A career con man brings his talents to Cleveland’s art world

That's when things got weird. Coleman began taking control of the finances, keeping the books at home. He set up different committees, appointing himself chairman of them all. And though the nonprofit group was on a shoestring budget, he lobbied to spend its scarce resources on big fund-raisers with valet parking, catered food, and invitations that cost thousands of dollars.

He was trying to reel in blue-blood donors, he explains. But "we weren't attracting anything of the sort," remembers executive director Sarah Gyorki.

Finally, Gyorki had enough. No one was looking over Coleman's shoulder, and she worried that he would bleed the organization to death. She tried to resign, but she had helped found the group — and her parents were among its biggest donors. The board begged her to stay.

Months of wrangling followed. Coleman tried to turn the blame on Gyorki, saying she should have applied for more grants. She countered that her hands were tied, because he was keeping the books at his house. It got so bad that they stopped speaking.

Board members took sides. Some resigned. It looked like the fight would kill the group in its infancy.

"It was really horrifying and scary and confrontational," remembers Cindy Barber, owner of the Beachland Ballroom and a board member at the time. "There was a lot of conflict on the board as to who to believe."

Only after an outside consultant sided with Gyorki did the board finally ask Coleman to step down. The whole episode might have been dismissed as another bureaucratic catfight, a fur-flying episode common to the arts world. Then the people of Collinwood discovered how much they had escaped.

Isaac Coleman Jr. grew up in Cleveland in the 1950s, raised — as he likes to mention at appropriately sympathetic moments — primarily by his mom. She took him to the orchestra and the art museum. He learned early the value of cultural smarts and impressive résumés, and he would later brag of degrees from Amherst College and Columbia Law School.

But his real history suggests he's a ladder-climber of more sordid accomplishments. In the late '70s, when his résumé claims he was in a New York law school, he was actually in Cuyahoga County, pleading guilty to writing bad checks.

By 1983, he had resurfaced in New York City with a new name, calling himself Courtney Isaac Saunders and landing a $63,000-a-year job in Mayor Ed Koch's human resources department. His credentials seemed impeccable. Along with the Ivy League education, he claimed to have been a partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm headed by Joseph Califano Jr., the former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Jimmy Carter.

Coleman fit in well at City Hall. Burt Neuborne, an NYU law professor, remembers thinking he was a lawyer for the city. Neuborne liked him so much that he considered recruiting him for the faculty of NYU.

"He was a very impressive guy," the professor says. "I had no reason to believe, when I was talking to him, that he wasn't a good lawyer. I could see how he could fool a lot of people."

But two months into the job, city officials finally conducted the requisite background check. Turns out Coleman hadn't gone to Amherst or Columbia; nor had he worked at a D.C. law firm. What he had done was rack up more than $3,000 in personal expenses on the city's dime — everything from plane tickets to stays at the Ritz. This scam won him a conviction for attempted grand larceny.

But prison only brought time to conceive fresh schemes. In 1989, he answered a woman's personal ad in The New Yorker, then ran up charges on her credit card as soon as he was released.