The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - The Greatest Scam Ever Written | 5. The Runner

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

U.S. Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber discovers that the letters are entering the country via Albany, NY, and that they’re originating from a company in Montreal. Locating criminals across the border for extradition is no simple task, but eventually Clayton finds two of the scam’s top lieutenants. Can he get them to give up the name of their boss, the true mastermind of the scheme?   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

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. A December morning in 2018,

in a police station on the idyllic Spanish island of Ibiza, a phone rings. The officer on duty picks it up and is immediately greeted with the sound of a woman speaking Spanish in a frantic, pleading voice. He tells her to slow down and explain exactly what's happened. She chokes out that her ex-husband has their young son. They're meant to call home every day, but today they haven't, and now she has no idea where her son is. The officer asks for the ex-husband's name and concentrates as she spells it out in English. He hits the return button on his computer, listens to the woman's ragged breath as the page loads.

When it does, the officer sits bolt upright. Not only is this man showing up in their system, it appears there's a warrant out for his extradition, courtesy of the U.S. government. The Spanish police, along with U.S. federal agents, have been looking for this guy for five years. Trying to steady his voice, the officer asks the woman to tell him where her ex-husband is. She gives him the name of a hotel. It's a 15-minute drive from the station. He slams down the phone and rallies his colleagues.

They need to hurry. Otherwise, the man known as CC1, co-conspirator number one, will slip through their fingers again. For five years, the authorities have used this codename for the mastermind of the Maria Duval scam, trying to keep his identity under wraps because he's extremely cautious and elusive. It takes several national agencies, the U.S., Canada, and Spain, triangulating their resources just to narrow down his location. And every time they think they have him, he seems to catch wind of their presence and vanishes again. But now, the hunt for co-conspirator number one is well and truly on. And once again, it's Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber who told us this story and is the driving force.

We have a criminal charge against this individual. We believe he's living in your country. This is where we think he's living. So then they go out and look for the person. From Sony Music Entertainment and ITN Productions, this is The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Episode 5, The Runner. We now know how the Maria Duval scam was born back in the 80s in France.

Its fathers were two master copywriters, Jacques Maillan and Jean-Claude Roy. With the help of fellow journalists, we piece together their stories. But with Jacques dead and Jean-Claude out of the picture years ago, it seems there must be a new player. And this person has ramped up the scam beyond anything that came before. From my conversation with UK investigator Richard Clark, I learned that there are patterns to how these people operate. They reuse and evolve their business plans, switching up what they sell. They stay in the background and off the paper trail. They're the archetypal larger-than-life characters that have no conscience in what they do. All these features make fraudsters like this extremely hard to catch and prosecute. To bring down the Maria Duvall operation, law

enforcement agencies will need to mirror the tactics of the scammers, working together across borders and pooling their talents. But from years of reporting, I know how hard that can be for them. All those different agencies with their own rules, their own politics. To keep everyone pulling in the right direction, you need a lead investigator with a very particular combination of zeal and pragmatism. We have administrative authority to stop mail delivery to an address if you're committing a fraud scheme. We last checked in with U.S. Postal Inspector Clayton Gerber during his dumpster diving mission in 2014. Here's what he knew about the international structure of the scam back at that point.

The Marie Duvall fraud model was a franchise model. It was crafted in Europe by two organizer leaders, and they sold the rights to her name and this suite of letters as a franchise model to North America, a different franchisee covered Europe, a different franchisee covered the Pacific. The two organized leaders Clayton mentions there are Jacques and Jean-Claude, the original founders. While they have left the stage by this point, the franchise model they put in place is still highly effective. If one branch gets shut down, it doesn't necessarily impact the rest. Clayton knows this, but he has no jurisdiction

outside of the U.S. So for now, he's after the franchise operating in his part of the world. And so we were focused on the North American franchise that was operating in the U.S. and Canada. He's already figured out the puzzle of where the return envelopes full of the victim's money were going. That's how he shut down Keitha's Long Island caging service, even though she still denies any wrongdoing. Now, it's time to trace the original letters, supposedly from Maria Duvall, the ones sent to the victims. Where are they coming from? We became aware the letters were being entered into the mail stream in Albany, New York. Not many post offices can process mail on the scale of the Maria Duvall letters, so Clayton knows where to look.

