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Jun.19, 2010, 2:05 p.m.

DELRAY BEACH — An activist, former city commissioner and local business owner, a church-going woman, Charlotte Gilmore Durante last month sat in court in a drab blue jail-issue smock. Her face was a mask. Her predicament was huge.

Durante, 66, is charged with operating a Ponzi scheme that for two years drained money from dozens of working-class Haitians and put $1.8 million in her pockets.

It is hard to square Durante's own hardscrabble past and her history of community involvement with the picture drawn by police of a woman who preyed on the poor.

"I always found Charlotte to be very knowledgeable. She was an integral part of the commission," said Leon Weekes, a former commissioner and mayor.

Weekes, like others who know Durante, was surprised to read about the charges against her. "It was entirely out of context with her," Weekes said.

Durante is the daughter of Claretter Gilmore, who was the granddaughter of slaves in Alabama. Gilmore, who only went through the sixth grade and made her living as a washerwoman, insisted that her eight children get at least a high school education, according to her 2000 obituary.

Like their mother, Durante and her sister, Ola Gilmore Vickers, also of Delray Beach, became active church women, though police say Durante used her religion to convince people to give her money.

Durante was the first black woman on the Delray Beach City Commission, serving from 1978 to 1981. In 1997 she started a nonprofit newspaper geared toward the black community, called The Village Beat.

She was active on the board of the Morikami Museum and Park and a founder of the Visions of Perfect Harmony Festival. The first black Realtor and insurance agent in her hometown, she was active in the business community of West Atlantic Avenue and president of the Delray Beach Sister Cities committee.

Before she was advised by her mother's attorney to be silent, Lori Durante stoutly defended her mother's innocence, accusing the State Attorney's Office and Delray police of working to "deliberately destroy Charlotte G. Durante's opportunity for any fair legal representation before she even made it to the courthouse."

But the voices against Charlotte Durante, against her reputation and history in Delray Beach, are louder and more numerous. As many as 93 people have talked to police.

Durante told them that they were giving short-term loans to people buying houses, according to the police report. As soon as the homebuyers got their mortgages, they would pay back Durante, who would pay back the loans with 16 percent to 18 percent interest.

According to a police accounting of the $1.8 million Durante allegedly collected, she paid $805,000 in interest payments to those who had given her money. She used $327,000, police said, to make mortgage payments on three pieces of property in downtown Boynton Beach that were to be the future home of her daughter Lori's Museum of Lifestyle and Fashion History. One piece of property, worth $1.25 million, has since reverted to the seller. Two other pieces of property, valued at $194,000 and $200,000, are still registered to the fashion museum. In addition, nearly $300,000 went to support the fashion museum, and $766,000 in cash to herself, according to police accounts.

Toward the end, Charlotte Durante was telling people that there was no more money, including a woman who needed cash to bury relatives in Haiti, others who hoped to live on the interest they earned and still others who had used their homes as collateral to invest with Durante.

Durante has sat in a county jail cell for more than two weeks while a court-appointed public defender and her family scramble to pay her $243,000 bail.

Sustained by her husband, sister, daughter, son and members of her church, Durante is still said to be in low spirits and poor health.

A year ago, as the Museum of Lifestyle and Fashion History was moving from its former Delray Beach home to the Boynton Beach Mall, Lori Durante told a Palm Beach Post reporter that part of the museum's rent was paid by an anonymous donor.

There is little about the 10-year-old 8,000-square-foot Museum of Lifestyle and Fashion History to suggest that it absorbed nearly $300,000 of what police are calling Durante's tainted money. It contains three exhibit rooms and a small seating area. Museum literature credits local businesses for paint, renovation of the 8,000-square-foot space, even furniture and rugs. Most exhibits were donated by local collectors.

Today, Lori Durante remains at her post at the front desk of her museum, whose fate might also hang in the balance of what happens in the case against her mother, Charlotte Durante. How the adverse publicity affects future shows and donors remains unclear. The quiet museum, like its exhibits of Barbie dolls and antique clothing, seems suspended in time.