For those who like to read interesting stories, here's one. I worked hotel security in D.C. around this time. This guy would show up, toss names around and work his way into any high profile event.
He was finally caught at a local hotel after he was exposed for being a fraud and con man. I had been trying to find this article for years.
This is a true Colin alert but worth the reading.
The Man Who Kept Coming to Dinner; What Are We to Make of Dr. David Hall, the Fashionable Freeloader With a Soft Spot for Charities?
The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Washington, D.C.
Author: Martha Sherrill
Date: Jun 26, 1992
He likes trade shows. He thrives at black-tie benefits. He knows the hotels in town like his own living room. David Lee Hall wanders happily - an assured bounce to his step - into conventions, receptions, press previews, galas, opening nights. Where 300 or more are gathered in an airless ballroom ... look for him there. Helping himself to another stuffed chicken breast with cream sauce. Reaching for another glass of sparkling wine. Elbowing his way into pictures with celebrities. With Art Monk, with Harry Belafonte.
Free. All for free.
The astonishing "Dr. David Hall" technique has been working in Washington for years: A day or two before a black-tie fund-raiser, a man calling himself "Dr. David Hall" telephones the charity. He says he needs two tables, right up front. Price is no problem. In fact, he's already sent the money.
Sometimes he says he's the director of "Christian Concern for Community Action." Sometimes he says he's a representative of "BPI" or "Black Press International." Sometimes he's a minister. Sometimes a drug counselor. Sometimes he says he's a psychiatrist too, a convention and event planner, a PhD from Morehouse College in Atlanta. The business cards he's been handing out most recently say: "Be Somebody. Be a Morehouse Man."
But he is neither.
The night of the party, a kindly "Dr. Hall" arrives in black tie. He's short - about 5 feet 3. He has a minor mustache and peppery short hair and a nice way about him. He is 47. He is slender. He stands at the ballroom doors with his guests by his side - mostly women all perfectly dressed up, all smiling. Then, with the sweetest good manners, in the softest voice - why, the doctor seems almost shy! - Hall breathes life into the most tired line of the deadbeat: "The check is in the mail."
But it never is.
David Lee Hall never went to Morehouse College, or Howard University, or Texas Southern University in Houston - as it said in Who's Who in the East from 1979 to 1989. The military has no records that he served in Vietnam, or with the U.S. Army at all, or with the National Guard, all of which is claimed in Who's Who.
He is described as a "clergyman" in five editions, then "religious organization administrator." But he has no church. The organization that he's allegedly administrating, "Christian Concern for Community Action," is not listed with the District government - not as a nonprofit concern, or a corporation, or a limited partnership. Hall's birth date as reported in Who's Who is at odds with the one listed with his Social Security number. Only his name and his address - on the 1300 block of K Street SE - seem to be accurate.
David Hall has not made himself available for interviews; we don't have his side of the story. But if we believe the testimony of more than three dozen people with whom Dr. Hall has enjoyed brief and unsatisfying contractual arrangements, this much is clear: In the past six years, Hall has spent an enormous amount of time eating for free. He has become something of a legend, an urban Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to himself. Giving to his friends too - mostly casual acquaintances he meets here and there.
"Out of the thousands of villains who walk the Earth every day, what he's done is pretty innocent," says William Reed, business editor of the Capital Spotlight and an acquaintance of Hall's. "The total sum of his crimes is really nothing. He just wanted to go to the big parties. He wanted to be at the right place at the right time."
His story first became public June 2, after The Washington Post's Reliable Source column was tipped off to Hall's freeloading reputation by several charities and nonprofit groups that claimed to have been burned.
That got people talking. Charities contacted charities. Notes were compared. Some groups had been burned several times.
Then, while crashing a GOP fund-raiser on June 4 at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel, Hall was discovered outside the men's room and served with a civil lawsuit on behalf of the Greater Washington Boys and Girls Clubs for an allegedly unpaid $7,500 tab from 1990. On June 12, at a court appearance on criminal charges of having defrauded a limousine service, he was served with two other civil suits.
What's he been up to, all those years?
Perhaps the idea was to redirect charitable contributions. Perhaps the American Heart Association didn't need all that money. Or the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Washington Home, the Art Barn, the Washington Charitable Fund, the YMCA, the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art, the Family and Child Services of Washington, the Washington Opera, the American Cancer Society.
Last November, Hall promised the Art Barn $3,000 for 30 tickets to the opening night of "The Addams Family." He saw the movie, dined leisurely - he was the last to leave - but never paid. On Jan. 21, he called NARAL and requested two tables at its Jan. 22 black-tie benefit in the Mayflower Hotel ballroom. He came and enjoyed the night with 19 friends. He had his photo taken with Belafonte, the master of ceremonies. The two tables were worth $7,500. According to Loretta Ucelli, director of NARAL communications, the organizers hadn't worried that "Dr. Hall" from "Christian Concern for Community Action" wouldn't pay. They worried that he was "an anti-choicer who might disrupt the dinner."
"Afterwards," says Ucelli, "he kept promising to pay, but we never saw the money."
