The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Greatest Scam Ever Written | 3. One Man's Trash

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

The Maria Duval letter scam began in Europe—so how did it make its way to America? U.S. Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber begins to unravel the threads of the scam when he discovers an address on Long Island, where victims are sending their replies to Duval. They also send intimate items like locks of their hair, hoping for the psychic’s help. Clayton’s team goes dumpster diving on Long Island and finds bags of return letters – proof Duval herself wasn’t getting the replies. Why were their replies ending up here, of all places? And who’s responsible?    Unlock all episodes of The Greatest Scam Ever Written, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month thats all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click Subscribe on the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. An ITN Productions & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Smokescreen, the greatest scam ever written. Before you dive in, if you want to listen to the whole story uninterrupted, you can. Unlock the entire season, ad-free, right now with a subscription to The Binge. That's all episodes, all at once. Unlock your listening now by clicking subscribe at the top of the Smokescreen show page on Apple Podcasts, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Jumping into a dumpster is not my idea of fun, and I was really not happy about this.

Clayton Gerber, an inspector with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, creeps along a dark alley on Long Island with his team of agents. Picking through dumpsters is not his favorite way to spend an evening, but you have to follow where the case leads. A standard investigative technique is to go pull the trash if it's publicly available.

The Maria Duvall letters are still landing across Canada. But Chrissy Robinson, whose mother sent money to Maria, and amateur scam buster Dr. Terry Polivoy are having no luck getting the authorities in their country to act. But by 2014, over in the U.S., Clayton and his team have launched an investigation and are working around the clock trying to figure out who's behind the letters.

He's got a good idea of how the scam works logistically and plenty of evidence to back it up. Clayton has gathered pages and pages of complaints and boxes full of identical pale green envelopes. Envelopes that were used by victims to send money to Maria Duvall. Clayton's team has traced thousands of these envelopes to a company based in a nondescript office building on Long Island. This location is clearly playing some important role in the scam network. But the evidence Clayton has

is from a few weeks ago. He won't be able to get a search warrant from a judge without proof the scam is happening right now at this very moment. So that's what he's here for tonight and he's in a rush. So we needed to provide this information that evening to the prosecutors because we were filing our court filings the next morning.

The team of agents tiptoe around the back of the offices. There's a row of dumpsters in front of them that are used by the company that's been receiving the Maria Duvall envelopes. But unfortunately for Clayton and his team, that's not the only type of business being done here. Some medical clinics that disposed of unsavory medical waste in the dumpster. So we're jumping in with not just paper, there's all kinds of stuff in there. What? Well, the building head office space that was rented by a proctology clinic.

Proctology, as in the branch of medical care that deals with the colon, rectum, you get the idea. It's hard to think of a worse place to dumpster dive. Luckily for Clayton, wading knee-deep into God knows what is well below his pay grade. As a supervisor, I actually didn't have to jump in the dumpster. I got to stand next to it while I told my guys, jump in the dumpster. The obedient inspectors jump into dumpster after dumpster, tearing into the bags and using their flashlights to hunt for anything related to Maria Duvall. But Clayton's worried about sticking around here for too long. So he tells them to grab as many trash bags as they can and get out. We put them in the van and then we drove off.

So we just drove about six blocks away to another office building and pulled over so we could sit in the back of the van and sort through all of this and organize it and count it up. Clayton slices into one of the bags. But just at that moment... So we're in the van and then all of a sudden, you know, red and blue lights light us up and there's a big spotlight. And now we have a problem in that I know he has a gun because he's a police officer. Clayton and his men are in an unmarked van, not in uniform, rummaging through a bunch of trash bags.

To this cop, it probably looks like they're committing a crime. And to top it off, Clayton's got his gun, too. So we have a blue-on-blue situation, a police-on-police situation, that is very risky, because he has no idea what we're doing. You have no idea what's going to go on when that exchange happens. Clayton needs to figure out a way to defuse the situation and avoid anyone getting shot. Because if he can't finish the mission tonight and get back to the station, the people behind

the Maria Duvall scam could slip right through his fingers. I'm Rachel Brown, and this is The Greatest Scam Ever Written from Sony Music Entertainment and ITN Productions. Episode 3, One Man's Trash. For the last 20 years, Clayton Gerber's been working as a U.S. Postal Inspector based in Washington, D.C. The mantra is that we are referred to as the silent service. Nobody knows who we are. If you read a news article and it says federal agents, it is very often postal inspectors.

