Bill and Dana had been dating for nearly two years when Ann started calling. Bill, six feet tall and 38, with thick brown hair and a rakish smile, told Dana that Ann was just a friend, someone who needed a shoulder to lean on because she was having problems with her boyfriend, a real scumbag.
Plus, he told Dana, there was another, very important reason she didn't have to worry about him cheating with Ann: Ann, Bill said, had told him she had herpes.
"I was like, 'Ooo-kay,'" Dana says now. "I let that one go."
But that story would turn out to be one of Bill Sullivan's many lies. A year later, when Dana figured out that Bill had cheated on her with yet another woman, she says she found Ann's number and called her. Yes, Ann admitted, Bill and she had an affair.
"He's truly a con artist," Dana says now. "This is how he lives his life."
Bill, now 43, denies it. While he admits there may be a few scorned women in his past, he says he lives his life on the up-and-up. A lot of what his ex-girlfriends, ex-wives and ex-co-workers say about him is "absolute garbage."
But others who've known or dated Bill over the years also say he's deceitful. Bill, they say, lies about having affairs and about having college degrees. He lies about things as small as his golf-club membership and as big as his bank accounts. In 1998, investigators caught Bill in a real whopper: He'd embezzled close to $1 million from a Denver DVD and laser disc distribution company, draining the startup's coffers so completely that it went out of business at what should have been the peak of its success.
Bill pleaded guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison, but that was reduced to eight years when he apologized to a Denver District Court judge in the spring of 2000.
He called the embezzlement "a terrible act" and said he didn't realize how far it had gone until he was caught. He said he was sorry, and that a compulsion to impress his wealthy father by living a lavish lifestyle despite his $35,000 salary drove him to steal. He promised to repay the debt, which totaled $1.8 million with punitive damages.
"I am convinced that I would not be a danger again," he wrote in a letter to the court a mere day after pleading guilty to a Class 3 felony.
But Bill was lying again.
Five women who met Bill after he was released from prison — he ended up serving just under two years — say their lives are worse for having dated him. And each one can rattle off a list of other women he has seduced and conned, too. They say he used the same pattern to borrow money from them and use their good credit to finance pricey cars and live the high life, eventually sending one of them into bankruptcy.
In the meantime, Bill has managed to dodge his former employer's attempts to collect the money he stole, and now claims he will never pay off the debt.
"He's the master of screwing people," one ex-girlfriend says.
But Bill's screwing may soon come to an end — at least if a group of his exes has its way. The women were introduced by a mutual friend who has never met Bill but has listened to horror stories about him for years. For two months now, the group has been attempting to warn his new girlfriends against him before they get in too deep.
Their strategy works like this: One woman who is still friends with Bill — they've nicknamed her "the mole" — pumps him for information about who he's dating. Then the mutual friend finds the women on Facebook and contacts them. She tells them to stay away from Bill and offers old articles from the Rocky Mountain News, including one titled "Accountant Sentenced to 10 Years in Fraud Case."
The name of their game: Operation Cock Block.
In mid-1994, Bill was hired at Lumivision Corporation, a then-six-year-old Denver company that distributed laser discs, the precursors to DVDs.
The company was the brainchild of Jamie White, a native Coloradan with a love of theater who started it in 1988. Lumivision specialized in buying the rights to "special-interest, esoteric, art house-type films" and then paying firms like Pioneer or Sony to make those films into laser discs. The discs would be shipped to Lumivision, which would then sell them to retailers like Tower Records.
Bill, then in his late twenties, came on as the growing company's second bookkeeper, and he seemed like an amiable guy. He was hired through a recruiting agency, and his resumé listed a degree in accounting. White says "he had the right background, as far as I could tell." (The University of Denver, however, where Bill says he earned his bachelor's degree, says it has no record of an alumnus named William P. Sullivan.)
Tim Miller, who worked at Lumivision from 1990 until it went under in 1998, says Bill was friendly and seemed competent at his job. He also appeared to have a lot of money. While Lumivision's other employees wore shorts and sweatshirts to work, Bill always dressed sharply in pressed jeans, collared shirts and Rolexes. His money seemed to come from his family. Miller says Bill told him he was related to Paul Revere and that his family received a cut of the profits from Revere cookware. Miller says he had no reason not to believe him. He certainly looked and acted the part. Soon after Bill began working at Lumivision, he traded his 1991 Honda Accord for a Mercedes.
Despite the money, Bill painted a grim picture of his childhood. Miller says he told co-workers that his mother died when he was young and that he and his father, a former bigwig at computer software company J.D. Edwards, didn't get along.
