Being Fred

The Times' Column One story today is all about Fred Brito, aka Federiqkoe DiBritto III, the Eastside con man who talked his way into a $100,000 job as a fundraiser for UCLA Medical School. That gig ended in handcuffs, like the others, and now Brito is at a familiar fork in the path of life.

Brito, 49, has spent his adult life using aliases and phony credentials to pull off one elaborate deception after another. He has lied his way into jobs as a Catholic priest, a youth counselor for a foster care agency and executive director of the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California, among many others. He once convinced a judge he was a psychiatrist in order to testify in a friend's criminal trial.

Sometimes his poses have landed him in jail. Other times, he's been allowed to leave jobs quietly. His latest unmasking put him behind bars for a couple of weeks while authorities decided what to do.

Brito was on parole at the time, but authorities decided not to send him back to prison because they found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing in his role at UCLA.

When we last posted about him in June, Brito was thinking of running for election to the Greater Cypress Park Neighborhood Council. No mention in the story of how that went. Brito waxes philosophic about it all: "There's going to be nowhere for Fred to hide anymore. Deep down there's a good person inside. Fred is trying to bring that person out." Yes, he's talking about himself.