Con man pleads guilty in $1.7M scam

A man who cops say spent years living in Quincy under a fake name while swindling Bostonarea investors out of millions will plead guilty later this month, his lawyer says.

Scott Wolas is charged federally with scamming locals out of $1.7 million before skipping town in September 2016. Authorities began investigating the man known around Quincy as Eugene Grathwohl and soon discovered he was Wolas and had been on the lam for two decades on suspicion of running multimillion-dollar grifts in New York and Florida.

“We are happy to report we have come to a plea agreement,” his courtappointed attorney, Jane Peachy, said during a hearing yesterday.

Peachy declined comment on his behalf after the hearing at the Moakley Courthouse in South Boston, and said she couldn’t elaborate yet on the terms of the deal.

Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV set the change-of-plea hearing for Friday.

Wolas, a man with a permanent half-smile affixed to his round face, sat quietly in prison beige during the brief hearing.

The 70-year-old is charged with felony counts of wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, mostly regarding a plan to redevelop the former Beachcomber nightclub on Quincy Shore Drive along Quincy’s Wollaston Beach.

The accused flimflam man, going first by Allen Lee Hengst and then Grathwohl, settled in Quincy in the early 2000s after meeting a local woman online. Court documents, which list five aliases, paint a picture of him settling in, getting a job at a real-estate firm in Quincy and rubbing elbows with South Shore folks with deep pockets.

He persuaded 20 of them to give him $1.7 million to develop two properties, including the Beachcomber, promising huge returns, the feds say. But the day before the Beachcomber deal was supposed to close, Wolas hopped on a train at the JFK/UMass MBTA stop and vanished.

Authorities found him last spring in Delray Beach, Fla., and hauled him back to face charges.

The feds say this was merely the latest scam in the 20-year career of a con man. Wolas had to flee New York City, where he’d been a successful lawyer, with the Securities and Exchange Commission on his tail looking for answers about a pyramid scheme involving liquor sales in Asia. Authorities say he went to Florida, where he stole a college roommate’s identity and began selling bonds and carrying out art scams.