If it's the FBI, it clearly says the FBI. And some of the times when it says it's the FBI, it's actually us. He's blunt and no-nonsense with a wry sense of humor. And when he talks about his work, you can sense his passion instantly. I have told my bosses repeatedly that I cannot believe they pay me to do this job. I really enjoy it. I was on the stand for my first jury trial for about eight hours, and I came back after the verdict, and I went into my boss's office, and I said,

you can have my pay for those eight hours. That was so much fun. When I go to the door to knock on the door to interview someone, I say, hey, I'm with the Postal Service. And they're like, oh, I like my mail. I'll talk to you, and I get people to say the darndest things. You may have never heard of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. I certainly hadn't before looking into this story. But it turns out it's a crucial arm of law enforcement. They investigate a wide variety of criminal activity across the country.

Think about things that are in the mail that are illegal. So bombs, drugs, white powders like anthrax or ricin, and it's letter carrier robberies, and it's very complex online crime. But all of it touches the mail. Everybody still gets stuff in the mail. So we still have a huge role to play. In fact, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service has been crucial in some of the biggest cases of the last century. You know, we have lots of famous investigations in our agency that people typically know about. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, it was postal inspectors that arrested him at his compound or ranch in wherever, Montana or North Dakota, wherever he was hiding out. Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and their megachurch, those were all postal inspectors. A postal inspector was one of the last people to interview Lee Harvey Oswald.

Clayton becomes aware of the Maria Duvall scam when his colleague stumbles upon hundreds of angry demands online for refunds involving this particular psychic. The sheer scale of the operation is what catches Clayton's eye. He can see right away that there's got to be more to this case than just one woman in France. All you had to do was look up Maria Duval's name on Google and you saw dozens and dozens and dozens of complaints about, you know, some online psychic or some mail order psychic and people, you know, loving her or hating her. And

we're like, this cannot be the case, right? This can't be accurate that there is some mail order psychic that is sending out, you know, thousands of mailings. Clayton then types Maria's name into their internal search system where historic cases are archived. He discovers that this was actually not the first time the force had come across the Maria Duval scam. We, postal inspectors, had done an administrative action against the Maria Duval scheme in 2004. Turns out, a whole decade before Clayton's team had even started digging into it,

the Postal Inspection Agency got a court order to shut down a company that was sending out the Maria Duvall letters. And it took several years to negotiate, which is a little unusual. The operators had hired high-paid lawyers in New York to fight us, which is is a little unusual. The operators had hired high-paid lawyers in New York to fight us, which is also a little unusual. And we ultimately negotiated a consent where they agreed they'd go out of business. No one was arrested at the time in that previous case,

but you'd still think it would help Clayton's current investigation. After all, a specific company was identified as sending out nearly identical letters to the ones he's investigating now. Surely Clayton has his culprits. That was just a DBA, a pseudonym, a fake name. A DBA as in doing business as. This just means that the company running the previous scheme

was operating under a different name altogether. And then they'd close it down when they needed to if they got too many complaints about it. This is the central frustration of investigating these types of scams, both for Clayton and for people like me as an investigative journalist. And it's almost impossible to trace who's really behind them. Just when you think you've found the address of the real criminals, it turns out to be an abandoned warehouse or a P.O. box somewhere. It's like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

But as Clayton and his agents follow the winding paper trail, there's one name that keeps popping up again and again. So the business name at the time was Destiny Research Center when we started investigating. The company Clayton's team identified appears to be registered in Hong Kong. The scale and scope of it all was revealing itself. The reality was the volume of these letters and the highly personalized representations

made it impossible for any human to do that for the number of people that were responding, right? Like very early on, we knew something like 7,000 people a week were responding to these letters. There is no human that can process any action 7,000 times in a week. There's no way this is just one person with a pen or home printer licking envelopes. For Clayton, the massive amount of letters points to an organized web of writers, printers, and distributors using Maria Duvall's name. But his theories are nothing without hard evidence. There's only one thing to do. It's time to get his hands dirty.

