Bigamist found guilty

Press, 10 February 1983, Page 7

Bigamist found guilty

NZPA Phoenix. Arizona Giovanni Vigliotto, who said he had married more than 105 women in 33 years throughout the world, was found guilty yesterday of fraud and bigamy in his marriage to an Arizona woman. The Maricopa County Superior Court jury deliberated about 90 minutes before returning the verdict. No sentencing date has been set for Vigliotto, aged 53. The charges against Vigliotto stemmed from his marriage on November 16, 1981, to Patricia Ann Gardiner, aged 43, of Mesa, who testified that he vanished

with $36,600 of her cash and property two weeks later and abandoned her in a San Diego motel. Vigliotto has admitted that his marriage with two other women had not dissolved when he married MS Gardiner, but he has denied defrauding any of the three. He also testified that he had married 105 women — several of them twice and one three times — while wandering about the world under more than 50 aliases, making his living as a merchant trader. He said he was born of Russian parents in 1929 in Sicily as Nikolai Peruskov

and that he had left there with his uncle after his family was killed by Nazis. Vigliotto angrily denied the prosecution’s contention that he was born in Brooklyn, New York, as Frederick Bertram Jipp. He said that name was an alias given him by the Central Intelligence Agency when he worked for. the C.I.A. under contract. The women he married had a lot in common, prosecutors argued — all were in their 40s, had had unhappy experiences with men, and were independent, hard workers with substantial property when Vigliotto entered and wrecked their lives.