U.S. Postal Service had a large processing facility in Albany where we could accept truckloads of mail like that. We talked to the personnel in Albany and they said, yeah, that we get a truck once a week or twice a week. They sort of identified the truck. They said the driver comes from Montreal. So after getting some details from their Albany team, they head to the border and start searching trucks entering the U.S. Before long, they discover one of the trucks is overflowing with Maria Duval letters. It's only now that Clayton has a clear sense of just how many letters are coming into the country. A typical mailing would be 50,000 letters, 100,000 letters. They do 50 or 100,000 a week, you know, and they were getting about 7,000 paid responses from that.

So at 100,000 a week, that'd be 7%. That's a remarkable return on a direct mailing scheme. That is phenomenal performance. So now they know that all these hundreds of thousands of letters are coming from Montreal in Canada. But they can't just charge over the border without first coordinating with the Canadian authorities. In the meantime, there's a more immediate issue. Though Clayton now knows roughly where the letters are coming from, he still doesn't know who is sending them. And figuring that out is easier said than done. On all of these mass mailing schemes, they diversify their locations. They don't want to get caught.

They will mail from some location. They will have their mailboxes where they receive their payment at some location. They will have that bundled up and shipped to another location to make it very hard to identify where they are. But in the paperwork they seized from Kifa, Clayton notices one company name that keeps cropping up. Infogest. So they would order the print jobs, hire a printing house to print the solicitations, and a mailing house to stuff the envelopes. This company seems to be coordinating it all. And on closer inspection, it turns out that Infogest is just the latest name from the same Montreal-based company that's been taking the Maria Duval payments, Destiny Research Center. But Clayton sees right through the ruse because the personnel are exactly the same.

There were two or three or four people that worked in Montreal at Infogest and were sort of coordinating the operation of the scheme. Clayton has found the company responsible for the Maria Duval scam, at least in North America. So who is running Infogest? We had a large volume of email communication between Infogest and the caging service. And that email communication was primarily Mary Thanos and Phil Lett talking to the caging service in the regular operation of the business. The documents Clayton seized from Keefa's caging service show that Infogest is run by two Canadian citizens, Mary Thanos and Phil Lett. Mary is the company's director of operations. She's in her late 50s, and from the emails, Clayton gathers that she supervises the whole team.

She looks after all the money that's coming in and out. Bulk buying products for the letters, magical pendants, the Lakshmi statues, gold rings. She instructs teams to remove the Made in China stickers from them. Each email politely signed, best regards, Mary Thanos. Philip Lett had the title of Director of Marketing. A few years younger than Mary, he was in charge of printing out the letters, mass-producing them, and shipping them out. Together, Mary and Phil are overseeing all aspects of the business. They even edit the content of the letters. As Clayton's investigation of Infogest deepens,

he begins to understand how Mary and Phil run the scam so successfully. The first step is that Infogest buys what are called suckers lists. Richard Clark, our UK fraud specialist, mentioned these last episode. They're lists of consumers that are grouped together based on their buying habits. Because what you have bought helps build a picture of what you might be willing to buy in the future. Whether that's another tiny bottle of eye-wateringly expensive moisturizer, in my case, or Maria Duvall's psychic services. Brokers then put these lists together and sell them to marketing companies and scammers. Clayton explains it to me using an old school example. You might go to a county fair

and you might put your name in a fishbowl to win a prize. And you put your name and address. And if you are willing to put your name and your personal information in a fishbowl to win a prize, you are deemed an opportunity seeker. Someone susceptible to believing luck is on the way. And those are often lists of people that are valuable to fraudsters and scammers and the like. If you're an ambitious scammer with a thirst for growth, then suckers lists are also essential for scaling up. If I'm a fraudster, I will go to these data brokers and I'll say, here's a list of my 10,000 customers. They've already given me money. Data brokers will

