Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Exposing The Hollywood Con Queen

Episode Date: June 12, 2024

Exposing The Hollywood Con Queen

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It was about something else. It goes back to 2018. At the time, I was working as a features writer at the Hollywood Reporter. And at the time, I covered almost exclusively what I like to call the kind of sleazy or dark underbelly of Hollywood. So, you know, anything that had to do with crime or cons or, you know, frauds or murder or just all the sort of weird. you know, kind of unseemly stuff that happens in Hollywood. That was, that was kind of my beat. It sort of became my beat.

And it was just a lot of weird stories, you know, strange tales. And so one day, a colleague of mine came over to my desk and she gave me a tip. She said that a contact of her as a big Hollywood producer had, was being impersonated. And she said, maybe you should look into it. And at the time, I thought, well, okay. But I didn't really think much of it. It was, you know, I heard a lot of stuff like that, a lot about just random cons or weird little grifts and things like that. So anyway, I looked into it.

I talked to the folks at the producers company. They said, yeah, there's something going on, but we're not sure what. There was somebody or a group of people, some entity was impersonating these famous Hollywood producers, all women. And these are not names that, you know, your average Joe would have heard of, but in certain circles, they were huge, you know, hugely influential, very powerful people. So, for instance, folks like Kathleen Kennedy, who produced, you know, E.T. for instance, Amy Pascal was another. She produced some really big movies. There were a number of these very high-powered women who were being impersonated. Well, not only were they being impersonated, but, But whoever was impersonating them was contacting up-and-coming professionals in the entertainment industry and selling them on the idea of some sort of work project for which it was required

that they then travel to Indonesia. And so these up-and-coming artists, a lot of photographers, you know, actors, screenwriters, people who were sort of in the business of entertainment were being contacted supposedly by these famous women and being told that they needed to go to Indonesia on these fake work projects. So right away, you know, it immediately took on these very strange overtones because I thought, well, this is just this is just completely bizarre. why, who would do this? Why, what's, why Indonesia? What's, what's the point? You know, where's the money? Like, how does it all fit together? What's going on? It didn't really make much

sense. And of course, as a journalist, when it doesn't make much sense, you know, you get more interested. So I was, I was, I was pretty curious at this point. Then I spoke to one of the victims, this young guy, he was a photographer, and I got on the phone with him and he, and he he unspooled this story for me. We spoke for like two hours, and he just told me this absolutely unbelievable story about how he had gone to Indonesia, thinking he was working for Amy Pascal. He had blown through $50,000 or $60,000. It was the entirety of his life savings, money that he had earmarked for medical care for his for his child he so he'd lost all his money but which was bad enough but what really struck me in my conversation with this guy was

was how sort of damaged he was I mean this guy was really messed up by this experience he had spent weeks weeks and weeks many weeks I mean I think it might have even been a few months in this kind of relationship with, with, you know, Amy Pascal, this woman thinking that he was on this fantastic work project with Amy Pascal. He'd gone all over Indonesia. He'd taken flights and buses and cars. I mean, he's just gone everywhere. He'd done all these things.

And the whole time he'd been in this ongoing conversation with the woman he thought was Amy Pascal, and she turned out to be this incredibly abusive, manipulative, volatile, contemptuous woman. And she had kind of strung him along for weeks and weeks, taken all his money, put him in these impossible situations

and really just engineered and orchestrated this crazy psychological, you know, mind game on him. And so when I spoke to him, he had just emerged from this. And he was, he was wrecked. I mean, it's, it, he was just, he was just a total mess.

He'd lost all his money, as I said, but he'd also kind of lost his self-confidence. You know, his whole sort of work life was, was messed up. His family life was a mess. So it had, it had just torn, torn his life apart. And I remember I got off that call. And I just thought, okay, well, this is, you know, there's something. going on here that is different than what I at the time understood to be, you know, your average scam because there was so much work that had gone into this, huge amounts of labor

on the part of the scammers to pull this off. And what I would subsequently learn is that the amount of money he lost was the exception rather than the rule. That is to say there were hundreds and hundreds of these victims who went to Indonesia. And the vast, vast majority of of them lost relatively little money, you know, in the order of a few thousand, you know, a few thousand dollars. Really not, not all that much. This guy happened to lose a lot. How did, but yeah. I'm sorry. How did he lose so much? Because I know that the scam, watching the scam, there was so little money derived, you know, as far as, you know, profit for the scam. Like, I mean, most of the money these people are spending is on hotels and cars and

traveling and, you know, buses and trains and, you know, whatever, you know, airfare, like that the money that the con artist is getting was actually like, you know, 1,500. I mean, these people are costing these people tens of thousands of dollars, like cost them $10,000, but the actual money that the con artist made was $1,500, $1,500. Like, it's like, and there was, it was so much work. Yeah. Because I was watching it with my wife and I was like, if, I was willing to put this much work into a scam, I could make millions.

Yeah. Like, what is this, what is this person doing? Why is, why are they doing this? Like, it doesn't, it didn't make sense. Yeah. I mean, it is. It was disturbing. Yeah, it is. And this is, this is kind of the, the question that sort of animated me from the beginning, which was, and I think everybody who comes into contact with this scam sooner or later gets to this question, which is, well, what, what in the hell was going on? I mean, Why did this person do this? What was the end game?

And we can certainly talk about that. I think, you know, I will say that the, there were enough people that that lost enough money, not just to the airlines and, you know, the hotels and stuff, but to the actual scammer, to the actual scammer that it made it. Well, a lot of, a lot, not all of that appears in the dock. I mean, a lot of that I do talk about it in my book. But so there were a few. very key victims who lost quite a bit of money, which I think, you know, enabled, enabled him in part to keep going. I mean, he had other sources of revenue and stuff. But, but yeah, I mean, to your point, he wasn't getting rich off this. You know, this was not the scam that you hear

about, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars where the person, you know, gets away and, you know, goes off and buys a villa and Hawaii and lives happily over after. This was, basically a labor of love in a sense. It was a constant effort to to keep this thing going because it required the involvement of many, many people across many continents. It required a constant effort to get more people sucked in to keep them going. And when people cottoned on and bowed out, it required getting new blood, new victims in. And then, And just keeping, keeping them going, keeping, stringing them along required a lot of work because he was constantly on the phone with these people. I mean, he would, like this guy that I mentioned, I talked to, I mean, you know, the Amy Pascal that he knew called him multiple times a day, kept him on the phone for, you know, 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour sometimes, just sort of haranguing and, you know, harassing and and sort of drumming home.

the importance of the work and stuff. So it was sort of a 24-7 operation, which brings us to your question, your central question, which is, well, why? I mean, why in the world would someone do this for such a little payoff? And the conclusion that I came to is that there was a payoff,

but it wasn't really a financial payoff. The payoff was to be found, So what's elsewhere in this case? And what I sort of landed on is that there is a kind of complex psychological game that he was orchestrating that satisfied something, some deep need within him, you know, and that took this very malignant, malevolent, you know, manifest. it was it was a desire to control a desire to manipulate there was a very sadistic element to this this was somebody who found pleasure in in the act i think of creating these elaborate scenarios placing people in these impossible situations and getting them to do to do his bidding and you know I'm not a psychologist and I hesitate to make any kind of definitive diagnoses, but I think just

describing the behavior gives you a sense of where the pleasure centers for this person lay. And they really didn't lay as far as I can tell in the kind of the financial reward, but rather in the interpersonal mechanics, the weird psychological gamesmanship that was required of him and that he forced on other people. And whatever that, that, you know, particular sort of sadistic event that he had was this particular scam satisfied that itch. And I think that's why he put so much work into it and was so willing to expend the kinds of energy that I think most people would, you know, just say, well, screw it. It's not worth it. Yeah, I wrote, so I wrote a book called bailout.

