Really, I didn’t expect to be missing in action for three days, but I’ve been dragged down a rabbit hole once again.

It started with a routine checking of the traps. Although I don’t report full time anymore, I do still have the habit of periodically checking regular sources of public documents looking for story ideas. One of the places I checked on Friday was the list of legal actions involving the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, the agency charged with investigating complaints against licensed attorneys in Hawaii, and other related tasks as spelled out by Hawaii Supreme Court rules.

Luckily, their active cases become public when ODC makes a recommendation for disciplinary action to the Supreme Court, and the cases and their documents then become publicly available via the Judiciary’s eCourt Kokua online system. I spend the several hundred dollars a year that it takes to subscribe to eCourt Kokua, which gives me the luxury of reading (or downloading) these court records without physically going to the relevant court, or paying a by-the-page fee. No, I don’t make any money off of it, but I do get info that I can share here with you. Crazy, no? That’s what happens when the journalism bug gets in your blood. I don’t know if there’s a cure.

In any case, I got online, signed into eCourt Kokua, and looked for cases in which ODC is a named party. Here’s what I saw:

The case on the top of the list knocked me back. Could it really be Eric Aaron Lighter, an all-too-familiar name from my reporting past? I clicked the link to pull up the case docket. And what I saw there sealed the deal.

The entry didn’t have to spell out Eric Lighter’s full name for me to see that it is definitely the same person. In the docket listings, he’s associated with a familiar (to me) company, the Hawaiian Colony Hotel Company, and with two other bland sounding companies, Lodging,Inc. and Volcano Ranch, Inc. He has used the Hawaiian Colony company for three decades, and it told me I had the right person. Yes, it’s definitely him. Eric is back. And I couldn’t help wondering what this action against ODC is all about? What is he up to now?

Let me explain. Eric Aaron Lighter is one of just two world-class con artists I’ve pursued going back even before I became a professional reporter. At this point, I’ve got notes buried in my archived files that include numerous interviews with Lighter’s alleged victims, documents copied from court cases and extensive notes on others going back 30 years. Seeing his name in this current ODC case is what sent me down the rabbit hole in an attempt to retrieve some of them and refresh my own memory of events.

I first met Eric Aaron Lighter back in 1989 or 1990. I was then working as “senior advisor” for then-City Council Member Neil Abercrombie. I don’t recall if Eric showed up unannounced, or whether he called ahead to say that he had some explosive information about something the council was debating at that time–a rail system for Honolulu. It doesn’t matter. As I recall, I met him in my new office on the third floor of Honolulu Hale. He told me an interesting story, and turned over a stack of documents six or eight inches high. I started reading, and I was hooked.

Within a week, I had read through the documents, then gone through the extensive footnotes which were meant to document the narrative. Most of them referenced documents filed with the Bureau of Conveyances, which gave them an official sounding veneer. But after hours in the bureau digging out the documents and comparing them to Lighter’s documents, I discovered they were mostly all prepared by Lighter himself and were nothing more than elaborate, self-referencing pieces of an complex fantasy. It was, if I can use the word, a con, a whole narrative meant to deceive and mislead. In some ways, masterly done. At the same time, very dangerous.

Now I’ll jump ahead in this tale. One of the last stories I wrote for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin concerned an episode in which Lighter was accused of defrauding a man he was supposed to be helping. You can read that 2001 story here (“Big Isle man says legal fraud cost him home, business“).

In a sidebar to the main story, I tried to write a concise profile of Lighter and his past exploits.

Eric Aaron Lighter is not your typical innkeeper.

The Kailua High School graduate, who at one time was studying for the ministry, has earned a reputation as an eccentric purveyor of conspiracy theories, a non-lawyer with a “system” for blocking or delaying legal proceedings, and a confidant of key figures in the extremist militia and patriot movements on the mainland.

In the past, Lighter has gone out of his way to become publicly entangled in controversial issues.

In 1995, he publicly “confessed” to taking part in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building and filed a 30-pound, 3,650-page legal brief in federal court there demanding to be charged as a co-conspirator in the case and to risk the death penalty.

According to news reports, Lighter said the federal grand jury’s failure to indict him was evidence of jury tampering.

In person and in public documents, he weaves tales of conspiracies linking world and national events, claiming key roles for himself in the outcomes.

Lighter says his conspiracy theories are bolstered by thousands of pages of “evidence” he has filed in the Bureau of Conveyances, including what he claims is a 250,000-page federal tax return.

He is not a lawyer, but has appeared in courts here and on the mainland, where many of the same documents are constantly recycled.

When presented in court, however, his “evidence” has been less than persuasive.

“Lighter’s pleadings are an exercise in redundancy and immateriality. They are replete with impertinent and scandalous matter,” the late Judge Harold M. Fong ruled in one case several years ago.

And Lighter’s courtroom tactics — including avalanches of paperwork, accusations of corruption hurled at opponents and their attorneys, and dogged persistence in appealing every ruling — have driven even experienced lawyers to despair.

Many lawyers contacted by the Star-Bulletin declined to be quoted about Lighter, saying they did not want to risk having him involved with their lives.

Lighter has sued federal and state grand juries, and has attempted citizen arrests on government officials, records show.

Lighter has even claimed to be “Ambassador to the Kingdom of Hawaii for purposes of establishing an Embassy to Washington, D.C.”

At the time I wrote that, Lighter had not been charged with any crimes stemming from his alleged frauds, although he had been sued multiple times in federal and state court by victims trying to recover their property.

In 2002, he was charged with theft, a class C felony, for allegedly fraudulently transferring title to a car into his own name while the owner was serving a sentence on the mainland for a prior drug offense. After a year of unsuccessful attempts to have the charges thrown out, Lighter withdrew his “not guilty” plea and instead entered a plea of no contest. He was then allowed to defer acceptance of his plea, over the objections of the prosecution. As a result, his record was cleared after an 18-month waiting period.

But in 2011, he was convicted in federal court in California on 17 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, blackmail, and witness tampering. Hawaiian Colony Hotel Company, the same one mentioned in the ODC case, was used as a vehicle for carrying out his fraud in that case. More on that part of the story later.