Most Eligible

He won 105 hands, loses trial

Beefy, none too tall and often clad in blue jeans and tennis shoes, Flea Market Merchant Giovanni Vigliotto seemed an unlikely Casanova. Yet in a Phoenix courtroom, Vigliotto submitted a list of 105 women from 18 states and nine foreign countries he claims to have wooed and wed over the past 20 years, some of them more than once and all without benefit of intervening divorces. A jury of eight men and four women, impressed with his stamina but not his style, last week convicted Vigliotto on charges of bigamy and fraud in his marriage to Patricia Ann Gardiner, 42, a Mesa, Ariz., real estate agent.

Gardiner testified that she married Vigliotto in November 1981, eight days after meeting him at a local swap meet. She said he told her that he had $49 million in savings and owned the Queen Mary ocean liner docked in Long Beach, Calif. "He looked right into my face and eyes," she recalled. "I liked that honest trait." He promptly persuaded his bride to sell her house, and they set off for the California coast in separate cars, with Vigliotto driving a van loaded with $36,000 worth of her cash and valuables. By the time she reached a San Diego hotel, she was alone except for her pet poodle.

Joan Bacarella of Englishtown, N.J., testified that Vigliotto proposed a day after they met in February 1981, urging her to divorce her estranged husband. She said that she realized her "prince had turned into a frog" when he borrowed $1,600 in cash and $40,000 worth of inventory from her clothing shop and then failed to return to a motel where she was waiting with her mother and three children. Another of Vigliotto's wives, Sharon Clark of Angola, Ind., told the jury that she was abandoned barefoot and $49,000 poorer in an Ontario motel three weeks after their June 1981 wedding. But Clark tracked her larcenous Lothario for three months and 10,000 miles to a Florida shopping center, where she turned him in to the local sheriff. He was extradited to Arizona on charges filed by Gardiner.

Vigliotto, who is in his early 50s, faces up to 34 years in prison. Although he conceded making the multiple marriages (and adopting some 50 aliases), he denied defrauding any of his wives. He claimed he worked as a contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency in 1953 and 1954 before getting into the flea market business. During the five-week trial, boisterous crowds, often outfitted with bags of food and drinks in ice chests, waited in line for a seat in the small courtroom and a chance to hear the latest installment of Vigliotto's romantic adventures. After the verdict, Gardiner said of the women who succumbed: "I don't think they fell for him. They found someone who told them what they needed and wanted to hear at that time in their lives." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.