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Freddrick Mark Brito, shown here in a photo taken while he was working at UCLA, was arrested on A

Freddrick Mark Brito, who recently held a position raising funds for the David Geffen School of Medicine, has had a history of working under aliases to hide his criminal history and was arrested after holding his position at UCLA for several months.

According to university police, Brito was arrested by university police on April 8 for violating his parole by not reporting a previous felony. Brito is no longer employed by the university.

Brito, who went by the name Federiqkoe DiBritto at UCLA, was hired last October as the executive director of development and patient relations for the division of digestive diseases at the medical school.

“We certainly feel upset and betrayed by anyone who might take a position with the university under false pretenses,” said university spokesman Lawrence Lokman.

Brito was hired by UCLA’s external affairs division, the university’s fund-raising and public relations branch. External affairs did not search for Brito, but relied on an outside firm, Askanas Human Resource Consulting, to check his references and obtain letters of reference.

Leslie Askanas, the president of the consulting firm, declined to comment.

Even though he was in charge of fund-raising during his time at UCLA, Brito had no access to the department’s finances, and there is no evidence of financial mismanagement, Lokman said.

But Brito’s position allowed him access to donor records, which include donation history, addresses and contact information for various donors to the digestive diseases division.

The university has not received any related complaints from donors, Lokman said.

As a result of Brito’s arrest, the university is deciding how to change its hiring practices and will implement changes with recommendations from campus human resources, Lokman said.

Currently, university policy only requires criminal background checks for positions that generally have to deal with campus safety and does not mandate checks for development officers. Human resources will suggest which other positions should require criminal background checks, Lokman said.

Brito has appeared in the Daily Bruin several times under the name “Federiqkoe DiBritto,” and was featured prominently in a Nov. 15, 2004 Daily Bruin article. The facts in those articles have yet to be verified.

He may have recently used the alias “Federiqkoe DiBritto,” which he used while at UCLA, to seek a seat on the Greater Cypress Park Neighborhood Council in northeast Los Angeles. Someone by that name was running for the elections, which are set to take place June 26, but has withdrawn his candidacy, said Jerry Kvasnicka, the independent election coordinator for various neighborhood councils.

Reached by phone, Brito declined to comment on his use of the alias “Federiqkoe DiBritto” at UCLA. But Brito confirmed that he was running for a spot on the neighborhood council and dropped out of the election.

According to court records, Brito pleaded guilty to a felony embezzlement charge in July 2002 and was sentenced to 16 months in prison. In 1991, he was charged with felony grand theft and forgery and was sentenced to two years in prison.

Brito’s history of working high-level positions spans almost 20 years, and he has pretended to be a psychiatrist, a priest and the head of a nonprofit organization.

He was first hired as a psychiatrist in 1987 to work with a Los Angeles County public defender, according to a Chicago Tribune article.

For a short time, he posed as a priest in Arizona at parishes in Tucson and Phoenix. It was when he was posing as a priest that Brito was arrested for the felony charges and extradited back to California.

Using the name Freddrick Esparza, Brito presided over various church sacraments, including funerals, baptisms and Mass, during his short stint as a priest. But some sacraments were invalid because he was not a real priest, according to an Arizona Republic article.

“It’s tragic because people oftentimes place their trust in clergy and this time it was misplaced trust,” said David Sanfilippo, vicar general of the diocese of Phoenix, in a telephone interview.

After his release from prison for the embezzlement charge, Brito was hired as the executive director for the National Kidney Foundation of Southern California. While on parole, Brito worked for a short time from late September to early December in 2003.

Brito was fired from his executive director position and was escorted out of the building by security guards on Dec. 1, 2003, said an employee who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution.

The employee said that Brito appeared to not know how to do some of the things that an executive director should know, such as reading expense reports.

Though Brito had no access to the foundation’s finances, the employee said Brito did damage to the foundation in other ways. The employee said that Brito verbally abused staff, volunteers and donors.

“Once we explained who he really was, then they were fine, but in the meantime they didn’t understand why they were being treated in such a horrible way,” the employee said.

Lokman said he did not hear any reports of Brito verbally abusing coworkers during his time at UCLA.

Despite being interviewed by the kidney organization’s board of directors and a background check, the organization hired him out of several candidates.

“Our national office ran him through an agency to verify his credentials and all his credentials were verified because all of the people (on his resume) were con people,” the employee said.

“Everybody on there was set up to make him look good.”