Original subtitles

In this episode of American Greed, hail to the thief, Commander Bobby Thompson.

This story went from a dilapidated, run -down duplex all the way to the White

House. Thompson's a Harvard -educated lawyer claiming to run a $100 million

charity for veterans.

This organization had collected millions of dollars promising to give that to

veterans who needed it, and in turn, doing far from that.

Veterans get pennies, and the commander uses the proceeds as a political slush

fund. Is it just politics as usual, or is there something deeper going on? I

still don't know the answer. When his crime is uncovered, Thompson dares

investigators to find out where he is and who he is.

We thought we were chasing Jason Bourne. The guy was a ghost.

I can't help but wonder, who is this man?

He's a man who thinks he can remain a fugitive forever using his own

intelligence training and other people's money.

It's the mother load. More money than I've ever seen in one spot.

April 16th, 2012.

Security cameras roll, capturing a man as he enters a storage facility in

Portland, Oregon.

He was once an intelligence officer, a master of disguise, who felt at home in

the corridors of power.

Now beaten down after decades on the run, his life is a tangle of lies, and

step is a struggle.

He's on his way to Locker 646, where he stashed the secrets to his very

survival.

To authorities, he's known as Mr. X, a fitting name for a man cloaked in

mystery.

The mystery has not been unraveled.

It might be stranger than what we already know.

Dr. Patrick Bray knows that service to country involves great sacrifice.

The Navy paid for him to go to medical school and sent him all over the world.

As a Navy doctor, I know firsthand some of the hardships that this works on

people. You know, it's tough to be deployed if your wife's pregnant and

not going to be there and they're having troubles at home. It's difficult.

After leaving the military, Bray practices medicine in Cleveland, Ohio.

In 2007, he gets a call from a fundraiser.

I'm usually hanging up right away on a telemarketer, but he said Navy, and that

kept me on the phone.

Representatives of a charity called the U .S. Navy Veterans Association tell

Bray they're sending care packages to troops and supporting local vets in

They aren't asking for much, and Bray writes them two checks totaling $300.

Just the name was, you know, sounded legitimate.

U .S. Navy veterans.

Who's against that?

As Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine will later see, Bray is just one target

among thousands in a relentless telemarketing blitz.

I think most Americans have a soft spot in their heart for veterans and feel

that we owe them.

A lot.

Claiming a history dating back to 1927, the U .S. Navy Veterans Association, or

USNVA, says it has 66 ,000 members, 41 state chapter offices,

and a headquarters in Washington, D .C.

Its CEO, Jack Nimitz, shares a last name with Chester Nimitz, commander of the

Pacific Fleet during World War II.

In Ohio, Assistant Attorney General Brad Tamero says the U .S. NBA seems like

the right organization at the right moment.

I think at this time in our history, there is a strong patriotic feeling.

There's a strong desire to help the veterans that are coming back from

Afghanistan and Iraq.

The charity has been recognized by the Department of Veterans Affairs and

granted tax -exempt status by the IRS.

41 states allow the association to operate after it files registration

and keeps them current year after year.

Though these papers list scores of officers, in truth, one man is behind it

Commander Bobby Thompson.

Thompson says he's a retired Navy lieutenant commander with a background

intelligence.

He hires Helen McMurray to be the U .S. NBA's attorney.

And she believes in him 100%. No one loved this country more than he did. No

was a greater patriot. No one talked more about liberty and freedom and his

appreciation for it than him.

The charity touts an 80 -year history. But Thompson first files registration

documents in the early 2000s, not long after showing up in Tampa, Florida.

When he first started off, there wasn't a whole lot of money coming in.

and he was doing everything by himself.

And it wasn't until he hired those professional fundraisers that things

seemed to take off.

The telemarketing firms Thompson hires will eventually help his charity bring

millions.

They are allowed to pocket an astounding 85 % of what they raise, and they don't

ask many questions about Commander Thompson.

If you want to look at it with a jaundiced eye, so to speak, you could

were being paid a lot of money to do what they were doing.

They asked a question. They got an answer. The answer seemed legitimate,

they didn't dig any deeper.

As a former Ohio assistant attorney general, McMurray once went after

cheats. Now she works for nonprofits and telemarketers, helping them to clear

regulatory hurdles.

Bobby Thompson called me up, and he said that, you know, these gosh darn

regulators just keep trying to tell me what to do.

He was the most passionate person I have ever heard talk about these issues on

anything with anybody ever.

I mean, when you're paying a lawyer hourly, you don't sit there and talk for

hours and hours.