then cross-reference the information they have on these individuals. And they buy Preparation H, and they buy adult diapers, and they buy canes and various walking aids. And we have 50,000 other people that buy that same stuff. That is a highly tailored list of potential victims for you. Once Mary and Phil know who to target, they start to craft the perfect letters. They'd sit around the office and say, this sounds good. Let's type this up. Okay, that sounds good. They would test whether one story would sound better than another. I, Maria Duval, am going to prepare your personal astral, the most important, your devoted friend, Maria Duval.

They experiment with different variations of the Maria mythology. So they'd have 100,000 piece mailing going out the next week, and they're like, I want to change the story a little. Let's try this. And they'd mail 50,000 with the new story and 50,000 with the old story. And they'd test which story would generate more payments. And whichever one won, that was the new story that they were going to go with. When I was a child, I could see through what people say, but I thought between the lines that everybody heard. They're always trying out new phrases, new buzzwords, getting a sense of what draws the most people in. Because ultimately, the scam is all about ratios. You mail out 100,000 initial solicitations and some small percentage of people will respond.

That doesn't make you any money. It costs way more to mail out. But what you do with that initial mailing is you acquire a customer. And if they've paid once, they're likely to pay again. So Mary and Phil send out a second letter, but you need a new story, a new pitch. The language in the letter has to evolve,

and Maria Duvall needs to take you to the next level. I look at your handwriting, then I take the date of birth. She has to get to know you, you need to get to know her. There was a call to action. All you have to do is grasp the hand of friendship. We are holding out to you. They wanted you to act, and what was that action? They gave you the return envelope that was pre-printed ready to go. Put your check in it and mail it back to them. Clayton's referring to those green envelopes, which, as we know, would be mailed to the Long Island Caging Service. And that's where the workers would slice open the envelopes, take out your order, enter your name, how much you had paid.

And that would trigger you to get the next mailing. And then the cycle started again. On and on, as more money was sent, more letters came through and more rewrites were being tested on people all across the country. This elaborate progression from the first letter to 50 or 60 different letters

deepened your relationship with Maria, convincing you that she was responding emotionally to your troubles and replying directly to you. From my conversation with Maria's son, Antoine, I knew that she was a woman who relished her own mystique. But in these letters, the line between fantasy and reality has dissolved completely. The stories of all of these things that she may have done, those were the creations

of Phil Lett, Mary Thanos. Every representation was more fantastical than the next. It's so brazen. I asked Clayton how a scheme like this has gone on for so long without being shut down. He says the key is the way its scale is hidden from each individual victim and each local police force. Let's say a victim gets one of these Marie Duval letters. They mail $40. They get another letter from her and they decide to go to the police. This is a scam. I got tricked.

I don't even know if a police department would even take your complaint. You're not going to find anybody to investigate. It's like when Chrissy Robinson went to the police station to report the letters her mother Doreen had received and got told it was just fire beware. These individual victims were just too small fry for resource-strapped local authorities to take seriously. But when you add up the volume, we never in our wildest dreams thought that these schemes were at this scale. I mean, the Marie Duval mass mailing scheme was extraordinary in its size and scale. Even just looking at the U.S. numbers, it's one of the largest scams the world has ever seen. 1.4 million unique humans in the United States responded. Now, there's 330 million people in the United States,

so that is one out of every 300 men, women, and children walking down the street fell victim to this scheme. That's what makes this scam unique. You'd be hard-pressed to find one out of every million officers who have investigated a crime with 7,000 victims. Compound that to 7,000 victims a week. It's just unheard of. Crimes like this don't exist. The only way to stop this sprawling scam is to take out the people at the very top.

