There’s a basic truth Napa County consumer fraud prosecutor Daryl Roberts has learned in 20 years of busting scam artists and watching county residents’ backs: We’re all suckers.

“It’s the old — I hate to say it — it’s the old quote from P.T. Barnum: A sucker is born every minute,” he said.

Often, the suckers will go for something legal: From playing the state lottery to popping miracle diet pills, many of us have gambled on the notion that if we just fork over a few bucks on a special offer, we can undo reality.

While someone somewhere truly does win the state lottery, Roberts gets working when a claim is fake or dangerous. He has made a career out of chasing down snake oil salesman, flim-flam ad slogans and even celebrity spokespeople peddling bad products.

Grocery store sale price not coming up at the register?

Roberts has had a hand in fixing that.

Personal alarm company strong-arming seniors?

Roberts made them pay.

Sheepish about being fooled?

Roberts is there to listen.

“The fact that there’s a sucker born every minute doesn’t mean it’s legal to take advantage of that sucker,” said Mark Pollock, a Napa attorney who helped hire Roberts for the DA’s office in the 1980s. “Daryl is not the kind of individual that is going to blame (someone) just because they’ve been taking advantage of.”

The seriousness of Roberts’ job contrasts with some aspects of his personality. He’ll wear ties with Warner Brothers cartoon characters, and adopt a British accent while playing in a comedy on stage. He spent 10 years on the board of the Dreamweavers Theatre and helped steer the group during hard times in 2005, according to June Rife, president of the troupe’s board.

“He loves his accents, that’s for sure,” she said. “He really likes physical comedy where people fall over and do strange things.”

It contributes to a reputation widely known in Napa’s legal circles.

“Daryl Roberts is a very interesting, intelligent guy,” Pollock said. “He is a ham and I mean that in a complimentary way. ... At the same time you can watch this guy pick up the telephone on a consumer fraud matter and lose all sense of theatrics. He becomes very committed, very precise, and it was that quality that impressed me when I interviewed him.”

From adoptions to vitamins

Roberts graduated from Sacramento’s McGeorge Law School in 1983 with an eye toward protecting the environment.

“I’d hoped to go to work for maybe a state environmental agency, but when I got out of law school the state was in the red,” Roberts said.

He ended up in private practice doing civil law, an experience that he said helped him after he found out the Napa County District Attorney’s was hiring for an environmental/consumer law position in the mid-1980s.

“I didn’t think I had the right experience, but I applied anyway,” he said. “Turns out they were looking for someone with civil experience because when you’re working on environmental and consumer law in the DA’s office you really do most of your work on the civil side.”

That means when consumer fraud wrongdoers get hammered in civil court, they don’t go to jail. Instead their pocketbook gets drained via fines and funds to repay defrauded consumers.

Over the years Roberts did more and more work with consumer fraud, developing a passion for it. In recent years the DA’s office hired a full-time environmental attorney, leaving Roberts to chase after consumer fraud full time.

One of Roberts’ most memorable cases is a 2006 settlement against Robert Chinery, president of the New Jersey supplement maker Nutraquest.

When Nutraquest was known as Cytodyne Technologies, it sold a diet supplement pill containing ephedra, a substance known to cause heart problems and one generally blamed for the death of Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler.

Chinery personally had to pay $1 million after his company went bankrupt. In a statement he said his company stopped including ephedra as a “business decision fueled by consumer demand.”

“I started to get involved in the dietary supplement cases in the mid-1980s,” Roberts said. “They have very deceptive ads. None of these things do what they claim to do and people just fall for it left and right, spending millions of dollars. ... People just want to believe, especially with dietary supplements. Everyone wants to believe that it’s a magic pill that will solve their weight problems and they don’t have to change their lifestyle.”

One of Roberts’ most high-profile cases involved a firm that dashed a very different kind of dream for would-be clients — the Yunona USA adoption firm.

Yunona president, Ivan Jerdev oversaw an operation in Napa that lied to more than 100 clients around the United States about the availability for adoption of orphaned children in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere, netting what Napa police estimated was more than $1.1 million in ill-gotten money.

Jerdev fled to Russia in 2005 before local police were able to launch an investigation, but in 2006 Roberts was able to secure a $368,000 judgment against Jerdev’s U.S. assets. Napa police are working on filing criminal charges.

Roberts also settled a May 2006 lawsuit against Albertsons supermarkets for overcharging customers.

“Albertsons had two problems,” he said. “One was when they’re selling you potato salad in the deli they’re not supposed to sell you the weight of the container that it’s in, but they weren’t deducting that. So for each consumer it only means a nickel, dime, or maybe a quarter, but when you add those transactions thousands and thousands of times statewide it was a lot of money for the company. The other problem was their scanners weren’t working correctly. You’d see a price at the shelf but it would scan up at a higher price at the checkout.”

The future may see Roberts merging some of his passion for the environment with his zeal for chasing down diet supplement quacks. Some supplement makers take their ingredients from China, where lead pollution is ending up in their products.

“You have cars burning leaded gasoline, you have lead smelters and they’re burning coal like crazy and the coal has lead in it,” he said, adding the lead in the air then settles on crops. “Unless you clean the lead off, which they’re not doing, it stays on the plant. What we’re now discovering is we’re looking at a lot of ingredients that probably come from China. You’re going to see some stuff from us about products having too much lead in them.”