True Crime Campfire - Magick Money: Greed Goblin Dawn Bennett

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

I read a book once about the inner workings of Wall Street. I don’t really like to talk about it—I still get a little nauseous when I think about it. Yechh. One of the most memorable bits, though, was an interview with an investment banker who said, with a total lack of irony, “What good does it do me to make ten million if the guy down the hall is making twenty?” When the author said, “Well…okay, but when is it enough?” the guy looked at him like he’d just grown a second head. “Enough? It’s never enough.” That right there, campers, is the engine that drives some of the worst stuff in the world. And there’s no shortage of assholes in the clown car—some of whom are more than willing to resort to fraud to get there. Join us for the story of Dawn Bennett, a woman who rose to fame as one of the "best" financial advisors in the country, then crashed and burned spectacularly, despite her efforts to put curses on the SEC agents coming after her for fraud. Yeah, you read that right: Curses. Sources:CNBC's "American Greed," episode "The Luxury Curse Scam"https://www.cbsnews.com/news/dawn-bennett-ponzi-scheme-suspect-paid-720k-for-prayers-by-hindu-priests-in-india/https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2019/10/04/when-a-financial-advisor-turned-to-hoodoo-spells/?sh=514afa3146bbhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/dj-bennett-brings-luxury-to-sporting-goods/2012/12/23/3c9a365e-43cc-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.htmlhttps://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/former-financial-advisor-sentenced-20-years-federal-prison-her-conviction-17-federalhttps://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-cr-maryland-investment-adviser-sentenced-0801-20190801-ueewer72wnglvdpwimudumebje-story.htmlhttps://www.sec.gov/alj/aljdec/2016/id1033jeg.pdfhttps://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2017/comp23922.pdfhttps://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/07/how-to-find-a-financial-advisor-who-wont-make-your-money-disappear.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. I read a book once about the inner workings of Wall Street. I don't really like to talk about it. I still get a little nauseous when I think about it, actually. One of the most memorable bits, though, was an interview with an investment banker who said, with a total lack of irony, what good does it do me to make $10 million if the guy down the hall is making 20?

When the author said, well, okay, but when is it enough? The guy looked at him like he'd just grown a second head. Enough, it's never enough. That right there, campers, is the engine that drives some of the worst stuff in the world, and there's no shortage of assholes in the clown car, some of whom are more than willing to resort to fraud to get there. This is Magic Money, Greed Goblin Don Bennett. So, campers, for this one, we're in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a neighborhood right on the edge of Washington, D.C., and located at the intersection of Hoyty and Toitie, by which I mean its fancy pants. On August 2nd, 2017, FBI agents rated two luxurious penthouse condos belonging to financial advisor and radio personality, Don Bennett, looking for evidence of a multi-million dollar fraud.

They found a ton of paperwork and evidence of ridiculously lavish spending. This bitch was essentially using one of her two multi-million dollar condos as a closet for her massive collection of shoes, clothes, bags, and jewelry. That in itself scores pretty high on the wealthy wax. but the next thing the agents uncovered blew the needle right off the scale. One of the agents was poking around in the kitchen and came across these two big freezers. And when they opened them up, they were full of dozens and dozens of sealed up mason jars with different initials written on the lids. And as they're looking at these jars, they realize every one of them was full of some kind of like gross mystery liquid and

floating around in there, every single jar was a nasty, big, tongue. Yeah, you heard me. Each mason jar contained a large tongue. What the hell? So who in the flippity fuck is this woman, Don Bennett, and why is the FBI swarming all over her house? And most importantly, why is her freezer full of tongues? All good questions, right? So let's get into it. Don Bennett started her illustrious career as a broker in 1987 at the age of 24. By 1996, she was working with financial Giants Leg Mason, managing the accounts of wealthy clients and building a pretty solid reputation for herself. By 2006, she was ready to branch out on her own and started her own investment firm, Bennett Group Financial Services. Now, she clearly was good at her job. If you spend 20 years