"Bill is charming," Miller says. "His gift was the lie that he would give you the shirt off his back; he'd do anything for you. And it made you believe he was a good person. I think part of it might have been genuine on his part. I think that's the kind of person he wanted to be. But history shows that that is not who he is. He is a manipulator, a cheater, a liar."
According to court records, Bill began cooking the books at Lumivision in November 1994, about six months after he started working there. By then, he'd been promoted from accountant to comptroller. It was his sole responsibility to track the company's accounts, pay its bills and reconcile the monthly bank statements.
In that role, Bill was authorized to write checks up to $2,000 without White's approval. On November 10, 1994, court records show, he wrote and signed the first of many $2,000 checks to himself. But instead of recording himself as the payee in the company's bookkeeping software, he recorded the check as if he were paying one of Lumivision's bills. He did it again on November 18, and again on December 9. By November 1995, Bill was writing himself up to seven checks a month. Two years later, it was up to ten or twelve. Sometimes he wrote himself two checks in one day.
He was also abusing the company credit card, records show. Some of the unauthorized charges were small: $18.50 to the Mile High Saloon in Denver and $22.50 to someplace called Wet Willy's in St. Thomas. He also charged rental cars, hotels and plane tickets. Some charges were even larger, including $1,833 to an Englewood aviation company (his exes say he flew planes) and $2,240 to Ben Bridge Jewelers.
In 1995, Lumivision started showing hints of financial trouble. White attributed it to the laser disc market, which had begun to stagnate as consumers waited for DVDs to be released (which wouldn't happen until 1997). No one suspected Bill was playing a part. In fact, it was just the opposite. That year, he bought 10 percent of Lumivision, providing it with a much-needed cash infusion. The exact amount of the transaction is unavailable.
It didn't solve the problems. By 1996, Miller says, it was clear the company was floundering. "We didn't have money to go forward on projects. We were wondering, 'Gosh, was there bad money management? Was it Jamie? Was it Bill? Was it a contract we had to pay too much for?'" Lumivision began laying off employees, and pretty soon, there were only a handful of people left, including Miller, White and Bill.
In March 1997, Lumivision joined the DVD market. But it wasn't enough, and the company's bank account continued to shrink. Again Bill stepped in, loaning the firm thousands of dollars. White claims all but $18,000 was paid back.
By July 1998, Lumivision could no longer make payroll and White began liquidating it. Even though Bill had found another job by then, White says he'd come in on weekends to get the mail, open the bank statements and take care of the accounts.
One weekend, White decided to open the bank statement himself. What he saw shocked him: copies of two checks for $2,000 made out to Bill. "I was stunned," White says. "I thought, 'We could have really used that $4,000.'"
White eventually contacted the bank, got copies of all of Lumivision's checks and began to add. "I thought initially it was a few thousand dollars," he says, "and it quickly went up to $30,000 and then up toward $1 million."
At that point, he hired a pair of forensic accountants to thoroughly review Lumivision's finances. What they found was astonishing: Between November 1994 and July 1998, Bill had written checks to himself totaling $901,568.68. The fraudulent credit-card charges totaled another $22,293.69.
In October 1998, Bill was charged in Denver District Court with five counts of theft, and an arrest warrant was issued. He told an investigator for the district attorney's office that he hadn't stolen the money; as part owner of the company, he'd simply given himself a raise without telling anyone else. As for why he'd attempted to cover it up, he had no explanation.
The case never went to trial. In November 1999, Bill pleaded guilty to a single charge of felony theft as part of a deal. Then-Denver chief deputy district attorney Phil Parrott asked the judge to give Bill the maximum sentence, arguing that he lived an extravagant lifestyle off the money he pilfered. Parrott pointed out that despite his $35,000 salary, Bill drove a Mercedes and a Land Rover and lived in a $450,000 house in Douglas County.
The money to finance Bill's lifestyle could have come from elsewhere. In a pre-nuptial agreement with his third wife, Jennifer, dated July 1999, just four months before he pleaded guilty, Bill listed a $3 million trust fund and more than $650,000 in a British bank account among his assets. But if Bill was independently wealthy, he wasn't sharing his fortune. By the time he was sentenced in January 2000, the supposed multi-millionaire hadn't voluntarily paid a cent back to Lumivision.
At Bill's sentencing hearing, White asked for the maximum sentence, too. "The company can no longer function," he said. "It's ruined my reputation. We had eleven employees, none of which are working now."
Bill and his lawyer, Harvey Steinberg, tried to convince the judge otherwise. They had Bill's psychologist, Claire Poole, testify that since being arrested, Bill was trying to turn his life around. Poole said the arrest made Bill realize the wrongness of his actions in a way that therapy never could, and that he had begun to openly discuss his shortcomings. "I don't believe that Bill would repeat this behavior again," he said.