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. As Clayton and his team look deeper into Destiny Research Center and the confusing web of companies associated with it, they uncover a crucial part of the chain, a business on Long Island called Data Marketing Group. It's a so-called caging service.

In the mail order business, a caging service is a company that will slice open your envelopes when they come in, remove the contents, and they'll enter the order information into your database. Basically, a caging service just processes mail and payments for other companies. Sounds harmless, right? Just an old-fashioned business model that no one really uses now that everything's digital. But the fact that a caging service is involved in the Maria Duvall scheme could be absolutely key to proving fraud. Because this is what Clayton thinks is happening. Imagine Doreen Robinson sends a letter containing one of her checks for $59. She thinks it's going straight to Maria Duvall.

In reality, her check goes to this Long Island caging service. This service cashes her check and sends the money to Destiny Research Center. They also keep tabs on how much money she's sending and what she's asking for in return. Trinkets, lucky numbers, a whole list of possible psychic services. There's your fraud right there. The fraud comes in the mismatch between what the victims are being sold and what they get or don't get. They believe they have a relationship with Maria herself. But in fact, Clayton believes,

their heartfelt letters are getting no further than this office on Long Island. They're paying for psychic services that they're never receiving. So Clayton's next step is clear. He's going to raid the caging service and shut it down. And that's what we decided was the most effective way to stop this victimization quickly. Of course, Clayton and Co. can't just charge in all guns ablaze. They need hard evidence. As we heard earlier, they're forced to gather this evidence from a series of unglamorous dumpster dives behind the Long Island offices. Most importantly, they find all those identical green envelopes.

The scammers have been providing these return envelopes so that victims can easily send money back to Maria. But just as Clayton had predicted, here they are, piled up in the caging office's trash. Pretty quickly, he puts together a strong case for a raid. But he still needs a court injunction, which means there's one final hurdle to jump.

The way the injunction statute works in the United States is you can get an injunction from a court to shut down a fraud scheme that is ongoing. So it's a live fraud scheme, or it is imminent, it's about to happen. Even though Clayton has plenty of evidence from just a few weeks before, that's not good enough. It needs to be totally fresh. There was a lot of hand-wringing about how are we going to prove that this scheme is ongoing. And the decision was made, well, do a trash poll the night before and see if the envelopes are still there, and then you know it's ongoing. Which is how Clayton and his agents end up where we left them earlier.

The night before the injunction's due to be filed, they're crouched in the back of a van, rummaging through bags of trash from the caging service. That's when a police officer turns up, shines his flashlight on the van, and demands to know what's going on inside. It seems that someone's called the cops on them. We had pulled in front of a building that had security cameras,

and the owner of the building that had security cameras and the owner of the building saw the security cameras through a remote recording, saw that we were sitting in front of his building in a van with the lights on and he called the police and they showed up. The timing couldn't be worse. Clayton potentially has the evidence right there in the bags.

He just needs to get back to the station before morning so that he can file the injunction on time. And now they're trapped in the van with an understandably suspicious armed officer approaching them. So if I step out of the van, I'm stepping out of the van with a gun, and if he sees that,

he is immediately going to be concerned about what happens. To me, it feels like Clayton's going slightly overboard with the drama here. Why would he assume they're on the verge of a Western-style shootout? This is America. Everybody has guns in America. And that is a real officer safety concern. That is really dangerous. Clayton decides he has to go out and try to explain the situation. So I took my badge off my belt.

I opened the driver's door about six inches, and I came forth with my badge clearly showing, which is a bright gold badge. And he had his light shining on it, so it would reflect very brightly. I slowly stepped out of the vehicle so he could see me. I kept my hands up, and I said, I am a law enforcement officer. I am armed. I am on official business. The police officer, much to Clayton's relief, quickly understands who he's talking to and lowers his gun.