successfully working in one of the most notoriously cutthroat industries there is, you pretty much got to have some degree of genuine competence and ability. And because part of her job was winning and keeping the trust of wealthy investors, it didn't hurt that Dawn had great people skills, too. She was charming and smart, good at building solid relationships. She was happy to just chat with her clients about anything. They didn't feel like they were just a way for her to make money. They felt like she really cared about them and wanted them to prosper. So when she opened her own firm, a whole bunch of her clients were happy to move right along with her. I mean, why not? She'd been successfully managing their investments for years. They trusted her. So Bennett Group grew like a

weed. By 2009, just three years after starting, they reported management of $1.1 billion of assets. That's billion with a beat. The financial magazine Barron's ranked her number five in their list of the top hundred female financial advisors. And in the later issue, she was ranked at 26 among all advisors. This was the big time. A big part of how Barron's decides their rankings is the value of the assets under management. And once that got over a billion dollars for Donner, Bennett had started turning. And Don was always thrilled to toot her own horn, using this high-profile recognition of her abilities to entice new clients and convinced the ones she already had that they were in the right hands. She was not at all shy about dropping awards and honors she'd won into

conversation, you know, pretty casually, I'm sure, which in most professions would be kind of obnoxious, but I don't think it's the worst thing in a broker. I mean, you want them to be dedicated to success because their success makes you money, right? Makes sense to me. Don was definitely hungry for success, seeking out new clients every chance she got. Like, one time she just happened to meet this dude, Steve Santagotti, who had some D-Less success with a dating self-help book. Good looking guy, did the talk show circuit and all that as a relationship expert, and kind of got a rep as a playboy pickup artist type. Ew. Yeah, his book is called The Manual emphasis on man.

A true bad boy explains how men think, date, and mate and what women can do to come out on top. So the less said about that, the better. Yeah, before mediocre and misogynistic men had podcasts, they were authors. As they talked, Don gave this guy the full court press about her new investment firm. And even though his assets were almost negligible compared to her main clients, she said she'd be willing to take him on. You know, since her firm was new and she was still trying to build a client,

base. She made it seem like she was doing him a favor. Like she was making an exception for him. She didn't normally take on clients with assets under a million dollars, but she'd do it just this once, just for him. Red flag. Oh yeah. But Steve was impressed by Non, and he was flattered by her offer to take him on alongside all her super rich clients. He started giving her every spare dollar he had to invest. So the guy walks away thinking he's gotten lucky. Lucky, which must have helped obscure just how odd this whole interaction was. Don had a client list of serious high flyers, serious cash, and she worked in a profession where that old saying about time being money was true.

Her time and effort was worth a hell of a lot, so why was she so eager to spend it on a small potatoes guy like this? One of the things that helped Don attract and keep clients was that she made them feel safe, confident that they were dealing with a calm, sober investor who's going to take good care of their money and not do anything too risky. As she told Barron's, I'm competitive, but I'm not going to chase the greed. Sorry. Wow, is that a lie. Yeah. And that's the balance you want, a go-getter who's not going to get carried away. Everything Don said, built the the image of a competent, driven, careful financial advisor, and there was no reason to think

she was anything other than what she portrayed herself to be. Not yet. Dawn might have claimed that she wasn't chasing greed, but she sure as hell liked spending money. She filled her two penthouse condos with pricey furniture, decor, clothes, shoes, bags, and jewelry. But her biggest indulgence was renting a luxury suite at AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys for the princely sum of $500,000 a year. Jeez and flipping crackers, lady. Jesus. Oh yeah, yeah. Wait. It was on a 20-year lease as well. So we're talking about a $10 million commitment just to sit a fucking mile away from the field and watch some tight ends in

spandex pants. Un-fucking believable. And in 2010, right on the heels of her Barron's magazine ranking, Don started an AM radio show in the D.C. area. She called it Financial Mythbusting with Don Bennett. So who listens to AM radio shows about financial investment at 11 o'clock in the morning? Well, mostly retirees, aka a big giant pool of potential victims, I mean clients, to lure in. The radio show brought Dawn clients directly. Plenty of regular listeners would eventually call Don's office and set up a meeting to talk about letting her handle their investments. Don was good on the radio, establishing an identity as a savvy financial guru, but personable enough that when listeners met her, it was like getting together

