MIAMI-DADE Published Sunday, May 21, 2000, in the Miami Herald Daring rescuer dogged by a questionable past BY CURTIS MORGAN With a war record that made Rambo look like a wimp, the nickname ``Gunslinger'' and gutsy gung-ho to spare, retired Army Lt. Col. Garrison St. Clair sounded larger than life. He was. Clad in camouflage fatigues and chomping a cigar, the Miami man marched into the international spotlight last year when he led an American squad in a miraculous rescue of a tourist lost for 40 days in the desolate Australian outback. Now, days before he was to appear at a major search and rescue convention in Miami Beach, St. Clair is quitting the globe-trotting team of trackers he created in a scandal over an apparently fabricated past. According to court, military and other records, the charismatic St. Clair never served in the military. He did serve in federal prison -- six months for mail fraud in a scam selling spots in a Bicentennial directory that didn't exist. St. Clair, 51, doesn't dispute the records but won't exactly admit he made up his brash persona either, hinting that his status as some sort of super-secret operative forbids him -- or anyone else -- from talking. ``All I can say is that everything is not what it seems,'' he said. The revelation has rippled the tight world of search and rescue teams, where St. Clair's success as a crackerjack organizer had overcome skepticism that he was, well, full of baloney. ``Now, some of the little pieces that didn't fit make sense,'' said Ed Wolff, who leads a Broward search and rescue team St. Clair once worked with. ``The more he said, the more people started questioning what he was saying,'' said Bruce Barton, chief of Pennsylvania-based Northeast Search and Rescue. It struck Barton as strange, for instance, that an officer with Vietnam and Persian Gulf medals would struggle with compass navigation. `AIR OF MYSTIQUE' </SNML_HEADLINES <SNML_BODY <SNML_LEAD ``He tried to have an air of mystique, being a special ops, covert operations-type guy,'' Barton said, ``but he didn't seem to understand some things he should.'' St. Clair appeared on the search and rescue scene three years ago, introducing himself to Wolff's group, the Florida Special Response Team-A. The nonprofit group, like dozens of other independent SAR (search and rescue) teams nationally, is composed of volunteers, many with police, fire or military training. </SNML_LEAD St. Clair, who described himself as a special-operations officer looking for something to do in retirement, didn't cut a heroic profile at a pudgy 5-foot-7. But he talked the talk, dropping GI jargon -- ``affirmative,'' for instance, instead of yes -- and attacking tasks with military precision. ``He was an excellent logistics person,'' Wolff said. ``If we needed something, he was the kind of guy who would get it.'' After acting as operations officer on a successful search for tidal-wave victims in New Guinea, St. Clair formed his own squad 17 months ago, the 1st Special Response Group. His concept was to create a search and rescue version of the A-Team -- a squad capable of responding rapidly to worldwide emergencies too small for federally run SAR teams. He built the team, now numbering about 80 volunteers around the country, at SAR meetings and by recruiting them on the Internet. In their first mission to Fiji, they helped an American family recover the body of a missing relative. Then last August, St. Clair captivated the media Down Under when his team tracked an Alaskan volunteer firefighter, Robert Bogucki, who had disappeared into the Great Sandy Desert. Bogucki had wandered off alone on a curious, death-defying trek to test his own mettle and had gotten lost. Bogucki's parents, a wealthy California couple, had engaged St. Clair's group after being referred by the U.S. State Department. At the time, a spokesman said the department wasn't endorsing the group but knew of it ``favorably'' because of its previous work in Fiji. <SNML_SUBHEAD A MATTER OF FINESSE Joel Hardin, a former U.S. Border Patrol agent and renowned man-tracker who lives in Washington state, joined the Australian trip in part because St. Clair seemed plugged in at high diplomatic levels. Within minutes, Hardin said, St. Clair had the State Department fax him a form to expedite his passport. ``Even if he is a fraud, he was able to do that, to finesse the whole thing and get it done,'' said Hardin, who considers it possible St. Clair is legitimate. While the Australian adventure raised his profile, it also raised suspicions. A Herald story on the rescue noted that the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, keeper of military records, had nothing on an officer who claimed a 20-year career. Bruce Margolius, a Utah lawyer who had known St. Clair through Internet SAR discussion groups, unearthed a 1976 federal felony conviction in Long Island for billing 2,750 companies $75 each for inclusion in a publication that did not exist: ``The 1976 Presidents' Directory of Business and Commerce in the United States, Bicentennial Issue.'' Besides mail fraud, records show, St. Clair also was convicted of obstructing justice for asking three women who stuffed envelopes to lie to postal investigators about the scheme. St. Clair, who got six months and three years of probation, won't discuss the case but doesn't dispute