Judge Frank Martinez didn't buy it, at least not at first. "The harm and impact to the victims here is palpable. Basically, it was an opportunity for some people to pursue their version of the American dream. And the defendant, through his own selfish behavior, bashed those dreams," he said before sentencing Bill to ten years in prison and ordering him to pay back the money he'd stolen.
But three months later, at a routine re-sentencing hearing, Martinez changed his mind after Bill apologized.
"I started taking the money from my company to try to make myself look better, to impress others, to gain admiration from friends, family and most importantly, my father," Bill wrote in a letter to the court. "Only after being caught did I realize just how wrong and illegal this whole thing was. I used to tell myself, 'This isn't hurting anyone,' when in fact, it did."
Martinez shaved two years off of Bill's sentence. For his part, Steinberg says he isn't authorized to comment on Bill's case.
Now, however, Bill says the apology letter and the psychologist were simply part of his legal strategy. "I hired a very prominent criminal attorney in Denver, and I did what he wanted to do," Bill says. "That's what you hire lawyers for." And although he says he doesn't want to talk about "old news," Bill claims that he wrote the checks to repay himself for what he loaned the company: "I put in what I took out."
Bill is also reticent about his personal finances. While he does insist that he's a relative of Revere and a beneficiary of his family's trust, Bill says he knows nothing about cookware. "I'm not privy to trust documents," he explains, adding that he doesn't know the sum of the trust, either. "I don't know where the income to it comes from."
After Bill pleaded guilty, a civil court judge awarded White another $900,000 in damages plus legal fees; White had sued Bill to recover the losses. With that judgment, the amount of restitution owed totaled more than $1.8 million.
The debt, Bill explains now, will "never be satisfied."
Bill ended up spending just under two years in prison. In October 2001, he was released to a halfway house, and from there he was allowed to return home, although he had to wear an ankle monitor and abide by a curfew.
Dana met Bill in May 2002, while he was still living in the halfway house. A thin, blond 35-year-old single mom to a young boy, Dana was divorced and looking to start dating again. Her hairdresser offered to set her up with a good-looking guy who'd come in recently for a haircut, a guy named Bill Sullivan.
On their first date, they went to J. Alexander's in Englewood for steak. Right off the bat, Bill was charming. "He's got this presence about him," says Dana, who didn't want her last name used in this story. On their second date, Bill came clean — to an extent. He admitted to embezzling the $900,000, but said he'd simply been paying himself back money he'd loaned the company.
"He said he was trying to turn his life around, that he had become a Christian," Dana says. "He told me that once he...started working that he was going to pay Jamie back. He said he was trying to work out his relationship with his father. He played all of those cards with me, and I fell for it, hook, line and sinker."
Their courtship started slowly. They went to church on Sundays and went out to dinner. Dana says she would often pay; Bill explained that he was paying $5,500 a month in alimony to his third ex-wife Jennifer, who he called a "gold-digging bitch."
"He never had any money because he was paying Jennifer," Dana says.
Bill didn't have a car, either, so Dana would pick him up in the morning and take him to the bus stop. He'd found a job at a small Denver electronics assembly company called AIM Technologies Inc., earning $750 a week. Dana recalls that AIM knew about his criminal background, and court records show that Bill's wages were garnished to pay restitution while he worked there. AIM declined to comment for this story.
Bill was a good boyfriend for the first year. "In the beginning, he was very attentive," she says. "He calls when he says he's going to call. He thinks you're the best thing since sliced bread, and he makes you feel like you are what he needs. You really think you're the one who's going to help him turn his life around and be a good person."
After they'd been together a year and Bill had been released from the halfway house, Dana helped him finance a used Range Rover. His credit had been ruined by the criminal case, and he couldn't get a loan by himself. Dana, however, had near-perfect credit and a good job as a paralegal. Plus, she'd received money from her divorce. So she put the Range Rover in her name, and Bill agreed to make the payments on it.
He did — which is maybe why, after a year and a half of dating, Dana agreed to move into a rented house with him. That's when her suspicions started.
It became clear that Bill had a bevy of female friends. They constantly called him, and he would frequently meet them for dinner. "It was always, 'Something's happened. She needs me. She needs a friend,'" Dana says. She considered leaving Bill, but, "I was already financially in deep with him." She'd financed a second, more expensive Range Rover for him when he was displeased with the first, and she'd also put a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle in her name, with the agreement that Bill would make the payments.
Plus, Bill was a good apologizer. "He would make it sound genuine when he would apologize when he would do something wrong," she says. "I was hoping he'd go back to the person he was, but that was never him."
After two years, Bill proposed. He hired a limo to drive them to a nice restaurant in downtown Denver, though Dana doesn't remember which one. They ate dinner, and when the dessert came, there was a diamond ring in the center of it. "It was all very romantic and whatever," Dana says. "And I had enough to drink where I said yes."