with an old friend. Her financial firm went from strength to strength. By 2011, they reported management of nearly $2 billion worth of assets, and Don continued to rise in the professional rankings, eventually being named the number two financial advisor in all of D.C., which is, of course, a city with a lot of big money. She'd built a solid reputation, so of course people felt safe letting her handle their money. Why wouldn't they? But a little later in 2011, the rosy glow of Don Bennett's reputation started looking a lot less rosy. Some clients started to notice losses in their portfolios. Not much at first, given the size of these accounts, like drops of a few thousand dollars, then over $10,000 at a time, and then free falls of over $100,000. So, of course,

this freaked her clients to feck out. Turns out, they're sober, sensible, financial. financial guru was not in fact taking meticulous care to safely handle their investments. Oh, no. Instead, Don was pumping their money into high-risk investments, the kind of aggressive purchasing that can lead to big rewards, but is way more likely to just blow up right in your face. This is the 2011 equivalent of investing in NFTs. Yeah, which is really not what most people are looking for from their financial advisor. You want to gamble with your money, you take it to a casino, you know, then at least you can have a few comped rum and coax while you're getting the financial shit kicked out of you and then, you know, maybe go see Tom Jones or something

afterwards or Cirque de Soleil. Nothing eases the sting of financial ruin more than watching an avant-garde French clown hanging from a big metal hoop by his dick or whatever it is they do. I've never seen it. I just, I hear stories. Dawn was also using her client's accounts to borrow on margin and buy more stocks. Now, before your brain just slammed shut, I'm going to explain what that means. This is essentially a loan that uses your investments as collateral. Okay, so it lets you buy more stock than you can directly afford. That's a red flag already, right?

And if things go well, more stock equals more profit. But if things go badly and your new stocks are duds, you can lose a lot of money, real fast, so obviously it's really risky. Buying on margin had an additional benefit for Don Bennett, though. It inflated the value of the assets she was managing, which is what kept her flying high in those financial advisor rankings, and added sparkle to her money guru image, which, as we've seen, attracted more clients. So this whole system can turn out great, as long as those risky stocks keep making good, as long as all those little investment coins you're flipping, keep Landon heads up. But if things start going wrong, the structure Don had built was about as

sturdy as a house of cars and a tornado. Over the next couple of years, Don's furious clients filed complaints with FINRA, the financial industry regulatory authority, alleging a whole slew of improper actions that cost them millions of dollars of damages. And around this same time, the SEC also started sniffing around Bennett Group Financial Services, investigating Don's claims about the value of her assets under management. So, storm clouds were certainly circling for Ms. Bennett, but she didn't seem to notice. Donnie was diving headfirst into a new project, DJ Bennett.com, an online luxury sports goods store that Dawn, long-time master of confident financial bullshit, talked up as a business that would soon be up there with heavyweights like

Lulu Lemon. Luxury sports goods, of course, means spit-takingly expensive sports goods. And while I admit to knowing less than zero about the wide world of athletic retail, I think it's possible Don was overestimating the number of people willing to pay 700 bucks for a ski hat. Yeah, even like Lula Lemon and Under Armour, know that there's like an upper limit on things people will pay to sweat on or in. Like, it's higher than you'd think, but it's not that high. Yeah, it's higher than it should be. It's not no 700 bucks, right?

so she was zeroed in on a high-end market the website is so ridiculous i cannot even stand it the website featured a private blog for regular customers where they could communicate with professional athletes and olympians for advice that must have been fucking wild wild can you imagine somebody just like drunk on a Friday night trying to get in a chat with an Olympic skier yeah hey Michael Phelps i would love to have been a fly on the wall. And the physical store in Chevy Chase was opened by appointment only, and customers would be plied with champagne and craft beer when they visited.