It was about a guy named Marcus Shrinker who had, he had run a few different scams. And, but he was a pathological liar. Like, I mean, like a very, I don't want to say a good pathological liar because he wasn't exception. You know, the problem with pathological liars is that they'll lie about little tiny, silly things that you figure out it was a lie. You know, and they, it's very quickly revealed that that's not true. You know, you like you pick up a phone or you bump into the person the next day or whatever, for whatever reason.

But he would tell these ridiculous lies. And it was to make himself feel better and he got a kick out of fooling people. Well, this is just pathological liars in general. They, they drive extreme enjoyment out of fooling someone. And it makes them feel better to fool people and to and that you feel that this person is important. he constantly and this is the thing about the guy he was married to a beautiful woman he was a pilot he had three beautiful children he lived in a multi-million dollar house he had a successful hedge fund he drove nice vehicles plenty of money he's a top tier individual yeah and he's still lying he

lies about working for NASA he lies about being a fighter pilot like none of these things are true You were never in the military. You were never a fighter pilot. You never worked for NASA, you know, but it was a constant thing. It's like, you're already somebody that people look up to. So, you know, the whole, so, and then when I was watching it and I was the, the, the documentary, I was thinking, like, there's, he had to get some kind of sick, you know, pleasure out of, you know, endorphin rush or whatever you, you know, you call it, like by fooling these people. or by, and like you said, by controlling them or allowing, you know, it, it almost seems like a different kind of like a pathology because I don't think it, because there just wasn't enough money in it, in my opinion. But then again, I don't know, like the person with the $50,000, I'm not sure how that individual ended up getting the money. Because initially, like the little fees that they had to pay along the way, got to pay $1,000 for this, $600 for this. So I could see that. And maybe being in, is it Indonesia? maybe that's a lot of money there like you know yeah i don't know like i'm thinking is that

is this a lot of money and he's doing this to over a hundred and some odd people oh more than that even going off it's like hundreds of people yeah yeah yeah and i think i mean your descriptions of of the pathological liar that you wrote about and and encountered overlap very neatly on a lot of the behavior that I saw with this individual. I'm just lying about random, easily disprovable things that just made no sense at all. I mean, it was almost, there were a few instances that I learned about where the lying was, I mean, it was so reckless and so almost whimsical, like it was just completely unmoored from any sense of reality. I mean, you could disprove it in a second. And, and yeah, I think there was a very strong, a very strong propensity to do that because, yeah,

it afforded a certain amount of pleasure. I think what you said about fooling people is key. I, you know, I spoke to a number of experts on psychopathy and various other pathologies just to get, you know, to get my head around what I might be dealing with with this person. And so I learned quite a bit about these different person. personality disorders and in the process of reporting the book and the documentary. And one of the themes that came up was this issue of, you know, kind of fooling people, getting one over on other people and the pleasure that can be had that can be derived

from, you know, going through with these really elaborate ruses and then sort of stepping back and seeing how people stumble and fall and, you know, trip over themselves in these traps that you've that you've made and and that was really interesting to learn about i was going to say it's funny because i read several uh studies and there aren't a lot on pathological liars and i read a book i already two books one of the books it was called uh lies lies the psychology of deception um and you know it was and it's funny because it referenced some of the studies that i then read you know and they're not long They're 12 pages, 14 pages.

But yeah, I read it and, you know, you're reading it and you're like, and it would divvy up the different types of pathological liars and, you know, it was super interesting. And then it's so funny because once you've read that material and you're having these interactions with this person, you're like, okay. Like, that makes sense. Like, I can kind of understand that. Like, I don't know why you said that, but it doesn't even have to be for a benefit. That's what really killed. For somebody who, you know, for my. who clearly doesn't have an issue lying but there needs to be a benefit like I don't just walk

around lying and saying that I I I won you know in 2002 I was a quarterback and won the Super Bowl like that's like I'm not going to say it like there needs to be a benefit like that's the kind of ridiculous stuff that he would say you know and and you'd go okay well I I know that's not true like and I could easily find that out like why would you even say that it makes no sense it's not it's not there's no benefit other than you feeling good right now because maybe you're trying to one up me or like it just didn't make sense like i couldn't even but you could see it it was so clear and the fact that this guy was willing to do it was the same thing with you know i forget what what is the name of the person eventually we he has lots he had lots of different names

obviously but but we he's most commonly known as harvey so we can call him harvey for the purposes of the show yeah yeah i don't you know and i know he was trying to but anyway let's keep going because he look for all of his you know horrible traits like he was an interesting guy yeah you know what i mean like that's the nicest way to put it's like like there's no downtime with this guy i mean he's he's he's living a very interesting life i mean he's he's a character you know i'm not going to let him i'm not going to lend him money i don't want to you know i'm not going to i don't want to introduce him to anybody as a buddy or a friend but i could see having conversations with him as being interesting.

Oh, I mean, without a doubt, that was also something that just kept me going with the story for the first couple of years anyway. It was just this, this sense that, okay, I was dealing with somebody who was a very complicated person with a lot of sides and a lot of complexity. and there was a lot there was a lot to unpack you know and I wanted to understand that and then ultimately I mean I don't know how much you want to give away for your for your viewers but I mean I will say ultimately and I did confront this individual and had a series of conversations that went on and on and on and can I interrupt like how did that happen like at what point when you start

did you start writing articles first like how How did you decide, hey, I'm going to go all in on this? Like, I mean, let's face it, it should, it could have just been an article. Yeah, it could have been. Well, yeah, I suppose, I mean, I suppose it could have been. And for some people, it was. But for a variety of reasons, I, I just felt compelled to to keep, to keep going with it. And ultimately to, you know, to try to find this, this person.

So just to kind of walk you through the chronology a little bit. sort of how, you know, how it developed after the summer of 20, so the summer of 2018, I got this tip and I ultimately, I wrote a story. It was a cover story for the Hollywood reporter. And it was, it was called, you know, hunting the con queen of Hollywood. And it was just about this weird scam. And it was about this investigator who, who was trying to kind of crack the case at that, at that point, she had not, had not, you know, solved. it, but she was hot on the pursuit of this person, or at the time, she thought it was a group of people. And so the story was just sort of like, there's this crazy scam, you know, who is the

Con Queen of Hollywood? What's going on here? Here are the voices of all these people who've been affected. Here's the best skitter. We actually got some recordings that had been grabbed of the scammer in action, and we embedded those in the article so people could hear the voice work. And it was It was very elaborate and weird and nobody knew, you know, was it a man? Was it a woman? Was it multiple people? Was it a criminal enterprise? So there were all these questions. The story went viral, kind of, and it just became a thing. And so I kept working on it, and I started getting more reporting, and I learned eventually, you know, who it was. And I started talking to more victims, but we didn't know, I didn't know, you know, really much more than that.

Like, I had a sense of who it was, but I didn't know the real name. I didn't know much about the backstory of the person. We didn't really know where he was from day to day. Because in addition, weirdly, to doing this scam, this person also had a side gig as a food influencer in London, which was a completely, you know, different and sort of just a very weird thing to be doing while you're running this very elaborate scam in Hollywood. So that added a new wrinkle to the whole story. And I thought, well, that's, you know, that's definitely worth, worth some time trying to figure that out. So, you know, the months go by, time goes by. And ultimately I decided,

well, I want to try to write a book about this guy. So I sold the book idea in 2020, early 2020. And I started writing, I started doing the reporting and working on the book. And then, of course, COVID hit. And that kind of changed everything because I couldn't really go anywhere or it was at least very hard to go anywhere.

