To steal valor is to adorn oneself in borrowed laurels of courage.
It’s the product of either malice, cowardice or vanity, and generally misses its aim in each of these aspects. Because sooner or later, the carefully placed blocks of deception topple under the gravity of truth.
Such is the case with three Arizona men busted by American Veterans Magazine in the last year for exaggerating or outright fabricating their military service for various personal benefits — reputation, monetary greed and political power.
The term “stolen valor” was coined by Vietnam veteran B.G. Burkett in his titular 1998 book. He busted so many people exaggerating and inventing their service records that he dubbed it “a national phenomenon, a weird ripple in the American psyche.”
It was an Arizona man who singularly caused Congress to pass the Stolen Valor Act of 2005, making it a crime to wear unearned military medals.
Gilbert Velasquez, a phony war hero from Willcox, made the front page of the Arizona Range News Nov. 10, 2004, when he detailed his dramatic military exploits and styled himself as the homegrown hero of his little mountain town. He ingratiated reporters with a marble fragment supposedly from Saddam Hussein’s palace and a fabricated DD-214.
Velasquez described hunting down the bodies of Hussein’s dead sons, capturing Hussein himself, destroying an enemy tank in Iraq to save his comrades, eliminating Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and participating in the “Black Hawk Down” battle in Somalia.
They were all lies.
In direct response, President George W. Bush signed breakthrough legislation that made it a federal crime for anyone to falsely take credit for military valor.
But Velasquez’s sullied legacy lives in on the Grand Canyon State through these three pitiful men and plenty more, cementing Arizona as the nation’s capital for stolen valor. Experts propose that, as one of the states with the most veterans and a prolific military history, the lies offer greater profit here than elsewhere.
A disgraced Marine who conned his way to the top
Entangled in a web of lies, a former Marine in Maricopa found himself ensnared in the sticky grip of stolen valor accusations. Like a black widow spinning artificial silk, his own web has become his prison.
“This is fucking retarded,” Billy Zinnerman said in an interview.
For Zinnerman — who falsely purports to be a retired sergeant major of the U.S. Marine Corps decorated with the most portentous service medals — it’s time to pay the piper.
The Bronze Star dangling next to the brass buttons of his midnight-blue jacket? The American War Memorial Library says he never received one. Museum-quality Bronze Star replicas are plentiful online, where they sell for as little as $10.
Zinnerman has been crafting and advancing his spurious saga since at least 2010, when, ironically, he pontificated about moral upstanding on PBS’ bygone Ethics NewsWeekly. In retrospect, it was a scintilla of credibility that metastasized into a whole new identity for Zinnerman.
Suddenly, he was no longer a low-ranking pawn with a lengthy criminal record, booted from the service amid accusations of repeated misconduct. He was a war hero and Maricopa City Council hopeful, and he intended to keep it that way.
Zinnerman’s guile empowered him to con his way to the top. He hoodwinked Maricopa’s American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, the Marine Corps League of Arizona and eventually the Marine Corps itself.
In November 2022, Zinnerman appeared at the 247th Marine Corps Ball as its guest of honor. Six months later, he was lauded by U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters as he delivered the keynote speech at a commemoration in Inglewood, Calif., and accepted an award from the city’s mayor.
At the event, Zinnerman recounted fantastical tales of a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, surviving gunshots in Kuwait and rescuing his comrade from a burning car in Hawai’i. He brazenly described a quarter-century of military service that culminated with an honorable discharge in 2002.
Zinnerman said he was a gunnery sergeant in Iraq in the years leading up to 9/11, leading a unit that identified targets for laser-guided missiles. Public records paint a different picture of Zinnerman at that time — one of a career criminal in Los Angeles.
By 2002, Zinnerman had been charged with nearly two dozen felony counts of burglary and theft, among other things. He was convicted at least four times, public records show.
The records also suggest Zinnerman never left Southern California between 1980 and his reputed retirement in 2002.
Fewer than 1% of those enlisted ever reach the rank of sergeant major, according to the Sonoma, Calif., nonprofit Wine Country Marines.