But Dana never made any wedding plans. She was working two jobs and says she "just knew deep down that it was never going to happen." She did, however, decide to buy a house with Bill about six months after their engagement. It was a dream house in Highlands Ranch: four bedrooms, stainless-steel appliances and a built-in backyard grill on a quiet cul-de-sac. Their deal was the same: The house, which Dana couldn't afford on her own, would be in her name, but Bill would help with mortgage payments.
Around the same time, Dana financed a silver, four-door Mercedes for Bill. "He'd say, 'We're going to be together forever,' and I didn't need to worry about anything," Dana says. "I trusted him because what's the harm if he's going to make the payments?"
But things got worse. For some time, Dana had suspected that Bill had been having an affair with an interior decorator named Lisa. And one night, when Dana and Bill were living together, Bill told her he was going to play poker with the boys. When he came home, he brought along several people, including Lisa, to party in the basement. Dana says she was upstairs in her and Bill's bedroom, trying to sleep.
"All of a sudden, I hear a knock on the door and [a woman] comes in," Dana says. The woman tried to convince her to come down to the basement for a drink. "She says, 'You know, Dana, we're all coupled up downstairs.' I said, 'Coupled up? So Lisa and Bill are sleeping together?' And she says, 'Yeah, they have been for about a year.'"
The woman, Dana says, thought Dana was Bill's ex-girlfriend. Bill had told the woman and her friends that he owned the house and was letting Dana stay there because she was too poor to move out on her own. Dana was furious and demanded that the guests leave. The next morning, Bill called the woman who'd spilled the beans and, within earshot of Dana, accused her of lying. He made it seem like the woman was crazy and that he had no idea what she was talking about.
In September 2005, Dana says she finally broke it off with Bill. He moved out of the house, leaving her with a mortgage payment she couldn't afford. After two years of trying to make ends meet, she sold the house in July 2007 at a $31,000 loss.
Dana also wanted the Mercedes out of her name, but Bill refused to turn it over for several months. After she threatened to report it stolen, Bill left the car in her driveway with the keys in the ignition — and a $900-a-month car payment.
Bill says now that he had no choice. As a felon on parole, he couldn't be caught driving in a car that had been reported stolen. He says he didn't have good enough credit to put the Mercedes in his name, so he returned it to Dana. "I'm sure she got screwed over on it," he says, "but I was trying to do the right thing."
He also admits to infidelity in some of his previous relationships, but claims that he has put that behind him. "It's not who I am anymore," he says.
Dana says she tried to sell the Mercedes, with no luck, and ended up turning it in to the dealership, along with her own Nissan Frontier. But she still owed $25,000 on it, which was one of the factors that forced her and her son to move in with her parents.
But Dana was still curious. After breaking up with Bill, she called his ex-wife Jennifer. From her, Dana says she learned that the $5,500 alimony payments were a lie. And the cheating? The "friends"? Jennifer told a similar story, Dana adds; now living out of state, Jennifer declined to discuss her history with Bill with Westword.
"He'd lied to me for three years," Dana says. "And once we broke up, [he told other women that] I was always the 'wack job.'"
That was exactly the story that Lisa heard.
Lisa began dating Bill in the fall of 2004. She was in her early forties — a divorced single mom working at a now-closed high-end furniture store in Lone Tree where Bill was a customer. He told her he was single but still living with his ex because she had a little boy and couldn't afford her own place.
"When I first went out with him, I was wooed by him," says Lisa, who asked that Westword change her name, partly because she fears retaliation from Bill. "He's a handsome man, he dresses nice, he drives a nice car, he has a condo in Aspen. He's kind of the whole package. Looking back on it now, I see how I was so naive."
Bill told her about his embezzlement charge on their first date, at an upscale restaurant in the Park Meadows mall. At that point, he still had an ankle monitor and a 10 p.m. curfew. He gave her the same story he'd given Dana: that he was trying to get his life back in order and was making the court-required restitution payments. He also complained about having to pay outrageous alimony to his third ex-wife, she says.
"He appears to make himself very vulnerable by letting you know things that maybe nobody else knows," Lisa says. "It's almost like a psychological game. He told me that he really trusted me and wanted a relationship with me."
But Lisa says her relationship with Bill was "always rush, rush, rush." They only saw each other a few times a week, and often only for an hour or two. Instead of dinner, they'd meet for cocktails. "And then he had to go, had to get home," she says. He was also oddly absent on holidays. "We'd make plans, and at the last minute he'd cancel out," she says. Afterward, he'd tell her an elaborate story about why he couldn't make it.
Lisa attributed his quick exits and absenteeism to the ankle bracelet and his demanding parole officer. Besides, she says, "he said all the right things. He'd say how much he adored me and had to be with me."