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After all, you're in your small space era. It's time to own it. Shop now at IKEA.ca. It was just kind of a crazy time, as you remember. And so I was working on the book and then Chris Smith, the documentary filmmaker, got in touch and he'd heard about the story and he'd heard about that I was writing a book and he said, maybe, you know, we should work on something together. And so he and I kind of paired up and that was in the summer of 2020 and very shortly after he and I paired up, I made the decision that I was going to go, I was going to go looking for this person, this scammer. And that was a kind of a pivotal moment. It changed everything because it meant I had to kind of venture out into the, into the world in COVID. I got on a plane and I flew to England, which is where I believed he was. But I didn't know, I didn't know where exactly.

I knew I had a pretty good idea that he was in the city of Manchester, but I didn't know really. I had an idea of where he might be, like what building he might be in, but I didn't know for sure. I had never spoken to him. I'd reached out many, many times to talk to him. He'd never responded. So I just was taking a gambling. I thought, I'm just going to go try to find this guy and get him to talk to me. So I flew to Manchester.

Hey, real quick, just wanted to let you guys know that we're looking for guests for the podcast. If you think you'd be a good guest or you know somebody, do me a favor. you can fill out the form the link is in our description box or you can just email me directly email is in the description box so back to the video yeah i was going to say the way you tracked him down was what you you had someone that did the yeah the global positioning where they studied all the like i have no idea how that works but did you ever see the documentary um don't fuck with yes yeah it was great that was what it made me think of i was like how like how like who has this software like how does this happen well you know it's funny but it might seem

sophisticated but it was it was well also i'll tell you the story so what what happened was okay i told you he is a food influencer right so one of his one of the things he did was that he had like 50 000 followers on instagram and i think most of them were just bought or purchased or whatever but he had this whole persona on instagram which was you know He'd get on there and he'd say, hey, Instagram folks. That was his thing, hey, Instagram folks. And he'd say, today I'm in, you know, fill in the blank. And he would, he'd be hopscotch all over the UK.

So he'd be in London, then he'd be in, you know, Edinburgh, then he'd be in Leeds. Then he'd be in, you know, whatever, pick your city, Bristol, whatever. And he was just all over the United Kingdom. And so you just never knew where he was. And sometimes, you know, he would do a video and then he wouldn't post it for a week or two. And by that point, he would have moved on to some other city and stuff. And he never, he never gave anybody any insight into where he lived or anything. So it was just this roving food influencer.

That's who he was. Yeah, his handle was pure bites. And it was just this roving food influencer who was tasting the greatest dishes from, you know, Edinburgh to London and everywhere in between and bringing, you know, bringing his. delightful treats to you, the viewer. And so the thing was, though, that when COVID happened, of course, it kind of curtailed people's movements. They couldn't really go maybe as far or, you know, as wide as they normally would.

So one day in that summer, he, for some reason, it's still a bit unclear why, but for some reason, he decided to do an Instagram interview with this old classmate of his from his childhood who was sort of interested in his life. So he gets on the Instagram live thing and he starts talking to her and he starts telling her about his life and his difficulties and, you know, it's half truths, half lies. He's just full of it. She later told me she thought he was just full of shit. but anyway at one point so he's sitting there right he's got the camera on him and in the background

you see this city all these buildings and everything and it's a bit hard to tell there's no there's no definitive landmark it's just a bunch of it's an urban landscape could have been anywhere could have been anywhere right there was really only one really only one building that was semi-recognizable but i'll bet you the similar buildings are all over the place in in uh in europe yeah i mean it was like it could have been yeah exactly it was like Like, just an anonymous city, you know, nothing particularly. London Bridge, London Bridge, was it? Right, right.

Like if he'd had the tour, the Eiffel Tower, London Bridge or something then. Right. But in the case, yeah, it was just an ordinary, you know, buildings. So he does this interview. And then in the course of the interview, he says to his interlocutor, he says, and then here, you know, here I am in the great city of London, which I love. And, you know, I'm living my best life. so forth. So anyway, so the interview ends. This is in like, I don't know, August or I

can't remember one, sometime in the summer of 2020. So I think to myself, well, that's interesting. So it's COVID. He has identified himself as being in London. And it was clear that he was like living in this whatever, wherever he was, wherever he was, you know, doing the interview from. This was his, at least for now, sort of a home or a temporary home or somewhere where he was right now. And I thought, okay, well, maybe this is my shot, you know, because all the previous interviews, he'd been, like, in the street or in some restaurant or whatever. But here he was in somewhere that looked like maybe he was living there. He said it was London. Hmm, okay.

So I took a bunch of screen. I recorded the video. And then later, I took a bunch of screenshots. And I contacted a friend of mine who was in. the UK and I said, look, I need, I just, I need some help here. Let's, let's figure this out. I don't know where this is. It could be anywhere. What do you think? Do you think, can you, you know, he's from the UK. Maybe, maybe he knows something. So he spends a little time on it. And in this very sort of serendipitous turn of events, he gets back to me and he says, I think I, I think I know where

he is. And what, what had happened is he'd looked at all these screenshots. I, sent him. And he was from Manchester, this guy. And in one little corner of one of the screenshots, he saw this kind of little, little tiny bit of almost like a little mini city park, not even a big park, but just like a patch of grass, basically, where there was a bench and there was some buildings that were positioned in relation to the bench. Then this patch of grass and he said, I recognize that. I recognize that spot. And I said, what do you, what do you mean you recognize it? He said, yeah. He said, I worked across the street in that building for like eight years when I was younger. And the trick was that because this guy, the scammer was

was filming himself with the with the camera everything was inverted everything was reversed so it wasn't immediately clear what was what but this guy spent some time with the images and he realized exactly where it was in the city and then he and then he pulled up a google maps image of the city and positioned it in such a way that it would mirror the the perspective that you saw in the screenshots that I had taken and just doing a bunch of, you know, kind of reverse engineering of these images and then I sent in more images and we sort of worked on it together, figured out that exactly where this was, like literally what street, what corner, what buildings, and we switched the images around and figured out that, you know, exactly where it was.

And not only where where the image was, but where possibly zooming back where it was, where it was taken from and that's how we deduced that he was most likely staying in one of two or three buildings that were like two blocks away and one of those buildings it turned out when we did some more research was this this it's kind of like they call them in europe they call them apart hotels they're sort of like half apartment half hotel there are these residences that are available for people who are kind of on the move or you know a business traveler who needs a place to stay for a week or a month or two weeks or or whatever they're kind of like they're they're they're you know furnished nice apartments so they're a step up from just a hotel room and you

you know you get your own kitchen and your own you know your own entrance and a concierge service and so it's sort of like having your own little mini apartment for a certain amount of time And that was perfect, right? Because this guy was always on the move. And so an apart hotel, no strings attached, no leases, nothing like that. You come, you stay for two weeks or a week or a month or whatever. You go. And also in COVID, it's great, right? Because you, you know, you can kind of hunker down. You can shelter in place. You can get your food. You don't have to deal with other people so much. You can be anonymous. I mean, it was all the pieces. started to fit. So that's where I went when I went on this trip. And ultimately, that's where I found him. And then what proceeded was the series of interactions that I had with him that ultimately went on for, yeah, like weeks and weeks. And that's when I really started to get a closer look at his personality. and the you know the complexity that we mentioned earlier that this was a really interesting person and he was a really interesting person very disturbed and and troubling but but certainly very interesting

um so you kind of staked him out and then you he came down and you approached him i mean how what you had to know he's i don't know if he's hiding i mean i know he's moving around but I don't know if he felt like he was hiding because he knew that he knew these stories had come out yeah you know he he was and when you spoke with him he explained right away that he was super concerned very you know he was obviously worried that it was going to catch up with him yeah I mean that's what it seemed like I could be misreading it but yeah I mean so at that point yeah there'd been there've been a lot of stories about him I'd written about you know other journalists in the states had written about him in the UK you know the FBI by

that point had opened an investigation and they had created a what they called a portal, which was essentially a website where they solicited testimonials from victims from around the world who had encountered this guy and they asked for relevant details. You know, how when, when were you scammed? How much money did you lose? Where did you go? What happened? You know, do you have any emails or supporting documents to help us? And so they had an entire digital infrastructure in place to help build their case because there were victims from all around the world. I later figured it out.

