The lowest scam

Cindy Drew, Eric's mother: We kept saying lie down. You’re sick. You can’t follow through on this. You have to give it up for awhile.

His mother wasn’t so happy with his new role as crime fighter. In truth, no one was.

Josh Mankiewicz, Dateline correspondent: Did your doctors think this was a good idea?

Eric Drew: Not at the time.  Not at the time.  They heavily advised against it.  You know, "Look, Eric, let this go.  Cancel the cards.  Deal with it later.”

But Eric couldn’t let it go, couldn’t deal with it later. He didn’t know if there would be a later.

Playing detective in search of his ID thief
His first move: getting a copy of his own credit report— where this newly-minted detective found his first lead:  an address for the fake Eric Drew in Southeast Seattle, the home of a woman named Gibson. It was a name that meant nothing to Eric. Even as sick as he was, it spurred him on, and out of that hospital bed.

Drew: I unhooked my hoses and put on my backpack with my pumps in it, pumping chemo and everything else into me.

Mankiewicz: Just a second.  Just a second.  You unhook your chemo, in the hospital.  You put it into your backpack.  It’s, what, still going into your arm?

Drew: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative.) Into my chest, yeah.

Eric Drew shows off the backpack full of chemo that he transported with him as he did his own detective work to find the identity thief.

Mankiewicz: And you go out on this little expedition to fight crime?

Drew: (Laughs) I guess if you put it that way, yeah.

Mankiewicz: He wants to go to that house, you never said to him, “Sweetie, this might be a bad idea.”

Cindy Drew: When he’s gets something in his head, he goes and does it.

Eric Drew: And I drove out to that house.  And I found that house.  I took pictures of it.  I took pictures of me in front of it.

Then he turned the tables on the thief who had stolen his good name: Eric filed a change of address with the post office for the fake Eric Drew. So the fake Eric’s mail would come to the real Eric’s mailbox.

Drew: That’s when I started receiving the bank statements.  All the statements from all the different cards. 

He was getting closer, learning where the fake Eric shopped and what he bought. But really how much detective work can a man sick with cancer do? 

Finding help from a local TV station
With law enforcement ignoring him, and his doctors and family telling him to ignore everything but his cancer, Eric decided to turn to the public: He put out a press release.

Luckily for Eric, it was a slow news day when that press release landed on the desk of reporter Chris Daniels at King-5, the NBC affiliate in Seattle.

Chris Daniels, King-5 reporter: I don’t know if it was just there was a lack of news that day or what.  But they said, “Chris, go check it out.” 

He was a reporter’s dream, in that he kept great notes about this crusade he’d been going on to find the truth. 

Daniels took Eric’s notes and began calling all the stores where the fake Eric Drew had shopped. 

In that first time after King 5 reported the news, Daniels found someone who remembered not only Eric Drew but what he bought.

Jon Krohngold, who runs a card shop on Seattle’s First Hill says he sold several statues to the thief last November. Krohngold’s Hallmark store is in an area called Pill Hill, where most of Seattle’s major medical centers are found, including the one where Eric Drew was getting his treatment. 

Could that be a clue? Could someone with a connection to Pill Hill be helping Eric Drew's thief?

Krohngold: He just looked like a just a regular typical guy, you know.

Regular, typical, but with a key difference from the real Eric Drew:

Krohngold: He was an African-American.

Now, Eric knew he was looking for a black man, and the story on King-5 turned up the heat: Eric and reporter Daniels started to get calls from people with possible leads.  As he checked out one of those tips, Eric put on his back pack full of medicine again and went to meet a stranger at the Seattle waterfront.

Drew: I could barely walk.  I had a cane. I had the backpack on, pumping--  fluids,  and antibiotics and stuff, into my chest all the time. 

As a leukemia patient, Eric’s immune system was severely compromised, which meant being out among people could be deadly. A common cold could send  him to intensive care. Now he was going out to meet a stranger.

It turned out, the man on the dock didn’t have a cold, but he didn’t have any solid information either. The dock was a dead end.  But across town,  reporter Daniels was hot on the trail.

Daniels: I was able to go down the list.  I called every single store that was on this list and said, here’s the deal, told ‘em Eric’s story.  “What I’m looking for is some surveillance video.”

They needed just one piece of tape, and Lowe’s Hardware had it.  But there was a catch, Lowe’s said they could only give the tape to law enforcement. So reporter Daniels called the Seattle police, the same cops who originally had told Eric his case was apparently too small.

Daniels: I said, “Hey, I tell you what.  I’ve got three purchases that I know about.  I’ll tell you when these purchases were made. I want the video.  We’ll put it on the air and see where it goes.”

Maniewicz:  That sounds to me like you’re doing the police’s job for them. 

Daniels: I don’t want to say that.  But there was a lot of work done.

With a TV station on the other end of the phone, this time the Seattle P.D. agreed to help.

The next day Chris Daniels put that video on the air. On February 26, 2004, the real Eric Drew and all of Seattle got a glimpse of the man playing the part of Eric Drew in a Lowe’s Hardware security video. And under the winter coat, one could see an important clue: The fake Eric Drew was wearing hospital scrubs.