Throughout their relationship, Bill bought tens of thousands of dollars' worth of furniture from her, including a $10,000 dining set. She remembers that he paid for it with credit cards, which was the same method of payment he used when they went out. Lisa didn't have much money, and on their dates, Bill always picked up the tab.
But Lisa did have the inside track on designer furniture. One time, she says Bill asked her to mark down a pair of framed prints that retailed for about $800 each. One of the frames was damaged, and Bill pressured her to knock off 20 percent. She did, and when her manager found out about it "it started a snowball effect of me leaving my job there," she says. "I'm a grown woman, and I have to be responsible for my choices. But he put me in a position where I compromised my job for him."
Lisa says she left Bill after she found out the truth about Dana. She describes going to his house one night to party in the basement and figuring out that Dana was indeed Bill's girlfriend and not his down-and-out ex. "I dated him for eight months, and it was eight months of lies," Lisa says. "He was good at it. He convinced me."
Emily met Bill around January 2006 on Match.com. At the time, she was in her late thirties, had a steady, well-paying job and had never been married. Bill saw her online profile and asked her for a date. She remembers that they went to a Mexican restaurant in Lone Tree and that Bill, now living in a Highlands Ranch townhome, was charming.
"He's very well put together," says Emily, who also requested that Westword change her name. "He does have money. He's got Rolexes. He drives nice cars, has a nice house." Again, Bill was up front about his theft charge, but downplayed the seriousness of it. "He said that he was a partner in the company and was paying himself back, and the whole court thing was a misunderstanding," she says. But unlike before, he didn't say he was eager to pay restitution. Instead, "he made it sound like he didn't need to," Emily says. "The way he puts it, he makes himself the victim."
Emily says she and Bill soon progressed to seeing each other every day. They went to dinner together, especially to Del Frisco's steakhouse in Greenwood Village, and to church every Sunday. Bill, who is an avid golfer, convinced Emily to try the game and eventually buy her own set of clubs. He even took her to Meridian Golf Club in Englewood, where Dana was a bartender. When Emily first caught sight of Dana, she was surprised at how much they looked alike; we could be twins, she thought.
Bill made it sound like Dana was his "psycho ex," Emily says. Though they were broken up, Dana and Bill were constantly fighting over the Mercedes, the motorcycle and the mortgage. In fact, Emily says Bill asked her to transfer the Mercedes into her name to get Dana off his back. She refused. "I'm not going to co-sign anything for anybody," Emily explains.
But she did lend Bill money. The first time was soon after he'd been laid off from his latest job. (Emily can't remember the name of the company.) Bill said he was short on rent for his townhome and asked her to spot him a couple hundred bucks. "It was $500 here and $500 there," Emily says. "It was always, 'I'll pay you back.'"
Emily was careful, though. She made Bill sign a contract and give her collateral. At first, she says, he offered a Rolex that he kept locked in a safe. One of the Rolex's hands was broken, so she decided to take it to a jeweler to have it fixed as a surprise. The jeweler, she says, took one look at it and told her it was fake. When she confronted Bill about it, he acted outraged, saying it was a gift and he couldn't believe he'd been given a knockoff. Emily was firm; she said she wanted something else as collateral, so Bill gave her a mountain bike. By that time, she says she'd lent him $3,000, not counting all the dinners, bills and groceries she'd paid for.
Soon, however, Bill asked her for $3,000 more. He'd recently dumped the silver Mercedes in Dana's driveway and wanted to buy another. Emily told him no; "I said, 'Don't get another Mercedes, get a Geo,'" she says. But that night, Bill drove home in a new Mercedes. He told Emily that a woman at his church had lent him the $3,000 because she "believed in him."
Around the same time, Emily spoke with Dana on the phone. Dana had called to talk to Bill about something, and Emily picked up. Dana told Emily that Bill was bad news, and said Emily should break up with him – not move in with him, as Bill had recently suggested. It was just another in a series of red flags, like the rent money and the Rolex. And then there was Allison, a "friend" who kept calling Bill.
Emily did some online research and found that Bill had active profiles on MySpace and Match.com that said he was single. She also ran a background check — and was stunned to find criminal convictions on his record.
In addition to the Lumavision charges, Colorado Bureau of Investigation records show convictions for check fraud in 1989 and larceny in 1995.
Bill says the larceny charge is because his roommate at the time was selling stolen computers out of Bill's house, and Bill was charged as an accomplice.
Emily says she knew she had to leave Bill, but she wanted to make sure she got her $3,000 back first. So she had the mountain bike appraised and, satisfied that it really was worth the $5,000 he'd said it was, stashed it in a friend's garage. Then she called Bill and told him he had a week to pay her back or she was going to sell the bike on eBay. "He was Mr. Charming up to the moment I made that call," Emily says.