There were every single continent on the planet except Antarctica. There were victims from everywhere. And so, you know, they had this, the FBI had this digital portal. They were soliciting information. There was, there was an investigation in the UK. This guy had already been, you know, had been taken to court by various victims in other scams and in other sort of criminal enterprises that, that, you know, for small amounts of money, but still, there were lots of people who'd tried to get him in court in the UK

already. The Indonesians were, you know, the authorities in Indonesia were, we're looking at. it, the Americans were looking at it, the Brits were looking at it. So there was a kind of a net that was closing in. COVID was further complicating it. And yeah, here he was. I mean, he was basically on the lamb. He was, he was hiding. He wasn't communicating with, with me or with any, any other journalists. And, and he was doing his best to just to stay in. And, and so, you know it was it was it was it was not a given that that an effort to communicate with him in this way was was going to be successful um and right yeah he hadn't been he hadn't been

answering your call your your your messages so yeah you would assume he you show up and he'd be like ah get away from me yeah exactly yeah and also you know by that point i had been talking to other people, like in his family, people who had known him as a young person, people who had a much, much deeper understanding of his past and who he was and what he was capable of as a person. And I had heard some really disturbing things about things he'd done, you know, behaviors, many of which were just deeply manipulative and criminal. but there were some stories I heard that, you know, in which he was, acted violently. That was troubling for me, you know, as somebody who was going in search of him.

I obviously didn't want to get into any kind of situation where I would be in danger or were anybody else around me, even people in the street potentially would be in danger. So that was, that was a concern. So there were a lot of factors, you know, that went into, or that I had to think about when contemplating this. You know, I didn't want to, and I didn't, you know, I didn't want him to hurt himself either. He was a subject to him of an investigation. There were serious people in the FBI and in the United States Department of Justice that wanted to hold him to account. I didn't want to stand in their way. So there was, there was a lot to consider. And ultimately, I settled on

the idea that I would approach him in a public place, you know, for maximum safety and also to give everybody involved a chance to extricate themselves with the least possible, you know, repercussions and damage and so forth. So there were a number of reasons for that. And yeah, so then I ultimately approached him and he agreed to, he agreed, I mean, he chatted with me for for quite a while there in the street. At first, he was, he was pretty freaked out. He said he didn't want to talk to me. And he started lying about all kinds of stuff right away. He said his lawyers were, you know, he said his lawyers would, would be in touch with me. He didn't have any lawyers at that time. He said, he started mentioning all these friends, people that he wanted me to talk to.

None of those people existed as far as I could tell. So there was this kind of barrage, right, of like faints and half-truths and outright lies. But then mixed in there was the skeleton of, you know, his story. There were things that he said that were true and people who he mentioned who did exist because I had spoken to them. So there was a kind of, you know, the seed of something real. And of course, that drew me in further because I really wanted to understand. who he was. And I think this goes back to maybe, you know, our mutual interest in

these topics is sort of like, well, what are the deeper psychological, you know, forces at work and who are these people? Why do they do what they do? What shaped them? What events in their early life, you know, went into making them who they are, who they became? And I really was interested in that. You know, I wasn't just out to kind of get a salacious, crazy story. I was genuinely curious about who this person was and why he did what he did. And so to me, there was like an intrinsic value in having a conversation with him because I thought those answers to be instructive about the nature of what it means to be a human being, which is of endless fascination to me right um how so what what was your plan if you didn't contact him yeah you've had enough

contact with everybody else and it would you know like it's good either way I was thinking either way it's good contact I'm sorry good content for the book to explain that look I did everything I could I went over there this is what happened I approached him he said no he spun me spun me i never heard from him again but you know you've got that two or three pages in the book and then you go on with the these kind of you know ancillary kind of people that are surrounding him that can give you some information yeah but you still have a book to put out yeah so if you can't talk to him yeah it's going to be a vastly different book oh 100% yeah and that was that was a real well that was that was basically one of the main motivators for

for going over there to see him was I realized at some point I just I have to talk to this person you know I don't it's just impaired I have to try I have to do my my absolute best to talk to this person to understand as much as I can about you know what happened and and why and yeah I mean I don't know I don't know how it would have gone if I hadn't if I hadn't talked to him I I mean I had quite a bit of material from other people, but I didn't have his perspective. And it was his perspective that I wanted and that I felt I needed to really understand things. And ultimately, you know, I think the kind of the sort of the big, the big picture takeaway that really was interesting to me that emerged from those conversations that I had with him was kind of a larger,

just a larger, a better, bigger, more nuanced understanding about the nature of kind of storytelling. He was somebody who was constantly telling stories. I mean, he told these elaborate stories to his victims to ensnare them. you know, in these really elaborate fantasies and these plots to get them to travel from, you know, Colorado Springs to Jakarta, Indonesia, I mean, thousands and thousands of miles away to pursue these fantastical fake work opportunities. You know, it takes a real skill, not just with impersonation, but with story building, like persuading people that this tail that you're spinning is real and legitimate. And that was his real skill.

He had a real talent for storytelling and kind of drawing people into these imaginary worlds. And what I was so kind of compelled by when I started having conversations with him was just the immense sort of descriptive powers that he had and the imagination that he had and the and the sort of ability to pull from all these different strands of, you know, myth and movies and books and childhood stories and, you know, this whole universe of stories that he would, that he would constantly be, you know, sort of,

of swimming in and he would he would use all of these things to inform our conversations and so as a result we would have these really interesting conversations about you know Indonesian Indonesian myth or the you know the the gods and the goddesses you know who people the ancient you know the ancient religions of the archipelago or you know or like you know the I talk about in the book, the 1001 Knights. He was a huge fan of the 1,0001 nights. So I wound up reading a lot of the 1,000 nights book

because he was so well-versed in those stories that they informed his understanding of himself, his understanding of the world, and then they also informed the scam. So I guess what I'm saying is that there was this huge, kind of sprawling universe of stories, that he was totally embedded in. And so the Khan, such as it was, existed in this kind of larger context of stories.

And so I found myself getting drawn into his world of stories. Khan was kind of embedded in this whole sort of sprawling universe of stories, and myths and, yeah, half-truths. Stop. Do you know how fast you were going? I'm going to have to write you a ticket to my new movie, The Naked Gun. Liam Nieson. Buy your tickets now.

I get a free Tilly Dog. Chili Dog, not included. The Naked God. Tickets on sale now. August first. Delusions and movies he'd seen and books he'd read and stories that he'd concocted himself, like literally stories that he'd, you know, written or dreams he'd had. And so the whole thing became a kind of an exercise in trying to figure out, well, which of these stories is real, which is total delusion or fantasy.