Sgt. Maj. Larry Leichty, one of the group’s board members, is one of the vanishing few. Liechty has had his own tangles with Maricopa’s infantry imposter in his home state of California.
“Zinnerman recently started defrauding some of our donors,” he said in July 2023.
Wine Country Marines reported more than $700,000 in donations in its most recent filings with the IRS and last year received another donation worth $10 million from San Mateo County. Liechty didn’t disclose how much money he thinks Zinnerman was able to purloin.
Coupled with donations that Zinnerman solicited, and other ill-gotten funds used to shuttle him from Maricopa to public events across the country to tout his counterfeit awards, it was a strong enough cocktail to turn heads at the FBI, Liechty said.
“There is a federal investigation going on for stolen valor,” Liechty said. “[Zinnerman] got himself into some really deep water. He might not realize how deep, but it’s deep.”
The FBI was mum on the issue, although multiple sources said they had spoken with investigators at the bureau about Zinnerman.
“We neither confirm nor deny the existence of an investigation into [Zinnerman] and have no comment,” FBI national spokesperson Tina Jagerson said.
The probe isn’t limited to lucre, Liechty claimed. Zinnerman could face additional federal charges for falsifying military personnel documents.
The DD-214 Zinnerman provided to reporters appears to be phony. The word “medal” is repeatedly misspelled on the document, which is dated after Zinnerman’s supposed retirement.
By 2002, when Zinnerman claims he retired, these discharge forms were generated electronically. But the document Zinnerman provided was typed on a typewriter. And the form lists decorations like the Bronze Star and Purple Heart that Zinnerman never won, according to national databases.
The nail in the coffin for Zinnerman was the beefy list of accolades, promotions, certifications and deployments spanning the 1980s and 1990s. According to the National Personal Records Center, “There is no record of [Zinnerman’s] service after his discharge in 1980.”
Records show Zinnerman was not honorably discharged, nor did he serve for close to a quarter-century.
He served just three years before he was accused of repeated misconduct and ousted from the armed forces. He was a private first class when he was discharged — the second-lowest rank in the Marine Corps and seven ranks below sergeant major.
“His DD-214 is a forgery,” Wine Country Marines President James Brown said. “He forged a lot of documents. It’s a lot of felonies.”
News that Zinnerman’s documents were forged spread like wildfire around the military community in Arizona. Zinnerman had attained membership in Maricopa’s VFW and American Legion posts as well as the Marine Corps League, a prestigious veterans’ organization chartered by the U.S. Congress.
Joe Uribe, a top officer in the Maricopa detachment of the Marine Corps League of Arizona, expressed remorse for accepting Zinnerman’s application to become a member some years ago.
“It pains me to say this,” Uribe said in an interview. “It’s clear and apparent to me that his document was 100% fraudulent.”
Frank Alger, a senior officer for the Marine Corps League’s Department of Arizona, said the organization had concluded its own investigation into Zinnerman.
“He has been expelled from the Marine Corps League,” Alger said. “This guy is a stolen valor guy.”
Cmdr. Thomas Kelley with Maricopa’s American Legion post also confirmed an investigation into Zinnerman was elevated to the district commander, where his membership was terminated.
When asked to defend himself against the claims of forgery, Zinnerman couldn’t offer an iota of evidence to support his own claims. He merely first referred reporters to friends who could “verify who I am and what I did.”
He said he had a stroke days before that interview and was partially paralyzed. He later couched his self-defense, saying he was hopped up on prescription drugs while talking to reporters.
Then, suddenly, he made an admission.
“You know what, I did have that one [other than honorable] discharge. I know what they’re talking about in 1980,” Zinnerman said. “I do remember that now. I’m just having a hard time with my memory.”
Photographs Zinnerman shared with reporters last year, purporting to be images of himself as a drill sergeant in Iraq in 1990, were proven to be bogus, too.
Zinnerman lifted the images, which did not depict him, from the Marine Corps Times. The individual resembling Zinnerman in the photos is Gunnery Sgt. Rashaud Drayton in 2018, according to Uribe and the Wine Country Marines.
