Art of the Con

In Grossman's version, she was but one in a bad run of needy, embittered ingrates. Reached by phone last week, he said their claims were fictions born of jealousy or addled minds and, if anything, they had exploited him for the earnings from his art.

"I'm not a mean person," he said. "I'm very kind. I care about people. I care about children. I care about animals. I care about everyone."

This much is indisputable: In summer 2004, Charlene Welde was gone. But her Volvo wasn't. He took it with him to Philadelphia, where he rented a room on South 18th Street. Soon, via Match.com, he was dating a research scientist who loved animals.

Grossman, however, did not love Liz Shea's cats, let alone her dogs, turtle and parrots. They made him wheeze, she said, and he leaned on her to get rid of them.

"He was deciding after the first date that he was going to move into my house," Shea told The Inquirer. "He said, 'So you're putting your cats over me?' And I said, 'Yes!' "

He turned his attention to her money, insisting "he could be really famous if he could get a gallery going," Shea said, and imploring her to borrow against her home.

Once, she lent him $700, she said. Another time, he nagged her into applying for a $5,000 loan for him at Commerce Bank.

"I called [the bank] when I got home and canceled," she said. "Then I told him, 'Oh, it's been refused.' "

His hard sell could be scary, Shea said, recalling his locking the dead bolt and pocketing the key. "He was really pressuring me to mortgage my house. He was saying, 'I won't let you leave.' "

Meanwhile, as Luc Sonnet, he was shopping his bogus self to art galleries.

"He was in Paris, he's got 800 people he's going to bring to my gallery, he's going to make me rich," said pop artist Perry Milou, reciting the rap when Sonnet dropped in at his Philadelphia gallery. "I just thought from day one he was a jiver."

He brought a portfolio, but the prints "almost looked like color copies someone made at Kinko's," unmatted and unframed, Milou said. "I wasn't going to just take them and throw them on a table."

Milou wasn't the only one to sniff out a "jiver."

Shea's friends did, too, and urged her to ditch him. "I don't know what I was doing," she said. "[They] were so worried about me because the guy is so very hypnotic."

When Grossman let it slip that he had done time, a librarian friend unearthed newspaper stories about his 1990s fraud conviction.

Shea stopped seeing him. But no matter. Grossman already was dating someone behind her back, she said.

Within six months, the new girlfriend was at the Marple Township Police Department in Delaware County, complaining of domestic violence.

She wanted no charges pressed, just the abuse put on record.

According to a July 8, 2005, report, Grossman "forcibly restrained her" from showering the previous night at their Broomall apartment, bruising her arm before she fled to her sister's house.