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A career con man brings his talents to Cleveland’s art world

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An immaculate apartment, fresh flowers, and a dinner invitation from Coleman awaited her when she returned from Greece. He said he had broken up with his girlfriend back in Cleveland. Gurlides got the impression that he now wished to be more than just her tenant. She turned him down, and he left quietly the next day.

A week later, however, she got a call from the bank, asking if she was enjoying her new credit card. Apparently, her "friend" Zachary Coleman had applied for cards in both of their names.

"Aw, shit," she thought.

Turns out Coleman was also using her MasterCard for everything from plane tickets to alcohol. When the final damages were tallied, he had burned through $17,600.

Gurlides reported the theft to police. A detective told her to let him know if she heard where Coleman had gone. In the meantime, she tried to repair her financial life, canceling her credit cards and bank accounts. "It was pretty hellish for a while, because I didn't know what was gonna happen," she says. And it wasn't over.

A few weeks later, her mail mysteriously stopped. It was being forwarded to Coleman somewhere in Massachusetts. Gurlides talked to a postal inspector, who began looking into Coleman's past. The inquiry would reveal more thefts — and a perpetrator without shame. He'd stolen a briefcase from a men's room at the Kansas City airport, using an American Express statement he found within to buy plane tickets. He'd even applied for credit cards using the Social Security number of his cousin, Rodney Coleman, a retired Shaker Heights lawyer.

As the inspector's probe continued, Gurlides' ordeal got even stranger.

One day she got a phone call from a woman asking for Coleman. They had gone out once, the woman said, and now Coleman was back in town. He had invited her to a homecoming party he was throwing himself. Incredulous, Gurlides explained what Coleman had done to her and asked for the caller's help.

The party was just four blocks from Gurlides' apartment. Coleman was subletting another swanky place from a wealthy owner, faking his tax returns to show he could afford the rent, Gurlides says. Caterers were delivering flowers, food, and liquor when police knocked on his door.

At first, Coleman played the offended socialite. "What is this about?" he demanded. But when Gurlides stepped up to identify him, he just rolled his eyes.

He was arrested that night for grand larceny, but posted bail and remained free for two years until the U.S. Attorney's office in New York brought federal charges against him. He was indicted for multiple counts of fraud for the scams involving Petrovic, Gurlides, his cousin, the man whose briefcase he had stolen, and a woman named Teresa Bosch, whose mail he had stolen. In a unexpected twist, Coleman decided to serve as his own lawyer, referring to himself in the third person as he cross-examined witnesses.

The prosecutor discovered that Coleman had been arrested 14 times in seven states and laid claim to eight names, three birth dates, and six Social Security numbers. After a weeklong trial, it took the jury only a few hours to convict Coleman on all counts. His impressive arsenal of aliases made it so easy for Coleman to move unnoticed that Judge Sidney Stein labeled him "a danger to the community" and refused to release him while he was awaiting sentencing. Yet even Stein was impressed by Coleman's legal skills.

"I think you've wasted great gifts," the judge told him. "You're articulate, you're intelligent, and you've devoted those gifts to a history of financial crimes and defrauding people."

Stein sentenced Coleman to nearly five years. The judge could only hope that this time, after Coleman had spent two decades betraying those who got close to him, he would finally learn his lesson.

At least one person believed he would.

Sitting in the courtroom as the trial concluded was Coleman's latest girlfriend, Betty Vandenbosch. The Canadian immigrant had short-cropped hair and an affection for cooking, sailing, and the underdog. She also possessed the two things Coleman craved in his victims: wealth and pedigree.

Vandenbosch had a home in Bratenahl, was a professor at Case Western Reserve, and had made a name for herself in Cleveland's close-knit arts world. She served on the boards of DANCECleveland and the Cleveland Music Settlement, where her son went to school. She was also a longtime friend of Sarah Gyorki's father, Miles Kennedy, who'd also been a Case professor. "Betty is absolutely what she says she is," Gyorki says.

Undeterred by the parade of women who took the stand to describe how Coleman had exploited them, Vandenbosch stood by her man. She even helped pay his bail while he awaited trial.

Four months after his release in 2001, the couple married.

It seems astonishing that a business school professor would marry a man with a zest for financial crimes — and a career built on betraying women just like her. It wasn't a decision Vandenbosch took lightly. "I'm not here to say that Zachary Coleman duped me," she says. "I knew the kind of person that I was marrying, and I believed that he deserved another chance."

They bought a $600,000 mansion in Bratenahl and a $22,000 boat, and joined the Edgewater Yacht Club. Coleman says he cooked, cleaned, and entertained guests at her faculty parties. His wife's wealth and prominence bought him entrée into higher circles.

They became the quintessential power couple, attending Democratic Party functions and arts fund-raisers, rubbing shoulders with the likes of politicians such as Eric Fingerhut, Tim Hagan, and Peter Lawson Jones. Coleman liked to wax poetic about being raised in poverty by a single mom and gleaning inspiration from great arts institutions like the Cleveland Orchestra. The tale he told was one of triumph, how he rose above adversity to become an Ivy League success.

Elite Cleveland lapped it up. In addition to running his consulting firm, ZBK Partners, he served as executive director of Race for Success, which was raising money to build an African American Business Hall of Fame. Cleveland Heights businessman George Fraser, who spearheaded the project, remembers Coleman as "an Ivy League graduate, a brilliant attorney."

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