I showed him my credentials, and I explained what I was doing. You know, we had just done a trash pull. We have a search warrant tomorrow. And I apologized to him. I said, look, would you like us to move? We're happy to move. He says, no, no. He says, you guys are working.

Clayton's attention turns back to the trash bags. His team opens them up and inside is exactly the evidence they were hoping for. Thousands of these same green envelopes. And that's not all. There's also a range of very personal items. They would throw away the green envelopes of hair. They would throw away any victim's letters. A victim who would complain,

hey, I've paid you 50 times, I haven't gotten anything. Or they would say, I can't afford my medicine, so I can't pay you right now, but if you would send me goodwill, as soon as I have money, I'll pay you. All of those sorts of letters and things that were included with the payment, those all got thrown away. This was disgusting, right? Let's be clear.

So the dumpster was full of these green envelopes that had people's hair in them, and they were all sealed up. So we knew right then the hair wasn't getting to Maria Duvall for her to put her hand on the envelope and do the reading, they were going straight into the dumpster. Let that sink in. Imagine you've built this intimate relationship with Maria through these letters. You trust her enough to cut off locks of your own hair, give up personal belongings, and send them to her through the mail. You believe these personal items will help Maria know you even better and give her the ability to improve your life. Now, you find out it's all just ending up in a Long Island dumpster next to medical waste.

It's not only a breach of your trust, it's also a breach of your privacy. Clayton now has a ton of disturbing evidence proving that this fraud is ongoing. He gets his injunction and prepares to conduct the raid. We were shutting the caging service down. Clayton's finally going to come face-to- face with someone instrumental in running the scam. So who will he find overseeing the caging service? And how will they respond? People should have the freedom to say yes or no to something.

And they were happy. Those 80,000 clients were very, very happy. After his dumpster diving expedition, Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber has everything he needs to shut down the caging service. It's a huge milestone for the investigation. A crucial part of the scam will now be forced to shutter completely. So who's on the other side actually running the caging service?

Who's been opening all these letters, taking up the money inside, and tossing hair and other personal items in the trash? So my name is Keith Arako, born and raised on Suffolk County, Long Island, New York. This is the woman I've been dying to speak to ever since I first started looking into this story. I think she was kind of suspicious about our project at the start. But after a couple months going back and forth with me, she finally agrees to speak. I guess she thinks it might be a good chance for her to clear her name,

but I want to figure out exactly what she did, why she did it, and how much she really knows about the wider operation. When I jump on the Zoom call with Keitha, I can't help but warm up to her. You know, I like to consider myself a successful businesswoman, as well as a mom, and it's all business, even raising kids. She's a whirlwind of energy with a messy ponytail and a frayed Yankee sweatshirt. She's easygoing, even turning up to one of our earlier video calls in a plush robe.

I'm also struck by the fact that she's a spiritual person herself. She attended a life-changing psychic reading when she was younger. It was a prediction and yeah, it actually came to fruition. And I think I was a little scared at that point. Like after that, I was like, oh. What was it, Ketha? What was the prediction? I was getting married and they had told me that, no, it's not going to happen.

There's going to something is going to change everything your whole course of your life. And yeah, unfortunately, somebody in the family passed away and the whole wedding was put off and we never got married. It's crazy. Yeah, I could write a book. It was back in 2009, five years before Clayton started his investigation when Keetha first got involved in our story. At this time, she was in her 30s and running various small mail and marketing businesses. And she was about to add a new one to her portfolio, Data Marketing Group, the Long Island caging service. On paper, Keitha thought the business looked great.