In February, he hit the opening of Entertaining People, an annual fund-raiser for the Washington Home. He got a $10,000 table that he and nine friends enjoyed. "I thought maybe I'd just let him in and trust him," says Susie Murphy, a volunteer who discussed the matter with the higher-ups. "We all decided to err on the side of trusting him, to believe him that the check was coming."
On April 25, after being denied a $3,250 table at the Corcoran Ball - the gallery folks knew all about his technique, having never received payment for a Halloween masquerade ball in 1990 - Hall attended the American Heart Association ball. He had called at the last minute, reserving a table for 10 people - worth $2,500 to the organization. "Hall told me that he worked with substance abuse patients," says a spokesman for the charity. "He was a very personable guy."
Soon afterward, the telephone number he gave them was reported disconnected.
"He's very pleasant," says Susan Rosenbaum, vice president for development and public affairs at the Corcoran. "Pledges a high amount of money. Brings a group of attractive, well-dressed people - mostly women. Arrives in limousines. Leaves with a phone number that he never answers... . I think it took awhile until everybody had tied his name and face with a scam artist. By a year ago, it was well-known that there was a con artist in town named Dr. David Hall who booked tables for charities and didn't pay."
But persistence does pay. A couple years ago, David Hall was told he wouldn't be admitted to a New Year's Eve gala for the Washington Charitable Fund at the Four Seasons Hotel unless he brought a check for $3,500. He came anyway. "With 12 people, mostly girls," remembers Nasreen Wills, vice president of the Georgetown Design Group. "He made an entrance with all those women ... at that point there wasn't much I could do. They were standing at the door. They were very nicely dressed." He never paid.
Hall was thrown out of a Touchdown Club reception at the Sheraton Washington in 1991, and then denied two tables at the club's annual dinner (his check for $3,000 hadn't arrived), but he had the temerity to turn up at the Touchdown Club awards dinner this year, on Jan. 18. As if they wouldn't notice.
"There he was - in black tie," says Sam Lomauro, secretary-treasurer for Touchdown Club charities. "He hadn't called for tickets, he just showed up at our press conference, saying he worked with a newspaper. We asked him to leave - although we let him finish his drink."
On May 14, he turned up at the 140th anniversary party for the YMCA.
"I told him that we would have to have cash or a certified check at that very moment," says Bob Schwartzberg, senior vice president of the organization. "He wasn't mad. He was low-key and gentlemanly about it. He said that he was worried about his check, that it was lost, and all that. Then he changed his tactic, saying that he was covering it for the black press. I asked for credentials. He went through his pockets. He said he had left them in the car."
He walked outside, Schwartzberg says, and never returned.
"I've known him for years!" says Colline Evans, PR director at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel.
"I've always had my doubts about whether he was supposed to be at certain events. Last event I remember seeing him was at a celebrity bake-off auction for the YMCA at the Ramada Renaissance in April." In 1987, Associated Driver's Limousine Services filed a suit against David Hall for nearly $10,000 in unpaid limousine charges, a bill the service claims he ran up in three weeks' time, at $60 an hour. Car phone too. The suit was dropped when the company went under. Criminal charges alleging theft of services have been filed against Hall over another limousine bill dating back to 1990. The case will be heard in Superior Court on July 6.
The previous owner of La Brasserie, Raymond Campet, says Hall owes him $3,000 for baked goods delivered to his town house during the spring and summer of 1990. According to Campet, Hall claimed to be a minister ordering food for church functions. Campet filed a civil suit against Hall this spring.
The National Black Media Coalition is suing Hall for $7,110 - charges the organization says he accrued while attending a conference, luncheon and banquet thrown in 1987.
"Sure I know him," says Pluria Marshall, chairman of the National Black Media Coalition. "He gets his slimy tail in every door. He takes money from the crippled, the blind, blacks, whites. He doesn't care. We filed a lawsuit against him, but what are you going to get from somebody who has nothing? He's just a man with a big ego and a lot of con man in him."
How has he been so successful for so long?
"It's expensive to sue him," says Michael Bentzen of Schweitzer, Bentzen & Scherr. But he's doing it anyway - pro bono on behalf of the Greater Washington Boys and Girls Clubs. Bentzen claims that Hall owes the charity $7,500 for three patron's tables, right up front, at the Automotive Trade Association Gala benefit in 1990. "First you got to find the guy, and spend hundreds of dollars doing that," says Bentzen. "Then, nobody believes he has any money - so why bother?"
Benefit organizers for Channel 32 say they never saw the $1,500 that David Hall promised after ordering a table for 10 people at a "Casino Night" fund-raiser in January 1991. "He came and had some very attractive young ladies with him," remembers Leonard Manning, who sits on the board of the public television station. "He walked up to me and knew who I was. I don't remember what we talked about except that I spent the whole time wondering who he was."
`Happy Birthday, Ann' END NOTES In February and March of this year, Hall began a strange spree of flower-sending - more generosity at someone else's expense. On Feb. 5, he called Nesha's Flowerland in Silver Spring, according to owner Yasmin Deonauth. Hall asked to open an account. She says Hall claimed to be a psychiatrist and the director of Christian Concern for Community Action. He also said he organized functions for the group and was always in need of flower arrangements.