And that's what he did.

McMurray says she's not the only one to hear the commander's self -serving, anti

-regulatory message.

He regularly interacted with different important political people.

You know, the same message is that, you know, we should be able to do what we

want whenever we want to do it, however we want to do it. That's our right.

As the U .S. NBA grows into a multimillion -dollar operation, Thompson

big -time donor to politicians, most of them Republicans.

The commander has his photo taken with presidential candidates John McCain and

Rudolph Giuliani, Speaker of the House John Boehner, presidential advisor Karl

Rove, and President George W. Bush.

He's not afraid to share these pictures with others.

He was trying to show he was a big shot, that he had a lot of pull with people

due to his position with the USNBA.

By 2009, tax returns say the U .S. Navy Veterans Association has brought in

close to $100 million.

It was a money -making business.

He had money coming in hand over fist.

If he had not had that altercation with the reporter, he would have kept taking

the money.

Journalists ask, who is the man behind this money -making organization?

There wasn't anything.

He might as well have landed in Tampa on a spaceship from Mars.

In August 2009, investigative reporter Jeff Testerman is on his way to see

Thompson about a donation he's made to a local politician in Tampa, Florida.

My expectation was that I would talk to this retired Navy guy.

And I'd have a nice quote for the, you know, the bottom of my story, you know,

about this county commissioner.

It didn't go like that at all.

When Testerman gets to the commander's home, it hardly seems a fitting place

a retired Navy officer running a multimillion -dollar charity.

He was stuck in a hole across from a cigar factory with barbed wire around

If you're looking to kind of keep a low profile, no better place.

Thompson has his apartment on one side of his duplex and the office from which

he runs his charity on the other.

His windows are covered with an odd mix of stickers.

Inside, he scrawls bizarre messages on nailed -up boards.

And in the kitchen, he's said to keep tequila by the case full.

This guy was no dummy.

And yet, the place he's living is a dump.

He might have a little bit of a screw loose, you know.

He became openly hostile, aggressive.

He basically threw me off his property.

Intrigued, Testerman returns to his office and discusses the strange

with the newspaper's head researcher, John Martin.

I said, you know, I just went over to see this guy.

And this Lieutenant Commander Bobby Thompson was just all over me, like a

vulture on roadkill.

You know, what do you think?

They think it's time to dig deeper and begin by looking at the association's at

times rambling website.

Among 85 names they find connected to the charity, one sticks out, that of the

association's listed CEO.

Jack Nemeth, this famous Navy name.

let's find him, you know, let's call him and find out what's going on.

And Jack Nemes was nowhere to be found.

Over the next few months, they continue searching and get similar results.

They were supposed to have a board of 12 people. They were supposed to have 85

officers in state chapters around the country.

They were supposed to have 66 ,000 dues -paying members.

We never found anything except Bobby Thompson.

But even information on Commander Thompson is elusive. He's like a man

past. The sort of background that real people, people like me, have, there

wasn't anything.

He might as well have landed in Tampa on a spaceship from Mars.

Testerman discovers that the purported Navy lieutenant commander has no

record. He's not the only one finding inconsistencies.

At a breakfast meeting, attorney Helen McMurray asks Thompson about holes in

record, and he offers a surprising explanation.

The reason why he didn't have any current information on file was because

actually working for the CIA, except it was black ops.

and that this was a continuation of his military intelligence days and had to

kind of remain somewhat invisible.

His lawyer doesn't know what to make of the early morning confession.

Considering he was finishing up his fourth Bloody Mary by the time he

the story, I didn't really think much of it.

But he had so many connections that worked out. It made a little bit of

In their reporting, Testerman and Martin dig into these connections.

They see that while Thompson lives in poverty, he has donated hundreds of

thousands of dollars to various politicians.

The reporters wonder what they've stumbled upon and come up with three

First, Thompson is a lone wolf on the run from the law who created the

association in order to survive.

Second, the professional fundraisers are really in charge, and Thompson works

for them.

And the third theory was, is Thompson the tool of a pretty much right -wing

group? I mean, sort of right of the Tea Party. We, to this day, I don't know

which theory is actually the correct one.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine received $1 ,000 from Thompson in 2006.

He offers a simpler explanation for the con man's seemingly high -profile

connections.

I'm sure the president of the United States had no idea who this guy was.

It was probably at a fundraiser where he'd given some money.

Both parties do that. It's not unusual.

And it's just kind of the nature of, you know, politics is you have to raise a

lot of money.