How do they relate to each other? How do they influence each other? And what does all of that say about the con, but also just about him? And then about, you know, at an even more kind of meta level, about this conversation that he and I were having. Like, was this just another story that he was telling? Was he using me? You know, was he, like, what was going on? And that, so ultimately, that's kind of where I landed at the end of all these conversations was just feeling like I was in this kind of kaleidoscopic Alice in Wonderland alternate universe.

peopleed with the characters of his fiction, of his imagination and his, and his, you know, his, is sort of fantastical life. And, and it was a very strange place to find myself. It was very strange to suddenly be, to feel like I was inhabiting his imagination in a way. And, but as a, as a writer, you know, it was great material because he, he would like, he would just tell me these, these absolutely wonderful stories about trips he'd taken and people he'd met and you know what it meant for him and his development as a person and i i just found all that stuff fascinating well while this is happening because at this point you'd gone back to um where were you living there i was i was living in seattle at the time yeah so you've gone back to seattle you're having these conversations um is he still like

he's still running this con? Like, how is he surviving at this point? Yeah. So I left, I left him in Manchester. I went back to Seattle. As far as I know, he stayed in his apart hotel there where I had found him originally. And we carried on having these conversations. And over the course of the next several weeks, I, you know, I had conversations with him, but I was sort of simultaneously through other sources, investigatory sources and law enforcement and this kind of thing, tracking what he was doing, you know, purely on the, for the scam. And one day I learned that, you know, I got a report basically that that very day he had, you know, a victim had, had revealed that he had sent something like a few thousand dollars anyway to the scammer.

And what had happened is that he had ever since COVID started, he had started tailoring the scam to COVID. So people were paying money for online courses, for instance, like, martial arts training, you know, acting classes. There were a whole range of services that people were paying for in a remote capacity and then wiring money overseas to, you know, for the work. And so instead of being crippled by the pandemic in the way that so many people were, he adapted.

And so that was happening. some of it anyway was happening it appears while i was talking to him and i should say while he was expressing at various points a great deal of remorse or supposed remorse for the uh right for the things that he had done yeah um so i mean you there's all of these investigations going on he's hanging out at this place. He knows you've found him. I'm assuming he knows, you know, that people know where he's at. Like he has to know this is coming to an end. Yeah. Well, so a few other things happened during the course of our, of our, of our, of our conversation. So one was that around that time, the grand jury in the United States,

at the behest of the Department of Justice had handed down an indictment. So the wheels of justice were spinning, you know, on multiple levels. There was an FBI investigation, the UK was investigating, but now there was also a grand jury indictment, which meant that, you know, things had proceeded to that phase. I mean, it wasn't just in an investigatory phase anymore. There were actual, you know, legal proceedings that were happening. So that was one thing.

And then the other thing that happened was that there was a podcast, you know, among the many people who got interested in this story, there was a podcast at one point that had been doing a bit of work on it. And they revealed his name, public. And that happened while he and I were actually in conversation over the course of these many weeks on these Zoom calls that we were having with him in the UK and I was in Seattle. And during that window of time of several weeks, this podcast revealed his name. And so suddenly he had been, you know, kind of publicly outed. And so I kind of had a front row seat in a way. Well, I did.

I had a front row seat to his reaction to being publicly outed. And I got to see the full measure of his rage and his frustration and his desire for vengeance and his absolute fury at being outed. And so interspersed with all the things that I was describing earlier, you know, his kind of rambling, storytelling and these very elaborate kind of fantasies that formed his biography or his autobiography as he was telling it to me, interspersed with that were these absolutely furious asides where he would just lash out at different people. He would lash out at Nicole, the investigator, who had been pursuing him for many years by that point. He lashed out at the folks who did the podcast, who had, who had publicized his name, you know, at victims. He told me that, you know, the victims deserved what they got, that they wanted fame, that they were, you know, they were just asking for it. And he lashed out at me. I mean, there were many times where he got very angry at me and, you know,

threatened to stop talking to me or, or worse. So, you know, I got to see the, all the different sides of his, of his personality, sort of in real time as he was responding to this, to this world, this law, you know, law enforcement, but also kind of the public. world closing in on him. And it was interesting because having seen where he lived and what his world was like in Manchester, which was a pretty circumscribed world, you know, he he left his apartment. He went to Marks and Spencer to get food. He came back to his apartment. You know, he didn't he didn't do a whole lot. And now that world was was getting even smaller and more

people were paying attention and not the people that he wanted to pay attention. So all of that was happening as I was having the conversation. And ultimately, his world got even smaller. It completely shut down because in the middle of our conversations, toward the end of our conversations, he got arrested. So what started as this, you know, this good faith effort on my part to have a conversation with him was successful but but it it was not ended by me nor by him our conversations were simply stopped because he because the police closed in on him and arrested him right well um did you ever i mean was he arrested to be extradited back to the u.s. or was this, you know, the U.K. arresting him?

Yes. I mean, do you commit crime in the U.S. Yeah, yeah, those are all good questions. So the way it works is the arrest, as I understand it, the arresting authority has to be the local authority, but there was a request by the FBI to both invent. investigate this person and then to proceed with an arrest for the purpose of extradition back to the United States, which is where he faces charges. So even though there are people

who want to pursue him for crimes committed in the UK, the charges that he currently faces are U.S. federal charges. So he would be extra. So, so, you know, he's been in jail for several years now. And, and, and that is all related to his extradition case back to the U.S. About a year ago, a judge ruled, a judge in the UK ruled after, you know, a couple years of proceedings, ruled that he should be extradited back to the U.S. And in his ruling, he cited Harvey's terrible behavior and his long-running scam and a bunch of other stuff. But basically, he ruled in favor of extradition. And then Harvey very quickly said about appealing the decision. And that's where it stands now. So the decision on the appeal has not yet been rendered.

but he remains in jail in the U.S., sorry, in the U.K., yeah, in the U.K., pending extradition to the U.S. on, I believe it's eight federal charges. Then the other question, of course, is, you know, is he going to cop a plea? Is he going to fight it? You know, maybe a judge in the U.K. might rule time served and cut him loose. All of that remains to be seen. Yeah, I mean, yeah, he can't go to charge. trial in the u.s not not with you know there's a ton of evidence yeah against them and people will show up yeah you know you don't need a lot to get convicted in the u.s right so i guess i guess you'd know about that yeah um but he uh you know and and and and um yeah he's uh he's there there's just so much evidence against them. I mean, they're going to have wire transfers. They're going to have

video calls. They're going to have phone calls. They're going to have, like, he can't go to trial. Like, he'll probably, and he's been arrested, and he was, he was in prison in Indonesia, correct? Yeah, exactly. We haven't even talked about that. But yeah, years ago, years before any of this happened, he was, he was convicted on basically, you know, white collar type crime embezzlement, something like that, sent to an Indonesian, high security Indonesian prison called Chippinang. And he was set to serve a year or two for these white collar crimes. And then while he was in prison serving time, he made a series of bomb threats against the U.S. embassy in Jakarta.

And then he was convicted, it was caught and convicted on, on terrorism-related charges in Jakarta and given several additional years on top of his existing white collar crime. And so he spent, you know, a number of years in a prison in Jakarta on these different, these different crimes. And that was all in a previous life prior to any of this stuff having to do with being a food influencer or an impersonator of Hollywood royalty. Yeah, they're not going to take a bomb threat lightly. Yeah. I knew a guy who wrote a letter who was incarcerated, who wrote a letter to the president and threatened the president and got seven years. Oh, wow. And the guy was mentally, he wasn't even all there.

Like, I don't think he could get himself to D.C., let alone close to the president. But doesn't matter. You know, they're not playing around. Yeah, they don't joke around with that stuff. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay.