Between Feb. 5 and March 11, Deonauth says "Dr. David Hall" ordered $1,800 worth of arrangements from Nesha's - sometimes stargazer lilies, sometimes blooming plants, but most often dozens of long-stem red roses. Deonauth started demanding payment when Hall's bill approached $700, but Hall kept insisting that "the person in his organization who had to sign the check was out of town," says Deonauth. Later, he claimed "the check was in the mail." Still later, he claimed the check had been lost. And still later, she says Hall told her that he couldn't bring the money because his mother had had a heart attack and he had to see her in the hospital.
"I don't want my money," Deonauth says now. "I want him thrown in jail."
Hall ordered sometimes four arrangements a day, and often two arrangements at a time to the same person. They were always to women.
On the night of her birthday in late February, Ann Coates in Fort Washington received an "exotic arrangement" - bird of paradise and anthurium. When the flowers arrived, Coates was utterly shocked, she says. So was her husband.
She barely knew Hall, she had to explain. She'd met him at a big black-tie Christmas party at the Washington Hilton two months before. He just walked up, during the course of the party, and introduced himself. "We were talking that night, going through the zodiac," says Coates, "and I told him that I was a Pisces. He wanted to know the date. I guess he wrote it down."
Hall gave her his business card - "Be Somebody, Be a Morehouse Man" - and offered to help her career. "He asked if I needed a job with the District government," says Coates. "He said he could get me one. I wasn't really interested in a job, but my girlfriend needed one, so I gave him my work number."
He called her several times afterward. He asked her to dinners and other functions. "I told him that I was happily married," says Coates. "I never went anywhere with him." When the birthday flowers came to her home address with a note - Happy Birthday Ann, Dr. Hall - Coates says that she wasn't sure, at first, who "Dr. Hall" was. Then she remembered the little guy from the Christmas party.
One woman on Hall's flower-sending list received very romantic notes from him, according to Deonauth. When the woman started refusing the flowers at the door, Hall became upset. The delivery man concurs. Pierre Valladay, the owner of Express-It, a courier service in Brentwood, says he drove David Hall himself out to the woman's house in Woodbridge. Hall knocked several times, but nobody answered. They left photographs of Hall at the door. Hall told him to drive around the block. When they returned to her address, the envelope was gone.
Valladay and his couriers made close to $2,500 in deliveries for David Hall. Hall sent mostly flowers and photographs of himself. He never paid.
"There was one of him with Redskins at a Touchdown Club party," says Valladay. "There was another picture of him with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte."
Several people who attended functions as guests of Dr. Hall say Hall never asked them to reimburse him for their tickets.
"What was he getting out of it? I don't know," says one guest of several cocktail receptions and dinners. "I don't think he was making material gains from it. He kept showing up in the same brown suits."
"He just wants to impress people," says one woman who has known Hall - socially - for years. "He wants everybody to think he's important. It's mostly for the girls... . He is very short. A Napoleon complex."
Leslie Winder met David Hall last December, at a trade show at the Mayflower Hotel. He stopped by Winder's booth - for the Toronto Convention and Visitors Association - and talked a bit. He picked up her business card. Soon after he began calling. Hall gave her the impression that he was an event planner and told Winder that he might have business for the city of Toronto and might be arranging some events there for "some people in the medical profession." He bragged a bit about his connections - about the parties he went to, about his business.
"First he invited me to a Redskins party at his house," says Winder. "I said no. Then another Redskins party. I said no. Then he invited me to a Harry Belafonte concert - it was when the abortion rights groups were in town and there was a fund-raiser concert. He wanted me to join him. I declined. Then he called again, when NOW had its anniversary party. But I had friends in town and declined too. He said he had a whole table and invited all my friends as well. I said no again."
Feeling a little bad that she'd been constantly turning him down - and slightly hopeful that he might really have some business for Toronto - Winder invited Hall to lunch. A date and time were set. He never showed.
Unconventional Campaign
It's not easy to find people who claim to be intimates of David Hall's. He appears to be a person with many acquaintances, but few close friends. "All those people who he invited to parties now will have nothing to do with him," says one woman, another acquaintance, "except to laugh at him."
"He's very hard to reach," says Nadine Winter, former D.C. Council member.
Winter says she has known Hall since 1978, when he ran against her, unsuccessfully, to be Council member for Ward 6.
It wasn't a conventional campaign - Hall's stab at elective office. He shook no hands. He canvassed no neighborhoods. He kissed no babies. This is because Hall conducted the entire campaign from a jail cell - where he was serving time for writing bad checks. There were 38 of them, written in a three-month period and totaling $1,200. At that time, in the newspapers, he was known as "Rev. David Hall."
Hall received 199 votes. Winter: 5,085.
Over the years, Winter says she has received many invitations from Hall, but has turned them all down. She believes she might have received flowers anonymously from him.
"I'm too old and too wise," she says, "not to see some of the things going on. But aside from that, he is a genuinely good person ... a very caring and sensitive individual. He just never seemed to know there was anything wrong with his behavior."
