend, Philip, and convince him it was time to leave town. That part was not going to be easy.

In the meantime, the NAM executives were uncovering one bombshell after another about their best ever CFO. First of all, his resume was fake from top-to-bottom. All the prestigious degrees and previous jobs in finance, fake. Stephen Russell didn't even have a college degree. He had a GED, and that was it. And he also had a colorful criminal record, just crammed to the gills with fraud. Insurance fraud, fake slip and falls, fake life insurance policies, Stolen Rolex watches, bad checks, password fraud, it went on and on.

So I guess this multi-million dollar company doesn't want to spend a few bucks on, you know, criminal background checks when they're looking to hire a chief financial officer. It's just, I don't know, I'm not an expert. Just kind of seems like it would have been a good idea. You'd think, but it shows you how far charm can go, doesn't it? Obviously, it didn't even occur to anybody that this dude might have a criminal past, let alone a criminal past that sounds like Bubba Gump's shrimp recipes

he was so engaging and everybody wanted to be around him he radiated great guy as you know bad people can never be fun to hang around never happen not once if a person gives a firm handshake he gets the job

limp fish handshakes that dude's trouble probably a cereal camera that one I stand by limp fish handshakes are the worst actually don't give me a lymphish handshakes although I don't give handshakes anymore I just wave on Zoom I just kick him right in the balls because it shows it's a show of strength establish your dominance that's right exactly later we'll get into some of the tactics Russell used to land this job in the first place and do a convincing job once he did and it's just my chef's kiss incredible We've covered a lot of scammers on TCC, some a lot better at it than others, but this guy is a capital L legend. Yeah, he did not half-ass anything. Stephen Russell scams with his whole entire ass, and by 1996, scamming was one of his main passions. Scamming and his boyfriend Philip Morris, who we'll get to in a minute. It wasn't always that way, though.

Stephen spent the first couple decades of his adult life pretty much following the same rules as everybody else. Weird, right? To walk the line for 20 years or so and then burst into full flower as a catch me if he can level con man? We just don't see that very often. But if you go even further back into Stephen's history, you do find some foreshadowing for that. He was born in 1957 to a bio mom who'd just gotten divorced and couldn't stand the idea of having a child with her ex. She put him up for adoption the day he was born, and soon he joined the family of Thomas and Brenda Russell, a wealthy North Carolina couple who owned a produce company. Now, actually, I want to stop for a second, even though this isn't in my notes. For some reason, two different sources had his parents' first names different. Like, one of them had the dad's name is George.

I forget what the mom's name was. But anyway, Thomas and Brenda, or possibly George and somebody, I'm not sure, but they were the Russell's. So a wealthy North Carolina couple who owned a produce company. They were a pretty standard 1950s couple, conservative but loving, and Stephen had a privileged childhood. He was kind of a strange kid, though. He didn't seem to relate very well to other kids. He liked spending time with the grownups instead, and I was actually kind of like this

as a kid, too. I mean, I did get along with kids my own age. I had friends my own age, but I was always just really comfortable around adults. And I've always had friends that were a lot older than I am. you're kind of an anomaly, Katie, and that you're quite a bit younger. Most of my friends have always been older. When I was in college,

I actually befriended a couple of my professors and, like, I'm still friends with them today. Like, even, I would go to lunch with my professors and stuff. So, but whereas I did get along with kids, you know, and grown up, Stephen just kind of avoided the other kids. And then when he was about nine years old, they told him he was adopted. And as it does for a lot of kids,

the news seemed to throw Stephen for a loop. He started acting out in some serious, disturbing ways. The most disturbing of which was fire setting. Uh, hello, item one of the McDonald triad. Nice to see you again. He set fires at his grandparents' house, at one of his parents' businesses, his uncle's house, his school, and we're not talking about little bitty fires. We're talking about big, blazing, dangerous fires. They got the fire department, scream into the scene, and when they got there, guess who'd be the one to meet him and point them where they needed to go. Stephen, of course. So he got to play superhero, and he loved it. But it didn't

take long for police and school administrators to figure out what was going on. I mean, look, Stephen Russell is a smart guy. We're not going to lie about that. But obviously not enough at 10 or 11 to figure out that when you keep popping your ass up at every four alarm blaze in the tri-county area, people are probably going to manage to work out what's going on. So when he was 12, Stephen got sent to reform school. God only knows what a Southern boys reform school was like at that time. Probably not great. And Stephen hated it like poison. He did make one important discovery there, though. He realized he was attracted to other boys. That's a big deal for anybody, that moment when you start to figure out your own sexuality. Not an easy thing to come to terms with in the south of the 1960s, though, and I suspect it made him feel even more separate from everybody else than he already had. Stephen also found out in reform school that he had an IQ of 163, which is just banana smart, like almost 30 points above genius. Dang. But he felt like a trapped animal at that school, and he obsessed about how to get out of it. Finally, he hit on a solution. His parents had gotten

braces put on his teeth, and he started bitching so much about him that the school was having to take him to the dentist like every 15 seconds. It got to be such a gigantic hassle that the school finally called his parents up like, hey, guess what? But it turns out Stephen's actually a great kid. Oh yeah, yep, that's right. Totally reform. And that's what we do at reform school, right? So if you could just go ahead and come pick him up like right now, now please, that'd be great.

