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E-mail StoryA mayoral candidate's colorful past
| Wednesday, Apr 9 2008 7:26 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Apr 10 2008 8:20 AM
He has been married in Las Vegas six times, although he says he doesn’t remember one of them. At least two marriages overlapped. He once accidentally shot himself. Someone who says he scammed her has created a Web site about him. And he wants to be mayor of Bakersfield.
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Joseph Caporali is running for mayor of Bakersfield.
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Joseph Caporali, 76, has a colorful history by his own description. Legal records back him up.
Caporali says his past, including alcoholism, helps him, motivates him to run for mayor.
“My yesterdays are pretty bad and pretty shaky, but I’m here now,” he said.
Caporali says he’s running to bring government to the people and be a positive role model. He’s especially interested in bringing a veterans’ hospital to the city.
“I’m kind of married right now,” he said. “I’m married to Bakersfield.”
OTHER MARRIAGES
Caporali married Torey Lynn Walters at least twice, maybe four times, each marriage ending within a day. The first was in 1999, while he was also married to Dorothy Ragsdale.
He married Ragsdale in 1999 and divorced her in 2000, according to Kern County records. But other records — liens, collection attempts and the foreclosure of his home — name them as husband and wife as early as 1983.
He’s also engaged to a woman he married for one day last year.
He said he grew up in an orphanage and any time a woman said she loved him, he’d go overboard.
Clark County, Nev. — which includes Las Vegas — lists six marriages for Caporali. The first was in 1985.
“That one I don’t recall,” he said. “I must have been really drunk.”
Then there was one in 1994, which he said lasted about two weeks.
The next few are more complicated:
• He married Ragsdale, his long-term common-law wife, in August 1999.
• He married Walters in October 1999. It lasted a day. On a petition for a restraining order against Walters, Caporali listed Ragsdale as his “live-in homeowner.”
• He divorced Ragsdale in February 2000.
• He married Walters again in June 2000.
Those three marriages were in Clark County. On his petition for his second divorce from Walters, he listed what is either two marriages to her the previous month, or one marriage with dates he couldn’t keep straight.
“I was quite fond of her at the time,” he said of Walters. But he couldn’t take being with her.
Walters could not be reached.
He also married Ann Louise Daley in Las Vegas in April 2007. It lasted a day, he said, but he expects to marry her in Bakersfield later this month.
He now lives with Ragsdale, he said, in a home in River Oaks in southwest Bakersfield. They are not together, he said; her boyfriend lives with them.
In 1999, he shot himself in the shoulder while showing a woman how to load a gun.
ENOUGH WITH THE PERSONAL LIFE
Caporali owns what he describes as a talent agency on Stockdale Highway and says he’s trying to make a movie.
Janet Needham of Bakersfield is not a fan. She said she gave Caporali $2,000 in 1998 as an investment in making a movie called “The Messenger” — about an alien computer virus. He promised her $10,000 in two years, but never came through.
She has set up a Web site chronicling what she calls her “ongoing saga to expose Joseph Caporali as a fraud.”
Caporali claims she was supposed to go on his radio talk show, but didn’t. That was breach of contract, he said, so he wrote it off.
When she showed up this year wanting money, he offered her the $2,000, he said.
Caporali was also sued in Los Angeles by two men who won a $2.85 million judgment against him. An associate of his, Stephen Combs, hired two men to work on a remake of the 1963 horror film “The Sadist,” which Caporali says he owns the rights to.
Caporali said the court dismissed the judgment against him. The men who sued him, Bill Rigopoulos and Gary Hoffman, could not be reached and confirmation of the dismissal couldn’t immediately be found.
Mayor Harvey Hall, who is seeking a a third term starting with the June primary, said he won't make an issue of Caporali’s personal life or anyone else’s. He said he will focus on his own campaign and why he deserves to be mayor again.
“That's not for me to concern myself with,” he said of the personal stuff. “That's good fodder, I suppose, but I don't care.”