Longtime con man back in the clink

The most honest thing Joseph Anthony Caracciolo may have done lately is to admit he's lived a life of lies.

Caracciolo, 50, has been breaking the law since he was 18 in Massachusetts, according to the Washington Post, and authorities said he's claimed to be a pediatric dentist, a celebrity chef, a salesman and an electrician's assistant while running cons from coast to coast.

Caracciolo has broken small laws, like selling fake cellphones and bogus sports memorabilia, and big ones too. His other titles, authorities said,  include convicted rapist, registered sex offender, identify thief, and bigamist.

In U.S. District Court in Camden on Friday, Caracciolo was sentenced to 300 months in prison for several charges, including engaging in "illicit sexual conduct" with a 12-year-old girl from South Jersey and claiming falsely that he had cancer to bilk victims out of $150,000, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

According to the complaint, Caracciolo had sexual intercourse with the girl repeatedly from May  to August 2012. He traveled to her home in Egg Harbor Township, Atlantic County, and took her to the Poconos, authorities said.

The investigation began when the victim became pregnant. She gave birth to a girl.

Carraciolo, who has over a dozen aliases, had failed to register as a sex offender following a rape conviction in Massachusetts in 1993, the U.S. Attorney's Office said. A 1995 Post story about Carraciolo said he posed as a police officer in that case and forced a woman to have sex under threat of arrest.

A Massachusetts judge, after reading Carraciolo' s pre-sentencing report at the time, said, "I can't think of one redeeming feature in this report."

Part of Carraciolo's sentence Friday included time for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. The U.S. Attorney's Office said Carraciolo became romantically involved with a woman in 2009, had a child with her, and then asked her parents to pay for his cancer treatment.

Though Carraciolo had a cancer ribbon tattoo, he didn't have the disease, authorities said, but he managed to get $150,000 out of the woman's parents.

The woman and her parents knew Carraciolo as Anthony Scibelli. He was  a Massachusetts man who died in 1998.

According to the Post, Carraciolo was a high school dropout who was arrested on a gun charge just after he turned 18 in Massachusetts. He fled after being charged with rape in 1988, married two women, and conned them both, along with others all over the country.

"He was so convincing and so believable," one of the wives told the Post in 1995.

Carraciolo tried to back out of a plea agreement, the U.S. Attorney's Office said, and during a motion hearing in Camden in January admitted under cross-examination that "he has lived a life of lies."