So, yeah, so he's, he's, I mean, have you spoken with him since he's been incarcerated? No, I did go up to the UK and I attended a bunch of, of his hearings for extradition. He never appeared in court. He always zoomed in remotely from prison. And, you know, those were pretty interesting. Yeah, he would rant and rave a bit here and there, but mostly there were just a succession of different witnesses for both sides, talking about his mental wellness or lack thereof. There were a number of medical professionals called by his legal team who testified to a variety of personality disorders that they believed he had,

and that's all in the court record. There were people, he was trying to make a case that he shouldn't be extradited because if he were sent to the U.S., he would be subjected to, you know, extreme cruelty and torture because he's a gay man. And, you know, I guess the argument was that gay people can't, you know, be in prison or something. But that doesn't hold. That's not true. That doesn't hold water.

I was in prison for 13 years. There were plenty of gay guys, I mean, openly gay. And they would, you know, they, you know, they, I always make the joke that they ran the place. Like they get free commissary. There's lots of guys that want to be their friends. They're not harassed. They're not raped.

Right. They're not, you know, they're just gay. Yeah. They got lots of friends. Like nobody's being. And he wouldn't end up in a prison that would, like maybe if he went to a penitentiary where there were violent criminals, but he won't. Right.

He'll go to a low. A low. Even if he gets, if he gets under 20 years. he's going to go to a low okay i spent nine years in a low okay he'll be fine okay interesting yeah so yeah that's not it now i could i could i could see an argument for you know hey the u.s is trying to give me 150 years and then the uk saying 150 years this is a white collar crime like what are you talking about like that's you know cruel and unusual and unusual usual punishment because I've seen guys that are being have been extradited from the UK or from

Canada. And that's a lot of times their argument because the U.S. attorneys will come in and say, guys, he's facing 400 years. And their attorneys will say he's facing a maximum of five years here, your honor. Do you want to give him a life sentence? You're basically giving him a life sentence for something that in the UK, you can't get a life sentence for it. So then they negotiate. Okay, we promise he won't get more than this much. And then they start dropping it because that's actually an argument that people have won. Right. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that. I can see that happening. I mean, I guess, but that would be, that would fall under the, that would be sort of part of the plea agreement, I guess, right? Yeah, you can, you can make a negotiation between the UK and the U.S. before you even plea in the U.S.

I see. The U.S. can have an agreement with the U.K. like, look, what, We're going to send him back, but you can't give him 100 years. I see. Like, the most he would face here is five or 17 years or 12 years. And then they'd say, okay, we promise we won't give him more than 12 years. I see. And then they're like, okay, well, now we don't have an argument anymore. Right.

You know, because the U.K., most places, no, obviously he's not going to get 400 years. Right. But, you know, that's what the U.S. does is they say, we can get, he's facing this much time. He's a serious criminal. and they don't realize that most European countries don't look at it like that. They're like, hey, like, we're not trying to kill this person or have him die in jail. We want him incarcerated and integrated back into society. You know, we're not trying to destroy people here.

We're trying to incarcerate them and then make them citizens again. Right. You know, in a way, they kind of feel like, hey, we've failed this person. How can we correct his behavior and integrate him back into society? And U.S. prosecutors do not look at it like that. Yeah, so that a lot of times, you know, a lot of times they'll go in front of a judge in the UK or in, you know, Canada for the crown and Canada or for wherever. And they're like used to being in front of a federal judge here. They're like, yeah, he this and this and this.

And it's serious. And they're thinking it's serious. He stole half a million dollars. I sentenced, you know, someone in that in Canada is like the guy stole half a million dollars. He'll get three years. at most here and honestly he'll do a year and he'll be able to do the next two years at home on an ankle monitor and be able to work like you guys are saying you're going to give him a hundred years so they're like I'm sorry I can't send him back there I can't let you do that so you know where

a federal judge in the United States would say you know like yeah it's a serious crime like because they'll sentence you to 20 years for a white collar crime they don't do that over there So that's a lot of time the argument. So then they'll negotiate and say, hey, look, we're going to drop all these charges. But we promise we won't give him more than the statutory maximum of 10 years. And sometimes they'll be like, that's still stiff, but he did break laws. He did rip a bunch of Americans off. You guys did indict him already.

Okay, we'll send him. Okay. I've seen that many times. So, and listen, he'll still get way more here than he will get. in the UK and that's why he's terrified trust me he would rather be sentenced in the UK or Canada or Belgium or someplace where they'll put you in a four-star hotel and let you work and come and go and you know like in Norway it's like that guy in Norway who executed 80-something children and camp teachers and stuff at a camp got like he got like 20

23 years. Like the statutory maximum they could give him was like 23 years or something. Yeah. He killed like 80 people. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. And he's staying in essentially like a little, like a nice little hotel. Right. On an island. Right. Where he gets to take classes and work a little job. It's like, yeah, this is insane. You've gotten the death penalty in the United States. Yeah, for sure. So I, so trust me, he wants to stay in the UK. I believe you. And I think you're right. He's already been there for, for three and a half years now. So I actually do wonder, yeah, I mean, I don't know what the judge is going to say on this appeal, but I wonder if there's a possibility, they might just say, okay, you've, you've done

your time, you can, you can go. So what, so why haven't you tried to contact him or spoken with him? And what, what's going, and what happened with the book? Like, how does that end? How, how do you, what do you do at this point? Well, I mean, the book, yeah, the book came out last June and I kind of ended it where the documentary ended, which is, you know, I went to Indonesia on this trip and I tracked down, I tracked down everybody that I could in his entourage or people that, you know, knew him. And there was one guy who was a driver who he worked with pretty closely. and I tracked that guy down.

And so I just, you know, I ended the book where the story ended at the time, which was with him in prison, having been arrested after having all these conversations and his fate, you know, uncertain. We don't know what's going to happen. So that's where the book ends. I encourage everyone to read it. But, yeah, it's called the Hollywood Con Queen, just like the Dachia. And I'll give you a, I'll give you the link.

and stuff and all that. But yeah, it's called the Hollywood Con Queen. And the, actually, the paperback came out the day that the doc was released. So the hardback came out last year and the paperback just came out last month. Okay. Yeah. And anyway, so that's where the book ends. And you know, in terms of my kind of contact with him, I did initially,

initially reach out to his attorney in the UK and I said, hey, you know, I'd love to talk to Harvey again and I'm here, you know, if he wants to talk. I tried a few times. I probably sent half a dozen emails maybe just making a bit of an effort to let him know that I was here and I'd love to talk to him and I never heard back. I mean, I did. I heard back from the lawyer, but I never heard any kind of positive response from Harvey. And then that was it. And honestly, I, you know, I spent a long time on the story, long time on the book, long time on the doc. And, and I, I kind of feel like I'm, I'm sort of ready to move on to something else. You know, I spent a lot of time with this guy. Right. So, well, how, so I have another question, which is maybe unrelated. How did you

end up and you're living in France? Yeah, yeah, I live here with my family. Yeah, I, so your question is, how did I wind up here? Yes. Yeah. Well, I, so in a, in a former life, I was, I was a foreign correspondent for a long time, and I started my career in France. I worked, I started at Newsweek magazine back when in the golden days, you know, golden era of magazines and journalism when Newsweek was, you know, a thing, a reputable place. If you got your face on the cover of Newsweek, it was a big deal, right? And so I worked at Newsweek for many years. I started at Newsweek in Paris in the late 90s. And I went on and I had a long career at Newsweek. a foreign correspondent and I worked all over the world and I worked in a lot of war zones and

worked in Afghanistan and Iraq and Africa and Latin America all over. But I started here. I also studied in France when I was a student in college. So I always kind of had this soft spot for France and then, you know, with my family, with my wife, we had always kind of had this idea that that we wanted to come back and live in France and raise our kids and have them learn the language and stuff. So we just moved back here a few years ago. And yeah. Okay. And what are you doing now for work? Are you still writing for? I'm just, I'm just writing. I, I, I, I, I just finished another book and I'm working on just seeing, I'm just editing it and working on what I can do with that book. That'll be, that'll be my third, third book. And then I just finished the doc.