A Home That Doesn't Match David Hall lives in a two-story brick town house on K Street in Southeast. It sits on a stretch of neighborhood that seems to be in transition - some boarded-up row houses, others renovated - but one block away from the Potomac Gardens housing project, a major drug market.
According to a neighbor and longtime associates, Hall has lived there most of his life, with a brother and sister. His mother, Lottie Hall, who owns the house, doesn't reside there all the time, but visits frequently - with other children, grandchildren and friends, in tow.
People who have gone inside the town house say they were surprised by its shabbiness. David Hall acts like a man of importance, a man with connections, but the house says something else.
One woman, who has been Hall's dinner guest at several functions, went to his house one afternoon to pick up some tickets. She describes the interior as "dilapidated."
"There was a lot of brown in there. A lot of old furniture. I was standing in the foyer and the inside looked scruffy, but very, very bad." She had been told it was his office, but "it was clearly not an office environment," she says.
Arthur Turner, a former account representative for Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, was sent to Hall's brick town house on May 9, 1989. A man calling himself Dr. David Hall had requested a mobile phone.
Driving up to the house, Turner approached the address and thought some mistake had been made. "It looked like a riot zone," he says. "Abandoned places. A bunch of boarded row houses. I couldn't believe there would be a doctor's office there." He pulled his car over to the curb and called his office to double-check.
"I wanted them to know where I was," he says, "in case something happened to me there."
Turner remembers that David Hall tried to get him to leave a mobile phone at the house - saying he'd pay later. "Just leave the phone here and I'll take care of everything tomorrow," he recalls Hall saying casually. But nothing seemed right about the deal.
"He kept telling me about these events that he had attended. He was trying to impress me. Bragging on himself. He told me about some banquet, and other dinners and functions he'd attended with very prominent people. I remember thinking, Why would they have this guy at their party?"
Back at Turner's office, when they tried to verify Hall's credit application for a $695 portable phone, nothing checked out. "I had suspected he was a phony," says Turner, "but my account manager confirmed it."
His Friend Mr. Johnson, I Presume After a reporter at The Washington Post sent a letter to Hall's address, requesting an interview, the newspaper received a handwritten legal document purportedly signed by Hall, requesting that the newspaper cease and desist from "writing any future newspaper columns or publish any photos of plaintiff ... until all legal or civil matters have been settled and disposed of in the legal courts of the said district."
A phone call also came in. A man who said his name was Don Johnson called twice, on behalf of David Hall. He called from a noisy pay phone and said he is a lawyer who has been an acquaintance of Hall's for five or six years.
"He'll be out of town until after the Fourth of July holiday," said Johnson. "He will not be giving any statement to the press until all the criminal and civil suits are taken care of."
What about these charities Dr. Hall owes money to?
"I understand that one charity asked him to pay for a table, but for more seats than he actually used. He would like the charity to be able to name the guests he had there. We understand there are charities claiming that he was there, but maybe he wasn't."
What about these flower bills, limo bills, the courier service?
"I will say this," said Johnson. "He did have an open account at these places. It's a breach of contract if you don't pay. It is not a criminal charge. It should not be."
David Hall says he's a minister, other times he's a reporter. What's the truth?
"He has been in the ministry for 30 years," said Johnson. "I know that he has honorary degrees, but I can't say where they have come from."
In Who's Who, Dr. Hall claims to have served with the U.S. Army and the National Guard, yet the military has no record of him serving with either branch. What is the truth?
"I`m sure he did serve. A number of years ago, I did see him in uniform, probably around 1970-1971."
But you said you'd only known him five years ...
"I really got to know him five or six years ago, but I`ve been acquainted with him for many years... . Come to think of it, now that you mention it, I have seen an Army discharge of his, and a National Guard discharge too... .
"But in fact, I'm not even sure that {Who's Who} listing was done by Dr. Hall. As a matter of fact, I do remember. Somebody recommended him. Somebody else sent it in, and he did not originally supply the information."
Why did he want to go out so often?
"He attended banquets in order to support the organizations and their causes."
But he never paid!
"That's an allegation, I don't know that. ... People are trying to cover their own backs. It's their own negligence. It's because they gave out tickets without asking for credit, without knowing an individual, and not being concerned about how they would be paid, or when."
Do you think it's possible he could go to jail?
"No one wants to be in jail. And I would not want to see anybody go there. Look at all the murders and drug activities going down, and this is where I think our system should be focusing on. If there's a civil complaint, focus on that. Why harass an individual, when lives are being taken every day, all day, all night long. Drugs are killing people all day and night long. People can't even sit on their front porches anymore. Did you know that's the sort of neighborhood he lives in? Not safe at all. All of this, that's going in the paper - it will be negative, won't it? - but all the good things will go undiscovered."
There are several birth dates listed. How old is David Hall?
"I'm not giving any information about his age... . I've never given him a birthday present, no. But he looks like a fairly young man, for his age. He's a young-looking man, and in good spirits, despite all this coming down. It's a hard time. Anybody would have a hard time going through this, having people say negative things about him. Matter of fact, I don't think he's talked to anybody at all about this. His mother has been quite ill. Even if he did, I don't think she'd even understand what he was saying."
But he's told you, Mr. Johnson.
"Yes, he has."
Are you David Hall?
