Nelson died of natural causes two years later–but police believe that at least five other geriatric San Franciscans weren’t so lucky. Officials say they were murdered by Bufford, her mother, Mary Steiner, and her longtime boyfriend, George Lama, in a lethal, decade-long variation on a ““sweetheart scam.’’ Prosecutors say that after romancing their victims, all lonely widowers, Bufford and her mother would cajole them into handing over cars, savings and homes. Then the trio would allegedly poison the men using toxic doses of digitalis purpurea, a heart drug made from the leaves of the foxglove plant. In early November, after a lurching five-year investigation, a grand jury indicted the three on six counts of conspiracy to commit murder; three relatives of Bufford and Steiner’s were indicted for theft and embezzlement. All deny the charges. Investigators say the gang accumulated at least $1.5 million from their elderly victims. ““They used and discarded these people like garbage,’’ says Fay Faron, whose detective agency, Rat Dog Dick, spent years urging police to probe the accused conspirators.
Angela Bufford and her mother belong to the Tene Bimbos, a tight-knit clan of American Gypsies whose long history of fraud was documented in Peter Maas’s best-selling ““King of the Gypsies.’’ The Tene Bimbos are among the most notorious of America’s 5 million Gypsies, a nomadic people of South Asian origin who speak their own language and often engage in tarot-card readings. But investigators believe the Tene Bimbos took confidence games to a sinister new level after moving to San Francisco from Boston in the 1970s. The first suspicious death connected to Angela and her mother occurred in 1984, after Angela, 24, wed 87-year-old Nicholas Bufford, a former janitor at the Mark Hopkins Hotel she’d reportedly picked up at a McDonald’s. The smitten Bufford willed his bride a $226,000 house and a $125,000 savings account. Weeks after their wedding, Bufford died of kidney failure. ““He was a vigorous octogenarian; suddenly he was a walking cadaver–then he was dead,’’ says Jack Olsen, author of a forthcoming book about the case.
The widow didn’t grieve for long. A few months later she landed a waitressing job at the French Village Cafe in downtown San Francisco. There she met owner George Lama, 35, a Palestinian immigrant with ambitions for the easy life. Lama allegedly signed on to the scheme and began procuring digitalis from a local pharmacist. Lama’s nephew has admitted grinding up the pills and sprinkling the powder into food from the French Village Cafe; police say Bufford and Steiner then delivered the toxic meals to nonagenarians they befriended. Sometimes victims caught on: Stephen Storvick accused Bufford of trying to murder him and cut her from his will before he died at the age of 90 in 1992. More often the old men ended up like Konstantin Liotweizen, a Russian immigrant who met Mary Steiner while recovering from a broken hip. Mary cut off his phone service and isolated him from relatives. A neighbor entered the apartment one day and found him lying in his own excrement, half starving. He died months later at the age of 91. Mary’s take: a half million dollars in cash, plus Liotweizen’s $937,000 apartment building.
Lama’s sister and brother told police about the scheme in 1992, but the cops shrugged off the accusations. Two years passed before the bodies of four alleged victims were exhumed and tested for digitalis. Even after some tests proved positive, the case drifted: a private detective obtained a secret police affidavit that contained the names of confidential sources and tried to sell it to Hollywood. Finally, San Francisco’s newly elected D.A. called a grand jury last July. Today the gang is in jail–and it doesn’t take tarot cards to predict they may be in for a spell of bad fortune.