In March 2010, after seven months of investigating, the St. Petersburg Times

publishes a series of articles about Thompson's Navy vet scam.

Weeks later, a number of states across the country open investigations.

Frying eyes are turning Thompson's criminal world upside down, threatening

expose the true story of his hidden past.

Next on American Greed, a U .S. Marshal's worst nightmare, tracking an

-intelligence officer who goes underground.

Every single lead that we uncovered just led to another false identity. This was

somebody who was highly trained and highly experienced.

For years, Bobby Thompson has been running a fake veterans charity from

rundown duplex in Tampa, Florida.

He's been aided by professional telemarketers who make millions by

for money and asking the commander very little about the charity.

Now, a series of articles has finally forced them to dig deeper.

In June 2010, one telemarketer calls Thompson to Manhattan to give him the

chance to prove there's more to the charity than just him.

The articles say there are no managers of this organization, there's no

officers, there's no trustees.

Okay, produce them.

Miraculously, Thompson brings two supposed board members with him.

But there's a problem.

They were appointed just days earlier.

The super -reported new board member made everybody feel even worse than they

were before.

And so the next morning we got a communication from the attorney, and

we're done.

And I never heard from Bobby Thompson ever again.

Since starting the U .S. NBA, prosecutors say Thompson has siphoned

approximately $3 million meant for veterans.

After the ill -fated meetings in New York, the commander begins hitting ATMs.

Then he heads up the coast to Boston, Massachusetts.

While trying to stay ahead of investigators, he hardly seems

After he went on the run, he started out trying to create new charities.

He created an organization on paper called the Plymouth Rock Society, and he

created an organization called Quakers Penn's Landing, both of them religious

organizations.

In Ohio, donors handed over millions to Thompson's fake charity.

And in October 2010, authorities there indict him on charges of racketeering,

money laundering, and theft.

But Thompson is nowhere to be found, and putting him in cuffs won't be easy.

Normally when we get a fugitive case, a police agency comes to us and says, go

find this person. Well, in this case, they said, go find a person. We don't

who he is.

It turns out that the name Bobby Thompson is nothing more than a stolen

identity.

Bill Bolden leads a team of U .S. Marshals from Cleveland, Ohio, after

on the hunt for the mystery man in late 2011.

They begin their search with three stolen identities their fugitive has

Bobby Thompson, Elmer Dozier, and Ronnie Britton.

As they dig deeper, this list grows longer.

We would uncover an identity, and that would lead us to another identity. And

we'd try to investigate that identity, and it would overlap with another

identity. We thought we were chasing Jason Bourne. The guy was a ghost.

Many of these identities were stolen from Native Americans living on the

reservations of the Southwest.

What's more, some were set up years before Thompson's crime came to light.

Marshals realize they're not dealing with a regular fugitive.

Well, he's good at what he is doing.

He knew how to cover his tracks.

Obviously, he was trained, or he trained himself to be very good at hiding from

the law.

Eventually, the search leads marshals to an apartment their fugitive has rented

in Providence, Rhode Island.

Though the commander has already skipped town, the team hunting him learns

another name he's using,

Anderson Yazzie.

There was only one Anderson Yazzie in the country. That identity was so unique

that it was very, very easy for us to track.

Next on American Greed, investigators zero in and make a crucial discovery.

In early 2012, a man with a limp shows up in Portland, Oregon, where he finds a

room in Celia Moore's boarding house.

He told me his name was Kenneth Don Morissette.

And he said, don't call me Ken. My mom called me Kenny when I was growing up,

and I don't like it. Just call me Don.

Morissette claims to be a retired cop and a consultant for the Boeing company.

Often working on a computer in his room, Moore says he was an ideal tenant, as

long as she avoided one topic of conversation.

Well, his politics were very, very far right -wing, and he said he was a

creationist, and just very far right.

Morissette lives quite frugally, taking some meals at a homeless shelter, and

existing on Pepsi, string cheese, burritos, and ramen noodles.

It's an amazing amount of lunches, like a man who was going to stay for a while.

I thought he was staying a while.

Outside the house, Morissette spends time visiting a rented storage locker.

Well, he mentioned that he'd been married for 35 years and that it was a

ugly divorce and that he didn't want his wife to know.

where he was.

That if she found him, she would take his money away.

Now I realize that he was worried that the U .S. government would find him, not

his wife.

Not far from Moore's home, Morissette makes credit card purchases under the

that U .S. Marshals have keyed in on, Anderson Yazzie.