Bill says he only borrowed money for rent once — and paid it back "in full." Once she got her money, Emily says, her six-month relationship with Bill was over.
"I didn't tell anybody right away," Emily says. "You're like, 'Oh, great. The guy I've been telling everybody about is a total shmuck.' I really thought I was dating this great guy. When I started figuring it out and putting it all together, it was like, good Lord. You've been with the guy, spent every night with him, you're thinking about moving in with him, and then you find he's a total fraud."
The one person she did tell was Allison. She called her with the same warning Dana had given her: Stay away from Bill. He's no good.
Allison, who asked that Westword change her name, too, met Bill in March 2006, also on Match.com. She was the single mother of a young daughter and had just gone through a divorce. Fit and brunette, Allison had a solid job, virtually no debt and drove a Mercedes.
Allison says she was immediately impressed by Bill. She liked his looks, his intellect and his "great sense of confidence and style." At first, Bill paid for dinner when they went out and was always texting or e-mailing her. "He acted like a good boyfriend," Allison says. "The only problem was, he would occasionally not be available to talk." But his odd disappearances weren't enough of a deal-breaker, and a few months into the relationship, Allison canceled her Match.com account. Bill told her he did, too.
That summer, Allison took Bill on an all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii for his fortieth birthday. Before they left, Bill said he needed a new cell phone because his wouldn't work in Maui. So Allison bought him one — which, she says, he ended up using to make clandestine calls to another woman from the balcony of their hotel.
After Bill and Allison returned from the trip, the other woman, who also believed she was Bill's exclusive girlfriend, found Allison's number on Bill's phone and called to confront her. "She called me and said, 'Your boyfriend of eight months is my boyfriend of two months,'" Allison says. "She told me, 'On nights you weren't there, I was in his bed.'"
Despite the indiscretion, Allison didn't leave Bill — though she says they broke up and got back together many times. "Part of it was I felt like I gave up too early on my marriage, and I was trying to overcompensate with him," she says. Maybe if she "did more, invested more, was more what he needed," it'd work out, she told herself. "I was blaming myself for not being enough for him," she says.
It didn't take long for Bill to ask Allison for money. The motorcycle that Dana had financed for him was still in her name, and Bill wanted it in his. So in June 2006, Allison agreed to pay the $7,594 he owed on it, with the understanding that Bill would pay her back. But Dana refused to turn it over. Instead, she contacted Jamie White's lawyer because, she says, "Jamie is entitled to Bill's assets." Bill disagreed, took Dana to court and lost. A judge ruled that the motorcycle rightfully belonged to White.
Bill admits that Allison loaned him the money and insists he paid her back. He also says Dana was being vindictive by giving the motorcycle to White, though he says he didn't really care. "I have another one," he explains.
Around Christmas 2007, Bill and Allison became engaged. The proposal, Allison remembers, was sweet. It was also familiar.
Bill rented a limo to take them to the upscale Flagstaff House Restaurant in Boulder but when the limo driver got into an accident, they asked him to take them home instead. After eating at a local joint, Bill got down on one knee. Allison knew it was coming. Though they'd picked out the $10,000, three-carat diamond ring together, she'd paid for it herself. "He said, 'We'll put it on your card and I'll pay you back,'" she says.
By that time, Allison admits that she'd become addicted to the drama of dating Bill. When it was good, it was really good — but it wasn't good very often. Eventually, with the help of counseling, Allison says she realized she couldn't marry him; she broke it off for good last year. A big motivator, she says, was her daughter: "I wouldn't want to have to explain to my daughter why Stepdaddy isn't coming home tonight."
As for the money, Allison was able to recoup about $20,000 from Bill's father after she explained in a letter that she'd paid for her own engagement ring and several of his son's other expenses.
"I owed [Allison] money, and my dad paid her off," Bill says. Bill's father, Peter Sullivan, did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.
But Allison figures that even with that money, Bill left her $50,000 in debt. Though she has a good job, a nice car and a townhome, she's in the process of filing for bankruptcy. One of her credit cards — one she frequently used to finance her and Bill's lifestyle — has a judgment against her and is garnishing her wages.
"Everybody right now is hurting because of the economy, but I'm hurting more because of all of this," she says. "It would have been nice to have never met him."
Michelle met Bill on Match.com this past October. A beautiful, successful single mom in her early forties, she says she was initially attracted to Bill's profile because he liked golf, one of her favorite pastimes. They began going to dinner and church together, but Michelle, who asked that Westword change her name, took it slow.