And so now I'm casting around for, for new ideas. I might start a podcast, a substack and a podcast. I've got, I've got a couple of ideas for another nonfiction book idea. And, but yeah, I'm open to suggestions. So if you have ideas for great stories, let me, let me know. Yeah, I've, I interview like four, you know, probably, it's probably one law enforcement or a writer or director or producer, and then probably three, probably, it's 75% former criminal and then 25% a mixture of producers, writers, you know, that's maybe it's 90, more like closer to 90. percent criminals. I don't know. Well, sometimes it's just somebody. I had a guy that came on and told a whole story about his father who had tried to scam the, you know, Bill Gates senior out of a few million dollars. But I mean, it just came out like yesterday. And he, so he wasn't even involved. It's just he was there when his dad was doing all of these things. And it was about his upbringing and his father and how he was kind of like a con man. But it was interesting. We talked for like two, two, two, two hours. It was really very very. interesting he told the story great so so i've got so sometimes it's not like that i got a question for you though as someone who has spent time in in prison and as someone who talks to a lot of criminals two questions one what did you think of this particular scam or this criminal and and then also i'm kind of curious like

what have you like are there commonalities or sort of what what are the what are the common themes I guess that you that you have come to understand about the lives and personalities of the of the criminals that you that you interview I mean that's that's got to be really interesting like um i would say most criminals you know obviously they have you know 90% of you know antisocial disorder um there's you know sociopaths psychopaths you know narcissists i'd say most of them almost all of them have entitlement issues you know they just feel that they're owed something because because i'm me i'm matt cox i'm I'm owed this, you know, I'm saying?

So, you know, it's super, just real personality defects, you know, I mean, not, no concern about, like, the idea that this guy would have done all this and was concerned and felt horrible for his victims. No, you don't stop it. That's not true. You may know, listen, I know what's appropriate to say. You know, I can tell you, I can say all the right things, but that's not, you know, I'd say it if I needed to. That's not one of them. You see what I'm saying? Like I've never laid awake at night and been concerned about a victim.

Now, I certainly, I didn't certainly didn't do any of the things that he did. You know, I, I focused on financial institutions, but that's not to say that periodically I didn't call somebody to have to go out and hire an attorney to fix something that I had done because I stole their identity or I encumbered the title to their home or something like that and they had to go hire an attorney and it cost them five thousand or ten thousand dollars like i certainly did that and and i could easily justify that at the time looking back and seeing what really occurred you know i'm like wow that wasn't my intention but the truth is i'm smart enough i should have known that was what was going to happen but you

in the moment you can justify it to yourself so you can sleep like a baby at night and move on with your day without feeling like oh i'm a jerk everybody wants to think they're a nice guy I'll bet you Harvey thinks he's a wonderful human being and all of this is just happening to him out of the blue and he didn't even deserve this wasn't even a big deal those people got a nice vacation and did they pay for it? Of course they paid for it. They had the vacation. You know what I'm saying? Like he's he's justifying these things to himself. So yeah, I would say, you know, that's that and I'd say that not all, but probably 90, 95 percent of. these guys have had horrific upbringings. But then again, you know, who can't look back on their, you know, on their, their upbringing and pinpoint one or two key moments that were horrific. And then what do they do? They, they suck it up.

They rub some dirt in it. They graduate high school and college and they get a job and they raise a family. They don't go out and rob 16 banks, you know, so those aren't really fair. You know, is it a commonality? Yes, but it's not fair. it's not fair to say oh well that makes sense well it can i think there's a lot of contributing but overall i think it's just you're in general i think it's just something that's ingrained in you like you're born with yeah yeah yeah for and then maybe some things push you in it's put you in

those situations and you run with it and or maybe everything goes well and you become an actor or a businessman and you never end up having to act on those behavior you know those those those your personality traits never take hold and you never have to utilize them to commit a crime just so happens you open a you open a waterbed warehouse uh you know location and before you know you have two and three and four and you have 400 employees and you're making great money and there was never a time that you needed to commit fraud to succeed do you see what i'm saying like had you probably would have you just didn't so yeah you know that's my you know so i unfortunately there is no commonality. Yeah. Sometimes it's, you know, situational. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. And in your case,

have you, has all, have all these conversations that you've had with other criminals and your own time, has it, has it led to insight about your own trajectory and your own path? Yeah, I, you know, what, what really happened for me was when I wrote a memoir. And really, I read a book, I read several books, but there was, there was one book in particular that I had read. I mean, it's the worst part is I can't even remember the name of it. And it was the shortest book I read, too, on how to write memoirs by a woman who'd written two memoirs. Like, apparently she thought a lot of herself. And, but I read this little, like, 90 page book, and it was just great.

And she said so many great things in it. And one of the things she said was that you need. needed to look for things that helped shape your personality or could kind of help predict the things that you did in the future, you know, throughout this journey. And she said, and be able to bring that to the attention of the reader whether it was true or not. Or no, whether you believed it was true or not. And at that point, I started looking at things that had had that I just brushed off. But yeah, that happened. And people have said that probably had an effect, but it didn't have any effect on me. That didn't have any effect on me. But then you start focusing and you do that

introspective, you know, work on yourself and you really look at yourself and you start going, yeah, that probably wasn't normal behavior, you know? Yeah, that probably, that's not a normal thing that my father did. Or yeah, not everybody does grow up with an alcoholic father that is, you know, verbally abusive. And, you know, some people do. They're super successful. they never break the law but for me it probably helped in contribute you know you start looking at those things and so I did that when I was writing my memoir in prison and then of course now then I'm aware you're aware of it and you start focusing on it and so every time I talk to people I'm always curious like well how are you raised did you have both parents like what they do you know and I'm

just just to kind of see did that contribute could you could you could you at least make the argument that that contributed you know like and in many ways you can i mean you know so you know your your your mom was you know had five kids from five different uh you know baby daddies your personal father was in and out of prison or you never knew him all your brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles were selling drugs they were in and out of prison you were raised next to the project projects your mother was almost never home, you know, and gee, guess what? You ended up selling drugs and going to jail. That's crazy. How did that happen? You know what I'm saying? Like, of course that that happened.

Like everybody you know that surviving and making decent money is selling drugs. Yeah, yeah. Of course you know, not everybody does. Some people look at it and say, oh, I'm not doing that. But some people don't. Some people say, no, I can do that. I'm going to make it work. Or if I go to jail, I go to jail. Like my life is so miserable to begin with like, yeah, so I'll have to go to jail. that's fine. So yeah, I wish there was something really definitive, but there's just no one thing. And I tell you what, though, talking to people now and hearing their stories and looking at them and where they are now and talking to my wife and I, there are so many signs that it's like, what was I thinking? And I do this all the time when these guys are talking.

They're like, so this happened, this happened. I'm like, what are you, what were you thinking? Why didn't, well, you know, I need the money. Why didn't you get another job? Why didn't you do this? And you know, I love the guys that do the, um, uh, you know, I needed to, you know, I want to be a man and be able to provide for my family and would then get another job, then get two jobs, then get, you know what I'm saying?