Don described it to the Washington Post as a very privileged customer experience, a very luxurious white glove experience. Because, you know, when you're buying a little club for battering fish to death, you want it to be a white glove experience. Yeah. Yeah. If you're running a sportswear store, you really want to make sure it's the kind that wouldn't let Julia Roberts character and pretty woman shop there. You know? Big mistake. Huge. The DJ Bennett website featured a cringy promotional video laying out the kind of customer Dawn was after. Over shots of safaris, private jets and models surfing, snowboarding, scuba diving, and meditating on a beach appeared these words with, the if in weird quotation marks every time.

If you exhale. If you're empowered. If you adventure. If you're a warrior. If you're extraordinary. If you're impeccable. If you're stupid rich and have an exaggerated sense of your own importance and way too much free time.

Okay. That last one was ours. But it's definitely the vibe. no pores please nobody who even has to think about checking their bank of balance ever hang on what do you mean if you exhale like what's the other option death yeah buy our overpriced tank tops or die don had big plans for dj bennett dot com they eventually sold goods from high-end manufacturers like louis Vuitton barbore and barretta but don's ultimate goal was to produce her own luxury line of sportswear she was also looking at expanding

the business into China. And in just a few years, the success of D.J. Bennett became a matter of real urgency for Don. In 2014, she learned about those pesky FINRA and SEC investigations, and when news got around about that, clients started leaving her in droves. Bennett Group Financial Services was going tits up, big time. Tits up is the professional term, by the way. Oh, yeah. By 2015, Don's income from commissions had dwindled.

to $100,000 a year, which for most people in America would still be just peachy keen, but for a one-slotted broker trying to get a new business airborne, it was a crisis. Dawn was getting into some deep financial water. Not that she let it slower down much. She still spent extravagantly on herself. She still had to have the best of everything, which I think was partly about trying to project to the world that she was still successful to make sure. nobody spotted any cracks in the business-suited armor.

But it also kind of strikes me as panicky behavior, almost superstitious. Like she was turning herself into her own vision board. If I act like I'm still wealthy, then I will be wealthy. Oh, yeah. Plus, she's an entitled Greed Goblin. That too. To help keep up this lifestyle, Don got a $750,000 line of credit from the bank, based on statements that she had a $4 million broker portfolio.

This, of course, was a humongous lie. The actual value of that portfolio? $35. That's a three and a five. 35. Meanwhile, she put everything she had, time, money, and hope into DJ Bennett.com. If it worked, she could get out of the hole she dug herself into.

If it worked, it had to work. It didn't work. DJBennett.com took a big old stinging belly flop into the pool of online retail, losing millions of dollars a year right from the start. And if you're starting an ambitious new business, losses at the start are most likely expected and nothing to worry too much about, as long as things soon start moving in the right direction. Yeah, well, and, In 2012, DJ Bennett.com lost $1.4 million. By 2015, it was losing over $6.5 million annually. That is very much not the right direction. So Don was still in a hole, and if you're in a hole, what else can you do but grab a shovel and start digging?

Don started desperately seeking out investors for DJ Bennett.com, putting together a prospectus that included revenue projections that were not so much rosy as blindingly brilliant. From revenue of $5 million in 2015, the company was projected to have a revenue of $100 million in 2020. That's a dragon whore to cash right there. Imaginary, ridiculous, never going to happen in a million years' cash. But who was Dawn to let the truth get in the way of a good investment pitch? Don hadn't lost all her clients. Not everybody had been burned by her risky trading practices, and to many people, she still had that aura of financial competence.

To these poor bastards, Dawn was somebody they knew and trusted. in some cases for decades. So when Dawn got in touch, and generous soul that she was, offered them the chance to invest in her new business, a lot of them were interested. Why wouldn't they be? The prospectus Don sent them showed a thriving young business with profits in the millions,

which, you know, was not strictly speaking the truth, inasmuch as it was actually a big sweaty lie. Don told her clients and potential investors that DJ Bennett.com was now outperforming her financial firm, with most of its business coming from China. Don's pitch to her existing clients was that by investing in DJ Bennett, they would benefit from her financial know-how more directly than ever before, and they'd be helping somebody they liked and trusted to build something great. For a given value of the word great. Fancy sportswear.

