Man pleads guilty; he faked death
Deal on 7 felonies is 24 years after ruse
Robert Arcieri faked his own death in 1987 to avoid prosecution for fraud, racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder.
And though the authorities never believed he was dead, he got away with it for 24 years, and his family persuaded a jury to award more than $1 million in life-insurance payouts.
On Wednesday, Arcieri, 73, pleaded guilty to seven felony counts in Maricopa County Superior Court.
His plea agreement requires that he spend 10 years in prison. He still faces a civil racketeer-
ing lawsuit over the insurance money.
Neither Arcieri’s defense attorney, Lisa Posada, nor the prosecutor, chief of the Attorney General’s Office’s criminal division, Jim Keppel, who was also prosecuting the case 25 years ago, would talk about the case. But court record tells the tale of how police and insurance investigators searched for Arcieri, and how he was set up by a notorious criminal on the prosecutor’s payroll.
It tells about his second life and his second wife in a new state under a new identity and hints at how his family may have aided him while he was hiding in plain sight.
Arcieri was 47 when he disappeared. According to court documents, he was a prolific criminal, allegedly involved in assaults and burglaries, drug trade and prostitution. He had hired hit men to kill three business associates, but the hits were never carried out. He hired the same thugs to steal his cars for the insurance pay-out and supposedly ran massage parlors that were fronts for prostitution. What he didn’t know, is that one of the hit men he hired was also working as a paid informant for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.
Michael Sanders, a bounty hunter with a criminal record, posed as one of the potential hit men. He approached Phoenix police and was referred to thenDeputy County Attorney Keppel. In court depositions, Sanders told how Arcieri planned the murders, and how he and the other hit man would each be paid $50,000 to carry them out.
Over the course of an unrelated murder trial, it was revealed that Sanders was paid $20,000 for his work as an informant for the County Attorney’s Office.
In the mid-1990s, Sanders was involved in the murder of an armored-car driver kidnapped at Arrowhead Mall. Sanders claimed he helped plan the heist but did not take part, and he pointed to fellow bounty hunter Timothy Ring as the leader of the gang that committed the crime. Ring was convicted and sentenced to death, but his appeals led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that places the responsibility for imposing death sentences on juries, not judges. Ring still maintains that Sanders committed the crime and has petitioned the court for a new trial.
Sanders was never prosecuted for his roles in the Arcieri or
When they got back to the dock after dark, (Robert) Arcieri claimed he was feeling dizzy. He stumbled and grabbed for his nephew, and both fell into the river. The nephew made his way to shore, but Arcieri disappeared.
Ring cases. He later was sentenced to life in prison for murdering two people in a bounty-hunter snatch that went bad.
But Sanders would have been a star witness in the case against Arcieri and another socalled hit man, if it had gone to trial.
When Arcieri and three other men were indicted on seven felony counts in 1986, Arcieri apparently started planning, taking out accounts under an assumed name and declaring bankruptcy, according to the court records.
In January 1987, Arcieri went on a fishing trip with his adult nephew and two other men on the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, near Page. He told his companions that he was taking pain medication for a sore back, and that it was interacting with the beers he drank while they were out on the water.
When they got back to the dock after dark, Arcieri claimed he was feeling dizzy. He stumbled and grabbed for his nephew, and both fell into the river. The nephew made his way to shore, but Arcieri disappeared.
Divers plied the waters for days, and pilots searched miles of the river from the air, but a body never turned up. In court depositions in Arcieri’s criminal file, the searchers noted that given the currents and the clarity of the water, if Arcieri had drowned, his body would have been there. Much of this information is contained in a 1990 letter from insurance investigators to Keppel. According to the record, the insurance company resisted paying off Arcieri’s $700,000 life-insurance policy. But Arcieri’s wife, daughters and the trustee in his bankruptcy case took the insurance company to court, and a jury found against the insurance company, which was forced to pay out $1,057,240.
According to the current civil racketeering suit, Arcieri moved to Spokane, Wash., and, using the name Frank Reynolds, took a job with a company that manufactures prefabricated homes. He met a woman there and they married. They moved to Thousand Oaks, Calif.
The racketeering complaint says that two of Arcieri’s daughters lived in a town just 7 miles away from Arcieri. It quotes a landlord of the daughters who said he met Arcieri and his new wife at the daughters’ residence; Arcieri was introduced to the landlord as Frank Reynolds, the girls’ uncle. The suit also alleges that Arcieri’s first wife, who had remarried, assisted Arcieri financially with the money from the insurance settlement, and that Arcieri’s and her remarriages are invalid since Arcieri and his first wife never divorced.
In June 2011, acting on a tip, Phoenix police found Arcieri in Palm Springs and returned him to Phoenix. He was booked on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder, burglary, theft, armed robbery, fraud, illegal control of an enterprise, detaining a person in a house of prostitution, and possession and sale of a narcotic drug.
On Wednesday, he pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiracy to commit burglary, two counts of solicitation to commit first-degree murder and one count of armed robbery stemming from the 1986 charges. He also pleaded guilty to one count of fraud, related to his disappearance. He will be sentenced March 12.