It had been running for years with a solid track record. It was being sold by the original owner's widow who was ready to retire. To Keitha, it all seemed legit. You know, I retained an attorney, a business attorney and an accountant and had them review everything. And it, you know, seems absolutely 1000% a business. And it certainly was, you know, seems absolutely 1,000% a business. And it certainly was. You know, it had been running for like 23 years. So Ketha bought the Long Island Caging Service for roughly $250,000. But of course, we know who was using the caging service. Its biggest client was Destiny Research Center,

the company accepting payments from the Maria Duvall letters. So when buying the caging service, Keefa had essentially taken on the logistics for a major element of the scam. So what did Keefa actually know about her new client, Destiny Research Center? Tell me about the client that you're working for. Destiny Research, right? So we really, you know, again, like when I came in, once I had bought the business, all that was just flowing like a well-oiled machine. So the office manager and the assistant office manager, they had relationships with the client. Like they would, you know, do their day-to-day operations.

There was six other employees, you know, that did, you know, a lot of the processing. And they were older women and they were just so, you know, so lovely. And it was something for them to do. She's saying she wasn't involved in the day-to-day running of the company. She left all that in the capable hands of the employees who'd been there for years. But alarm bells started ringing for me when Keefa claims she wasn't aware of what exactly Destiny Research Center was selling when she first purchased the caging service. I was simply a third party for other marketing companies, and we were doing third-party processing for them. Simple as that.

But you understood that the nature of the campaigns were related to psychics and astrology and crystals and that kind of thing? There was a little bit of a touch on that. You know, obviously we were looking at numbers and percentages of profit and what made sense. I'm sure there's some truth in what Keefa is saying here. She was focused on the big picture, making money, and didn't pay too much attention to the details.

But if you spent a quarter of a million dollars on a company, wouldn't you want to know a bit more about its most important client? And whether or not everything was 100% legal? And Keefa does mention a few details about Destiny Research Center that I would maybe consider to be red flags. I knew that they had a disclaimer on the letters that said, you know, this is for entertainment purposes only. Keetha found out that this disclaimer stating that the letters were for entertainment purposes only had been added after some, quote, legal issues in the past. But again, she wasn't phased. As far as she was concerned,

these issues had been taken care of. And that's why, you know, there was a disclaimer. I didn't delve that deeply into it. Was this a case of willful blindness? Or did she genuinely not consider the disclaimers to be a big deal? I don't know, but for whatever reason, Keetha ignores the warning signs that Destiny Research Center might be shady. And for a long time, everything seemed to be ticking along just fine. A steady stream of letters arrived week in, week out, for seven years. Until one morning in May 2014,

when Keitha gets a phone call. My office manager called me at about 11 o'clock, maybe a little early. I was on my way into the office and told me that the DOJ had been there since 8.30 that morning. They came in, bulletproof vests, guns, DOJ, you know, Postal Investigation Service. That was really who it was, who was prosecuting, I guess is a good word. The DOJ, as in the Department of Justice. It's Clayton and a team of federal agents. And I said, what? You know, obviously I'm in shock, complete and utter shock. What do you mean the DOJ? You know, she's like, yeah, they've had us all away from our desks.

They're asking questions. They're, you know, they had one of the employees in one office, one in another, one in another. Were your employees scared? Yeah, that was devastating. My office manager was 72 years old. Like I said, I had a couple of other elderly women there, some were almost 80.

Keefa immediately phones her lawyer, who tells her not to go to the office. So she sits at home, anxiously waiting for the DOJ to turn up at her door any minute. What had started as an easy money-making venture has quickly turned into a nightmare. Keitha's facing the possibility of both criminal and civil charges for her involvement in a fraud.

You know, I'd never been faced with anything like that before. I didn't even understand it. Or, what do you mean? You know, like, criminal what? Am I going to jail? Like, no. They had seized all the money out of my bank account. It was like $60,000 and then, you know, another $60,000 in lawyer fees.