Zinnerman had gone so far as to print and frame the stolen images and hang them inside his home. They were visible when reporters interviewed him last year.
When asked why the photos were hanging in his home, Zinnerman said Drayton was a family member. But he mispronounced Drayton’s name.
Son? Cousin? Nephew? Not quite.
“Rashaud is, uh, just a distant, uh, family,” Zinnerman said. He could not even articulate if Drayton was a relative on his mother’s or father’s side of the family.
Those who violate the Stolen Valor Act are required to repay stolen money and can face a prison sentence of one year under federal law. But sanctions can increase exponentially as related charges, like wire fraud and falsifying military documents, pile on.
As Zinnerman himself told reporters, “This is a clusterfuck.”
Fake war hero scammed the state — and many others along the way
Some weave grand lies and exit dramatically. Then there’s Stanley Wayne Wineberg Jr., who spun a slow-burning tale of wartime heroism that spans decades and a great distance.
The Apache Junction resident scammed a state agency and got away with it, forcing a change to the department’s legal policy in November. But that’s the mere tip of the iceberg.
Wineberg, by all accounts, seemed like an ordinary guy.
He’d drive home from his job as a cable guy, park his truck in the driveway of his cookie-cutter home and greet his newlywed wife at the door.
The setting sun would throw a beam of light against his polished Purple Heart license plates as his wife closed the front door on another picturesque day.
She didn’t know about the half-dozen wives who came before her. She didn’t know he left them all in financial ruin. She definitely didn’t know she’d be next.
What else didn’t she know? Plenty — like his criminal record, bankruptcy, mounting back child support, tax fraud and IRS fines. And she hadn’t yet figured out those Purple Heart license plates were obtained fraudulently.
Not until that letter from the Arizona Office of Inspector General came in the mail last fall.
Mr. Stanley Wayne Wineberg Jr.,
The Office of Inspector General has discovered a discrepancy with your customer record.
Our records indicate that on June 21, July 3 and July 20, 2023, you obtained Purple Heart License Plates and failed to provide the required documents.
No response to this request will result in your license being further suspended or canceled, or other appropriate criminal charges being filed.
Wineberg fronted as a sergeant first class in the Army with 15 years of service, a Green Beret in the Elite Special Forces with top secret security clearance. He earned his Purple Heart, telling anyone who would listen, when he suffered shrapnel wounds, saving his comrade “Eddie” in Somalia.
Indeed, Wineberg is an Army veteran who was honorably discharged, earning 18 medals and badges along the way. And yet no detail in his story — not a single one — is true.
He served fewer than seven years, according to military service records obtained from the National Personnel Records Center through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Wineberg’s highest rank was E-5, two notches below what he claims. The records don’t mention Somalia. Although his awards suggest he saw combat, he was also a driver and mechanic.
He never received a Purple Heart, the National Archives confirmed. He’s not credited with saving anyone’s life. He had standard security clearance, and he was never in the Special Forces.
Yet his Purple Heart vanity plates read “SF RNGR” — Special Forces Ranger.
Earl Fisher, a detective at the Office of Inspector General in Phoenix, is also a proud veteran who served in the Vietnam War as a medical combat corpsman.
For him, investigating stolen valor is personal. So, when the state opened its investigation into Wineberg, Fisher was the man for the job.
“He’s a vet, but he’s not happy with what he has,” the detective said. “He wants more.”
According to Fisher, Wineberg abused a loophole in the system. Had he gone into a Motor Vehicle Division office to request his plates, he would have been denied. But he used the MVD Now website to order them, which at the time would send the tags by mail and allow the driver to supply his DD-214 after the fact.
Under Arizona law, he needed to prove he received a Purple Heart to obtain those plates.
“Because of the glitch in the system, I couldn’t prosecute him,” Fisher said. “I brought it to MVD’s attention, so they’re fixing that flaw.”
