Seer’s Scam Preys on Dreams

WASHINGTON —  One by one, Sen~ora Guadalupe’s clients gathered on her doorstep in the drenching afternoon downpour. They did not meet each other’s eyes.

Though strangers to one another, they shared a terrible secret: All were Latino immigrants with little money to spare, and all had been warned by Guadalupe that they faced a deadly curse that could be lifted only if they brought her a large bundle of cash. She would use it in a purification ritual, the ebony-haired fortuneteller had promised, then return it--in some cases doubled--on this, the appointed day.

Guadalupe had backed up her predictions with persuasive evidence. She had prayed in a mysterious foreign tongue and read her customers’ deepest secrets in her Tarot cards. She had “discovered” the hexes plaguing them by rolling an egg over their bodies and then cracking it open to reveal blood and worms. One woman, a Salvadoran cook, handed over $2,300. A Guatemalan landscaper gave about $25,000--most of it borrowed.

Now they and the small crowd of others were ready to retrieve their money and their peace of mind.

But Guadalupe did not answer the door that July evening. Nor the next morning, when the group gathered again in front of her modest brick home on a quiet street in Langley Park, Md. Finally, the landscaper peeked into the living room window and gasped in horror: Guadalupe’s furniture was gone!

Over the ensuing weeks, seven of Guadalupe’s victims filed reports with Prince George’s County, Md., police claiming a total of more than $40,000 in losses. They also named six other victims who have yet to come forward. Police say they have little hope of finding Guadalupe, a tall, heavyset woman in her mid-thirties who signed the lease for the house in June, under the name Ana Ibarra, along with Jose Ibarra, Carolina Ibarra and Manuel Perez.

Yet her victims continue to search for her--trading tips and calling every fortuneteller they can find in the hope that Guadalupe may still be working the area under a different name.

There are few other leads, beyond the fact that Guadalupe and her roommates spoke an unrecognizable language in addition to fluent Spanish.

The swindle is “a classic” of the genre, said Tony Zavosky, a retired detective who investigated a spate of similar cases in the early 1990s while with the D.C. police’s check and fraud unit. “Sometimes they’ll use an egg, sometimes a tomato--it’s sleight of hand,” he said.

The scam has ensnared countless people in this country. But the Latino residents of this working-class suburb in Prince George’s County proved a particularly vulnerable target. For if there is one quality that con victims share, it is their power of imagination--their ability to conceive of disaster or fantastic success in defiance of common sense.

And although the residents of Langley Park are some of the area’s hardest workers, they also are some of its most ardent dreamers. Many have left everything behind in pursuit of a vision of prosperity only slightly more probable than Sen~ora Guadalupe’s prophesies.

She promised help with everything from love problems to alcoholism to impotence in the Spanish-language leaflets she distributed in Langley Park’s apartment complexes.

It was the reference to muscular pain that caught the canning factory worker’s eye. A tiny, gaunt woman of 46, she said she had developed chronic back and leg aches from years spent peeling vegetables in a refrigerated room. On Guadalupe’s orders, she brought her $2,500 wrapped in a pair of underwear “without sin”--the fortuneteller’s term for new.

The 39-year-old Salvadoran cook hoped that Guadalupe would cure her insomnia. Anxious about the declining number of customers at the “restaurant” she runs out of her living room and concerned about the welfare of the young sons she had left in El Salvador, the cook rarely got a good night’s sleep. A devout Catholic, she said she would not have turned to a psychic’s help back in El Salvador. “But I thought, here in the United States, the treatments are more advanced. Maybe this will work,” she said.

Like Guadalupe’s other victims, the cook and the canner are too ashamed to tell their families that they were swindled, and they spoke on condition of anonymity. Carlos Moreta, Latino liaison for Prince George’s police, and Marcos Rodriguez, the investigator on the case, confirmed the details of their accounts and others.’

Moreta arranged for them to make their reports and even wrote out the canner’s statement for her because she has difficulty spelling. It was a depressing tale, Moreta said, but it seemed not to have shaken her faith in the spirit world. “When she was done, she looked up and asked if I had a newspaper so she could check her horoscope,” he recalled with a grim laugh.

Many of the victims are illegal immigrants who would have been disinclined to go to the police if not for the encouragement of Guadalupe’s Latino neighbors, who happened upon them just as they saw that the fortuneteller was gone.

“One woman was sobbing. Another man kept kicking the ground and screaming that he wanted to find Guadalupe and kill her,” recalled Monica Ramirez, a housecleaner who lives across the street. “Then there was a man who was so overcome he couldn’t speak.”

Ramirez and other neighbors offered the victims juice and sympathy. Still, Ramirez said, she could not help chiding them for being so gullible.

“I asked them, ‘Did [Guadalupe] have an altar?’ And they said no,” Ramirez recalled with a roll of her eyes. “Well, everybody knows that real fortunetellers always have an altar.”