Deadbeat Dad Lured Home With Promise of Role in Jennifer Aniston Film

When “producers” contacted a man who owed $32,000 in child support with the offer to play a role in a new Jennifer Aniston rom-com, Joshua Garlathy didn’t think twice about leaving his Hawaii hideout and heading back to Allentown, Pennsylvania.

There, his ex-girlfriend had spent the last 19 years trying to get Garlathy to pay up — but nothing worked. The “producer” was actually Scott Bernstein, a nationally known bounty hunter, and the movie — called Banished in Brooklyn, in which Garlathy would play “a small part as a guitar-strumming bad guy named Dirty Nick” — was all bogus.

It might be the greatest deadbeat ruse since Operation Iron Snare, down in Alabama, which rounded up deadbeat parents with the promise of Iron Bowl football tickets.

Garlathy pleaded guilty Tuesday to willful failure to pay child support, more than a month after he was arrested when his flight from Hawaii landed in Philadelphia. He was nabbed under a new law making it a crime to move out of Pennsylvania to avoid paying child support.

The plot had originated with Garlathy’s ex-girlfriend, Beth Ann Holderman. … “He always wanted to be famous,” Holderman said. “Now he’s famous,” she told the Allentown Morning Call.

Garlathy arrived at the Philadelphia International Airport in May to find a film crew there. They weren’t filming a movie, but Bernstein’s pilot for a reality TV show on deadbeat parents.

The man pleaded guilty.

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