"No, I'm not. Why would I be Dr. Hall?"
He was finally caught at a local hotel after he was exposed for being a fraud and con man. I had been trying to find this article for years.
This is a true Colin alert but worth the reading.
The Man Who Kept Coming to Dinner; What Are We to Make of Dr. David Hall, the Fashionable Freeloader With a Soft Spot for Charities?
The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Washington, D.C.
Author: Martha Sherrill
Date: Jun 26, 1992
He likes trade shows. He thrives at black-tie benefits. He knows the hotels in town like his own living room. David Lee Hall wanders happily - an assured bounce to his step - into conventions, receptions, press previews, galas, opening nights. Where 300 or more are gathered in an airless ballroom ... look for him there. Helping himself to another stuffed chicken breast with cream sauce. Reaching for another glass of sparkling wine. Elbowing his way into pictures with celebrities. With Art Monk, with Harry Belafonte.
Free. All for free.
The astonishing "Dr. David Hall" technique has been working in Washington for years: A day or two before a black-tie fund-raiser, a man calling himself "Dr. David Hall" telephones the charity. He says he needs two tables, right up front. Price is no problem. In fact, he's already sent the money.
Sometimes he says he's the director of "Christian Concern for Community Action." Sometimes he says he's a representative of "BPI" or "Black Press International." Sometimes he's a minister. Sometimes a drug counselor. Sometimes he says he's a psychiatrist too, a convention and event planner, a PhD from Morehouse College in Atlanta. The business cards he's been handing out most recently say: "Be Somebody. Be a Morehouse Man."
But he is neither.
The night of the party, a kindly "Dr. Hall" arrives in black tie. He's short - about 5 feet 3. He has a minor mustache and peppery short hair and a nice way about him. He is 47. He is slender. He stands at the ballroom doors with his guests by his side - mostly women all perfectly dressed up, all smiling. Then, with the sweetest good manners, in the softest voice - why, the doctor seems almost shy! - Hall breathes life into the most tired line of the deadbeat: "The check is in the mail."
But it never is.
David Lee Hall never went to Morehouse College, or Howard University, or Texas Southern University in Houston - as it said in Who's Who in the East from 1979 to 1989. The military has no records that he served in Vietnam, or with the U.S. Army at all, or with the National Guard, all of which is claimed in Who's Who.
He is described as a "clergyman" in five editions, then "religious organization administrator." But he has no church. The organization that he's allegedly administrating, "Christian Concern for Community Action," is not listed with the District government - not as a nonprofit concern, or a corporation, or a limited partnership. Hall's birth date as reported in Who's Who is at odds with the one listed with his Social Security number. Only his name and his address - on the 1300 block of K Street SE - seem to be accurate.
David Hall has not made himself available for interviews; we don't have his side of the story. But if we believe the testimony of more than three dozen people with whom Dr. Hall has enjoyed brief and unsatisfying contractual arrangements, this much is clear: In the past six years, Hall has spent an enormous amount of time eating for free. He has become something of a legend, an urban Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to himself. Giving to his friends too - mostly casual acquaintances he meets here and there.
"Out of the thousands of villains who walk the Earth every day, what he's done is pretty innocent," says William Reed, business editor of the Capital Spotlight and an acquaintance of Hall's. "The total sum of his crimes is really nothing. He just wanted to go to the big parties. He wanted to be at the right place at the right time."
His story first became public June 2, after The Washington Post's Reliable Source column was tipped off to Hall's freeloading reputation by several charities and nonprofit groups that claimed to have been burned.
That got people talking. Charities contacted charities. Notes were compared. Some groups had been burned several times.
Then, while crashing a GOP fund-raiser on June 4 at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel, Hall was discovered outside the men's room and served with a civil lawsuit on behalf of the Greater Washington Boys and Girls Clubs for an allegedly unpaid $7,500 tab from 1990. On June 12, at a court appearance on criminal charges of having defrauded a limousine service, he was served with two other civil suits.
What's he been up to, all those years?
Perhaps the idea was to redirect charitable contributions. Perhaps the American Heart Association didn't need all that money. Or the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL), the Washington Home, the Art Barn, the Washington Charitable Fund, the YMCA, the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art, the Family and Child Services of Washington, the Washington Opera, the American Cancer Society.
Last November, Hall promised the Art Barn $3,000 for 30 tickets to the opening night of "The Addams Family." He saw the movie, dined leisurely - he was the last to leave - but never paid. On Jan. 21, he called NARAL and requested two tables at its Jan. 22 black-tie benefit in the Mayflower Hotel ballroom. He came and enjoyed the night with 19 friends. He had his photo taken with Belafonte, the master of ceremonies. The two tables were worth $7,500. According to Loretta Ucelli, director of NARAL communications, the organizers hadn't worried that "Dr. Hall" from "Christian Concern for Community Action" wouldn't pay. They worried that he was "an anti-choicer who might disrupt the dinner."
"Afterwards," says Ucelli, "he kept promising to pay, but we never saw the money."