Okay, thanks. Bye. And they bundled him up with all his crap and put his ass out on the curb, which is, of course, exactly what he wanted. Clever boy. Like, you know there were conversations in the teacher's lounge that were like, if this kid says one more fucking thing about his teeth, I'm going to lose it. I'm going to fucking lose it. And I do. And while the teachers are in there smoking.

Oh, yeah. Because it was the 60s. Yeah, their teeth are yellow. It's happening. I do think there is a lesson in this for everyone. Like, just become such a huge pain in the ass that you get your way all the time. I heard that out loud. No.

Never mind. I think that's how Karens are formed. That's exactly how Karens are formed. We don't want to do that. And here's an interesting little detail. The day he got out of reform school was Friday, May 13th, 1971. Friday the 13th. And from that day onward, Stephen would consider Friday the 13th his lucky day.

So if he was planning some kind of caper, he'd try and wait for a Friday the 13th to execute it. Huh. My lucky number is 13, too. Weirdly enough, my volleyball team only did poorly when I wasn't wearing that number. So I get it, Stephen. No way. Yeah. One of my best friend's kids was born on Friday the 13th, so, you know. Oh, I'll be damned. Yeah. It's a good number for me.

Reform school may have done Stephen some good after all, though, because it was after he came home from there that he actually managed to get his shit together for a while. Quite a while, actually. For the next two decades, he lived a pretty ordinary life. For a while, he volunteered as a part-time police deputy. Can we say irony? Oh, boy. He's like in the interrogation room giving the perps, like, recommendations and advice. Pointers, right. Listen, man, you can't have your name attached to anything. And while he was doing that, he met the police chief secretary, Debbie Davis, and they hit it off. At this point in the mid-70s, Stephen says he hadn't fully admitted to himself yet that he was gay.

He and Debbie got married, had a little girl named Stephanie, and Stephen became your basic law-abiding. church-going family man, TM. He even played the organ in church. Everything just kind of chugged along for a while. But then, in 1985, his dad died, and it hit Stephen hard. A sort of existential crisis hit him right between the eyes, and he started questioning everything about his life, including his sexuality. To his credit, he didn't try to hide that from his wife. He sat down with her and told her he felt like he was gay. He and Debbie decided to split, but it was amicable. They parted his friends.

And once the divorce came through, Stephen moved out to L.A. and found a job as a sales manager for a food distributor. He was good at it, by all accounts. But that wasn't enough to protect him when his boss found out he was gay. Oh, no. The guy fired him on the spot. Fucking gross. And Stephen was livid.

Yeah, it would be too. Yep. And there were no protections in place for this kind of bullshit discriminatory hogwash. So there was nothing he could do about it. And in his own words, it really screwed with his head. And this, Campers, is when Stephen J. Russell decided to give in to the urge that had never really left him all these years. The urge to find out what he could get away with. To put one over on the world.

In the words of writer Carl Smallwood, to stick it to the man. Did you just hear a sick guitar solo? Because I just heard a sick guitar solo. Wic-a-woo. And this quickly became the driving force in Stephen's life. I think it eventually becomes an addiction. But he started off just kind of dabbling and this and that. Not sure yet what his forte would be.

He started selling knock-off Rolex watches and then moved on to identity theft and insurance fraud, fake slip and falls. Sounds the kind of thing where you like pretend to slip on a puddle of spilled pudding at the piggly wiggly and then show up with a neck brace on and collect as much cash as you can from the insurance company, right? Yeah, precisely. And it paid off for Stephen. He scored pretty big on his first slip and fall scam. Got almost 50 grand, and that's in early 90s money. Dang.

While Stephen was getting his criminal career off the ground, he was also starting to explore life as a gay man. and before long he met his first boyfriend, Jim Kempel. They met at the Ocean Grand Hotel where Stephen was checking in with another boyfriend. Jim was working as a bellhop and he showed Stephen and this other guy to their room. Stephen was so attracted to Jim, like immediately at first sight, that he ditched his boyfriend the first chance he got. Oh, that's real nice, poor guy. I know, right? And in the interview I saw, he made it sound like Jim Kempel showed them.

them to their room, put down the bags, and left. And as soon as the door closed, Stephen was like, well, that's it for us. I'm going out for the bellboy. Bye. Bye-bye. He went and found Jim, asked him out, and the rest was history. They fell for each other hard. There was a dark cloud hanging over their relationship, though. Yeah, Jim was HIV positive, which was a lot different in the early 1990s than it is now. We just didn't have the treatments that we have now. so for a lot of the folks who got sick then, HIV was pretty much a terminal diagnosis. You didn't know when it was going to happen,

but it was probably going to happen. So it was a big deal, but Stephen let Jim know it didn't scare him and he wasn't going anywhere. And Stephen used the proceeds from his budding career as a fraudster to spoil the absolute shit out of his new man. Good food, good wine, nice clothes, nice place to live. Stephen was in love.

