A five-time felon has spent his life elaborately lying his way into jobs at churches, nonprofits and UCLA. Now he’s ready to go straight. Maybe.
By Tonya Alanez, Times Staff Writer
Each morning as he backed down the driveway of his Glassell Park home, Federiqkoe DiBritto III couldn’t be sure if that day was going to be his last on the job.
For months — much longer than he had any right to expect — his luck held.
Then on April 21, DiBritto, a fundraiser for the UCLA medical school, was summoned to his supervisor’s office, handcuffed and taken to jail.
DiBritto, who had been hired for the $100,000-a-year UCLA job with what seemed to be excellent credentials, was really Fred Brito, a con man and five-time felon. UCLA detectives arrested Brito after a tip from the Los Angeles Police Department.
Brito, 49, has spent his adult life using aliases and phony credentials to pull off one elaborate deception after another. He has lied his way into jobs as a Catholic priest, a youth counselor for a foster care agency and executive director of the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California, among many others. He once convinced a judge he was a psychiatrist in order to testify in a friend’s criminal trial.
Sometimes his poses have landed him in jail. Other times, he’s been allowed to leave jobs quietly. His latest unmasking put him behind bars for a couple of weeks while authorities decided what to do.
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