Instead, Fisher sent the letter demanding Wineberg turn in the plates or face criminal charges. The detective didn’t confirm whether he surrendered the plates and neighbors reported seeing them months later.
When he received the letter, Wineberg called the inspector general’s office.
“He was very distraught when he called me, probably because he thought I was going to arrest him,” Fisher recalled. “He said, ‘I made a mistake, I was in a bad place.’”
For Fisher, Wineberg’s Somalia story reeked of falsehood. “I don’t know how that story can be true,” he said. As soon as a soldier is wounded, his unit would recommend the Purple Heart and it would be awarded immediately upon treatment.
Wineberg never supplied a DD-214.
“If he provided any of those documents, they would have been forged,” Fisher said. “That’s where we’d get him. On forgery charges, and maybe tampering with public records.”
Fisher said he believes Wineberg is guilty of stolen valor. Attorneys agree.
“It is a federal crime if he used ribbons or medals to obtain something of value,” says Chuck Pardue, a military law attorney in Evans, Ga. It’s also a separate felony charge in Arizona that could mean more than four years in prison.
It’s unclear if a forged DD-214 exists for Wineberg. He joined a Combat Veterans Motorcycle Association chapter in Denver, where he wore a Purple Heart medal on his jacket. The nonprofit veterans’ charity requires discharge papers from its members.
“We cannot meet your request without authorization from the former member,” the chapter said in response to inquiries about the matter.
Wineberg did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan Masche was running a Republican bid for governor in 2022 when he met Wineberg at a speaking engagement in the Valley. The eight-year Air Force veteran still remembers touching Wineberg’s fake Purple Heart medal and thanking him for his service.
It’s a memory that now disgusts him.
“There’s nothing more disrespectful, hurtful, insensitive and plain disgusting in my book than stolen valor. It speaks to a deep-seated psychological personality disorder,” said Masche, who studied psychiatry in college.
“It’s hurtful. It’s sleazy. It speaks to a number of different psychological conditions that someone is so hard up for attention, they have to go out of their way to make up lies about who they are.”
Masche is active in veterans’ groups and understands their psychology. It made him uneasy when Wineberg didn’t ask about his military experience, but rather touted his own heroic stories.
“People who have seen really bad stuff, they just don’t talk about it,” Masche told reporters. “When Stan talked about Somalia, all these pieces were starting to come together. I was figuring it out in my mind.”
Masche once called out a phony war hero in Scottsdale just minutes after meeting him. This one took him a little longer than he liked to admit, but sooner or later, he figured it out.
“Something in my stomach just didn’t sit right in that situation, but I couldn’t quite figure it out,” Masche said.
Then, he started replaying their conversations in his head. Something clicked.
“Here I am thinking Stan was somebody who was involved in combat, in a disaster in Somalia,” he said. “In actuality, he wasn’t asking me about my service because he knew I would, in a short amount of time, realize this guy was full of shit.”
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Stolen Valor Act was a violation of the First Amendment in 2012, a revised version was signed by President Barrack Obama a year later. It narrowed the scope for prosecution to people who intend to profit or otherwise enjoy undeserved benefits that coveted service awards entail.
“I think it was a bad call on the part of the Supreme Court,” American Military News journalist and stolen valor researcher Cheryl Hinneburg told American Veterans Magazine. “Those who are guilty of stolen valor should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. It is a slap in the face to our military and veterans.”
In 2019, Congress upped the federal prison sentence from six months to one year for violating the stolen valor law to curb such criminal acts. But just one year later, investigators at the National Archives reported stolen valor cases were on the rise.
In a survey of 3,000 Arizona residents by American Veterans Magazine, more than 85% said the penalties are not strict enough. One in 10 respondents said the penalties were adequate while just 1 in 100 said they were too strict.
Susan Buonsante is in the super-majority on that issue.
Buonsante was married to Wineberg less than a year when she found out about his stolen valor. Not before he took her for $70,000, she said.
“I had no idea the man I married was a con artist and a serial predator of women,” she said. “He fabricated nearly every detail of his life story.”