He had a thriving new career as a thief. What was not to like? He and Jim moved around a lot, probably to stay ahead of the cops and for a while worked. Stephen got away with everything he tried, until he started dabbling in passport fraud. That got him nailed, and in

1992, while living in Texas, he got arrested for insurance fraud and submitting a false passport application. Womp, womp, and he did not get a slap on the wrist. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Now, obviously, he wouldn't have done that much time. A 10

year sentence rarely means you're actually going to spend 10 years in jail, but for Stephen, it might as well have been a million years, because six months into his sentence, Jim got really sick. His HIV developed into AIDS, and he was not doing well. Stephen had never really intended to serve out his sentence in the first place. He'd been looking for an angle ever since he arrived at the prison, some way to escape. But now that his boyfriend might be dying, he was desperate to get back to him. So he pulled the trigger on the plan that had been percolating in his brain from day one. He'd been watching the guards, their

personalities, their routines, their weak points. And he'd made sure to educate himself on all the rules, both written and unwritten of the prison. He put the first step of his plan into action by a grit in his teeth and beating the absolute hell out of himself in his cell. Bruised himself all up. This got him moved to a different cell block, one where he had the option of bribing his way into a sweet gig selling sandwiches off a cart. Now this gave him a lot of freedom to mosey around the cell block, an idea of the layout, and it often put him in close contact with guards. Close enough contact, for example, to swipe one of their walkie-talkies. It was also the place where the new female inmates came in and exchanged their civilian

clothes for the prison jumpsuit, and Stephen was able to get his hands on a pair of red pants and a tie-dye t-shirt. He noticed that the guards tended to take their smoke breaks at the same time every day, and it was easy to, as he put it, go exploring while they were busy with their sigs. And one afternoon, the afternoon of Friday, May 13th, of course, Stephen put on his red pants and tie-dye shirt, grabbed his stolen walkie-talkie, and took advantage of one of those smoke breaks

to take an elevator down to the ground floor, where inmates weren't supposed to go. And with the air of casual confidence that every con man has to master if he's going to be a success, Stephen used the walkie-talkie to tap on the glass by the guard station, just like the guards always did when they were ready to leave for the day. The guard behind the glass didn't give him a second look, look, just saw the civilian clothes and the radio and opened the door. And seconds later,

Stephen J. Russell was breathing freedom's air again. He still had the walkie-talkie, so he could hear what the guards were saying back at the prison. And when they finally figured out he was gone, Stephen had one more little trick up his sleeve. He got on the radio, pretending to be a cop, and said Stephen J. Russell had been seen at a particular airport in Houston. So of course, everybody went, wee-woo, over to that airport. And meanwhile, Stephen was on the other side of town, reuniting with his love, Jim Kempel. That, of course, was his mistake, and it only took a week for the police to track him and Jim down, as they were just about to catch a flight to Mexico.

Because, see, the thing is, you're going to break out a prison, you can't be associating with people that they know you associate with, because they're just going to keep surveillance on those people. But Stephen has always been a lucky bastard, and he just happened. to score a judge, who was either real naive or real fond of charming Southern dudes, and the guy set Stevens bail at 20K, which was no problem for him. He paid it, he walked out of jail, he picked up his boyfriend, and off they went to Mexico, skipping out on the charges. Never wanted to miss a chance to stick it to the man, Stephen called the sheriff from Mexico, claiming he and Jim were in the Dominican Republic, and saying, he hoped the sheriff wasn't blaming

his escape on those poor guards on their smoke breaks. He said, you could fix the problem if you allowed smoking back in the jail, the sheriff said, fuck you. Can't blame him. What did I say about snappy repartee? Like, that is just, I don't think a writer could write that. Like, it's just fantastic. Yep. Oh, man, chef's kiss again.

I'm trying really hard not to be charmed by Stephen. He's going to wear off. He's going to wrap around his little finger. It'll wear off in a second. Once it starts getting really bad, I know. I just, you can't, you could fix the problem if you allowed smoking back in the jail. Fuck you. Anyway.

So they hung out in Mexico for a while, but as soon as they realized Jim needed better health care than they could find down there, and they crossed back into the States. Jim was getting sicker and sicker, and making matters worse was the constant war they had to wage with Jim's insurance company to try and get his care paid for. Oh, my God, we got to fix ourselves. That is just outrageous to have to spend hours on the phone arguing with insurance companies when you're literally in the process of dying. Ugh. Yeah, it fucking sucks. And it made Jim and Stephen furious, so much so that Stephen made Jim a promise.

