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Call him a schemer, a dreamer, a big talker. Call him a shady operator, a global operator, a lawbreaker. All of these have been used to describe John Clifford Ellsworth. By repute, the 42-year-old convicted felon also is a spinner of tall tales who has a yen for attaching himself to celebrated events.
A globe-trotter who has been in Los Angeles less than four years, Ellsworth has bragged of a mysterious past that supposedly included roles in President Richard Nixon's historic trip to China and in secret negotiations for hostages in Iran and Lebanon. He testified last year that he managed the Rolling Stones rock band for five years.
Some law enforcement people here tend to take these claims with a whole shaker of salt.
But in the eyes of a growing cadre of Ellsworth watchers, the promoter outdid himself playing big shot during the two-day visit of Pope John Paul II to Los Angeles last September.
Ellsworth managed to inject himself among the volunteer army helping the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles to lay on the hospitality, but he was not your run-of-the-mill volunteer. In pursuit of papal glamour, a bankruptcy court has been told, Ellsworth bounced checks and piled more than $20,000 in bad debts on one of his companies.
A particularly intriguing item: a worthless check for $1,073.63 that he used to buy Kentucky Fried Chicken for scores of U.S. Secret Service agents assigned to protecting the Pope.
In feeding the hungry feds, Ellsworth also obligated his now bankrupt U.S. Coal Corp. for hundreds of dollars for provender from Greenblatt's Delicatessen in Hollywood and from Sarno's Caffee Dell'Opera Restaurant in the Los Feliz district. He even stiffed Winchell's Donuts for a paltry $16 worth of doughnuts for lawmen, according to the testimony.
Other expenses that Ellsworth failed to pay included about $32,000 to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, of which an estimated $20,000 was for rooms during the papal sojourn. Biltmore manager Richard Delaney told the Los Angeles Times recently that "we have an arrangement with them for payment," but he did not give details.
Sensitive Topic
The Kentucky Fried Chicken caper has since become a sensitive topic for the Secret Service.
That's because two months after the papal...