QUINCY — Scott Wolas showed up for years at a small storefront real estate office on Beale Street, just around the corner from the Wollaston Beauty Box and across from a liquor store. He didn’t have an assigned seat; he would grab a desk for the day at the Century 21 Annex, toting his files around in a worn briefcase.
To colleagues and clients, he was Eugene Grathwohl, a frumpy man with thinning hair and food stains on his shirt. His sometimes slovenly appearance belied a more sophisticated side that charmed many. He’d spring for $800 dinners and knew his way around an expensive wine list. He had an encyclopedic grasp of history, and seemed to juggle numerous money-making ideas at once. And he would take certain clients under his wing, checking on them multiple times a day amid their divorces and life troubles.
His own back story, he told them, was tragic. He’d lost a wife — a member of the wealthy Mellon family, he claimed — and two children, in a plane crash. He said his mother died of alcoholism, his father of a heart attack. All he had left was a purported nephew in Florida, who visited on occasion.
Wolas kept his memories and framed photos locked away in a briefcase in an upstairs closet, his girlfriend, Lorraine Croft, said. The only piece of that past he kept in view was a tattered teddy bear, she said. He slept with it each night.
Today, the FBI is hunting for Wolas. He allegedly defrauded at least 25 Massachusetts residents of $2 million in real estate deals, according to the Quincy police. It’s the third time in two decades that the 67-year-old has slipped away from authorities, after allegedly running three different investment swindles.
“We’re working hard on following up leads and trying to find this guy,’’ said Detective Lieutenant Kevin Tobin of the Quincy Police Department, which last month issued a warrant for Wolas’s arrest and is cooperating with federal investigators.
His disappearance has been hard on the people who entrusted him with their affection — and their money.
Croft met Wolas in 2001, through Yahoo personals, she said. He went by the name Drew Prescott, wore a thick beard, and wasn’t working at the time. He told her he was living off a trust, she said. He didn’t go out much, but when he did, he pulled his hat down low, over his ears and glasses.
About two years went by before Wolas took a job, she recalled, as a bartender at the Jockey Club in Raynham, 40 miles south of Boston. He did not drive a car. Croft drove him most everywhere in their early years together, she said. She assumed he’d had a DUI conviction and didn’t want to tell her about it.
“I was in love and foolish,’’ she recalled. After two bad marriages, here was a man who was kind to her and loving, Croft said.
Once, at one of his bartending gigs, Croft heard someone call her boyfriend Frank. When she asked him about it, he refused to explain, she said. Upset, she moved out of their Taunton apartment, she said. But he wanted her back. He told her he was in a witness protection program, she said, and used different names to hide from people who wanted to hurt him.
By 2006, the couple moved closer to Boston, to a house not far from Wollaston Beach in Quincy — an area Wolas would one day focus on for his development projects. He studied for the real estate exam, passed easily, and soon began working for Century 21, where he did well, according to office manager Arthur Foley.
Now he was using the name Eugene Grathwohl. Croft went along with it. To her, he was still Drew. But at dinners at the Neighborhood Club of Quincy and at other outings with clients and friends, he was Gene.
“He’s honestly one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met in my life,’’ said Benjamin Porter, a 40-year-old chemical engineer who invested $50,000 with Wolas. A father of five, Porter regrets not only his own losses, but having persuaded friends to invest, too. He helped Wolas raise about $700,000 for property deals, he said, including buying the old Beachcomber bar and building a house next door on Quincy Shore Drive.
“I was trying to hook up my friends on this awesome investment opportunity,’’ Porter said.
It was hardly the first time Wolas had lured people into his pet projects. Little did Porter and the other Boston-area investors know, but Wolas was a disbarred lawyer with a long resume of financial wreckage, tens of millions of dollars in investor losses, and several discarded identities.
This same man had once been a successful New York attorney, with a law degree from Fordham University School of Law. Admitted to practice in that state as Scott J. Wolas on April 25, 1977, according to public records, he had become a partner and litigator with the firm Hunton & Williams.
He had many of the trappings of success, according to interviews and news accounts. Clients recalled visiting him in his Manhattan law office, with a large conference room. He was a bon vivant with a black car and driver, and a house in a tony suburb on the Hudson River. Over drinks, he used to talk about slipping away to an island one day and resting under a palm tree, recalled one investor.