In February, he hit the opening of Entertaining People, an annual fund-raiser for the Washington Home. He got a $10,000 table that he and nine friends enjoyed. "I thought maybe I'd just let him in and trust him," says Susie Murphy, a volunteer who discussed the matter with the higher-ups. "We all decided to err on the side of trusting him, to believe him that the check was coming."
On April 25, after being denied a $3,250 table at the Corcoran Ball - the gallery folks knew all about his technique, having never received payment for a Halloween masquerade ball in 1990 - Hall attended the American Heart Association ball. He had called at the last minute, reserving a table for 10 people - worth $2,500 to the organization. "Hall told me that he worked with substance abuse patients," says a spokesman for the charity. "He was a very personable guy."
Soon afterward, the telephone number he gave them was reported disconnected.
"He's very pleasant," says Susan Rosenbaum, vice president for development and public affairs at the Corcoran. "Pledges a high amount of money. Brings a group of attractive, well-dressed people - mostly women. Arrives in limousines. Leaves with a phone number that he never answers... . I think it took awhile until everybody had tied his name and face with a scam artist. By a year ago, it was well-known that there was a con artist in town named Dr. David Hall who booked tables for charities and didn't pay."
But persistence does pay. A couple years ago, David Hall was told he wouldn't be admitted to a New Year's Eve gala for the Washington Charitable Fund at the Four Seasons Hotel unless he brought a check for $3,500. He came anyway. "With 12 people, mostly girls," remembers Nasreen Wills, vice president of the Georgetown Design Group. "He made an entrance with all those women ... at that point there wasn't much I could do. They were standing at the door. They were very nicely dressed." He never paid.
Hall was thrown out of a Touchdown Club reception at the Sheraton Washington in 1991, and then denied two tables at the club's annual dinner (his check for $3,000 hadn't arrived), but he had the temerity to turn up at the Touchdown Club awards dinner this year, on Jan. 18. As if they wouldn't notice.
"There he was - in black tie," says Sam Lomauro, secretary-treasurer for Touchdown Club charities. "He hadn't called for tickets, he just showed up at our press conference, saying he worked with a newspaper. We asked him to leave - although we let him finish his drink."
On May 14, he turned up at the 140th anniversary party for the YMCA.
"I told him that we would have to have cash or a certified check at that very moment," says Bob Schwartzberg, senior vice president of the organization. "He wasn't mad. He was low-key and gentlemanly about it. He said that he was worried about his check, that it was lost, and all that. Then he changed his tactic, saying that he was covering it for the black press. I asked for credentials. He went through his pockets. He said he had left them in the car."
He walked outside, Schwartzberg says, and never returned.
"I've known him for years!" says Colline Evans, PR director at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel.
"I've always had my doubts about whether he was supposed to be at certain events. Last event I remember seeing him was at a celebrity bake-off auction for the YMCA at the Ramada Renaissance in April." In 1987, Associated Driver's Limousine Services filed a suit against David Hall for nearly $10,000 in unpaid limousine charges, a bill the service claims he ran up in three weeks' time, at $60 an hour. Car phone too. The suit was dropped when the company went under. Criminal charges alleging theft of services have been filed against Hall over another limousine bill dating back to 1990. The case will be heard in Superior Court on July 6.
The previous owner of La Brasserie, Raymond Campet, says Hall owes him $3,000 for baked goods delivered to his town house during the spring and summer of 1990. According to Campet, Hall claimed to be a minister ordering food for church functions. Campet filed a civil suit against Hall this spring.
The National Black Media Coalition is suing Hall for $7,110 - charges the organization says he accrued while attending a conference, luncheon and banquet thrown in 1987.
"Sure I know him," says Pluria Marshall, chairman of the National Black Media Coalition. "He gets his slimy tail in every door. He takes money from the crippled, the blind, blacks, whites. He doesn't care. We filed a lawsuit against him, but what are you going to get from somebody who has nothing? He's just a man with a big ego and a lot of con man in him."
How has he been so successful for so long?
"It's expensive to sue him," says Michael Bentzen of Schweitzer, Bentzen & Scherr. But he's doing it anyway - pro bono on behalf of the Greater Washington Boys and Girls Clubs. Bentzen claims that Hall owes the charity $7,500 for three patron's tables, right up front, at the Automotive Trade Association Gala benefit in 1990. "First you got to find the guy, and spend hundreds of dollars doing that," says Bentzen. "Then, nobody believes he has any money - so why bother?"
Benefit organizers for Channel 32 say they never saw the $1,500 that David Hall promised after ordering a table for 10 people at a "Casino Night" fund-raiser in January 1991. "He came and had some very attractive young ladies with him," remembers Leonard Manning, who sits on the board of the public television station. "He walked up to me and knew who I was. I don't remember what we talked about except that I spent the whole time wondering who he was."
`Happy Birthday, Ann' END NOTES In February and March of this year, Hall began a strange spree of flower-sending - more generosity at someone else's expense. On Feb. 5, he called Nesha's Flowerland in Silver Spring, according to owner Yasmin Deonauth. Hall asked to open an account. She says Hall claimed to be a psychiatrist and the director of Christian Concern for Community Action. He also said he organized functions for the group and was always in need of flower arrangements.