He said, when this is all over, you mark my words. I'm going to make them pay. Them, meaning the health insurance industry, who made Jim's illness even more miserable than it had to be. Stephen, of course, jumped right back into a series of scams, including federal bank fraud. In two years after his escape from prison, it caught up with him. He and Jim were both arrested for various frauds and schemes. They let Jim go home, but Stephen went to jail on a six-month sentence. He later told Esquire magazine that the last time he saw Jimmy Kemple was in a holding cell.

They stayed in touch, but Jim died of complications from AIDS months later, with his dog. lying next to him. Oh, man, bless this heart. I'm glad he had his doggy with him. It's sad. Of course, Stephen wasn't done answering to the law once that six-month sentence was done. He was still facing more fraud charges, plus a charge for the escape he'd pulled two years earlier. And in December of 1994, they moved him to a jail in Houston for all that.

And it was there where he met the love of his life. Stephen Russell met Philip Morris, a man who had never let having the same name as an evil tobacco corporation get him down in the prison law library. Philip, a short guy, but only five two or so, was trying and failing to reach a book on a tall shelf, and six-foot-two Stephen plucked it down for him. Philip smiled at him, and that was pretty much it. Stephen was a goner. A smitten kitten. Wasn't that just a true meet-cute? It really is, yeah.

And in true Stephen fashion, he started the ball rolling with a big, fat lie. Told Philip he was an attorney, told him, in Stephen's own words, all kinds of bullshit. He told Esquire, you don't expect to meet someone cool in jail. You expect to meet the derelicts, and damn, was I wrong? So his go-to when he wanted to impress somebody was just to start spewing a bunch of manufactured shite. I mean, not really the best way to start off a relationship, I think you'll find, but it seems to be all Stephen is capable of. Yeah, I don't think he's actually capable of telling the truth ever. I think he just lies as easy as breathe in.

That's the default. Yeah. It was pretty much an instant connection. And fortunately, both Stephen and Philip got paroled a few months later. here was a chance to settle down, build a real life, lay off the scamming. But that, as I suspect you've figured out already, is not how our boy rolls. He and Philip moved into a nice apartment in Clear Lake outside of Houston, and pretty much immediately got the party started.

Stephen cashed in a life insurance policy on his late boyfriend, Jimmy, and he and Philip lived large for a while. They bought Mercedes Benzizzizz. They went to the best restaurants. It was pretty much a non-stop back-and-all. and Stephen was determined for it to say that way. He'd actually promised Jim Kempel months before his death that when he fell in love again eventually, he'd show his new man the same kind of love and care he'd shown Jim. He wanted to spoil his man.

But of course, to do that, he needed lots of cash, and God forbid our boy like get an actual job or something ridiculous like that. He had a different scheme in mind. He saw a job posting for chief financial officer at North American Medical Management or NAM and immediately knew this was what he was like. looking for? Remember his, totally justified, grudge against the health insurance companies who'd made Jim's life so miserable in his last days? And remember how he promised Jim he'd make him pay? Well,

this was his chance to kill two birds with one stone, wreak some righteous vengeance on the American medical insurance industry, and make some serious bank to throw in his boyfriend. Win, win. Of course, Stephen had never worked as a CFO in his life. Didn't know shit about it. But a mere lack of knowledge, credentials, ability, or experience had never stopped Stephen before, and it wasn't going to stop him now. Stephen wants something, Stephen's going to find a way to take it. First, he placed an ad for a job posting for a CFO, as if he were the one hiring. Resumets soon started rolling in, and Stephen used bits and pieces of the best ones to put together his own fake credentials. Clever. Next, he studied up on the job, just enough to get a feel for the vocabulary,

the right buzzwords, the general vibe. Enough to skillfully bullshit his way through an interview. And it worked. Well enough that Steven stood out head and shoulders above all the real actually qualified candidates. Talking skills, y'all. That ability to charm people, as unfair as it may seem, is worth its weight in diamonds. Especially in industries and positions where being charming is more important than being experienced. Being a good salesman is more important than an Ivy League degree in some cases. Oh, sure. And the last gear in this well-oiled bullshit machine was to set up an answering service with various phone numbers attached to the fake references Stephen put on his resume.

When Nam called his references, they were actually calling Stephen himself, who just disguised his voice and gave himself a whole bunch of glowing reviews. Dang. Stude has got a Godzilla-sized sense of entitlement, don't he? It's like, you know, imposter syndrome? Well, whatever the opposite of that is, that's what Stephen Russell has. Poster syndrome. Right. And from day one, everybody at NAM thought they'd scored the best CFO in the country.