Clayton zones in on Mary Thanos and Phil Lead. By 2015, he's got enough evidence for an indictment and is working with Canadian authorities to bring them in. We have all of the evidence. We are ready to go. But how will the masters of the Maria Duval operation respond? So we had overwhelming evidence that Mary Thanos and Phil Lett knew what was going on. They were overseeing the mailing operation. They were overseeing the caging operation. So we were prepared to charge them and file criminal charges and indict them. The charge? Conspiracy to commit mail fraud, which carries the maximum penalty of 20 years in jail plus a fine of $250,000. Clayton quickly gets a court order forcing Infogest to stop trading,

effectively closing down the largest, most profitable arm of the Maria Duvall scam. But before pushing the button and extraditing Mary and Phil from Canada, he decides to lean on them to see if they'll cooperate. And if they do, he'll be able to roll up anyone else involved in the scam in the U.S. and Canada, and perhaps even gain some intel on its operations worldwide. If Mary and Phil plead guilty and share what they know, their sentences could be drastically reduced. They agreed to cooperate. They agreed to come to the United States and sit down and meet with us. In 2014, Clayton and his fellow investigators finally interview the duo running the scam he's been investigating for months. He's surprised to find out that the threat of

indictment is not the only reason they've come here today. They had a significant change of heart. One of them had started to care for her elderly father. Her father had been paying money to a mass mailing scheme, and it hit her very hard that she was running one of those schemes. It's a strange moment. Mary Thanos has a crisis of conscience and reveals that her own dad has been a victim of a scheme that's very similar to the one she's been running. And after InfoJest shuts down and they both await indictment, Phil Lett gets a job as a letter carrier delivering mail for Canada Post.

And he recalls that he would go to a mailbox and he would have a stack of letters to put in the mailbox, and he recognized that these are fraudulent solicitations. He knew what they looked like, and he knew that there were elderly people living there, and he was sticking these solicitations in their mailbox, and there was somebody victimizing them, and it hit him very hard. There are plenty of moments in this story that seem almost too neat, like the work of a cheesy screenwriter. I even had to go back and fact check what Mary and Phil said with Clayton, given how convenient it all sounds. He told me that his team is pretty good at sorting truth from BS, and if there was any hint that Mary

or Phil were making any of this up, they would have lost their cooperation credit. Maybe it's naive of me, but I want to believe that their moral revelations are sincere. I think they had probably rationalized what they were doing for so long that they stopped thinking about the people opening the letters until they were forced to. Of course, I'm desperate to speak to Mary and Phil directly, but they've declined to take part in this podcast. Whatever their motivations may have been, Mary and Phil tell Clayton everything. Mary knew how to administer the operations. They were good at it. They had been doing it for a long time. They confirm everything Clayton has pieced together about the way the scam's been operating.

But then they throw in a curveball. It's not until Mary, Thanos, and Phil let come in and start talking to us that we get the full picture. They claim that they were acting under instruction, and they have email and phone record evidence to back this up. Turns out, Mary and Phil are not at the top of the chain. They're second in command. They had an absentee boss who was rarely in Montreal and took great pains to stay off the books. His name didn't exist on paperwork anywhere.

He had intentionally kept his name off of InfoJazz paperwork. He would direct Mary and Phil on how to adapt the letters to push new psychic products. He was always driving them to scale up, to target more people, to make more money. I think his typical direction was to call them up and say, I need more money.

Send me money. I need money. I have to buy another car or I'm buying another house. Who is this boss? The emails are signed with the entirely unconvincing pseudonym Billy Rod. But sitting across from Clayton, Mary and Phil give him the true name. And they are the ones who reveal that really Patrice Runner is running the show. Patrice was the owner of Infogest. He was the boss. Patrice Runner. It's almost too perfect

for a scammer living outside the law. With Mary and Phil as high-level witnesses, Clayton now has Patrice squarely in his sights. They were cooperating, providing us records, and we were able to prove the charges against him. It's official. Patrice Runner is the boss. And Clayton's ready to take him down. Then it's a question of where is he? So by May 2016, two years into Clayton's investigation, InfoGest has been shuttered and nearly all the main players are cooperating. Clayton has the orchestrator of the entire Maria Duvall scam in his crosshairs. But he still has no idea where Patrice Runner is. Because, remember, this is still two years before Patrice's