This client and dozens of others, lawyers among them, agreed to invest in a Scotch whisky-exporting scheme with Wolas. They believed he was for real because his family had a large and well-known liquor business on Long Island, Great Eastern Liquors.
In retrospect, there was a hint of the chaos to come: his sloppy briefcase. One investor recalled that when he did the deal with Wolas there was no ledger, no receipt, only a disheveled pile of papers stuffed into a bag.
By the summer of 1995, Wolas had vanished from New York and investors were owed about $50 million. They sued the law firm for allowing the alleged scheme to go on in its offices, and Hunton ultimately had to pay millions to settle .
The New York district attorney’s office in 1997 filed a 119-count indictment against Wolas, alleging fraud and grand larceny over a decade. But he was never found. The case, unsealed in 2001, remains open, a spokeswoman said.
“These are people who tend to be both smart and duplicitous — good liars,’’ said Donald Stern, a former US attorney in Boston. “There are many fugitives who live among us around the country, and in fact around the world.’’
The FBI says that at any given time it has about 2,000 open fugitive investigations across the country. Often, violent offenders like James “Whitey’’ Bulger are priorities for law enforcement, Stern said. Until an alleged criminal is labeled a priority, he said, “it’s easier for someone to live under the radar screen and get away with it.’’ Even Bulger was able to elude capture for 16 years, spending most of his time hiding in plain sight, in a bland apartment building in Santa Monica, Calif.
Wolas wound up in Florida and became a stock broker for a unit of American Express, using the name Allen L. Hengst, according to public regulatory records. He was barred from the industry in 2002, after allegedly defrauding customers of millions on gold certificates and other investments.
By then, Wolas was already living in Massachusetts with a new identity. A decade went by, and he was again enjoying a comfortable life, a trusted real estate agent to lawyers and business people in Quincy.
The company Wolas used to handle his Massachusetts real estate deals was called Increasing Fortune Inc. He is listed in state records as its president, treasurer, and secretary. The address, Suite 208 at 1085 Commonwealth Ave. in Boston, is a UPS delivery office. No one saw a need to look more deeply into Wolas’s background, despite his sometimes far-fetched stories.
Porter would buy and sell four properties over five years with the man he knew as Eugene. In time, he and others who’d done business with Eugene agreed to invest money with him to buy the Beachcomber, a once-popular bar and live music destination across from Wollaston Beach, for about $1.5 million, and develop a new restaurant there.
Wolas put up hundreds of thousands of dollars in other people’s money, investors say, but kept delaying the closing date this past summer, paying $40,000 monthly penalties for every month past the deadline.
He also was working on an adjacent property at 833 Quincy Shore Drive, building a house with a former Boston investor who had retired to Florida.
Over the summer, the pressure on Wolas from investors was ratcheting up. He persuaded Croft to take out a $200,000 second mortgage on the house where they lived, she said, to help seal the Beachcomber deal.
Foley, his manager at the real estate office, also had invested in the deal, and he was getting antsy. Wolas had allegedly traveled to Zurich months earlier to get money from a bank account there. Over breakfast in August, Foley asked Wolas if he could see the stamp in his passport sometime.
On Thursday, Sept. 8, Wolas packed up his laptop and a duffel with enough clothes for a few days, Croft recalled. He told a handful of people he was going on a business trip to raise the rest of the money he needed. Some recall him mentioning New York. Oddly, he wore sneakers, and told Croft he’d walk to the T station, she said.
It was a long way for a man who got winded just climbing stairs. So Croft offered him a lift to the JFK Red Line station about 3 p.m. Wolas asked Croft, who is also a realtor, to cover his work while he was away. He didn’t tell her where he was going, she said, but made some mention of catching a train. He said he’d call when he reached his destination.
Croft has not heard from him since. He left the teddy bear on the bed, she said. But when she went looking for his old briefcase in the upstairs closet, it was unlocked — and empty.
“That’s when I knew I had to call the others,’’ she said.
Wolas’s cellphone number, dialed dozens of times in the days following by his girlfriend and the victims of his alleged swindle, has been disconnected.
Beth Healy can be reached at beth.healy@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @HealyBeth.
