Pro and Con

Harlan didn't mention being a pro football player at Sil-TerHar, but that didn't mean he'd put his old con to rest. One night in early 2003, Harlan walked into Stevinson Lexus at 801 Indiana Street in Lakewood and said he played for the Broncos. "He had the look of an athlete," admits general manager Steve Szekula, but he wasn't convinced — especially when he looked up his name later on the Internet and found no mention of Harlan as a Broncos player. Szekula called a Lakewood police detective, and they set up a sting. The next day, he called Harlan back and said he had a deal he couldn't refuse. "As soon as he came in and signed the credit application that he was a Denver Broncos football player, he committed forgery and perjury, and the cops came in and arrested him," says Szekula.

Harlan's parole was revoked, but the penal system wouldn't hold him for long. He was paroled again in June 2003, used a bad check to obtain a motorcycle from Thunder Mountain Harley-Davidson in Loveland and absconded again. When he was arrested in 2004, he faced more serious charges. According to a U.S. District Court indictment, in late 2002 Harlan had broken into the post office in Nucla and stolen money orders.

He was paroled in March 2005, but he was soon up to his old ways. That month, he used bad checks to take an $18,000 Lincoln LS from RD Motors in Lakewood. Later that summer, he showed up in Lubbock, Texas, using more bad checks to pay for a hotel room. In August, back in Denver, he provided police with several false names when he was arrested and charged with domestic violence after a fight with his wife.

"He's sort of an argument for a 'three strikes and you're out' law," says Greg Goodwin, owner of the Kuni Lexus dealership. "It seems like the system is sort of helping him do this."

Paroled again this past summer, Harlan began working for Denver-based Legal Aid National Services, or LANS Corp. The company offered phone-based, low-cost legal aid services, but past employees have raised questions about the operation — and the Colorado Attorney General's Office is currently investigating it, says department spokesman Nate Strauch.

"LANS Corp. ended up being a big scam," says Thomas Carrigan, the company's former national director of recruiting. "A lot of people got hurt very, very badly." Former staff members say the lawyers and paralegals working with the corporation often wouldn't get paid, and clients who paid for services would sometimes be left without legal help or a refund. They note that the company often used Craigslist ads to hire people with criminal backgrounds to man the phones, since they'd be less likely to complain if they never received a paycheck. Harlan fit the bill, and he was assigned to take clients' credit-card information when they called the 800-number listed on the LANS Corp. website, www.legalaideusa.com. Both the website and the 800-number are currently out of service.

Harlan eventually quit because, like his co-workers, he wasn't getting paid, says Vince Martinez, the company's former human-resources director — but he may have found the experience valuable.

In late September, Harlan filed for bankruptcy to wipe out the $80,000 worth of debt he owed for bad checks, court judgments and loans he'd never repaid. At roughly the same time, he registered a new limited-liability company, Harlan21, with the Colorado Secretary of State's Office. Then he leased offices at 3801 East Florida Avenue in Denver — in the same building and on the same floor that LANS Corp. had used.

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The open house at the Harlan21 Sports Complex took place on December 5 as planned. Several dozen neighbors showed up and ate cake and drank H21 water in a large meeting room as employees explained the future plans for the facility. On a wall behind them, a large banner proclaimed, "Harlan21 LLC: We Bring the Game to You!" There was no appearance by the mayor, no sports superstars — and no Amadeus Harlan.

The staff tried to act confident, but they knew something was wrong. Harlan had never returned from his business-loan class the day before, and he wasn't answering his cell phone. That morning, about 24 hours after Harlan had disappeared, Winchester had showed up. His son had been in a bad car accident, he'd said; Harlan was in the hospital.

But when the staff began calling hospitals in the days after the open house, they found no record of Harlan. Instead, they discovered he was in jail for violating his parole. Harlan hadn't reported his company, his new cars or other recent activities to the probation officer he was assigned when he'd left prison the summer before, violating the terms of his release. Soon, Harlan's employees knew his whole history.