It was crazy. Keefa can't understand how she's done anything wrong. Even after her lawyer explains to her what Clayton and the DOJ are alleging about the letters. It was not a scam. These people were being provided with their fulfillment of their orders. They continued to be repeat customers that really appreciated and

enjoyed the product and services. And the ones that didn't enjoy it or felt it was a scam or whatever their take was, they were provided a refund. So I am clearly happy to say that I believed in that business. I was proud to be the owner of that company. But what did she make of the fact that the mailing scheme her company was part of was targeting vulnerable, elderly people? People should have the freedom to say yes or no to something, no matter what their age. And they were happy. Those 80,000 clients were very, very happy with the little strings of hope. They were giving people something that they truly wanted and they

were happy to pay the $10 or the $40, how do you take that away from them? It's like anything else to me. It's like a prayer book. You know, you know, older people, they love rosaries and they hold on to that stuff and they really truly believe it and it gives them hope and faith and they pray. And it's, you know, all that is right in the same category as far as I'm concerned. Something bigger than yourself. Ketha's argument does give me pause for thought. It's hard to draw a sharp line between the Maria letters and other faith items that people buy all the time. Things like Catholic rosary beads or healing crystals.

Whether it's for entertainment, hope, or relief from anxiety, you could make the case that they all provide comfort. And Keetha herself sees the importance in offering this to people. And really what I find more than anything is the validation. It's actually beautiful and it actually can help you understand a little bit more about your path and what your values are that you have to offer the world and why you're here even better. You know, you're here for a reason. But her own belief doesn't change the fact that people suffered because of the letters. Ketha has her own take on that. I don't think the customers were

victims. Maybe somewhere. You know, I have a very strong feeling about that. Again, you know what I've said, I just felt that they had the freedom to do what they wanted and spend their money the way they wanted. I don't see the customers as victims. I'm an American and I believe you have freedom and you should be able to buy what you want to buy. If you don't want it, throw it in the garbage. In this moment, I think again about Doreen Robinson cobbling together pennies to send to Maria Duvall, even when she could barely remember her own children's names. And the whole time, her heartfelt letters were just ending up in the dumpster outside Keitha's office building. Whatever Keitha personally believed or didn't believe, she was part of that system.

Eventually, prosecutors decide that although Keitha's caging service has been a crucial part of this huge international scam, she personally isn't part of the inner circle. She doesn't know enough about Destiny Research Center or anyone high up in the network to make it worth pursuing a conviction. And this is possibly by design. The less the middlemen like Keetha know, the more people at the top are protected from scrutiny. Keetha isn't charged with any crime, but signs a civil agreement promising not to work in the mail order or direct marketing industry for a year. At the end of our interview, I ask Keetha about what her life has been like in the aftermath of all of this.

And she leaves me with one final head scratcher. I've been in therapy ever since, you know, talk about, I mean, I'm not joking, you know, when I literally say I listen to an astrologer every week. I find the affirmations that continue to validate me and keep me moving forward. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Where else would Keitha turn to to make sense of these events but to the stars? For Clayton, shutting down the caging service is bittersweet. He's closed down an element of the scam, but the web is vast and there's far more to unravel. There were a whole bunch of businesses that may or may not be involved in running the scheme.

We have no idea. I'm of two minds. I'm kind of glad this part of the scheme got shut down, but at the same time, Keefer knew so little about the bigger picture. And whoever's in charge of the Maria Duvall scam remains anonymous. That is, until I get more details about two figures higher up the food chain, the men that first approached Maria to start the letters in the first place. According to Maria's son Antoine, these men were people that Maria

herself feared. She was very, very afraid of the consequences. Really scared. We don't want to get too deeply involved. That's next time on The Greatest Scam Ever Written. immediately unlock all episodes of this show, but you'll get binge access to an entire network of other great true crime and investigative podcasts, all ad-free. Plus, on the first of every month, subscribers get a binge drop of a brand new series. That's all episodes, all at once. Just click subscribe at the top of the Smokescreen show page on Apple Podcasts, or visit getthebinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode of The Greatest Scam Ever Written was hosted by me, Rachel Brown. Our sound designers are Luca Evans and Sam Cassetta. Our mixer is Jay Rothman. Our assistant producers are Luca Evans and Leo Schick. Our producer is Millie Chu. Our story editor is Dave Anderson. Voice by Jean-Luc Fontaine. For ITN Productions, our production manager is Emily Jarvis.

Our executive producer is Catherine St. Louis.