Nobody had any idea he was stealing him blind. Stephen bought a gorgeous big house in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in town, and his and Phillips' party slash spending spree went on for six months, all five-star dining and jet skis until a routine application to refinance his mortgage got Stephen found out. Remember that from the beginning of the episode, right? So as soon as he realized the jig was up, Stephen withdrew 40 grand from the one account the company hadn't managed to freeze yet and went back to break the news to Philip. Now, Philip has always insisted that he didn't know Stephen was stealing from NAM, and I can

actually buy this, okay? I mean, Stephen did have a high-paying job at the company, even without the embezzling. He was making like 700K a year in 90s money. So Philip just took the Cartier watches and the fancy dining as part of the lifestyle of a CFO. And although Philip was in jail when he met Stephen, he doesn't seem to have had much of a criminal pass. He went to jail for like returning a rental car late on vacation and then not being able to afford one of his restitution payments and revoking his bail.

It's like, ooh, watch out everybody. It's Billy the kid, right? I mean, he's a law-abiding citizen until he met this guy. So Stephen is the one with the history of scamming. I can believe there's actually a pretty good chance Philip just got duped. And the other thing I think is important is Philip's a lot younger than Stephen too, like almost 20 years younger, I think. So there's that whole power differential that comes with a big age gap. But the problem was, Philip was in this shit up to his eyeballs, whether he was

an intentional accomplice or not. Because Stephen had used his name and several variations of it to take out multiple bank accounts and write multiple fraudulent checks. Which if he wasn't an accomplished is just incredibly shitty. So he and Philip left their big fancy house and went on the lamb, moving from hotel to hotel to stay ahead of the cops. Always the control freak, Stephen tried to keep on top of the police investigation to see if they'd filed charges on him yet. He'd pose as a judge and make calls to various attorneys in the DA's office trying to pump them for information. It worked at first, but eventually people got suspic. And, And the DA figured out what must be going on.

He got what they call a pocket warrant, one that doesn't get filed with the county clerk to keep their intention secret. So the next time Stephen called to check up on things, he was told there was no warrant out for him. And he figured, hey, I guess it's safe to go back to our house to pick up a few things. It wasn't. The Houston police, who'd had surveillance on the house for days now, put the habeas grabs on him as he walked through the door. As they were putting him in the squad car, Stephen stopped them. I'm a diabetic, he said. I need to take my insulin.

Not fully understanding exactly what kind of con man they had in custody, the officers let him get it. And on the way to the station, Stephen injected himself with a massive dose of insulin. Insulin prescribed not for him, but for Philip Morris. Stephen wasn't diabetic. Philip was. So like, injecting a non-phobic. non-diabetic with a Schrelli's weight and insulin will fuck you right up to death's door.

Oh, yeah. Later, Stephen claimed this was a suicide attempt, but Philip Morris puts a different spin on it. He told Esquire, it's easier for him to plan and escape when he's not in law enforcement custody. It's much easier from a hospital. That's why he did that. By the time they got him into the booking area at the jail, Stephen was slipping into shock. Yeah, one little too far, it seems. and at the hospital, he ended up being too busy trying not to die to plan an escape.

The police picked poor Philip Morris up soon, too, for his alleged role in the NAM theft. Philip ended up getting out on a manageable bail, but the court system had different plans for Stephen, hitting him with almost a million dollar bail. Ouch. But as we've seen so many times before, you can't keep a good con man down. If he couldn't afford his bail, Stephen figured he'd just change the same. the amount. He drew up a fake bond order, changing his bail to 45K, and on the date of his next court hearing, he stuck it in his jumpsuit and waited for his chance. As the deputies were

walking him down the hallway to the courtroom, he noticed a court clerk approaching with an arm loan of papers, and he casually dropped his fake bond order on the floor. And lo and behold, a moment later, the lady saw it lying there, assumed she dropped it and picked it up. Oh, my God. The next day, our boy walked out of jail. His bond paid. The next day, by the way, was Friday, July 13th, Stephen's lucky day. Oh, my God.

Now, Campers, here's the thing. If he just sat his ass in jail and took his medicine for the embezzlement, he probably would have done a few years in prison and gotten back out again, free to get back to scamming or, God forbid, find something useful to do. But it never seems to have occurred to Stephen to. just, you know, do his time. He was always determined to get out and get right back to Philip. And, I mean, I get the impulse, okay? I wouldn't want to be separated from my husband either. But dude, you had a good gig as Nam CFO. You were actually doing a good job at it, despite your

total lack of qualifications. You were making 700 grand a year. This whole embezzlement caper was just totally unnecessary. Like, if your objective was to treat Philip right and everything, you all could have lived happily ever after, man, but that wasn't good enough for you. I just don't get it. So however much Stephen claimed to love Philip, it's pretty clear to me he loved scamming more. And I got to admit, he is damn good at it, scary good. He beeline for his and Philip's house in Clear Lake, walked up on Philip just as he was taking the dog out for a walk. Stephen grinned and said, surprise, but Philip wasn't surprised. He knew what day it was. He'd been expecting and something like this. And here's where I feel like Stephen might not be the great

lover he claims to be. In order to convince Philip to jump his own bail and leave town with him, Stephen lied to him, told him there was an active warrant to bring him back to jail. Scared, not wanting to go back to prison, Philip let himself be convinced and he and Stephen headed for Florida. Having finally figured out what Stephen had pulled to get himself out on a 45K bond, the Houston DA was not pleased. Investigators got warrants to monitor the phone lines of everybody close to Stephen, and it did not take long for this to lead them right to our two favorite lovebirds on the lamb. Once again, may I say, wamp, womp, man, for the love of God, go somewhere with no extradition treaty with the U.S. Why, you always insist on staying in the