On the night of April 30th, 2012, it's been two years since reporters exposed

Commander Bobby Thompson's veterans charity as a scam.

That night, he sits down at Biddy McGraw's Irish pub on Portland's

side.

Sitting next to him is someone who has just arrived in town.

It's one of the men tracking the scam artist, Deputy U .S. Marshal Bill

Hoping to find clues inside their fugitive's home, they wait and follow

Slowly. We were not going to arrest him right away.

We wanted to find out, number one, who he really was, and we were looking for

what we were calling the bank of Bobby Thompson.

As he approaches his front door at 10 .30 p .m., marshals cuff him.

They finally caught the man who reeled in millions claiming to help those in

uniform. But who is he?

We asked him his name. Sir, what is your name?

His response was, I invoke my Fifth Amendment rights. I'm not going to tell

my name.

Though their shadowy figure is tight -lipped, he's carrying three separate

wallets, each containing a fully fleshed -out identity.

In one, they find a business card for a storage facility with a unit number

written on it.

The marshals head there, not sure of what they'll find.

Inside, they see two suitcases.

This is stacks of birth certificates.

One contains a virtual workshop of fake ID material.

And

inside

the second bag?

Oh, my God.

Oh, 100.

These are 100.

How much?

It's the mother load. This is, uh, we joked. We said hopefully this storage

is the bank of Bobby Thompson.

This is it.

We're talking these are mostly hundreds.

50s, 100s, there's obviously a lot of 20s as well, but this is more money than

I've ever seen in one spot.

The team takes the loot to a secure location, running it through cash

anxiously waiting for the final tally.

$2 ,800.

$2 ,800?

Yeah.

$981 ,650.

It's just under a mil.

It's a huge haul.

But it's just a fraction of the millions that prosecutors will later say the

commander pocketed.

Across town, landlord Celia Moore makes one more interesting discovery in her

tenant's rented room.

A DVD of the film Catch Me If You Can.

He thought he was like the guy in the movie, and nobody was ever going to

him, and he was going to keep going and doing what he was doing. Because with a

million dollars, he could have disappeared across the border the next

But instead, he was staying and doing it all over again.

The marshals prove they can catch their man.

But when they lock him up in Ohio, where he's facing state charges related to

the USNBA scam, he still refuses to say who he is.

and signs his name with an X.

Pete Elliott, U .S. Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, isn't too

concerned. I thought for sure we were going to find out his true identity once

we put his fingerprints in the national system.

But it's not that easy.

When they search for fingerprint matches, nothing comes up in the U .S.,

or through Interpol.

I've been in law enforcement 30 years, and I've never seen that before.

We had no clue who Mr. X was.

For five months, Mr. X sits in a cell, leaving Elliot and others wondering who

he is.

I always felt that Bobby Thompson was probably somebody that did a similar

in the past, but was never arrested for it, because if he was arrested, his

fingerprints would have been in our national system.

To check this theory, in September 2012,

Elliot fires up his computer.

I started Googling missing Navy vets, most wanted military fugitives,

and also most wanted fraud fugitives.

What he finds is a story that would be unbelievable were it not true.

Next on American Greed, his past catches up to him. Mr. X's true identity

revealed. He just was strange.

And it only got stranger as the conversation went on.

When Marshal Pete Elliott starts searching for the true identity of Mr.

X, he has no idea that the story of the Navy Vets charity scam is about to

become even more bizarre.

Among the results he finds is a wanted poster for a fraud fugitive from the

1980s named John Donald Cody.

So the first thing that popped out to me was a picture on the far left -hand

side of John Donald Cody from 1980, and he had a pompadour hairstyle.

And Bobby Thompson from 1990s and 2000s, he has a pompadour

hairstyle.

Elliot notes other similarities between the man on the wanted poster, Cody, and

the man in custody, Thompson.

The fugitive, Cody, has no tear glands.

Thompson leaves bottles of eye drops in his room in Portland.

Cody is a former Army intelligence captain.

Thompson claims to be a Navy intelligence lieutenant commander.

Cody has a Harvard law degree.

Thompson is taking an active role defending himself in the Navy veterans

Give us a breakdown, Mr. Britton, of what you were doing in 1997.

So all these things started adding up, but nothing's exact.

I could be as right as I could be wrong.

To prove that the man arrested for stealing millions is actually John

Cody, Elliott needs his fingerprints.

When he calls an FBI agent working Cody's old case, he learns that the

has a set of his prints that were never entered into the national database.

I don't know why they were not in the national system. The bottom line is, if

they were in the national system, then we wouldn't have spent five months

to identify who he really was.