In December, she encountered her first sign of things to come: A friend who was associated with Bill's employer told her that Bill had actually been fired months earlier. When Michelle confronted Bill about it, he said he hadn't wanted to admit that he was unemployed. He said he didn't want her to think he was "less of a man."
Bill promised her that he wasn't hiding anything else and said he was working on turning his life around — and he needed her help. Michelle was skeptical.
Even so, she invited Bill to attend a friend's wedding in Mexico in February. The trip went fine, and when she got back, she immediately posted her vacation photos on Facebook. By that time, Michelle was highly suspicious of Bill's many female "friends," and hoped the pictures would net a response that would explain Bill's caginess.
They did. In fact, the photos set off a flurry of connections between several different women — a sort of Six Degrees of Bill Sullivan — that eventually came back to bite him. Within minutes, a woman messaged Michelle, asking why she'd gone to Mexico with her boyfriend. "She said, 'Oh, you look very cozy with my boyfriend in Mexico,'" Michelle recalls. "I said, 'Boyfriend? He told me you were just friends.'"
The woman said she'd been dating Bill for more than a year. Michelle admitted she'd been dating him, too. "I was not surprised," Michelle says.
A high school friend of Michelle's named Rachel also saw the photos. Rachel, who asked that her name be changed, already knew all about Bill. She was friends with Emily and had witnessed their roller-coaster relationship. "I hope you're not dating him!" she wrote. "Call me immediately!" When Michelle did, Rachel filled her in. The two women decided they should warn Bill's other girlfriends. By then, they'd also included Dana in the group. And Operation Cock Block was born.
After that, Michelle, "the mole," went undercover. She told Bill she no longer wanted to date him but wanted to remain friends. He bought it, she says, and for the next several weeks, Michelle kept abreast of who he was dating and then fed the information to Rachel, who contacted the women on Facebook.
In all, the Cock Blockers contacted seven women in six weeks. At least a few were single moms, and one was incredibly wealthy, they say. Another admitted to them that she had been considering leaving her husband for Bill.
"We called it the 'Shock and Awe Campaign,'" Rachel says. "We were bombing him left and right." When Facebook started to seem too risky, Rachel began contacting women via e-mail. Instead of using her real name, she signed the notes "Sgt. Blocker."
Two weeks ago, Bill filed a police report against Sgt. Blocker with the Douglas County Sheriff's Department. According to department spokeswoman Deputy Cocha Heyden, Bill reported that he was being harassed via e-mail by someone impersonating a police officer and that someone was calling him on the phone and threatening his life.
Heyden says the second charge is the more serious one — and the reason the police are keeping the investigation open. As for the e-mails from Sgt. Blocker, she says, "nothing in the e-mails was criminal." (The women deny calling Bill or threatening him.)
But Bill is convinced that the e-mails constitute a felony. And he says he has a feeling his exes are behind the scheme. "I think there's this little pack of two or three women who are out to ruin me," he says.
Bill admits that he wasn't always the nicest boyfriend. "Have I cheated before in a relationship? Yes," he says. "On every woman? No."
As for the money his exes lent him, Bill claims to have paid back every penny. "I've never screwed anybody over," he says, adding that he has perfect credit and owns three vehicles and his $342,000 home on a cul-de-sac in the luxury Tresana development in Highlands Ranch.
While county real-estate documents show that Sullivan bought his home in March 2008, they also show he borrowed $50,000 from a woman to help pay for it. Michelle and others say the woman is one of Bill's girlfriends. Westword is not naming her because she didn't return phone calls seeking comment. When asked about the loan, Bill admitted the woman had given it to him but offered no further details about their relationship.
Lumivision, however, is another story. White's attorney, Phil Barber, says he's recouped about $55,000 from Bill over the past ten years almost exclusively by garnishing Bill's wages when he's been employed. (A few thousand dollars also came from the motorcycle, which White sold.) But in order to garnish his wages, Barber first has to figure out whether Bill has a job — and where. It hasn't always been easy.
The information, Barber says, "is not volunteered to us, I can tell you that."
Court records show that Bill's wages were garnished when he worked at AIM Technologies in 2004, and again when he worked at TMJ Implants Inc. in Golden, a small company that makes metal jaw implants. Nancy Johnson, TMJ's vice president, says Bill was honest about his past when he was hired in June 2006. "We are a Christian-based company," she says, "and we feel like people deserve a second chance."
Bill worked at TMJ for a year, earning about $1,300 a week. Johnson remembers him as "very personable" and says he was good at his job. She says he left the company in August 2007 to pursue a higher-paying position. "Had he been happy here, he'd probably still be here, and maybe he wouldn't be in the trouble he's in now," she says. "I think there's a lot of goodness in him if he could grow up."
