Real-Life Inmate Role for 'Chameleon Street,' Notorious Con Man

PLYMOUTH TOWNSHIP, MI – When authorities arrested William Douglas Street, 65, last year, the former Plymouth Township man was wearing a doctor’s coat and using the name of William Stratton.

Street is no doctor.

Instead, U.S. District Judge Gershwin Drain said Monday when he sentenced Street to three years in prison for aggravated identity theft and mail fraud, Street is “a con man” and has been his “whole life,” The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press report.

“Why do you keep representing yourself as someone you are not?” Drain said. “I don’t understand that. … I don’t see any real basis to believe you are going to change.”

For the more than four decades that Street conned victims across Michigan, Illinois, California and Florida, he became known as the “Chameleon” and “The Great Imposter,” according to court records. He was the inspiration behind “Chameleon Street,” Flint filmmaker Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s jury prize winner at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival.

Also on Patch

• Accused in Terror Threat, Dearborn Heights Man Appears in Court

Incidentally, Stratton, the man whose name was on the medical coat Street was wearing when he was arrested, isn’t a doctor either. He’s a West Point graduate and U.S. Defense Department contractor whose identity was among those stolen during Street’s decades-long crime spree.

Since the 1970s, Street has impersonated a doctor at the Henry Ford Hospital, a lawyer volunteering at the Detroit Human Rights Department and a TIME magazine reporter, according to court records. Claiming he was a wide receiver for the Houston Oilers in the 1970s, he convinced the Detroit Tigers to let him try out for the team in the 1970s when he said he wanted to switch to baseball.

He stole a Maryland defense contractor’s identify in 2013, including the man’s college transcripts, diplomas and class ring from Duke University and the U.S. Military Academy, and building a fake resume on CareerBuilder.com. He even scored a speaking engagement at a college alumni function when he claimed to be a Duke grad.

When federal authorities caught up with Street last fall, his record was already long and colorful. He had 17 felony convictions, and it was a pair of bad checks that caught him in federal investigators’ net.

According to federal court documents, Street bounced a $7,000 check for a Rolex at an Ann Arbor jewelry store and a $200 check to a dry cleaner in 2013. He gave both businesses phony addresses and phone numbers, and local warrants were issued for his arrest.

The FBI eventually was brought into the investigation, and when federal authorities raided the Plymouth Township home of Street’s estrange wife and daughter, they found the stolen military ID, college transcripts and diplomas used to impersonate others.

At his arraignment last September, Street’s attorney insisted “he’s not a bad guy.”

“His point in all this was to get a job,” Joseph Arnone said of his client. “When you have his kind of record, his kind of history — the chance of getting a job was nil.”

The only job his phony background ever yielded was selling insurance.

Arnone argued for leniency in the Monday sentencing because of Street’s poor physical health, saying that his client misses putting his feet up on the couch and watching TV, and that technology has become too sophisticated for Street to pull off the ruses.

Street himself said that he “chose incorrectly.”

“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. “I am tired of this nonsense.”

However, Assistant U.S. Attorney April Russo said Street’s “actions are predatory.”

“The character of the defendant is of the worst imaginable,” Russo said. “He does not have remorse. ... It’s like a game for him.”