She guaranteed a fantastic 15% annual return on investment with the promise that investors could withdraw their money at any time. Sounds like a great deal, huh? I mean, you could almost say it was too good to be true. Now, let's stop for a second, campers, because this is important stuff. Please, for the love of God, absorb this essential truth of the human experience. If it seems too good to be true, it is. Okay? It just is. Whether it's a 15% return on your investment or a work-from-home opportunity that promises

you at 1,500 a week for stuff in envelopes, or a gorgeous businessman on Match.com who's stuck in Nigeria and just needs you to pony up a little bit of cash so we can come back home and marry you. No matter how sexy it might look, shut it down. Okay? You'll thank yourself later. If you get nothing else from our show, please take that.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. So some of Don's perspective investors did ask her about that. Like, how can you guarantee a 15% return? Don's answer was that, well, this was her company, her money, so she could offer whatever returns she wanted. And, hey, this was Don Bennett, money guru, and her company was clearly going great guns. I mean, it said so, right in the prospectus that she wrote. Lord have mercy.

So, unfortunately, this attractive bait got plenty of bites. One client of Don's, who'd worked with her since 1995, moved his entire investment with Don's financial services company over to DJ Bennett.com, becoming their largest investor. Bless his heart. She was relentless in pursuing other investors. One of her Bennett Group clients initially turned down. her offer saying he couldn't afford to take any financial risks with his savings because his wife was really sick and was going to need expensive medical care. And Don, who knew full well that

DJ Bennett.com was failing hard, wore this guy down, eventually talking him into investing all his life savings, about $850,000 into her bullshit online business. And this, I think, is where she really turns a corner from reckless into just evil. So yes, her risky training had all already damaged a lot of people making their lives worse and less stable, certainly, but this is a whole different ballpark. This man told her, my wife is sick. If we lose this money, we won't be able to afford her care. And Don just went right ahead and took the cash for a business. She knew full well was failing. That is a chilling degree of callousness. Yep. And it didn't stop there. Don's radio show had provided her with a stable of clients, many of them elderly and not very

financially sophisticated. She went after these people hard for investments in DJ Bennett.com, even driving one of them to the bank herself, standing beside her at the teller and telling her what to do to wire out the money. Ugh, gross, because

she's a fucking predator. Definitely. While Don concentrated furiously on her retail venture, her other business, Bennett Group financial services, was in scalding hot water. In 2015, the SEC announced charges against the company, claiming that Bennett Group had repeatedly misled the public.

I mean, remember that staggering $1.1 billion of assets they were supposedly managing in 2009, which got Don ranked so high on the Barron's list? And the $2 billion just a couple of years later? Lies, lies, lies. Don actually managed a fraction of the assets she claimed she did. She just falsely inflated the numbers to attract new clients and to keep existing ones. convinced they were onto a good thing. On her radio show, she also exaggerated the gains her clients were seeing,

really just making up numbers on the spot to entice listeners into investing with her. So, this was a scam, straight up. Don lies to Barron's about the size and success of her new company so that she starts getting glowing write-ups in their magazine. Then she uses this newfound and fake status amplified by her radio show to reel in new clients who think they're signing on with a much more serious and sizable operation than they were. This is why she was willing to take on smaller clients like our pickup artist guy. Not because she was doing him a favor, but because they aren't actually small clients to her.

