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I’m not King Con, says man accused of impersonating top lawyer
Paul Cheston, Courts Correspondent21.10.09
A serial conman accused of posing as the Director of Public Prosecutions to fleece women today told a court: “Don't call me King of the Swindlers'.”
Paul Bint, 47, took the jury through a history of his life of lies, duplicity and deception.
He has accumulated a string of convictions across four decades, in the course of which he has dated a former Miss Scotland and slept in some of Britain's most luxurious hotels — and vilest prisons.
He has posed as a doctor and a lawyer, which led him to con Virgin executives and work legitimately as a West London estate agent.
He even claimed to have been a have-a-go hero who rescued a young family from a blazing building, he told Southwark Crown Court.
He described how he had been the subject of hundreds of newspaper articles and five TV documentaries but had been wrongly branded “King Con.”
He told jurors: “I don't think I would describe myself as a conman, or King Con Man or King of the Swindlers, as the newspapers call me. I'm someone who lied about myself and my status.”
Bint said his life of crime started at the age of 15 to escape being put into care in his home town of Northampton.
In 1978 he broke into a hospital and stole a stethoscope, which launched him on a life of impersonating a doctor.
“It made me forget what the reality was, and for me it was a way of escaping. It always has been,” he said.
Bint pulled ever more audacious stunts as his crooked life spiralled, the court heard. In 2000, he told a Virgin Train executive he was a barrister acting in the Lockerbie bomb trial, and was given a free rail ticket to Glasgow.
He said: “There was barrister who once said when I was at Newcastle Crown Court that I made Walter Mitty look like a nine o'clock newsreader.”
The court has heard that during a sixweek “spree of fraud and deception” he stole cash and jewellery from his victims while posing as Mr Starmer and another high-profile criminal barrister, Jonathan Rees.
But Bint said he had only meant to impress first victim Penelope Edwards on their first date in Windsor.
He said: “I wanted to impress her. If it led to anything more than a first date it was my intention to sit down and tell her the truth.
“I brought a huge bouquet of flowers and two bottles of pink champagne. I had a lovely day and I was able to forget a lot of things.”
The court has heard he went for a date in St Albans with the second alleged victim Vivian Walsh, while still seeing Miss Edwards, and claimed to be a barrister.
Bint, of no fixed address, has pleaded not guilty to nine counts of fraud by false representation, four of driving while disqualified, and one count each of theft and burglary.
The trial continues.