Between Feb. 5 and March 11, Deonauth says "Dr. David Hall" ordered $1,800 worth of arrangements from Nesha's - sometimes stargazer lilies, sometimes blooming plants, but most often dozens of long-stem red roses. Deonauth started demanding payment when Hall's bill approached $700, but Hall kept insisting that "the person in his organization who had to sign the check was out of town," says Deonauth. Later, he claimed "the check was in the mail." Still later, he claimed the check had been lost. And still later, she says Hall told her that he couldn't bring the money because his mother had had a heart attack and he had to see her in the hospital.
"I don't want my money," Deonauth says now. "I want him thrown in jail."
Hall ordered sometimes four arrangements a day, and often two arrangements at a time to the same person. They were always to women.
On the night of her birthday in late February, Ann Coates in Fort Washington received an "exotic arrangement" - bird of paradise and anthurium. When the flowers arrived, Coates was utterly shocked, she says. So was her husband.
She barely knew Hall, she had to explain. She'd met him at a big black-tie Christmas party at the Washington Hilton two months before. He just walked up, during the course of the party, and introduced himself. "We were talking that night, going through the zodiac," says Coates, "and I told him that I was a Pisces. He wanted to know the date. I guess he wrote it down."
Hall gave her his business card - "Be Somebody, Be a Morehouse Man" - and offered to help her career. "He asked if I needed a job with the District government," says Coates. "He said he could get me one. I wasn't really interested in a job, but my girlfriend needed one, so I gave him my work number."
He called her several times afterward. He asked her to dinners and other functions. "I told him that I was happily married," says Coates. "I never went anywhere with him." When the birthday flowers came to her home address with a note - Happy Birthday Ann, Dr. Hall - Coates says that she wasn't sure, at first, who "Dr. Hall" was. Then she remembered the little guy from the Christmas party.
One woman on Hall's flower-sending list received very romantic notes from him, according to Deonauth. When the woman started refusing the flowers at the door, Hall became upset. The delivery man concurs. Pierre Valladay, the owner of Express-It, a courier service in Brentwood, says he drove David Hall himself out to the woman's house in Woodbridge. Hall knocked several times, but nobody answered. They left photographs of Hall at the door. Hall told him to drive around the block. When they returned to her address, the envelope was gone.
Valladay and his couriers made close to $2,500 in deliveries for David Hall. Hall sent mostly flowers and photographs of himself. He never paid.
"There was one of him with Redskins at a Touchdown Club party," says Valladay. "There was another picture of him with Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte."
Several people who attended functions as guests of Dr. Hall say Hall never asked them to reimburse him for their tickets.
"What was he getting out of it? I don't know," says one guest of several cocktail receptions and dinners. "I don't think he was making material gains from it. He kept showing up in the same brown suits."
"He just wants to impress people," says one woman who has known Hall - socially - for years. "He wants everybody to think he's important. It's mostly for the girls... . He is very short. A Napoleon complex."
Leslie Winder met David Hall last December, at a trade show at the Mayflower Hotel. He stopped by Winder's booth - for the Toronto Convention and Visitors Association - and talked a bit. He picked up her business card. Soon after he began calling. Hall gave her the impression that he was an event planner and told Winder that he might have business for the city of Toronto and might be arranging some events there for "some people in the medical profession." He bragged a bit about his connections - about the parties he went to, about his business.
"First he invited me to a Redskins party at his house," says Winder. "I said no. Then another Redskins party. I said no. Then he invited me to a Harry Belafonte concert - it was when the abortion rights groups were in town and there was a fund-raiser concert. He wanted me to join him. I declined. Then he called again, when NOW had its anniversary party. But I had friends in town and declined too. He said he had a whole table and invited all my friends as well. I said no again."
Feeling a little bad that she'd been constantly turning him down - and slightly hopeful that he might really have some business for Toronto - Winder invited Hall to lunch. A date and time were set. He never showed.
Unconventional Campaign
It's not easy to find people who claim to be intimates of David Hall's. He appears to be a person with many acquaintances, but few close friends. "All those people who he invited to parties now will have nothing to do with him," says one woman, another acquaintance, "except to laugh at him."
"He's very hard to reach," says Nadine Winter, former D.C. Council member.
Winter says she has known Hall since 1978, when he ran against her, unsuccessfully, to be Council member for Ward 6.
It wasn't a conventional campaign - Hall's stab at elective office. He shook no hands. He canvassed no neighborhoods. He kissed no babies. This is because Hall conducted the entire campaign from a jail cell - where he was serving time for writing bad checks. There were 38 of them, written in a three-month period and totaling $1,200. At that time, in the newspapers, he was known as "Rev. David Hall."
Hall received 199 votes. Winter: 5,085.
Over the years, Winter says she has received many invitations from Hall, but has turned them all down. She believes she might have received flowers anonymously from him.
"I'm too old and too wise," she says, "not to see some of the things going on. But aside from that, he is a genuinely good person ... a very caring and sensitive individual. He just never seemed to know there was anything wrong with his behavior."
A Home That Doesn't Match David Hall lives in a two-story brick town house on K Street in Southeast. It sits on a stretch of neighborhood that seems to be in transition - some boarded-up row houses, others renovated - but one block away from the Potomac Gardens housing project, a major drug market.