South. I just, ugh, anyway. Yeah, you've got to stick to landing, man. Come on. Right? So they hauled Stephen in on escape charges and fill up for jumping bail, and off they went back to jail in Texas. The DA offered Stephen a deal right out of the gate, but it wasn't exactly a sweet one. Feeling perhaps a bit put out at the fact that our boy had now escaped several times, he decided to go for a serious prison sentence, 45 years, and he fully expected Stephen to reject the plea offer and go to trial, which most people would do. Much to his surprise, though, Stephen said, okay, I'll take it. Forty-five years. You'll take 45 years? Uh, all righty, then. Everybody was shocked, but they made it happen and sent Stephen off to the Estelle

unit of the state prison, a unit, by the way, from which no one had ever escaped. And they put him under the maximum super-duper super-villain lockdown, too. No access to a phone, which for Stephen pretty much robs him of his best tool to pull shenanigans with. Okay, so he's going to stay put now and do his time, right? Right? Yeah. Wrong. The Estelle unit was a medical unit. It's where the infirmary was and where the prison docs and nurses saw patients. And it didn't take Stephen long to notice something. The doctors were these mint-green scrubs that looked very much like the white ones the prisoners wore. Stephen started complaining of explosive diarrhea. It was so bad he told the doctors that he really needed a couple extra

pairs of scrubs. Once he had his hands on those, he bartered with another inmate for dozens and dozens of green highlighter pens from the prison art room. and then one red permanent marker. He used the green markers to slowly and meticulously dye a pair of white scrubs green. It took a lot of work to get it to approximately the same color as the doctor's scrubs, but he managed it. And then he used the red marker to color in the background of his prison ID to change the inmate blue background to the doctor red. And on December 13th, a Friday, of course, I don't even know there were this many Friday the 13th. It's amazing.

It's just all over the story. On December 13th, he waited until the very end of the guard shift. He knew there was a guard there who was still new to the place, and she liked to spend her shift on the phone, not really paying the closest attention to the door. He knew she'd be tired and ready to go home soon, and with the perfect casual confidence, he always managed to muster up at these times he put on his green scrubs,

flashed his colored-in red ID at the distracted guard, and waltzed right out the door. On his way through the big gates out front of the prison, one of the armed guards called out to him. Damn, Doc, those look like prison whites you're wearing. Which most of us would be like, okay, I'm fucked and just like, please don't, you know, don't kill me or kill me and would wet themselves.

Stephen just laughed. Don't shoot. Kept right on walking. And as soon as he was out of sight, he turned around and flipped off the prison. Now that, as writer Steve McVicker once said, is Hootspah. Honestly, he's like the MacGyver of prison escapes.

Like, escape prison with a few markers and the clothes on your back, or stolen clothes and a sandwich cart. Or you'll explode. Or like, not see your boyfriend for a long time or whatever. Right. Of course, freshly freed and presumably smelling faintly of Sharpie, Stevie beeline right for Philip Morris, out on bail once again. Philip took one look at him and said, asshole. I bet he did. Poor bastard. He had a normal life before he met this dude. But he wasn't mad enough to say no to Stephen. They went on the lamb again, this time to Biloxi.

But it didn't take long for them to get caught once again, because again, they were in the South. The story of the most prolific prison escapee ever was all over the news, and the police were monitoring the phone lines of all Stephen and Philip. friends and family members. And this time, y'all, the hammer dropped hard. Philip was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Rough, but it probably wouldn't end up being anywhere near 20 years in reality. But Stephen's sentence, yikes. In addition to the 45-year sentence, he'd already accepted a plea deal for last time,

the Houston DA added a staggering 100 years for the escapes. That's the kind of sentence you want to see for a fucking war criminal or a serial killer, not a con man in love. Right. As you can imagine, Stephen wasn't having it. His immediate reaction was, well, that's just going to take forever. It wouldn't do. He needed to get out so he could work on getting Philip out, too. And the way he came up with this time campers, buckle the fuck up for this one.

he somehow managed to get his hands on his medical file at the prison and he altered it to say he was HIV positive and then he launched into a year-long campaign to convince the prison doctors he was dying of AIDS he took laxatives, skipped meals, whatever he could do to drop a startling amount of weight a la Bundy yeah and it worked he looked gaunt, waxy, terminally ill

having seen what Jim's symptoms were like he knew what kinds of things to complain about what signs to try to mimic and he was so effective at this that it never occurred to any of the prison doctors to actually test him for HIV they just saw this thin pale sick looking guy and took his word for it that he was dying which okay I feel like this one in particular is on them like you just look at a skinny gay guy and go yep he's got AIDS next yep come on This man is a known liar. Especially since that prison had been specifically warned about him. Obviously, nobody paid any attention. He beat the fuck out of himself. He injected himself with insulin. Like, this man, this man was capable of doing something like this. Just test him.