They were her bread and butter. The prey, the whole elaborate Venus flytrap of her operation was designed to live in. God, this bitch sucks. Now, Barrens is a serious financial magazine, not just a bunch of money. of naive goofs. When financial advisors would claim a certain value of assets under management, Barron's would compare that value to the SEC database. But Don was lying to the regulators, too, so there was no way for her to be caught out, at least in the short term. It seems like there's a loophole there. We need to close up, right? Yeah. When news of the SEC charges broke in 2015,

Don's excuse to clients and investors was basically, thanks Obama. She claimed that because she'd been critical of the president on her radio show, she was being persecuted now, that the charges were just part of a witch hunt, which just makes me think of the end of the last Avengers movie where Wanda says to Thanos, you took everything from me. And he says, I don't even know who you are. Sure, Don, Capitol Hills just grind into a halt from 11 to noon to listen to financial myth. busting on AM radio. I do not think you're as important as you think you are, hon. But the troubles with her financial services company made Dawn even more desperate to find investors in DJ Bennett.com. I mean, she had to find new investors, so she had money to pay the 15% return she'd promised the earlier investors. Yeah, apropos of absolutely nothing.

I was thinking the other day about a Happy Days episode where Henry Winkler's character tries to cheer up Richie by setting up a sneaky double date with Laverde and Shirley. I can't quite figure out how to describe it, but I think, I think it'd be a Fonzie scheme. A Fonzie scheme? Yes, a Fonzie scheme. Or, hey, remember how when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were together, people called them Brangelina? Well, if Potsie and Fonzie started dating, then... All right, we get it. It's a Ponzi scheme. Enough with the Happy Days jokes. What is this, 1975. Okay, gosh, it's hard to find good rhymes for Ponzi, which is, of course, what our girl Don had ended up running here. Funds from later investors were not actually invested at all.

They just went to paying off those ridiculous returns Don had promised the earlier investors, and of course, a healthy percentage went straight into Don's pocket. And from Don's pocket, the money went to some unusual places. We're going to skip clear across the country now to the San Juan Islands, Washington State, where a guy named Ben Collins, runs a website called Puja.net. Now, Ben is a follower of Hinduism, and puja.net is a site where anybody from anywhere can pay a small fee to have priests in Indian temples perform rituals on their behalf, with most of the proceeds going to the temples. Now, most of the time, when people pay for the service, they ask the priests to pray for specific favors. And in 2015, our Ms. Don Bennett

became Puja.net's newest customer. In the span of a few months, she started racking up a startling number of rituals spend in way, way more money than most of their clients. Enough money, in fact, that founder Ben Collins called her to check up on her like, oh, ma'am, you good? He was worried about her. It was like, what are you doing? So Don immediately spilled about her troubles with the SEC, but she painted, of course, herself as the innocent victim.

She was clearly feeling the pressure and starting to get desperate, emailing Ben, I am in a very, very tough fight against my enemies and I need all the hell. I can get. Oh my God, Don, chill out. They're rules nerds wearing pocket protector. It's not a horde of Urukai. And the help she wanted from Ben was, of course, more and more and more rituals. Soon, she was spending $1,000 or more a day to have a hundred priests prey on her behalf. And Ben Collins tried to get her to dial it way the hell back, saying she didn't have to do this stuff in such, you know, an insane volume, but Don wouldn't hear it. She told Collins that, at her peak, she was making a million dollars a month, so he shouldn't worry about the money.

But Donnie, girl, you are not making a million a month now, if you ever were. You're living vastly beyond your means, and both your businesses are going down like the Titanic. Also, I'm pretty sure this is a shitty use of a prayer service, okay? It's like, hey, can y'all help me get away with crimes, or... Miss Cleo could never. So anyway, in just two years, Don ended up paying around $800,000 to puja.net, which, I mean, love that the priests are getting this money, but like, holy molly. But of course, to no avail, the SEC was not backing off, and things were about to get even worse for Dawn. I sincerely

hope these people just took her money and laughed all the way to the bank. I really, really do. I hope these guys were not wasting their valuable time and energy praying for Dawn. I buy Louis Vuitton toilet paper Bennett to skate by the flippant SEC. Good God. In late 2015, a bank employee felt her spidey senses tingling when it an elderly woman came in and requested to withdraw money to invest in DJ Bennett.com. This customer had brought in some financial paperwork related to the business, complete with unlikely guarantees of a 15% annual return, and that was enough for the bank employee to do some research before releasing the funds.