Buonsante spent more than $55,000 on a parcel of land in unincorporated Pinal County under the auspice her new husband would obtain a VA-backed Veterans Home Loan to build a house there.
It was only after closing on the land she learned he was not eligible for a VA loan.
According to a divorce decree in Pinal County Superior Court, Buonsante was awarded the land “due to Wineberg engaging in fraud.”
Wineberg has been married at least six times and has at least six children, none of whom he supports, according to government records.
He married one woman four days after divorcing another — and owes at least $27,424 in back child support, according to official records from the Colorado Office of Economic Security supplied to reporters by two women.
Caren Fluharty, the mother of one of his daughters, said he tried to dodge child support by claiming his sperm was genetically modified to only produce male children. He still owes her more than $8,000 in child support although his daughter is 21 years old.
“Within a week, he moved in with me,” Fluharty said. “He rented a home in my name that was four times what I could afford. When I told him I was pregnant, he packed his shit and left, and I got evicted.”
Fluharty estimates Wineberg took her for $19,655.
They were never married, although court records show an El Paso County, Colo., judge issued a permanent restraining order against Wineberg in 2001.
Another ex-girlfriend, Tina White, estimates she lost north of $71,000.
White said Wineberg took out three vehicle loans in her name: $50,000 for a brand-new Chevy Silverado and $21,000 for two brand-new Honda dirt bikes. He convinced her to borrow $400,000 for a home loan in his name but disappeared the week of closing, she said.
“He put me in a very bad financial situation,” White said through tears. “He is very abusive towards women. He promised to pay back the money he owed me, but he never did.”
It’s difficult to pinpoint the genesis of Wineberg’s financial woes.
Judges in Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico ordered him to pay restitution in seven civil lawsuits he lost between 1994 and 2016.
He’s been evicted at least four times in Colorado and metro Phoenix.
In 1998, on the same day he was discharged from the Army, Wineberg was charged with theft, computer crimes and possessing a forged instrument.
A Denver District Court judge ordered him to pay his victims $13,329 in restitution and court fees after he pleaded guilty to the latter charge in a plea bargain and was sentenced to fines and probation. He violated his probation in 2004, court records show. A public records request for case documents did not reveal specifics about his crimes.
IRS records show Wineberg didn’t file taxes for nearly a decade, racking up $21,738 in penalties. In 2019, he finally filed for bankruptcy.
But his financial misdeeds continued, according to his former employer, Chris Hofmann.
In 2020 and 2021, Wineberg filed W-2 Forms with the IRS naming Sioux Falls, S.D.-based TAK Communications as his employer.
“He never worked at TAK,” said Hofmann. “Everything he did with us was 1099 [contract] work.”
Hofmann supplied Wineberg’s 1099 forms and called the W-2 forms “fake.” He noted the employer identification number didn’t match the company and the company does not issue W-2s.
Wineberg used those fishy W-2 fForms to both file taxes and apply for mortgage loans.
According to a letter from the IRS to Wineberg last year, the IRS “has no record of a processed tax return for 2020.”
Hofmann, who hired Wineberg based on his resume — which was supplied to reporters and boasts the bogus Purple Heart medal — sympathetically loaned him $3,000.
Weinberg never repaid the loan, telling Hofmann he was tending to his deceased father’s affairs in Florida.
His father is alive today.
City council candidate plays dress up as Air Force veteran
With aspirations as lofty as his title, Maj. Dr. Leon Willis wants Maricopa residents’ votes for city council when the polls open in July.
Such a title conveys a remarkable aptitude for leadership. In fact, there are only 620 airmen in the entire country who can claim that title, according to U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Deana M. Heitzman.
According to the university where Willis purportedly serves as dean of theology and earned his doctorate degree, he is a distinguished U.S. Air Force veteran. His academic journey, as depicted, is marked by scholarly achievements, including a master’s degree from a theological institution in Atlanta.
But none of this is true, an American Veterans Magazine investigation reveals.
