ONE NAME'S DOUBLE LIFE DAVID LOMBARDI LOST HIS ID CARDS, ACQUIRED COWORKER'S DEBTS AND CRIMES

By Elizabeth Neuffer, Globe Staff
May 27, 1991

HOPKINTON -- David Lombardi winces as he remembers the May 1988 day when he realized just what's in a name.

It was 8 a.m. The police had pulled him over for speeding in a school zone. But when Lombardi identified himself, he was whisked to jail, under arrest for hordes of traffic violations -- in counties he had never visited.You've got the wrong guy! he thought.

But the crimes had been committed, the police said, by David Lombardi, a man with his birth date, his Social Security number, and his home address.

And so the case of the name heist was unveiled: a case that began in 1982 with the alleged theft of a wallet and has since snowballed into the nearly decade-long obsession of one man, Keith Ciummei, with David Lombardi's name, identity and personality.

It is a case that reveals how today an individual's identity is defined more by a wallet full of embossed plastic cards than by physical appearance. It is a tale that illustrates how easily that identity can be stolen and used.

And it is a story of one man's lust to transcend who he is: Keith Ciummei, who answers only to the name of David Lombardi, wants to be David Lombardi, too.

"If he were to die today, and there was a way I could fit into David Lombardi's body, I would," says Ciummei, musing as he sits in the Plymouth County jail where he is awaiting trial by the Middlesex County district attorney's office on fraud and other charges stemming from the alleged theft of Lombardi's identification. "Or I'd transfer my brain to his brain. . ."

Dozens of stolen identity cases occur every year, law enforcement authorities say, though few are so complex and entangled as that of the two Lombardis. The most frequent mixup occurs through typographical error: someone whose name differs from yours by a only a letter can, with a slip of the typewriter key, start receiving payments intended for you.

But there are also thieves who turn to impersonation to hide their criminal records and start anew.

So how did Keith Ciummei persist in being David Lombardi for almost a decade?

"At the time Ciummei did it, unfortunately it was fairly simple," says Middlesex Assistant District Attorney David Linsky, who is prosecuting the case, adding that state and federal regulations have since made such fraud more difficult.

The government alleges Ciummei stole Lombardi's wallet and, using the identification he found, gained additional identifications to perpetrate the impersonation.

The two men's versions of their relationship are as different as their physical appearances.

Lombardi is a well-muscled, dark blond man, 26 years old. As he pokes at a potato roasting on the barbecue in his mother's back yard in Hopkinton, he seems to stretch taller than his 5 feet and 10 inches. A small blue tatoo winks through his hair at the top of his forehead, the legacy of some friends he met in a work camp for juvenile offenders.

Ciummei, 38, is barely 5-feet-2-inches tall with a head that appears slightly oversized for his body. His eyes twinkle impishly, as he says hello to fellow inmates at the Plymouth County jail -- all of whom call him "Dave." But his smile reveals that he is missing his front teeth, which gives his speech an almost menacing lisp.

To hear Lombardi tell it, the plot of the last decade is as macabre as a novel by Stephen King.

Lombardi says Ciummei maliciously stole his identity and stalked his life -- going so far as to visit one of his girlfriends in the hospital with flowers after her operation, telling the staff that he was David Lombardi.

"He has ruined my name," says Lombardi, angrily. "There are tons of people out there who think David Lombardi is a bum. . . which I am not."

Yet Ciummei tells a different story, one that sounds like it could be a long-lost novel of Charles Dickens. He claims that Lombardi took pity on him and gave him permission to use his name. Over the years, he says, he came to idolize Lombardi, a man he called an "upstanding citzen" and the only person to have ever truly befriended him.

"Verbally, I had his consent," says Ciummei, folding his thick, stubby fingers into a steeple, in a distinctly lawyerly fashion. "I figured if I took another name, I wouldn't get into trouble."

Both agree on this: They met in 1982, when Lombardi was 17 years old, a high school dropout working as a cook at Duca's restaurant in Framingham. Ciummei, on a work-release program after a conviction for armed robbery, washed dishes alongside him.