ex-wife would frantically call the Ibiza police looking for their son. Well, Patrice Runner certainly was globetrotting during the life of the Maria Duval scheme. He was living wherever he wanted. He and his wife just sort of decided, let's do a change of pace and move to Costa Rica. He lived in Montreal for a while. He moved to Vancouver. He moved to Germany. He moved to Austria. He lived in France. He had sort of unlimited resources to do that. But thanks to the continuing cooperation of Mary and Phil, Clayton has a lead. They told us, well, he's in Ibiza now because they had to send him money. I've moved to Ibiza now. Here's my new bank account. Send me the money.

There's no guarantee that Patrice is still in Ibiza now, given his jet-setting lifestyle. And wherever he is, Clayton's all too aware of the headache-inducing obstacles arresting criminals abroad. It can be challenging depending on the country and depending on what evidence collection and information is like. It takes another two years of back-and-forth emails, waiting for responses between Interpol and the Spanish police to confirm that Patrice is still in Ibiza. By 2018, Clayton believes that Patrice is no longer living the high life that came from

running the Maria Duvall business. We shut the scheme down and all of a sudden the money stopped, right? So he doesn't have these unlimited resources to fund this fabulous lifestyle and move around willy-nilly. The tragedy of Patrice Runner is he didn't save any of his money. He spent it all. You know, over the span of 10 years, the Marie Duval scheme brought in a quarter of a billion dollars, and he doesn't have any money to his name. The sheer nerve you must have to live like a rock star, blowing so much money, when the whole business is so precarious, the whole thing just seems a bit reckless. There's also a part of me that wonders if it's really true that all the money is just gone

and not secretly stashed somewhere in a Swiss bank account or something. But either way, Clayton knows that Patrice is somewhere in Ibiza with not much money in hand, virtually trapped. He just needs to find him. We had obtained an indictment in the United States for his arrest, and we sent it to Spain. Spain, we have a criminal charge against this individual, Patrice Runner. We believe he's living in your country. This is where we think he's living. Here are his identifiers. Please go arrest him for us and let us know when you have him,

and we will fly him to our country. So then they go out and look for the person. Clayton is wracked with nerves. He's done all this work and now his case is in the hands of local Ibifan police officers who he has no control over. But then, in December 2018, Clayton gets the call he's been waiting for. Patrice has been arrested. The chase seems to be over. They bring him to court and they say,

there are these charges against you in the United States. They would like to extradite you. And Patrice gets a lawyer. He's like, I'm going to fight this. And so they say, great, here's your court date in Spain. And they release him. Believe it or not, two more years go by of back and forth between Patrice's lawyer and the Spanish courts.

The legal tussle culminates in Patrice flatly refusing to come in for his hearing in 2020. Finally, the courts have had enough. They order the police to arrest him again. Clayton is on standby, waiting to fly to Madrid, pick up his prisoner, and take him back to the U.S. Well, it's time to arrest him, and he's no longer living at his home. He and his wife had separated, and they go to the home, and the wife says, he's not here anymore.

And where is he? I don't know where he is. And so then he's gone. As far as the police are concerned, he's fled. Clayton is furious. There's nothing he can do from his side of the Atlantic. The police in Ibiza begin an island-wide hunt for Patrice. They interview his ex-wife, who reveals some grim details about how Patrice has been living. Well, it turns out he had no means of income, and his wife kicked him out, so he was essentially homeless, and he was living in a tent on the beach in Ibiza. But he and his wife had a child together. They had a son, and in theory, they had joint custody of the son. And

so he would stay in a tent during the week. And then if he had a son for the weekend, he would rent a hotel room. And he and his son would stay in the hotel room and they would do father-son stuff. It sounds like a pretty depressing existence. Homeless during the week, putting on a facade for his son on the weekends. Despite being armed with this information, the Ibizan police still can't locate Patrice. That is, until a few weeks later in December 2020, when a fresh lead falls right into their laps. Patrice's ex-wife, panicking about where her son might be, calls up her local police station. The wife had a rule that the son had to call home every day. Pretty typical in a divorce and a separation.