When Elliott receives a copy, he has them triple -checked against Mr.

X's prints.

Then he pays the Navy vet scammer a visit in his cell.

I go, we uncovered who you are, John Donald Cody.

And he just looked at me with a smile on his face.

And that was it.

Elliot has figured out the mystery man's true identity.

But how Captain Cody became Commander Thompson is a story that still leaves

guessing.

While many of his classmates protested the Vietnam War, John Donald Cody

followed the call of duty.

When he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1972, Cody was a reserve army

officer with a specialty in military intelligence and a top -secret

He was intelligent.

He had all the opportunity he could want.

It seemed like everything would have been on the up and up for him.

Cody's military records show him working civilian jobs at a variety of top

-notch law firms in the early 1970s.

They also include an offer letter from 1974 for a job with an obscure Defense

Department office in Washington, D .C.

Cody and a person once listed publicly as an employee of the office say it was

cover for CIA agents.

Cody will later say he worked for the agency starting in 1972.

The CIA declined to comment on his claim.

Whether he ever had any contact with the CIA, I have no clue. There's just no

way for us to know that.

In 1977, Cody's records say he's in the Philippines attending graduate school.

In 1979, the year he leaves, his employer is listed as U .S. Government

Classified.

That same year, he returns to the U .S. and sets up his own law firm in an

unlikely place,

Sierra Vista, Arizona.

It's a dusty town along the Mexican border and is home to an Army

base where Cody once trained.

In Sierra Vista, he befriends Terry Sariso, who gets to know him as a

liberal Democrat.

He had a picture of Bobby Kennedy on the wall behind his chair in his office.

He wanted equality for people, and he was willing to fight for it.

One of Cody's secretaries, Diane Shaughnessy, says this philosophy

to the way he treats his clients, many of them indigents.

Important. One was not better than the other.

And he fought hard for everybody.

Representing clients in both criminal and civil matters, Cody racks up many

courtroom victories.

While Cody has his law office, as a reservist, records say he also does part

-time legal duty at the intelligence base in town.

Performance reviews from 1980 call him a superior officer.

with a high degree of integrity.

This is a far cry from the Cody that former prosecutor Dennis Lusk knows

the same time.

Honesty meant nothing to him.

Ethics meant nothing to him. Candor to the court meant nothing to him if it

meant getting ahead with his clients.

Here at the Bisbee Courthouse, Lusk prosecutes many of Cody's clients.

He says Cody viewed him and other prosecutors through a distorted lens.

No matter how routine the case was, it was the worst case of prosecutorial

misconduct and overstepping, and we were trying to stomp him under the Nazi

boot. And that was a term he used fairly frequently over the course of time that

I knew him.

In legal filings on behalf of his clients, Cody seems at times unhinged.

Signed with a strange scrawl, he references Adolf Hitler and compares

KGB agent.

As time went on, he seemed more and more radical, almost to the point of being

an anarchist.

Cody lives at this simple apartment complex, and over the years, friends

he's growing increasingly paranoid.

In 1981, he tells a reporter he fears prosecutors may be trying to kill him.

Did he have personality disorder?

I don't know.

In late May 1984, Cody meets Sariso at the Sari Gulch Saloon and tells her

he's involved in a secret mission.

There were a lot of drugs coming in across the border.

He felt there were official people who were perpetuating it, and he wanted to

bring them down.

But he said, if I can't accomplish this, I will have to disappear.

On May 21, 1984, Cody says he's leaving town on unexpected business.

I had no idea that this would be the last day that I would ever see or hear

him.

I was perplexed. I thought John was trying to do something good, and it went

bad.

But in the days to come, another story will come out.

At the Bisbee Courthouse, Cody has been held in contempt after he allegedly lied

to a judge.

He has skipped town with nearly $100 ,000 stolen from his clients and left

Corvette at the Phoenix Airport, unlocked with the keys in the ignition.

In 1987, Cody is indicted on federal fraud charges related to the theft from

clients in Arizona.

The FBI poster that Pete Elliott will eventually find says Cody is also wanted

for questioning in an espionage investigation.

The FBI tells American Greed that national security precludes them from

about Cody's case.

So what made Cody run?

Prosecutors in Ohio say his advancement in the Army Reserves was not going as he

might have hoped.

But a definitive cause remains elusive.

There's nothing in his military records that indicates anything right off the

bat that would say this happened and therefore he's gone.

And that's the big question mark.

It's not the only one.