One day, Lombardi says, he noticed he was missing his wallet, containing his Social Security card, his birth certificate and an ID card. At the time, he thought nothing of it.

But then a tax refund check did not arrive in the mail. Bills for purchases he had never made began pouring into his mailbox. He went to withdraw money from his banking account -- and found the funds had already been withdrawn.

"They'd say, you took it out," recalls Lombardi, "I'd say, no, I didn't."

David Lombardi says he began to realize that he was the victim of an impersonation attempt.

Slowly, Lombardi says he realized that Ciummei was having all of his mail rerouted. One of Lombardi's IRS checks, it was later discovered, even got routed to Ciummei during one of his many stays in jail.

And when he got a driver's license, so did Ciummei -- and the speeding tickets and towing bills began arriving.

Today, the credit card bills, the phone bills, the motor vehicle offenses, and all the other paperwork he alleges his stolen identity has created fill a plastic bin to overflowing in the kitchen of his mother's home. Lombardi does not know how much the other Dave Lombardi has cost him: Bills are still arriving at his house.

There are MCI bills, Lombardi says. ATT bills. American Express bills. Visa bills.

One phone bill alone stretches for 28 pages. The motor vehicle offenses fill 14 pages.

"All this stuff he put on my record," says Lombardi, wearily. "Speeding, driving recklessly. . ."

But in a small room at the Plymouth County Jail, Ciummei looks very, very hurt when he hears this version of the tale.

It was Lombardi, he says, who rescued him from ignominy and poverty. The two became so close he moved into the Lombardis' family home in Hopkinton, Ciummei says, describing the family's kitchen in precise detail.

"He took care of me. He took me places," says Ciummei. "When I was down and out, he took care of me."

"As of today, we are still friends," he adds, wide-eyed.

He contends that Lombardi granted him the use of his name so that he could purge his arrest record -- a record that boasts more than 147 arraignments between 1972 and 1990 on crimes ranging from a bomb hoax to fraud.

But what about the thousands of dollars of bills and fines he racked up? Would anyone loan someone his name only to get billed for it?

Ciummei looks sheepish.

"I went overboard to begin with, by applying for credit and loans," he says. "I got greedy with the use of David Lombardi."

His lawyer, Martin Gideonse, defends Ciummei's actions, saying he needs help, not a jail sentence. "He's somebody who would have a difficult time at best surviving in the real world," Gideonse said, adding that Ciummei had been institutionalized as a child.

Today, David Lombardi and his mother Claire blame the Department of Motor Vehicles as well as Ciummei for many of their troubles. They claim they alerted the Department on numerous occasions, but action never occurred.

Officials at the Department of Motor Vehicles say they hope to have safeguards in place to prevent identity theft from occurring. The agency plans to announce regulations that will require duplicate licenses to be mailed to an original home address, according to chief of staff William Donnelly.

Projects under consideration in the future include a photo-image system that would call up a picture of the original applicant for a license as a visual safeguard against theft, Donnelly says.

At the Social Security Administration in Boston, spokeswoman Pam Lawrence agrees that identity theft can be quickly stopped. "If you can document someone else is using your Social Security number, we'll give you a new number," Lawrence says.

Ciummei's case is expected to come to trial this summer. But Lombardi says he would almost be satisfied if Ciummei would pay the bills. Clear up the driving offenses. Restore his bank accounts.

And give him back his name, for once and for all. "I like my name -- it's 26 years old," he says. "Otherwise, I don't know what's up. I won't know if the next time I go through a stop sign, if I will be given a $50 ticket, or arrested."

In an interview last week, Ciummei said he will pay all the credit card bills. He will settle all the phone accounts, if he can. He says he will even stop using Lombardi's date of birth and Social Security number.

But on one point, he refuses to budge.

"As far as I am concerned," says Ciummei, flashing a Massachusetts court opinion that says it is his right to take any name he wants, "I am going to stay David Lombardi."

Copyright 1991, 1998 Globe Newspaper Company