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And about a year into his charade on Friday, March 13th, 1998. My God. Stephen got just what he was hoping for. compassionate release, a kind of parole reserved for the dying, or sometimes really elderly inmates. The prison released him to a medical facility where they basically sent inmates to die. And right away, Stephen got to work.

He'd read an article about an AIDS doctor, Dr. Adam Rios, and from his room he called the director of the facility, posing as this doctor. I need a subject for a research study, he said. someone who's dying of AIDS. Well, isn't that convenient seeing as how the facility just got a new patient who, guess what, is dying of AIDS? No way. It fit the criterion exactly. The director, eagerly, I presume, said, we'll send him right over.

And before you know it, Mr. Stephen J. Russell was out on his own once more. But he wasn't finished. to make sure the state of Texas never troubled him again. He was technically still on parole, you see. So he got himself a pair of scrubs and a white coat, and he showed up at a funeral home posing as a doctor to score himself a death certificate. He filled it out for one Stephen J. Russell, cause of death, complications from the AIDS virus, and he filed it with the state, along with a letter to his parole officer, informing him of the sad event. For all until, sense and purposes, to the state of Texas, Stephen J. Russell was dead.

As always, it was his obsession with Philip that would prove his undoing. He wanted to get his love out of jail. His first move was to put on a suit and tie and visit Philip in jail, posing as his attorney. But he knew that was too risky a move to try too often. He'd been in that jail. They knew him. And he was a great impersonator, but he was no master of disguise. He started looking into getting cosmetic surgery to alter his looks. And he also went to a Kinko's Copies type place one afternoon and said, Hey, could you make me up a fake Texas State Bar Association card? It's for a gag gift for a friend.

Hmm, a bar association card could open up all kinds of doors for Stephen to file all kinds of fake paperwork, maybe something that could get Philip released early. The Kinko's guy agreed to do it. Took a picture of Stephen to use for the fake ID and everything, but after Stephen left, the guy started getting a bad feeling in the pit of his his stomach. Like, eh, probably shouldn't have did that. He still had a photocopy of Stephen's picture, and he called the police. Soon after that, that somewhat grainy photocopy landed on the

desk of Terry Cobbs, the head of the fugitive task force, the folks who brought Stephen and Philip in last time. But as far as he knew, Stephen was still in prison. Imagine his surprise when he found out his boy had been granted compassionate parole. Curious and already suspic, he called up Stephen's parole officer, and when he got the sad news of his old praise death, he just burst out laughing. He's not dead. He told the parole guy, believe me, he's not dead. And just like that, the task force was back on Stephen's trail. But he wasn't as easy to lay hands on this time. They'd pick up the trail, then lose it again. But finally, Agent Cobbs got a call from the FBI field office in Dallas, and they had a wild story to tell, one that seemed like classic Stephen Russell. A guy had come into a bank,

kind of ritsy and apparently wearing a hairpiece and saying his name was Art Sandler. This, by the way, was a wealthy friend of Stephen's parents, a guy Stephen sort of vaguely remembered. He had a driver's license and a birth certificate in Sandler's name, said he was a multi-millionaire and just needed to withdraw $75,000 in cash. No big deal. The bank manager, whose radar is obviously better than most people's, got suspicious as they were talking and he asked for the name of Mr. Sandler's personal banker. He didn't know it. And as the manager stepped into the next room to call the police, and then the FBI bank robbery squad, Mr. Sandler must have figured out that his scam was about to go tits up.

So, he fell to the ground, convulsing in pain, and grabbing his arm. Unbeknownst to him, while he was flopping around, he dropped his fake ID, which the cops would pick up later and match to Stephen Russell's mugshot. Basically, our boy was trying to steal 75 grand of poor old Art Sandler's millions to hire Philip Morris a top-notch lawyer. And when he realized he was about to get caught, he faked a heart attack. So ambulance came, woo, woo, woo, woo to the hospital. Normally, this is a great thing for Stephen, right? Easy place to escape from. But this hospital had a regular cop on duty. And by now, the Dallas PD had been in touch and told him to post the cop right outside his room.

The FBI were on their way to question the guy. They suspected he just tried to rob a bank. Fortunately for Stephen, though, there was a phone in his hospital room. He called, called the hospital, from the hospital, posing as an FBI agent, and said, hey, do you have this dude under guard right now? Well, he's free to go. We don't need you to hold him anymore. And lest their hearts, the poor hospital fell for it. And off Stephen went once again.