After leaving Arizona in 1984, Cody remains underground until he emerges in

Florida in 1998 as the highly connected Commander Bobby Thompson.

There's a big block of time where no one has been able to determine what

Thompson was doing in that 15 -year period.

How did he feel so comfortable walking into the White House while he was an FBI

wanted fugitive?

I still think there's a lot about John Donald Cody that we just do not know.

Next on American Greed, from his jail cell, Cody offers up an intriguing

explanation for his Navy vet crime.

How did I drop into a Tom Clancy novel?

I mean, that's what came to my mind.

As John Donald Cody heads to trial for running the Navy Vets charity scam, he

digs into his past as a Harvard -trained lawyer, filing scores of handwritten

motions.

In these, he says that he worked for the CIA beginning in the 1970s, that the

agency subjected him to hypnosis and psychotropic drug treatment.

and even claims that until 2012, he was working for them as a non -official

cover officer.

We can't say whether he was a CIA agent or whether he never was a CIA agent.

According to the record, he was a lawyer, and that's what he was.

That's what the records say.

While running his fake charity, Cody donated hundreds of thousands of dollars

politicians.

He claims the U .S. Navy Veterans Association was not a criminal

a U .S. intelligence community, White House, and Republican Party manipulated

operation.

I was taking orders.

Higher -ups were telling me to do this, and I was, you know, following orders

and this sort of thing. He put that out there.

Attorney Helen McMurray remembers that breakfast meeting when Cody downed

multiple Bloody Marys and told her the association was tied to the CIA.

She still wonders if his story is one she can dismiss 100%. I can't.

And quite frankly, the fact that when they arrested him and his fingerprints

not turn up in any database, it really makes you question.

But prosecutors see it another way.

It sort of goes against what would be in the, I would guess, the spy 101 manual

to say I'm a super secret spy.

But by the way, here's a picture of me shaking hands with the president of the

United States.

What's more, they say Cody's cloak and dagger justification for running his

charity is a moot point.

Even if he would have been the James Bond of Ohio.

There's no exemptions that allow a federal officer of any kind to come into

state of Ohio or any other state and break state laws at their own will or at

the command of someone else.

In September 2013, Thompson's Navy Vets charity fraud trial gets underway here

at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio.

In his opening statement, Cody's attorney, Joseph Patatus, hints at a

involving Cody's claimed CIA career.

You're going to have to ask yourself, how does he get that close to the

president of the United States?

The prosecution presents its case first and calls 42 witnesses.

As they finish, things turn strange.

Those in the courtroom hear the defendant in a nearby holding cell

head against a wall.

Days later, he shows up looking disheveled.

The magnitude of the evidence that was presented against him was coming home.

It was a ploy for a mistrial, again to try to manipulate the system.

After months of hitting on a defense involving his claimed CIA career, Cody

refuses to testify, and his lawyer calls no witnesses in his defense.

I think he didn't have any defense.

There was nothing that he really could say.

Once you take the stand, you open yourself up for all kinds of cross

-examination.

The jury needs only three hours before they find Cody guilty of racketeering,

theft, money laundering, and identity fraud charges.

One month later, Judge Stephen Gall sentences him to 28 years in prison.

He also orders the one -time Army captain to spend every Veterans Day in

solitary confinement.

Now, Cody sits here at an Ohio prison where he could spend the rest of his

To this day, many are left with questions about Cody's past, about his

to hide in plain sight, and about his reason for stealing millions while

a life of poverty.

The game was what it was all about to him.

The ability to walk into the White House with a fake ID.

knowing that he was already a fugitive when he did that.

One thing about John Donald Cody, he always has to be the smartest guy in the

room, no matter what room he is in. He may have been the smartest person in the

room most of the time, but somewhere along the line, he got twisted, he got

turned, and just dropped off the deep end.

And when he dropped off the deep end, he went full bore.

This story went from a dilapidated, run -down duplex, and it went all the way to

the White House.

What's going on here?

I still don't know the answer.

In Portland, Marshall's found close to $1 million.

But it's only a fraction of the $100 million Thompson -slash -Cody said he

raised for veterans.

What happened to the rest?

A lot of this money really hasn't been accounted for.

And I don't know if anybody knows, aside from Thompson, where it went.

Do I think there's other storage units out there?

If I was a betting man, I would say I think there probably is.

Next, a devious genius gets rich quick, printing millions at home.

The opportunity was there for them to make easy money.

The CNBC hit series, American Greed. Games, scoundrels, and suckers. Knack.

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Greed.