So the son goes for the weekend to stay with Patrice, and he doesn't call home to mom. He's supposed to call every day, and he doesn't call. So mom gets upset. She calls the police station looking for her child. She can't locate his father. What's his name? His name is Patrice Runner.

This is the phone call we opened with when Patrice's panicking ex-wife unwittingly provides the final tip-off. And they, you know, sort of zoom in on her and say, tell us what you know. Tell us where he is, where you think he is. Well, he's been staying at this hotel. Lo and behold, he was, and the police go and arrest him in the middle of the night at the hotel with his son present. The news reaches Clayton in the U.S. The Spanish judge has ordered Patrice Fronter to be extradited to the United States. This is fantastic. Clayton's going to finally be able to put Patrice behind bars. There's just one small issue.

It's November 2020, right at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. International travel is complicated, to say the least, and the Spanish courts have only given Clayton 30 days to collect Patrice. After that, he'll be released. And so I scrambled to figure out how I was going to transport an international fugitive from Spain to the United States during COVID when there are no vaccines, there are no visas being issued to travel to Spain. And it's, by the way, 30 days is basically going to be Christmas Day.

Clayton feels like everything's against him. He gets on the phone with the Spanish authorities and practically begs them for a visa. Eventually, they give in, with a few conditions. We would not be allowed to be armed in an international flight, so we would be unarmed, but he would be handcuffed. Interpol works as the go-between for the Spanish police and Clayton's team. There is a small police precinct at the airport and we go there and they hand him over to us and then they drive us out on the tarmac to the plane and we walk up the steps and we're the

first ones on the plane. We go to the very back of the plane. He's in handcuffs. What was it like being face-to-face with this man who had been under investigation for so long and had been responsible for this massive scam? Well, it's always anticlimactic. I have arrested folks that I have had under extradition for 10 years, and I finally meet them, and it's really a letdown. They're not some superhuman. They're just a human. Patrice looks like all the photos that Clayton's team have managed to find of him. He's got a slightly grown-out beard, long hair tied back in a ponytail with some silver strands. And to Clayton, he kind of looks like he's in a state of shock at the situation he finds himself in.

Patrice had assumed that the loss of his business, Infogest, was the only punishment he'd suffer. I had to explain to him. I said, no, we're here with handcuffs to put you in jail. That's different. To me, it seems bizarre that the leader of such a huge scam would be surprised to be arrested. But Clayton can understand Patrice's perspective. You think that this company that is your life's work, that you've run for 20 or more years, that made you fabulously wealthy, gets shut down, is completely out of business, and now you don't have any money to your name. You think that's the end of the story. It's all over. Why would you possibly think that you could also go to jail, right? Except it, in fact, was a crime. Despite years of work shutting down the Maria Duvall scam and chasing its mastermind,

imagining what sort of person he might be, Clayton never managed to interview Patrice one-on-one, even during that intimate plane journey. We could try to interview him. He didn't want to talk to us, really. Patrice basically stonewalled him. In fact, Patrice has never spoken publicly to anyone before, never told his story. So I did what I thought would persuade him to speak to me. I sat down and wrote him a letter. When I got it, a dog was speak to me. I sat down and wrote him a letter. When I got it,

I thought, who's writing to me? And then I signed it, Rachel. I thought, who's that? Next time on The Greatest Scam Ever Written, I get a hold of Patrice, and he wants to talk.

Unlock all episodes of Smokescreen The Greatest Scam wants to talk. 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. Our assistant producers are Luca Evans and Leo Schick. Our producer is Millie Chu. Our story editor is Dave Anderson. Voice by Nevada Red. For ITN Productions, our production manager is Emily Jarvis. Our executive producer is Rubina Pabani.

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