In May 2002, the lone captain in control of a barge floating along the Arkansas River near Webbers Falls, Okla., fell asleep at the helm. Depending on who you talk to, Clark is a heartless conman, a brainwashed tool of the federal government or a victim of the system suffering from a mental illness without proper treatment. But plenty of other people had plenty to say. Hackett, Clark's attorney in Fairbanks, declined comment when asked about his client, and an interview could not be arranged with Clark. military to assassinate then-president Vladimir Putin. Another time he nearly caused a made-for-TV international crisis when he told the Russian Embassy he was working with the U.S. One time he assumed control of the scene of a bridge collapse disaster that had every imaginable type of real government boots on the ground. But even though a dime-a-dozen crime is what did him in, Clark's road to the Last Frontier is anything but ordinary.Ĭlark has a penchant for living a fake life. He awaits sentencing in a Fairbanks jail.Īt a glance, Clark's crime spree seems a couple notches above petty but not much different from the other 750,000 or so cases of check fraud that occur every year in the United States. The FBI found Clark in Juneau, and he later pleaded guilty to taking 224 people for a collective $66,893.52. In Alaska alone, he passed five fictitious out-of-state checks to the Alaska Marine Highway System under the pretense of military travel. The Feds quickly realized Clark had outstanding arrest warrants for a cross-country check fraud spree that stretched from Iowa to Alaska.
That interaction, coupled with apparently counterfeit Travis Air Force Base vehicle identification on Clark's car, was enough for Brandwein to push the information up the military justice chain, which eventually spurred FBI agents in Clark's direction. He wrote that he shouted Clark down in the parking lot and made him pull the insignia from his fake uniform. Or with the imposter's questionable story: Why would an active member of the Green Berets, headquartered at Fort Carson, Colo., be looking to buy all-terrain vehicles for "his guys" at a gun show in Alaska, anyway?īrandwein recalled the story later on the popular online gun forum, Georgia Packing.
It didn't take much for the real soldier to spot glaring problems with Clark's uniform. Brandwein later recalled to Army Times that Clark was a "ridiculously obese" guy in fatigues. Louis Brandwein, a 25-year-old stationed at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. Clark, then 36 years old, looked as though he'd had a successful military career: his Army uniform was decked out with an array of insignia and patches, most notably captain bars on his shoulders and lightning struck swords sewn into the left sleeve of members of the 10th Special Forces Group.Īs Clark passed up tables of guns in favor of a Polaris salesman peddling all-terrain vehicles and the like, he caught the attention of U.S.
William James Clark showed up at a gun show in Alaska's rain-soaked capital of Juneau on Aug.
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