You know, the untold story of Stephen Russell is the sheer amount of people he got fired for being inattentive and helping him get away with shit. Yeah, you know it. It's got to be like a dozen people, right? That just got to be sacked. At least. Terry Cobbs tracked him across several cities after that, picking up his trail and losing it again. Finally, he got hold of the phone logs from a hotel where Stephen had stayed a few days before,

and there was a number he'd called again and again. And when Agent Cobbs called it, it was a life insurance company. Stephen was trying to pull yet another scam. And it was this that finally put the nail in the coffin for Stephen. Cobbs and the life insurance company worked together to get Stephen to a car. copy shop to pick up a fax, and when he got there, the task force was waiting for him. In August 2000, a jury took less than an hour to find Stephen J. Russell guilty on the escape charges. He was sentenced to life in prison. On top of his previous sentence for the NAM theft,

this added up to 144 years. Holy smokes. He's still there now, though he does have parole hearings now and then, and by all accounts, he's doing his best to sweet-talking. himself into release. As for Philip Morris, he got out of prison on early release and moved back to his home state of Arkansas. And as of 2010, when he gave an interview to journalist Alex Haniford, he was feeling pretty jaded about old Stephen. He said, quote, it's hard to describe my feelings because they change daily, but it eats

me up sometimes. I wake up in the middle of the night's sweating, thinking I'm still in prison. And it makes me mad at it. Steve. He and Steve corresponded for a while, but they don't anymore. At least they didn't as of the timing of that article. Philip says he's forgiven, Stephen,

but he doesn't go visit him. His feeling is the guy did wrong, and he's paying his dues. Yeah, and you know, it's tempting to think of this as a love story, and Stephen Russell is a kind of folk hero, and if you want to think of it that way, I'm not your mom, go ahead. I can see the appeal. I really can. And I have to admit a grudging admiration for just how freaking clever the guy is. I mean, you got to love watching people who are good at things, you know, and he is really good at this.

But the story might be a little bit more complicated and a little bit less Hallmark movie of the week than it's been made out to be, at least according to Jim Kempel's mom, and according to Philip Morris himself, as we just heard. Jim's mom, Helen, told Esquire magazine, quote, I really liked Stephen at first, but he conned Jimmy. He lied like a rug. He told one lie after a another. And he deserves to be where he is 100% because he'll do it again. Yeah, I joked in the beginning about being charmed by Stephen. And I think that's his superpower almost is that he's able to charm. And it's because he lives his life like a movie. Like that snappy repartee with people in authority. But you have to remember, like, people got fired because of the things he did. People lost money in their jobs because of the things that he did. People went to prison because of the things he did. Poor Philip.

Exactly. Exactly. And it's not, you know, it's easy to forget that real people, human beings were involved in his shenanigans. But, I mean, he was a bad person, is a bad person. And of course, Philip Morris spent time in prison for crimes. He has always maintained he didn't commit. It was guilt by association. Stephen used him, used his name, to steal that money from NAM, and didn't seem bothered by the possibility that Philip's life might get ruined in the process. That's the thing about Stephen Russell. You can see him as a sort of fool for love, always motivated by a desire to get back to the love of his life. Right, but he's been pretty careless with the people he loves, hasn't he?

I mean, his own obsession, his own passion, his own desire always seems to drive the bus. I'm not sure what he feels for Philip is love, exactly. I mean, obsession? Yeah, affection, probably. But there's a narcissistic, kind of selfish quality to it, too. All that said, and we are on the tightrope of nuance here, folks. Yep. I kind of feel like his prison sentence is absurd. I mean, the man is in jail for 144 years for nonviolent crimes. The main victim of which was a major corporation who seemed to me to recover just fine. not that it makes it okay obviously it doesn't it's still a crime but i can't help but feel the state

of texas slapped that sentence on him not because of the nam theft but because he embarrassed the shit out of them by busting out of their arcomas prison so many times yep and it's not just the sentence it's also that they've got the guy in solitary like buried in the bowels of the death row building like he's fucking magneto or something or like hannibal lector like they're so afraid he'll be able to talk his way out again, that they've essentially just tossed him into an obliette and thrown away the key. A dude spends 23 hours a day in a tiny cell. Does he deserve that? I don't know. I don't think so. I'm not going to say he never heard anybody, just like I previously said. I think he did, actually. Sure. But is he dangerous to the point where we got to punish him

worse? Worse than most murderers and rapists? Rapists get slaps on the wrist in three months in prison. Yeah. And he gets, you know, three lifetimes in jail, two lifetimes in jail. Yeah. I'm going to go out on a limb and say, no. No. If you agree, by the way, there's an online petition you can sign. We will share on our social media.

Hollywood made a movie of this case. It's called I Love You, Philip Morris, named after the book by the same name by Steve McVicker. The book was one of our sources for the case, by the way, and it's terrific. I haven't seen the movie, but I see the movie. suspect it's a lot of fun, probably a very romanticized version of the truth, but apparently both Stephen and Philip liked it a lot. Philip got to go to the premiere. The movie stars Jim Carrey as Stephen and Ewan McGregor as Philip. Check it out. Let us know if you like it. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week. But for now,

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