Like that, why wasn't that the option? You know, that's what a man does. He gets two jobs, you know, but, you know, that's not how they think and it's not what happened but you can see it but as they're talking you can already see it on you know unfolding so to serve justifying their their bad behavior yeah do you think that you mentioned like verbal abuse can you elaborate on that at all or i mean that you don't have to i'm just curious like what what no it's fun listen i'm like an open book Like, you know, like, it's virtually possible to embarrass me or get me, you know, um,

um, you know, I would say just, you know, my father was just an alcoholic. He would get drunk. And the worst thing about it was when he was sober, he was a great guy. He was semi-belligerent sometimes, kind of a bully. But when he was drunk, he was a complete bully. And he'd yell at you. He'd call my sister's whores and tell him they're never going to be anything and, you know, that I was stupid and I was never going to be anything and you know I was a little kid I'm you know you're seven eight nine 10 12 years old and I'm struggling with dyslexia I'm going to special schools like I already think I'm stupid like I don't need your I don't need your affirmation you know like I'm good I'm good with my own opinion I'm seeing what's happening already I'm not passing

school very well I'm not doing very well I don't need you to help you know make me feel it work and then he was belligerent to my mother and you know calling her names and she was a saint The worst thing my mother ever did was she was an enabler, you know, but she's also trying to protect the guy who's providing the income that's keeping all of us in a nice home, driving decent vehicles. And my father made good money, you know, he was, we were definitely upper middle class. Like, we all had cars, you know, we're living in a nice house, you know, we're living in, you know, off the golf course, you know, it's close to the golf course. Next to the Hillsborough River, I mean, you know, we're members of the country club. I mean, it's, you're, it's a nice life. So, but yeah, you know, you don't, you hear those things enough and you start to believe them and you start to wonder how am I going to survive when I get older.

So, you know, so when things start failing, I'm willing to do whatever it takes to succeed and willing to do whatever it takes not to have to move into this guy's house. Right. You know, when you, I graduate college, I get, you know, start becoming a mortgage broker. and when it comes time that I've got a loan that almost ready to close but there's one thing wrong and if you just fix that one thing you'll get a check I'm ready to fix it you know I have to make this work oh you know not that it's his fault I mean obviously I could have done the right I could have you know I could have stepped backwards and moved into my old spare room and said I'm just going to stay here until I can make this work but that wasn't that wasn't that wasn't the road I

traveled. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So. And then it just spiral out of control, you know? Mm-hmm. Then I, you know, just because the more you, the more things that work, you know,

the more brazen, you know, you get, the more brazen I got. And, you know, every time I got away with something, emboldened me. And then you make money on it. And you're, and before you know it, you, then you start feeling good about your yourself and I, or I start feeling good about myself. And I started thinking I was just great at this. I was amazing at this. And this is what I should be.

doing. You know, I'm good at it. I'm making tons of money. They're not catching me. I'm amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Self is self-fulfilling cycle. Yeah. Yeah. Super optimistic. Yeah. But yeah. So, but I do. The one thing is funny. The one thing I love doing is the interviews. Yeah. Like I was talking to a guy who another podcaster recently, he's like, man, you're doing like four week because that must be exhausting listen that's the that's the that's the only part of this job i like you know the scheduling having to talk to people on the phone and schedule here there here the you know is there enough here for a podcast is it interesting enough to hold my viewers attention like you know having to kind of weave a story sometimes when people get off on a tangent and

you got to remember to pull them back like all of those are things that like i enjoy that part of it It's the finding people, scheduling, making sure they show up, making sure they're in the right spot and everything looks as good as it can look, you know, that kind of stuff. Like that's, you know, that's a pain in the ass. But actually when we start talking, like, it's like it's one of the few times that I actually don't want to talk about myself. Like my narcissism doesn't tend to take over. I get to sit there and do this. Uh-huh. Then what happened?

Well, you like, you like the stories, right? It's the thing. I love the stories. I love the stories. Yeah, yeah. You know, who doesn't love stories? Well, that's it. I always tell these guys, I'm like, I'm like, I'm not doing anything now that I didn't do for 13 years sitting in the rec yard in a prison. The only difference is there's a camera now and YouTube mails me a check at the end of the month. Right, right. Like, how cool is that? Right, right. This is the coolest job ever. Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, yeah, good for you, man. You've really cornered a a little market here. It's, it's cool. Yeah, I didn't even know this was a thing. Like when I got

out of prison, I didn't even know how I was going to make a living. I'd written a bunch of true crime stories when I was locked up, gotten some books published, got out, had a bunch of synopsies. But I still was thinking, you're going to work at McDonald's, you're going to live in someone's spare room, and you're going to be appreciative, and you're going to keep your head down, and you're going to just ride the rest of your life out doing this. That's it. That's your life. And then I got out, And there was this whole YouTube thing. And I thought, probably, probably look into that. It might be stuff.

And everybody kept saying, you've got to do this. You've got to do this. I was like, well, you guys can use your iPhone and I can't use mine. You're clearly smarter than me. I can barely figure out the technology that's developed over the last 13 years. So maybe I ought to pay attention and start looking into it. And so I did. And it's doing great.

Got a few great people to help me along the way. I was just blessed to have people that just everything fell into place like you know very very lucky could have gone it could have gone bad I could still be in that spare room how long have you been doing the the the interviews um I want to say I want to say four years now it's got to be close to four years it definitely you know what it's definitely four years now I think I'm I think it must be right at I must be right at the cusp of four years I'm doing the math of when I moved in my first apartment. I was, did it for about six months when I was living this, this, uh, uh, uh,

rooming house for six months. It was just me talking to the camera. Then I started a pot. I got a one bedroom apartment started it there, live there for a year. And then I moved into the place I'm at right now. And I've been doing it here since then. So it's got to be, it's four years. Yeah, four years.

Hmm. And, and four years that it pays all my bills. Yeah. that's amazing yeah i mean good for you yeah i mean i do this you know i do this i do keynote speeches where we're the same banks that i used to rip out rip off fly me in have me talk for 45 minutes to an hour and then fly me back out and they pay me for it so that's amazing um you know i do that i do podcasts i do i'm trying to get several documentaries made right now i've signed some agreements with several production companies, been to Los Angeles a few times

in the last few months. And I also do stuff for Home Title Lock, which is a company that provides a service that watches people's titles so they can't get scanned by people like me. So I do stuff for them. So, yeah, yeah. It's a brave new world. Yeah, well, congratulations. I mean, that's a success.

story that's cool we'll see i want to have a documentary like you're like someone wants someone to take one of my books and turn it into a documentary yeah well yeah we'll see yeah we'll see um well i mean do you feel good how do you feel about all this do you feel like is there anything else you want to cover or um i mean by the book yeah watch the document by the book we got that down yeah by the book, watch the documentary. Follow me on Instagram, Scott Cameron Johnson. So there's two books, actually. By the books. There's The Wolf and the Watchman. And that is the story of my life with my father, who was a CIA case officer for 30 years. And that's on Amazon available wherever you buy books and then the second book is the hollywood con queen uh also available

wherever you get your books and then the doc also by the same name the hollywood con queen available apple tv you guys i really appreciate you watching do me a favor hit the hit the um you know hit the subscribe button hit the bell so you get notified also i'm in the in the description we're going to leave all of scott's links like to his instagram to both of his his true crime books also to well i'm not sure they're true prime nonfiction nonfiction books and to the documentary i watched the documentary i thought it was great can't say i've read his book but it was based off of his book it was a it's a it's a great doc super interesting and uh really appreciate you guys watching please leave me a comment and uh consider joining my patreon i really do appreciate you guys watching

thank you very much see you