The license plate on the truck he drove reads “THE KNG.”

Joshua Mitchell didn’t own the truck.

Courtesy photo

Joshua Mitchell is pictured in an outfit with a “special agent” hat, a shiny badge and an object resembling a gun. Mitchell is in jail in Denton on charges of child endangerment, fraud and failure to identify, and is being held on a warrant out of North Carolina. He says he is an international agent working undercover.

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He’s told people over the last several years that he’s an international agent working undercover, an FBI agent and a Navy SEAL.

Not likely, Denton police say.

After arresting Mitchell last week under the alias of Ryan Webb, police call him the biggest con man they’ve handled, and they’ve connected him to about a dozen law enforcement agencies — on the wrong side of the badge.

“With a person like that, you never know where he’s been,” said Lt. Scott Langford, who supervises detectives at the Denton Police Department.

Officers ran across Mitchell in a restaurant parking lot Aug. 24. They had seen that vanity license plate hours earlier on an intelligence bulletin. The driver was wanted in Collin County and North Carolina and believed to be heavily armed. When he got out of the truck and walked up to the officers to ask about a motel, they detained him.

His real name is Mitchell but he had a fake Arizona driver’s license with the Webb name, they confirmed. Police searched his truck and reported finding two pistols, 25 law enforcement badges, materials to steal and counterfeit identification and credit cards, and explosives.

They also found his common-law wife and two small children. Officers jailed both adults and turned the children over to Child Protective Services.

Rachel Sheridan was charged with two counts of endangering a child in connection with the children riding in a truck containing explosives and weapons. She remains jailed in lieu of $50,000 bail.

Mitchell was charged with two counts of child endangerment, fraud and failure to identify, and had warrants for issuance of a bad check and a probation violation. Bonds total $60,500, but he is being held without bond on the North Carolina case.

That was only the beginning of the things police learned about the man who claimed he was actually an international law enforcement agent deep undercover.

In the 11 days since his arrest, police have interacted with a number of law enforcement agencies interested in Mitchell. They learned he is accused of being involved in scams involving two country clubs in North Carolina in real estate deals. He has been the subject of investigations in Wylie, as well as Tulsa and other Oklahoma cities. He faces charges in Plano and possible charges in McKinney and Garland, Langford said.

U.S. Attorneys offices in two areas are investigating his false claims of being a federal agent.

“When we arrested him, we sent out a bulletin to all the contiguous states, and the reports keep coming in,” Langford said.

The truck was registered to a Frisco police officer. Frisco Police Lt. Jason Jenkins, acting as a spokesman for the department, said the officer sold the truck on Craigslist.

“[Mitchell] never had the title transferred into his name,” Jenkins said.

Jenkins said he could not confirm reports that the officer believed Mitchell was a federal agent and bought the two pistols for him.

“I don’t know anything about that. I do know we don’t have a case against him,” Jenkins said.

And law enforcement agencies are not the only ones after Mitchell.

Don Wojan is a private investigator in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was hired by an elderly couple after Mitchell moved into their Garland rental house, paid no rent for eight months and refused to leave. When the elderly man confronted Mitchell, he was beaten in the front yard, Wojan said.

“When you go and beat up a 78-year-old man, that’s pretty sad,” he said.

Wojan’s investigations turned up a jail stay in Arkansas and a scam in Oklahoma that ended with 300 to 400 people who paid for a year’s worth of Internet access losing their money, he said. The company vanished in the middle of the night.

The Garland couple tried going through the justice system, with no results.

“They rented to him. He gave them a deposit check, and it never cleared the bank,” Wojan said. “They moved in, and he said now you’re going to have to evict me. They lived there for eight or nine months and never paid a nickel.”

Wojan went with the couple to the house. They used a garage door opener, and when Mitchell ran into the garage they ran in the front door, Wojan said. While Mitchell screamed and cursed at him, Wojan searched the house and took photographs.

He found a rifle that Mitchell said was fully automatic and that he used in his job, Wojan said.

“He told me he was a Navy SEAL and worked for the FBI. He’s a very good dancer,” the private detective said.

Wojan was able to get Mitchell and his companion out of the house they were squatting in.

Monica McCoy said she knows firsthand what it means to trust Mitchell.

The McCoys bought a house next door to him in Wylie about five years ago. He befriended them immediately and visited often, bringing along his wife, Sarah, and their small daughter, McCoy said.

He encouraged the two women to go on shopping trips. But Sarah never had any money, and she asked to borrow cash to make purchases with a promise to pay McCoy back. She never did.

Mitchell began borrowing money to tide him over between contracting jobs, McCoy said, adding that it was never repaid. The McCoys said they learned that he would contract for a remodeling job, take a down payment and then never return to do the work.

The elderly woman who lived across the street baked cakes. Mitchell paid her to make his daughter a fancy birthday cake. His check bounced, McCoy said.

He went to the McCoys’ house one day looking desperate. He needed to borrow pain medication for his back.

“He took three Vicodin and chewed them up,” McCoy said. “It was pretty obvious what was going on.”

One day McCoy’s husband approached her. Mitchell was really in a bad place financially, he said. He needed to borrow a large sum of money. The couple agreed to help.

“We ended up loaning them $5,700,” she said. “They moved out two or three months later in the middle of the night. We knew we’d never see that money again.”

Last week the couple were getting ready for work when they saw a familiar face on a television news program. It was Mitchell, and he was in jail in Denton.

“My husband had felt so bad about losing all that money. You try to help someone, and that’s what you get,” she said. “But when we saw him sitting there on that TV, it was joy.”

DONNA FIELDER can be reached at 940-566-6885. Her e-mail address is dfielder@dentonrc.com .