His military service, like his master’s degree, is entirely fabricated. And the university where he serves as dean? It doesn’t exist. And when it did, its credibility was cloudy at best.
Although he announced he’d run for city council in August 2023, Willis pulled off the feat of gathering all 424 of his election signatures in just four days up to and including the April 1 deadline, according to nomination petitions he filed with the City of Maricopa.
Never mind some of those signatures were from people who don’t live in the city, an analysis of the documents revealed. That included voters registered in places like Tucson.
Willis said education is his top priority, as he was a career public schoolteacher, retiring from the Thornton Township High Schools District in Harvey, Ill., in 2021. He said he was qualified to teach when, in 1994, he obtained his master’s degree from Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta.
The school’s registrar, Arlene Clarke, said she “noted no record of this person as a graduate.”
Willis said he went on to earn his doctor title, one he displays proudly on all his election documents, at Larry Love University in Muskogee, Okla., in 2018.
He’s now the dean of theology at that university, he claims. The school’s entity status expired in 2016, according to the Oklahoma Secretary of State.
The university’s most recent graduation ceremony was in 2020, its website states. When Willis graduated in 2018, however, the university’s address was a vacant office building. That year, the building had been most recently occupied by several defunct outpatient medical facilities, according to brokers for the property.
Larry Love University does offer doctoral degrees, according to a document listing its 38 certificate and degree programs. In the same document, the university also claims it will award graduate degrees for $11,700 to students who haven’t completed any credit hours or taken any courses if they have “prior learning experience.”
Larry Love University was never accredited by an accepted accrediting agency, according to the U.S. Department of Education. In Willis’ native Illinois and 28 other states, the use of unaccredited degrees is not allowed. Arizona, however, has no such restriction.
Calls and emails to Larry Love University didn’t go through. Its website contains mostly broken links, save for pages where you can make donations or payments. The application page is still functional, too, which allows students to apply for scholarships — and next to the U.S. Veteran’s Scholarship is the Major Leon’ Willis Scholarship.
It’s on this website where Willis is pictured, clad in what’s ostensibly a U.S. Air Force uniform, with a caption reading, “US Airforce Major Dr. Leon’ Willis.”
Military records obtained from a public records request show no one with his name ever served in the Air Force.
Willis admitted in an interview he never served in the military but refused to answer questions about why he identifies himself as a veteran on his college’s website.
Willis was a longtime member of the Civil Air Patrol’s Cornelius Coffey Composite Squadron in South Holland, Ill., a volunteer service arm of the U.S. Air Force. The auxiliary awards rank titles mirroring the Air Force, explaining Willis’ title of major.
CAP membership does not equate to membership in the military, however, according to the nonprofit humanitarian organization.
“If you’ve only served in CAP, you are not a veteran,” David Hutcheson, spokesperson for the CAP in Danville, Va., told American Veterans Magazine. “They have asked us to never identify ourselves as Air Force.”
At the Larry Love University commencement ceremony in 2019, Willis is pictured wearing the standard senior CAP getup — a three-button uniform in Air Force blues with a Company Grande service cap. To the layperson, the uniform is indistinguishable from those worn by military servicemembers.
That’s why the rules around where and when CAP officers can display their uniforms are so stringent. When asked if it’s permissible to wear your CAP uniform to a college graduation, Hutcheson said: “That is forbidden.”
“He cannot wear the uniform because it creates confusion that he was in the Air Force,” Hutcheson explained. “And believe me, he knows that. Our uniforms are very similar to the Air Force and our ranks are sometimes identical.”
Cornelius Coffey Squadron Commander Capt. Levetta Parker would not answer questions about her former member.
Although CAP members fly a variety of emergency and operational missions for the federal government including assisting the Air Force and Army National Guard, they aren’t even allowed to shop in basic exchange on an Air Force base.
CAP is very protective of its integrity, Hutcheson said. The organization wants to know who’s misrepresenting themselves so they can act.
“Anyone who does that is not playing straight, and we want to know who they are so they can straighten out their act,” he said. “You don’t borrow respect or steal it. You earn it.”
