Xavier Alvarez’s lie began soon after he was elected on November 6, 2006, by a 48-vote margin, to the Three Valleys Municipal Water District Board in the Claremont, California, area.
In June 2007, the bespectacled Pomona resident, with a bushy dark mustache that practically devoured his face, was among a group of local officials who were on a tour of a Southern California Edison hydroelectric facility in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. During a breakfast on the first morning of the tour, Alvarez met Melissa Anne Campbell, a Southern California Edison project manager who was helping to organize the trip. Her coworkers had told Campbell that Alvarez was a former marine, so she informed Alvarez that she, too, had served in the US Marine Corps. Alvarez said that he had served for 29 years, retiring at the rank of sergeant major, and that he spent 25 of his years in Marine Force Reconnaissance.
But none of those stories were true. Not in the slightest. Alvarez never even served in the…