the court records. His attorney, Harvey Michelman, still thought highly enough of him to hire him to draw up a corporate proposal for a child adoption service. Michelman didn't recall St. Clair mentioning any military background but didn't find it improbable that St. Clair might be an undercover agent. <SNML_SUBHEAD `PEOPLE MAGNET' ``I don't dismiss anything because this guy was so damn bright,'' Michelman said. ``He's one of those people who is a people magnet. He's got the gift of gab, so to speak.'' Margolius and others have serious doubts. For starters, a felony conviction is almost always grounds for discharge. Besides, nothing about St. Clair -- aside from his dashing name -- stood up. He claimed to be a Georgetown Law School graduate. The registrar has no record of him. A DD214 form, a military discharge document he produced to back his claims, showed him entering the Army as a lieutenant with the Judge Advocate General, then joining intelligence, graduating from special forces and Ranger courses. None of those outfits has a record of him to support the document. He also claimed to have won numerous decorations, including the nation's second-highest honor, the Distinguished Service Cross. Patti Bielling, an Army spokeswoman, said he's not on the list of recipients. If St. Clair did fabricate his past, and discharge papers, he may have broken the law, Bielling said. Falsifying official documents and lying about military records are crimes, ranging from misdemeanors to felonies, she said. MEDAL QUESTIONED All of which puts into considerable doubt one of his most colorful claims -- the French Legion of Merit he supposedly received along with his nickname ``Gunslinger,'' a moniker he also uses as an e-mail address. In that tale, which he has shared with several colleagues, he rescued a French diplomat's daughter who had been kidnapped outside an unnamed embassy by seizing the attacker's gun and killing him with one shot. While not impossible, it would be highly unlikely for a retired officer, even doing classified duty, to have no record. ``I don't care how black ops [secret] a guy he is, he'd be there somewhere,'' one Army records officer said. ``And if he was that black, he wouldn't be bragging about it anyway.'' For St. Clair's doubters, the bigger concerns are credibility and safety. St. Clair had begun training others and was listed on the faculty for the largest national gathering, the Search and Rescue/Disaster Response World Conference, which begins June 2 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. ``My concern was that people tend not to change,'' said Margolius, a longtime criminal defense lawyer. ``I assumed that whatever a guy who appeared to be a con man was doing was some sort of confidence game.'' St. Clair says the skeptics' probes into his background are driven by professional jealousy and denies that he's running a scam. He says he hasn't made a dime and points out that he lives modestly, currently in a Miami hotel room. ``This isn't being done because somebody considers that 1SRG is a bad SAR team,'' he said. ``This was done because somebody wanted to hurt me.'' `NOT EMBARRASSED' He refused to discuss his past, but in an e-mail sent to his team, he wrote, ``I'm not embarrassed or cowed by these allegations. I'm comfortable with what I know as the truth, with who I am, and what I've accomplished in SAR.'' St. Clair's actual past is sketchy. His Social Security number is a New York issue, and according to his own 1976 deposition in the mail fraud case, he operated a number of small companies out of Long Island, selling things like coffee, used medical gear and cell phones. Then, at age 26, he said he had only a year of high school. Prosecutors, in the deposition, painted a pattern of evasiveness by St. Clair, questioning whether some of the companies had been legally formed and getting him to admit that he had previously lied about his age. In other public records, St. Clair first shows up in Miami in the mid-1980s at a number of Coconut Grove addresses. For a time, he was tooling around town in a well-worn Ferrari. Between 1987 and 1992 -- a period that covers the 1991 Gulf War -- Florida records list him as a director in three short-lived companies, including one formed to operate charters of a vintage yacht called the Beluga, which sank, at a Miami Beach dock. <SNML_SUBHEAD RESTAURANT MANAGER In 1994, at least for a brief time, he worked as restaurant manager at The Beacon Hotel in Miami Beach, where he was arrested for criminal mischief in a scuffle with the hotel owner over an electrical box. Charges were dropped. In February, Miami Police picked him up on an 11-year-old charge for a bounced check of less than $150. The Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office did not prosecute. Besides his search and rescue work, St. Clair said much of his time in recent years was consumed playing volleyball in South Beach. Despite the evidence, St. Clair still has supporters. David Kovar, an executive in a California high-tech firm who is taking over as commanding officer of St. Clair's team, would say only that he was ``extremely disappointed'' his predecessor had to step down but was confident 1SRG would survive. He and other team members will be in Miami Beach. ``Garrison accomplished everything he set out to do,'' Kovar said.
