Richard Allen Minsky (born March 15, 1944), also known as Richard Alan Minsky, is an American former used car salesman who was convicted of multiple charges of rape, assault, battery, extortion, grand theft, larceny, lewd and lascivious behavior, oral copulation, sexual assault, sexual battery, sodomy, and escape. He was charged over 80 times and convicted in more than a dozen trials over a series of scams committed in the states of California, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. A registered sex offender, Minsky was featured on the television shows America's Most Wanted and Fox Files several times in 1999 and arrested in Tampa, Florida on September 15 of that year. After extradition to California, Minsky was sentenced to 146 years to life in prison by the Superior Court of Los Angeles County on November 30, 2001. Background Richard Allen Minsky was born in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1944. He was a used car salesman who lived in the nearby towns of Brookline and Winthrop. According to police, his hobbies included smoking, gambling and betting on horse races. Sex scam Detective-III John Metcalf, LAPD, first investigated Minsky in 1982 for the same M.O. involving 4 victims. Metcalf again ran across Minsky in 1998, after his release from a 2-year sentence in Massachusetts. According to Metcalf's testimony, Minsky preyed on women randomly selected from a phone book. He was able to imitate voices of various people to aid in the deception. Minsky would start cold calls by whispering at a barely audible level until the victim called out a name, giving him the information needed to continue the ruse. He would then pose as an attorney to convince them that the aforementioned loved one was in legal trouble. In variations of the scam, he would say that the loved one was involved in a hit and run accident that carried a mandatory two-year sentence. He would tell the victim that a witness would have to be bribed with sex or money in order to drop charges so that their loved one would be released from jail. Minsky met with the women as the so-called witness at various locations such as hotels, and sexually assaulted some of them. In some of the cases, he urged the victim to dress provocatively for the meeting. In the 1982 cases Minsky was difficult to prosecute because there was no weapon or threat of bodily injury. Arrests and incarceration