Pucker up, Biden to deliver $1,400 stimulus kiss to inmates

Meet David Staveley, age 53, also known as David Sanborn, also known as Kurt D. Sanborn, also known by his federal Bureau of Prisons number 04230-049.

Kurt — the name I used to know him by in his radio days — is currently locked up in Central Falls, R.I., at the feds’ Wyatt Detention Facility.

He’s charged with fraud in the attempted theft of $438,500 from the feds’ first COVID-19 relief program.

Now, as this career con man awaits trial on those COVID-19 theft charges, Congress is preparing to send him a check for $1,400 as part of its newest … COVID-19 relief program.

You can’t make this stuff up.

In case you haven’t heard, when the Democrats in Congress say everybody making less than $75,000 a year is going to get $1,400, they mean EVERYBODY, even if the reason you’re not working is because you’re locked up for robbing an earlier COVID-19 program.

Poor Zip Connolly – can the FBI hitman vacate his new digs in Pompano Beach long enough to return to his Florida jail cell to pick up his $1,400 check? Will Whitey Bulger’s estate sue for a posthumous $1,400 payday?

Since news of this Felon Fun Fest broke this week, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has been tweeting about the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is now Club Fed’s best-known inmate.

But think about all the dozens — maybe hundreds — of scammers and grifters like Kurt, who are locked up because they tried to heist COVID-19 relief programs, and now the system rewards them for their crimes with a big fat new COVID-19 check.

Back when he had the radio job on Cape Cod, Sanborn was always … that guy. He told one of our co-workers that he’d almost made the U.S. Olympic wrestling team until he was “the final cut.” They’re always the final cut, right?

He claimed he could get Red Sox tickets from his good pal Mo Vaughn. He and the then-Boston police commissioner, Ed Davis, were thisclose, going back to their days in Lowell.

Sanborn has spent much of the last decade behind bars. He went down on a federal wire-fraud rap in New Hampshire in 2009 — he stole more than $300,000. He got 30 months.

Six years later, he was lugged on another wire-fraud rap, and was sentenced to another 30 months. All his schemes are complicated, involving such things as diamonds and the Lowell Spinners baseball team, among others.

When the Panic hit a year ago, Sanborn was between grifts.

But then the CARES Act set up the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and it was like blowing a dog whistle that could only be heard by fraudsters like Sanborn. They all came running.

Sanborn and a co-defendant were the first two perps busted by the feds last spring, mere weeks after the PPP started handing out billions in free money.

Sanborn claimed he was running two restaurants in Warwick, R.I., and one in Berlin, Mass. Two of them had already closed and the one that wasn’t he had nothing to do with.

According to the original criminal complaint, he complained of the PPP to a fed on a recorded line that “the whole thing has become a little bit of a sham.”

The feds called that “an ironic twist.”

In his spare time, according to court testimony, Sanborn also stalked women.

He told one woman he was a U.S. Naval intelligence officer. He’s been arrested in Rhode Island on felony stalking charges. In 2016, prosecutors said, he harassed a Massachusetts woman by barraging her with text messages and phone calls, finally placing fliers on car windshields in her hometown accusing her of promiscuity and alcoholism.

I wonder how these women feel about having their tax dollars used to provide a $1,400 check to their alleged stalker.

Last May, despite all the evidence against him, a judge released Sanborn to home confinement with a GPS monitor. He soon cut it off and then abandoned his car near the beach in Quincy, unlocked, with his driver’s license and a suicide note on the front seat.

As if Sanborn would kill himself. He had to figure there would be yet another kiss in the mail for him down the road.

The U.S. marshals soon arrested him again, this time in Georgia, where he’d taken another fake name and was driving a minivan with stolen California license plates. Since then he’s been cooling his heels in Central Falls.

Last week, in court with a new lawyer, Sanborn asked to be released from custody — again. Oh no, he’s not a flight risk or anything.

His new pitch: He’s suffering from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, after being “assaulted” by a prison guard back in 2011. He also claims that he’s lost 50 pounds and he’s lonely because the guards at Wyatt have been told to “steer clear” of him, as the Providence Journal put it.

To repeat: This jailbird is now going to collect a $1,400 “relief” check from the feds.

There are 151,819 stories in the BOP’s penitentiaries, and all of them are apparently going to get a $1,400 kiss in the mail.

What could possibly go wrong?