Good for her. We need more watchdogs like this. It didn't take long to uncover an SEC press release from earlier in the year, detailing their investigation into Don's financial services company. So the bank employee went ahead and called the SDC, and before long, they were investigating Don's retail company, too. Soon, Donnie's case went to the FBI. As part of their investigation, FBI agents talked with Ben Collins, which was when he discovered that the hundreds of thousands of dollars Don had been spending via his website came from her Ponzi scheme from investors who thought the money was going to DJ Bennett.com. It was the money she had stolen, essentially.

Collins cut her off from the site and cut all communication, telling the FBI he'd help however he could. When the FBI got hold of Don's bank records, they found that whenever investors' money came in, it was withdrawn almost immediately, paying lawyers in Don's fight with the SEC, paying the sky-high mortgage on her two luxury condos, and paying for her credit card. And that card must have been worn wafer thin, because like a waffer. for thin car. It's funny. It's funny, campers. It's a reference to Monty Python. Cosmetic procedures, high-end clothing stores, gemstones that were supposed to have spiritual or healing properties, including one yellow sapphire that cost over $80,000.

It does more healing if it costs $80,000. The money, the money vibes around it. Eels you. And of course, she was still paying half a million dollars per year to the Dallas Cowboys for her luxury suite. Those dudes can't even win a game. She's paying them a half a million dollars. Oh, now, I know you're going to piss people. I don't even watch football. You're messing with Texas. You're messing with Texas. I just know that the Cowboys aren't that good at football. That's all I know. Don's legitimate income was drying up like a puddle in a drought, but she was living a billionaire lifestyle. spending investors money as fast as it came in.

Keeping a Ponzi scheme running can be exhausting. You always need more investors, more new money coming in, and Don let some things slip. Some investors were not seeing their promised returns and wanted to pull all their money out, and some creditors weren't getting paid. When these people called, Don did the professional equivalent of closing her eyes and the stick in her fingers in her ears. That is, getting her assistant. to tell people she couldn't speak to them for one bullshit reason or another.

Of course, if you're going to pull those shenanigans, you have to keep your story straight. And at least early on, Don's assistants didn't do a great job as an FBI wiretap revealed. There's a hilarious recording of a client calling and asking to speak to Don, and the poor bastard assistants, like, uh, she's out of the country right now? the client's like well I called yesterday and you said she was seriously ill so which is it is she sick or out of the country and the assistant's like yes it's like some out of a sitcom except for all the people who gave the bitch their life savings and had to find out she'd used it for potstone massages and Botox that part's less funny obviously right generally if a client called with the slightest suggestion that they might want to take their money out Dawn would always be either in China or on death store. Unsurprisingly, during each of these alleged trips, the FBI tracked credit card purchases from less exotic locations, like the Starbucks down the street from her office.

Dawn's early investors still had no idea anything was amiss. They were still getting their fat annual returns, after all. And then the FBI started visiting the bigger investors, and the truth started getting hard to ignore. especially when they were shown evidence that Don had lied to them about being out of the country. Things were getting dicey for Dawn. In July 2016, the SEC barred her from the securities industry. The door had just slammed shut on a 30-year career, and her second gig as a luxury sportswear retailer was under FBI investigation as a Ponzi scheme.

And the investigation came to a head right where we started this story. August 2nd, 2017, when FBI agents raided her offices and both of her penthouse condos. In the office, they found a list of excuses Don's assistance were supposed to use in various different circumstances, including one that said, if process server, Don working out of the country till 2016. I'm only a consultant. I don't know much about high finance, I'll admit, but I'm pretty sure that if you need a preset routine for dodging process, servers, things maybe aren't going so great. So one of Don's condos, the one she actually lived in, not the one she used as a closet,

had beautiful antique Asian furniture, very much the kind of place you'd expect a wildly successful broker to live in. The other place was more along the lines of a wealthy hoarder's nest with decent shelving. Rack upon rack of clothes, tables piled high with hampers of fancy underwear and over 700 pairs of high-end shoes, many of which still had their price tags, because they'd never been worn. Now, the agents initially thought, well, she's in clothing retail. Maybe she stores her inventory here, but the clothes and shoes were all one size, which, oddly enough, was Don Bennett's size. All this stuff, all of it was hers. And now we get to the real weird shit. So as you probably remember from the start of the episode, because how could you