It's unclear from court records where Bill worked after TMJ, but his federal tax return indicates he made $75,489 in 2007. However, he only paid $8,520 in restitution that year. Similarly, in 2008, his tax return says he made $96,107 and paid $4,814. That year, he worked at an Englewood accounting firm called Cordovano and Honeck LLP. The firm didn't return Westword's calls.
In 2009, Bill admitted under subpoena from Barber that he was working at a new company, a Denver medical clinic called Spine One. A former co-worker who spoke under the condition of anonymity says Bill didn't tell the company about his criminal background when he was hired as its chief financial officer last January. She says he was fired after seven months, though, when yet another woman who was angry with him told the company about his past; that woman couldn't be reached for comment.
Bill says he didn't feel he had to tell Spine One about his record. Most background checks only ask whether a person has been convicted of a crime in the past ten years, and his convictions are now older than that. He also says he's not currently working. "I don't have to," he explains. "I come from an incredibly affluent family."
His family, however, hasn't stepped forward to help pay the restitution he owes. Barber says he and White have tried to go after the money in Bill's trust fund and in his mysterious British bank account, but to no avail. "We found out most of them never existed or weren't subject to our reach," Barber says of the accounts. Bill's father has also been unwilling to contribute, he says.
The state Department of Corrections hasn't helped either. Parolees who owe restitution are required to pay it, provided they can, says David Michaud, chairman of the state parole board. But Michaud couldn't talk about Bill's case specifically; Bill was discharged from parole on December 27, 2009, and DOC has since shredded his file.
Any unpaid restitution would have been turned over to the state's collection agency, which is housed within the Department of Personnel and Administration. Department spokeswoman Julie Postlethwait says she can't comment, either; per federal law, debts — from library fines to criminal restitution — aren't public information.
But by Barber's calculations, with 8 percent interest compounding annually, Bill now owes White close to $4 million. White, a self-described optimist who now runs a non-profit organization out of his Denver home that promotes short films, is hopeful that the money will be paid back, but he's not holding his breath.
"If they refuse to pay and you can't find any assets, you can't collect," Barber says. As for Bill, "from what we could tell, he has little or no equity in the house he's living in." And the cars? The Mercedes? "If someone drives a nice Mercedes-Benz but it's leased, he has no equity."
Bill is offended by suggestions that he lives lavishly. "I get why people would say that, but I drive what I drive," he says, referring to his Mercedes. "It's a car." And his $342,000 home? "I live in a modest house," he says. "It's a patio home, not a castle."
Dennis Carter, a friend of Bill's for ten years, agrees. "The fact that he has assets and [that his creditors] can't go after them doesn't mean he has to sell those assets," he says. "How he paid for them is his business and nobody else's business. You can't fault a guy for being a smart businessman."
Carter also thinks the women who spoke to Westword did so out of spite. "These women are envious and jealous and bitter," he says. "You have a bunch of women who conspired to do harm to Bill Sullivan. Bill Sullivan is a good guy."
Jacqueline, an ex-girlfriend of Bill's, thinks so, too. She agreed to talk to Westword after Bill asked her to, provided that her last name wasn't printed.
Jacqueline grew up with Bill in Aspen and says they began to date after reconnecting through work about a year and a half ago. They recently broke up, however: She wants to start a family, while Bill, who has no children, isn't interested. But Jacqueline says Bill was a good boyfriend. Though she says she knows that Bill struggles with cheating in relationships, she thinks everyone deserves a second chance.
"He's a fun and great person to be around," she says. "He's adventurous, loving. He'd probably do anything for me if I asked him. And I probably would for him."
At Bill's sentencing hearing in 2000, his psychologist, Poole, painted a different picture. He called Bill "dishonest" and "insecure," and told the court that he'd diagnosed Bill with narcissistic personality disorder. Poole attributed it to Bill's childhood: He was a rich boy raised by an alcoholic father and a stepmother "who was only partially involved." Money and status, he said, took the place of parenting.
"So he's been doing this since he was a boy," Poole explained, "trying to establish security with people just by looking better, achieving and spending a lot of money."
Poole declines to discuss Bill or his diagnosis with Westword. But he does offer some insight. Narcissists, he says, feel entitled, like they shouldn't have to work for their rewards. Sometimes they get what they want, but often at the expense of others. "They can be really charming," he says. "People can get drawn in and think they're being treated so well, so specially. Then the whole thing can turn on a dime if you're not gratifying enough, or if they just get bored of you."
Narcissists have no remorse, Poole says. "They don't feel they need to adhere to the social contract," he says. "If you loan your lawnmower to a narcissistic person, it might come back broken and they wouldn't care."
Bill denies being a narcissist and shrugs off the subject of remorse. "They say I owe it, so I owe it," he says of the restitution. "Am I sorry or not? That's irrelevant."
