The Randy Meisner imposter was finally arrested in February 1998 after causing chaos in Randy’s life for about ten years. The imposter is a con artist and gambler named Lewis Peter Morgan, and he was finally caught and arrested in San Francisco. However, before this guy was caught he had caused a lot of damage to Randy’s reputation with various scams. Hopefully people eventually found out it wasn’t actually Randy scamming people for money and guitars and that it was the fake Randy Meisner. The arrest happened just about a month after the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction in 1998.
The con man does not even look like Randy Meisner, but he probably got away with it because this was before it was easy to look someone up on the internet and see photos. Prior to impersonating Randy this same guy had been doing the same thing to Don Henley, but that was a short-lived endeavor. He was found out and arrested, but jumped bail. Then he directed his attention to impersonating Randy. Even after this fraud got out of jail for impersonating Randy and stealing money from people, he went back to scamming.
There are several articles on this page about the fraudulent Randy Meisner, and someone even wrote about a personal experience with him in this blog dated March 14, 2014. There is also a video below.
Randy Meisner Imposter
This was a video on the YouTube Rock N’ Roll True Stories channel about the Don Henley/Randy Meisner imposter.
The “Fake It to the Limit” San Francisco Weekly article of April 29, 1998 mentioned in this video is below in pdf format.
“Morgan is about the right age to be Meisner, a 51-year old native of Scottsbluff, Neb., but the similarity ends there. I consider myself ugly, Meisner said. But this guy is pretty darn ugly.”
San Francisco Chronicle – Nov. 21, 1997
“I’m just so happy they finally caught him, said Meisner, who wondered if the impersonator is also to blame for bad blood with former band mates.“
The Times (Shreveport, LA) – Feb. 28, 1998
“It’s a strange scam, but he fooled a lot of people, said Inspector Curtis Cashen of the San Francisco Police Department.”
San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA) – Mar. 10, 1998
“The impersonator also made enemies, including a former fan who came to an Eagles concert with an ice pick to exact revenge, said Meisner, who split with the band in 1977 and was snubbed for a tour in 1994.”
Kokomo Tribune (Kokomo, IN) – Mar. 14, 1998
San Francisco Weekly – Apr. 29, 1998
This 2-part interview has a lot of details about Lewis Morgan’s scams using Randy Meisner’s name and contains input from many of the people he scammed.
gambling911.com – Feb. 4, 2009
Note that an error is in this story. The writer says Lewis Morgan was jailed for 16 years, but it was 16 months.
This photo and description about Lewis Morgan came from an Eagles Facebook fan page a few years ago.
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