Biography
Jerry Texiero was a Vietnam-era Marine Corps Corporal who deserted from his California base in the summer of 1965 in opposition to the war and lived underground for 40 years under the assumed name Gerome Conti. He worked selling boats for a living. In 1998 he was convicted of fraud and theft under his assumed name and placed on probation - the booking that put his fingerprints into the national database. When the Marine Corps later reopened his desertion file and ran his prints, the match surfaced and he was taken into custody by police in Tarpon Springs, Florida on August 16, 2005, at age 65. He was held for approximately five months at the Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater - four of those months in solitary confinement - and was released on January 11, 2006 with an Other-Than-Honorable discharge without a court-martial. (Had a court-martial gone forward and convicted him, he could have faced up to three years in the brig and a dishonorable discharge.) After release he returned to his boat-selling job, which his employer had kept open for him. As he told Banderas News: I thought they couldnt possibly be looking for me anymore. I would think they would have stopped looking for anybody who had been gone as long as I had. (Source: Banderas News, June 2006.)