According to a neighbor and longtime associates, Hall has lived there most of his life, with a brother and sister. His mother, Lottie Hall, who owns the house, doesn't reside there all the time, but visits frequently - with other children, grandchildren and friends, in tow.
People who have gone inside the town house say they were surprised by its shabbiness. David Hall acts like a man of importance, a man with connections, but the house says something else.
One woman, who has been Hall's dinner guest at several functions, went to his house one afternoon to pick up some tickets. She describes the interior as "dilapidated."
"There was a lot of brown in there. A lot of old furniture. I was standing in the foyer and the inside looked scruffy, but very, very bad." She had been told it was his office, but "it was clearly not an office environment," she says.
Arthur Turner, a former account representative for Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, was sent to Hall's brick town house on May 9, 1989. A man calling himself Dr. David Hall had requested a mobile phone.
Driving up to the house, Turner approached the address and thought some mistake had been made. "It looked like a riot zone," he says. "Abandoned places. A bunch of boarded row houses. I couldn't believe there would be a doctor's office there." He pulled his car over to the curb and called his office to double-check.
"I wanted them to know where I was," he says, "in case something happened to me there."
Turner remembers that David Hall tried to get him to leave a mobile phone at the house - saying he'd pay later. "Just leave the phone here and I'll take care of everything tomorrow," he recalls Hall saying casually. But nothing seemed right about the deal.
"He kept telling me about these events that he had attended. He was trying to impress me. Bragging on himself. He told me about some banquet, and other dinners and functions he'd attended with very prominent people. I remember thinking, Why would they have this guy at their party?"
Back at Turner's office, when they tried to verify Hall's credit application for a $695 portable phone, nothing checked out. "I had suspected he was a phony," says Turner, "but my account manager confirmed it."
His Friend Mr. Johnson, I Presume After a reporter at The Washington Post sent a letter to Hall's address, requesting an interview, the newspaper received a handwritten legal document purportedly signed by Hall, requesting that the newspaper cease and desist from "writing any future newspaper columns or publish any photos of plaintiff ... until all legal or civil matters have been settled and disposed of in the legal courts of the said district."
A phone call also came in. A man who said his name was Don Johnson called twice, on behalf of David Hall. He called from a noisy pay phone and said he is a lawyer who has been an acquaintance of Hall's for five or six years.
"He'll be out of town until after the Fourth of July holiday," said Johnson. "He will not be giving any statement to the press until all the criminal and civil suits are taken care of."
What about these charities Dr. Hall owes money to?
"I understand that one charity asked him to pay for a table, but for more seats than he actually used. He would like the charity to be able to name the guests he had there. We understand there are charities claiming that he was there, but maybe he wasn't."
What about these flower bills, limo bills, the courier service?
"I will say this," said Johnson. "He did have an open account at these places. It's a breach of contract if you don't pay. It is not a criminal charge. It should not be."
David Hall says he's a minister, other times he's a reporter. What's the truth?
"He has been in the ministry for 30 years," said Johnson. "I know that he has honorary degrees, but I can't say where they have come from."
In Who's Who, Dr. Hall claims to have served with the U.S. Army and the National Guard, yet the military has no record of him serving with either branch. What is the truth?
"I`m sure he did serve. A number of years ago, I did see him in uniform, probably around 1970-1971."
But you said you'd only known him five years ...
"I really got to know him five or six years ago, but I`ve been acquainted with him for many years... . Come to think of it, now that you mention it, I have seen an Army discharge of his, and a National Guard discharge too... .
"But in fact, I'm not even sure that {Who's Who} listing was done by Dr. Hall. As a matter of fact, I do remember. Somebody recommended him. Somebody else sent it in, and he did not originally supply the information."
Why did he want to go out so often?
"He attended banquets in order to support the organizations and their causes."
But he never paid!
"That's an allegation, I don't know that. ... People are trying to cover their own backs. It's their own negligence. It's because they gave out tickets without asking for credit, without knowing an individual, and not being concerned about how they would be paid, or when."
Do you think it's possible he could go to jail?
"No one wants to be in jail. And I would not want to see anybody go there. Look at all the murders and drug activities going down, and this is where I think our system should be focusing on. If there's a civil complaint, focus on that. Why harass an individual, when lives are being taken every day, all day, all night long. Drugs are killing people all day and night long. People can't even sit on their front porches anymore. Did you know that's the sort of neighborhood he lives in? Not safe at all. All of this, that's going in the paper - it will be negative, won't it? - but all the good things will go undiscovered."
There are several birth dates listed. How old is David Hall?
"I'm not giving any information about his age... . I've never given him a birthday present, no. But he looks like a fairly young man, for his age. He's a young-looking man, and in good spirits, despite all this coming down. It's a hard time. Anybody would have a hard time going through this, having people say negative things about him. Matter of fact, I don't think he's talked to anybody at all about this. His mother has been quite ill. Even if he did, I don't think she'd even understand what he was saying."
But he's told you, Mr. Johnson.
"Yes, he has."
Are you David Hall?
"No, I'm not. Why would I be Dr. Hall?"
