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Friday night lights Mount Doug Rams junior varsity running back Manny Lopez hustles with the ball as he is tackled by St. Thomas More Knights Matthew Duda during high school football action at Royal Athletic Park. Lopez scored the only touchdown for the junior Rams in a 21-7 loss against Vancouver’s St. Thomas More. Later, the senior Rams won 41-26 to win the first regular season game. Friday night football returns to Royal Athletic Park this Friday when Vancouver College visits the Rams, juniors at 2:30 p.m., seniors at 5 p.m. See page A22 for more. Don Denton/News staff
Year in jail for handyman fraud artist Court lauds Saanich police for detecting region-wide scam Edward Hill News staff
A man who committed a string of handyman scams across Greater Victoria will spend another year behind bars. On Thursday in Victoria provincial court, judge Robert Higinbotham sentenced Glen French to 12 months for each of the 10 counts of fraud under $5,000, to be served
concurrently. That's added to his three months in jail already served, due to his bail being revoked when he fled to Ontario. Striking a curious image as a 62-year-old with tattoos crawling around his bald head, French sat quietly through the proceedings. None of the victims attended court. Crown prosecutor Jocelyn Byrne described French, a Sooke resident, as a habitual con artist and liar, who entered into professional looking contracts with his victims for handyman jobs, collected some money up front, and either didn’t complete the work or start the job. In many cases French skip out on work by telling customers his father had died, Byrne
said. In one case, French ran into one of his victims at a hardware store in Victoria after claiming he would be out of town at his father’s funeral. “Every victim who met Mr. French, despite him being covered in tattoos, said he seemed like a very nice guy and people liked him,” Byrne noted. When his customers demanded he finish the work or return the down payment, he often turned viciously aggressive and threatened his victims with lawsuits. The scams took place in 2009 and early 2010 in Saanich, Victoria, Esquimalt and the West Shore. Byrne said that many of the victims
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reported their individual conflicts with French to their local police, but were told it amounted to a civil contract dispute. Saanich police suspected a pattern of fraud when it started investigating French in 2009. “In every case people were told it was a civil matter. That’s how he got away with it for so long,” Byrne said. “Thank goodness the Saanich police fraud section ... looked at the bigger picture. In all these cases they proved fraud, and that there was no intent to finish the work.” PLEASE SEE: Similar scams, Page A6
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