Revisiting the Life of King Corcoran–Part 3—from Matt Schudel off the Washington Post

“With so many stories about King,” said longtime friend Dave Darrikhuma, “I end up finding there was an ounce of truth to everything.”

Several times a year, Mr. Corcoran would jet off to Florida or the Bahamas to judge bikini contests. At public events, he’d invariably step out of a limousine with a buxom 20-year-old on each arm.

“He dwarfed Joe Namath as a ladies’ man — dwarfed him,” Murphy said. “He was the ladies’ man of ladies’ men.”

Mr. Corcoran moved from Potomac to Clifton to Manassas to parts unknown. He had been trailed by accusations of fraud and theft since the 1970s, and during one court case in the 1990s not even his lawyer knew where to find him.

Some people believe he spent as much as two years living on an Indian reservation in Montana. About 10 years ago he grew his hair to his shoulders and began to wear an earring with a feather. He said his Indian name was Running Wolf, that he had been born on a Blackfoot reservation and was orphaned when he was 9.

It was just another contradictory but inscrutable side of his personality. As garrulous as he was, Mr. Corcoran never revealed much about himself. It’s safe to say that no one in his life knew the full truth about him.

Everyone knew about his football career, about his jovial nature, about the women who were always around. But few people knew of a darker history, of a criminal past that included convictions for theft and fraud for trying to sell properties he didn’t own. In 1997, he served six months in federal prison in Cumberland, Md. — he called it “Camp Cupcake” — for tax evasion. He was arrested a year later for violating parole.

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At one sentencing, the court record listed nine names that he went by, not one of which was his given name. In fact, he was born James Patrick Corcoran in Jersey City, N.J., on July 6, 1943. (He sometimes said he was born Dec. 26, 1942.)

His claims that he was Indian and an orphan were, in the words of his sister-in-law, “totally untrue.”

“He was born and raised in [New] Jersey of Irish Catholic parents,” said Maria Corcoran, the widow of Mr. Corcoran’s younger brother, Raymond, who died in 1991.

“He was very charismatic,” she added, “sometimes to the point of being obnoxious.”

After his father, a truck driver, died in 1966, “Jimmy” Corcoran, as his family knew him, never saw his mother again. When she died last year, he didn’t come to the funeral. He has two half-brothers living in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

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