Judge Orders $125,000 in Assets of Con Man in Copter Caper Seized

SAN FRANCISCO —  A federal judge Friday ordered seized more than $125,000 in assets belonging to Ronald McIntosh, the convict con man who escaped from a federal prison in October only to return a few days later in a hijacked helicopter to retrieve his inmate girlfriend.

U.S. District Judge Eugene Lynch ordered McIntosh to turn over the assets--including the matching rings he and his girlfriend, Samantha Lopez, were buying when they were recaptured at a suburban Sacramento shopping mall last month--to court-appointed receiver Frederick Wyle.

Wyle has been assigned to represent the interests of 2,500 investors who lost an estimated $18 million to a fraudulent San Francisco-based precious metals company, called First International Trading Corp., run by McIntosh.

$1.7 Million Still Missing

About $1.7 million in cash and gold coins still are missing, while other, non-negotiable assets are being recovered.

In addition to the rings, the seized property, which has been in government custody since the couple’s arrest Nov. 15, includes a $108,000 pleasure boat held in Seattle, a $10,000 investment in an Oregon home and a $4,000 account with Bank of America in San Francisco.

San Francisco attorney Beth Parker, who represents Wyle and the defrauded investors, said the $10,000 Oregon investment was made by McIntosh in March of 1985, after FITC was shut down but before criminal charges were filed against him. She did not know if the $4,000 was held in a checking or savings account at the bank.

However, Parker did say more than $2.1 million in recovered assets already has been distributed among the FITC investors.

‘More Coming In’

“And we still have a sizable amount we haven’t distributed, and there is still more coming in,” she said. For example, the receivers recently sold off some silver-ore processing equipment located in Oklahoma, she said.

Meanwhile, Judge Lynch set a Feb. 9 trial date for federal escape charges now facing McIntosh and Lopez, who was serving a 50-year sentence for a string of violent Georgia bank robberies at the time of her escape.

McIntosh is accused of fleeing after being sent on an unescorted transfer--that is, after being given a bus ticket and directions and sent out on his own--to travel from the Federal Correctional Institution in Pleasanton, about 40 miles east of here, to the minimum-security Federal Prison Farm in Lompoc.

Eight days after his own Oct. 28 escape, however, McIntosh returned to the Pleasanton prison in a hijacked helicopter, which the Vietnam-era Army veteran used to pluck Lopez from an exercise yard. The helicopter was found abandoned a few miles from the prison.

After an intense weeklong manhunt, the pair--both of whom are married to other people--were arrested at the Sacramento-area jeweler, where they had gone to buy inscribed rings.