Mankiewicz: Did you recognize that person?

Drew: No I did not. I did not. 

Mankiewicz: Eric didn’t recognize the man.

Daniels: No.

Mankiewicz: And you didn’t recognize him.

Daniels: No.

Mankiewicz: But it wasn’t long before people called in.

Daniels: People said, “I think I know who that guy is.  And I think he works at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.”

It was the very same hospital where Eric Drew was receiving his treatments, and struggling to stay alive.

Mankiewicz: How long before you had a name?

Daniels: Less than 24 hours.

Mankiewicz: And the name was?

Daniels: Richard Gibson.

Meet the ID thief
Richard Gibson, a 42-year-old father of three was a lab technician who tested Eric’s blood at the hospital.

Mankiewicz: Did that name, Richard Gibson, mean anything to you?

Drew: Well, the Gibson name sure did.

The house Eric had visited two months prior, camera in hand and chemo in back pack. The people there were named Gibson.  He had been on the right track... only someone had listened.

Mankiewicz: He was the guy who tested your blood after it was drawn from you?

Drew: That’s right.  My blood was drawn from me every day for eight months.

Mankiewicz: And so your thinking is that Mr. Gibson saw somebody who was terminally ill, and probably was not gonna be needing his credit very much longer.

Drew: Very little chance of me making it through.

Mankiewicz: And took advantage.

Drew: Absolutely. Without a doubt. 

Cindy Drew: To pick on somebody—knowingly pick on somebody who is so ill and in such dire situation, you can’t have a soul.  You can’t have a heart.

Richard Gibson turned himself in to the Seattle police on March 2, 2004.

Eric was still quite ill, and just getting the bad news that the treatment that had brought him to Seattle in the first place, hadn’t worked at all.

FBI agent James Rogers who eventually handled Eric’s case says hospital patients are very vulnerable to this type of crime, but that this case was particularly outrageous.

Mankiewicz: When most people check into a hospital, they usually have bigger concerns on their mind than their credit or protecting their privacy?

James Rogers, FBI:  Oh, that’s correct. I wasn’t surprised that it happened in a hospital. I was just more, I guess, irritated by the fact that somebody was picking on a poor cancer patient that’s fighting for his life.

It turns out that besides picking on the wrong cancer patient—one who fought back, Richard Gibson picked on a cancer patient at exactly the wrong time.  Gibson wasn’t charged with identity theft at all, but with something more serious. In Seattle’s Federal Court, Gibson became the first person charged under a new law with the wrongful disclosure of medical information for financial gain. In Gibson’s case, he wrongfully disclosed Eric’s information from his medical records to get all those credit cards.

Though Gibson plead guilty, he says he didn’t know who Eric Drew was or that he was a terminally ill patient. 

The judge didn’t buy Gibson’s claim of ignorance. He called Gibson’s acts "the most deplorable he’d seen in his 15 years on the bench." And though the prosecution was asking for a one year sentence, the judge gave Gibson more— the maximum of 16 months.

Eric had hoped to be in court on the day of sentencing, he wanted to tell the judge his side of the story. But he was too sick to get there and had to tell it on videotape.

By then, Eric was in Minneapolis at yet another hospital fighting not crime, but once again, leukemia.

What's the responsibility of credit card companies?
The arrest of Richard Gibson was some consolation. But, Eric believes Gibson didn’t act alone.

Mankiewicz: Is Mr. Gibson the only culprit here?

Drew: No. I think the biggest culprits are the people that are handing this money out. These banks have no right to go out handing criminals money in my name, with my Social Security numbers, with my identity, without doing the due diligence to verify that it was me.

We wanted to ask the credit card companies about Eric’s case, about why those fake cards weren’t suspended with Eric’s first phone calls and about easy availability of credit. None of them would agree to talk to “Dateline” on camera, but they did tell us that the companies do all they can to help people  with identity theft problems, and that in America, people want convenient credit.

Mankiewicz: Most people just call the credit card company and say “Those are not my charges,” and they don’t have to pay?

Rogers: Right.

Mankiewicz: Eric wouldn’t do that?

Rogers: No, he wouldn’t settle for that. It  was more personal to him, and it was more of the principle behind it, that somebody was going to take advantage of his situation and try to use that against him when he’s fighting for his life.

In Minneapolis, Eric underwent yet another experimental treatment—using umbilical cord blood— a procedure which had only been tried on about 600 adult leukemia patients. It was a last hope.

But this time, it worked.

So how is Eric’s health?  A year after that last experimental treatment, his body is finally cancer-free.

And how is Eric’s credit? He’s still fighting to get it cleaned up. It turns out that for him, it was easier to get over cancer than identity theft.

But maybe one trying issue helped the other. 

Drew: The identity fraud gave me something that I can sink my teeth into, that I could go after, that I could be angry at.

Mankiewicz: So crime fighting as cancer therapy?

Drew: Fantastic.  I recommend it to everybody.

Eric continues to work for other victims of leukemia and identity theft. Click here to check out The Eric Drew Foundation.

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