Heartbreaker's payback

Patrick Giblin was such a regular customer at the Global Cash Access window inside Caesar's Atlantic City that the cashiers would talk about him.

Not only because he was there so often, using the Western Union service several times a week. But also because the money arrived exclusively from women all over the country, often addressed to various aliases.

Giblin never used his real name, and he never produced any identification, choosing an option to answer a "test question" before he could accept the money, said cashier Sandra Bikhit.

She described one day when Giblin appeared three times in one day to collect money wired from different women.

"After the third time, he actually went, 'Yesss!' " Bikhit recalled, pumping her fist. " 'That's three in one day.' "

In five years, Giblin, who described himself as a compulsive, addicted gambler, swindled more than 100 women he met through online and phone dating services, persuading them to send him money - and, occasionally, threatening and cursing them, prosecutors said.

Giblin, 42, of Atlantic City, pleaded guilty in May to 10 counts of wire fraud. An unsympathetic judge, who simply said Giblin "is not a good person," sentenced him yesterday to 115 months in prison, the maximum term under the advisory guidelines.

All of the money, Giblin said in federal court in Camden yesterday, went into feeding his gambling habit.

Prosecutors said that from 2000 to 2005, victims wired somewhere between $200,000 and $400,000 to Giblin under his own name. There's no way to know how much money he scammed under his aliases.

Giblin targeted women, prosecutors said, who were vulnerable in some way. Women such as Carolyn Corcoran, a Houston resident whose only son had been killed in a car wreck the year before she met Giblin through Quest Personals.

Corcoran testified that Giblin told her he was going to move to Texas and maybe they could get married. She told him, to her later dismay, that she had $20,000 in insurance money from her son's death.

Giblin's first request, she said, was for money to buy new tires for the drive. Then he needed money to get out of jail. More and more scams followed, Corcoran testified.

She eventually hocked her car and persuaded a friend to do the same after Giblin threatened to "knock off" her father, who had terminal cancer.

In all, Corcoran wired Giblin $18,000, and she said she was so broke she often went without food.

"There will never be another man in my life. Period," she said. "Patrick took everything I had. Self-esteem. Money. Everything."

Another victim, Shirley Whitfield, has diabetes and is legally blind. That didn't seem to matter to Giblin when they started corresponding.

"He promised me romance and led me to believe he was going to move to North Carolina," she testified. "He was a smooth, fast-talking northerner."

Eventually, Giblin started asking for "loans." Once, he asked for money so he could fly south and accompany Whitfield to visit her brother, who had suffered a heart attack. She wired the money, and he never showed.

"Please give him the maximum sentence," she told the judge. "I want him to feel the hurt, pain and agony of every one of us."

Giblin, who has 33 convictions on his record, mostly for petty thefts and financial crimes, apologized to his victims in court, then launched into a long description of his gambling problem, saying that he never had any help or a "plan" to beat his addiction.

"I need to stop gambling," he said.

"You need to stop stealing money," said U.S. District Court Judge Robert B. Kugler. "I don't care where it went. You could have burned it and thrown it down a hole."

The judge also read back a transcript from one of Giblin's other convictions, in which he promised to attend Gambler's Anonymous and put himself on New Jersey's self-exclusion list, which allows gamblers to bar themselves from casinos. Giblin admitted that he didn't do either.

"I don't know if you're sick or not, but I know one thing: You're a crook, a scam artist," Kugler said. "Until you face up to that, you'll never solve this."