forget. Don had two freezers in her main condo, one in the kitchen and one in a back room. These were stuffed full of dozens of sealed mason jars, each with initials written on the lid, and each containing a large tongue submerged in some kind of nasty-looking liquid. I'm guessing the FBI agents they send to raid people's houses. I've seen some pretty out-there stuff, but I'd be willing to bet freezers full of tongues was the first for every one of them. I mean, I hope so. Anyway, close to one of the freezers, the agents found printed sheets. containing details on the SEC investigating attorneys who were handling Don's case and quickly realized that the initials of these attorneys matched the ones on the mason jars.

Uh, creepy? What the hell was this woman doing? Well, the answer to that was revealed in another document nearby, printed out from a website. Printed out from a website. Instructions for a beef tongue shut up spell. Dawn was doing magic. Specifically, she was doing hoodoo, a folk magic tradition. And this particular spell involved cutting open a beef tongue, putting a picture or the name of the target inside this tongue, stitching it back up and incanting, I cross and cover you.

Come under my command. I command you to hold your tongue. I command you to keep my wife's name out of your fucking mouth. Exactly. So it's designed to keep your enemies from flapping their mouths about you, basically. Don Bennett, the buttoned up, immaculately puts, together financial high flyer had apparently done this ritual dozens of times, cutting up cow's tongues and chanting magic words by candlelight to try and get the securities exchange

commission off her back. You know, it just kind of makes you go, huh, and it really makes you wonder about her state of mind at the time. By then, she'd known for a couple years that the SEC was after her financial services company, and she had to suspect they'd be onto her ongoing Ponzi scheme, too. Imagine the stress of that for somebody who cared so much about her image as the supremely competent financial guru, knowing that any day might bring that knock on the door that would expose her as a fraud and a crook and cause her fragile financial empire to come tumbling down like a jangistak. I mean, you could almost see why she would grasp at anything, anything that might get her out of this jam, although I think it's fair to say most of us would have made less ex-filesy

choices. So Dawn was arrested soon after this raid and the arrest warrant included what the FBI had found in her condos. Her clients and investors, needless to say, were flabbergasted and no wonder, oh hey, the woman I entrusted with my entire financial security is obsessed with tongue magic. That's not what you want to hear. Dawn was charged with 17 counts, mostly related to fraud and making false statements on financial documents. Prosecutors felt they had a solid case to prove that at least 46 people put over $20 million into Don's Ponzi scheme. The jury heard testimony from people who had been greatly damaged by Don's scheme. People who'd lost money they'd set aside to care for loved ones or themselves

or money that would have left them retire or money they planned to use to pay for their grandkids' education. These were real, deep wounds in people's lives. One woman, a retired travel agent whose husband had Parkinson's disease and dementia, had known Dawn for 25 years and had no real. reason not to believe her promise of a 15% return. Don knew that the $200,000 this woman invested was all she had to care for her husband. She got back only $37,000 and lost the rest. Yeah, we want to make this clear. Her whole schick about serving super wealthy clients was bullshit. Her victims were mostly

middle and upper middle income people, not rich people at all. Not people who could afford this shit. This woman devastated people's lives. The relationship expert guy, he ended up losing everything he had in savings and living in a van. Fortunately, the jury saw the situation for exactly what it was. It was clear that Don was spending millions of dollars that were intended to go into her company on her own pleasures and indulgences. She was just a big, rich crook stealing from people less well off than herself, people who trusted her. In October 2018, Don was found guilty on all 17 counts and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. She was also instructed to pay restitution of $14.5 million, but I don't think anybody's holding their breath on that.

Hell no. Don didn't testify at her trial, but at her sentencing, she said, I am so profoundly humiliated that it would be difficult to ever shake off. Sure, Jan. What a fucking martyr. She also promised to spend whatever time she had after prison working to repay every penny she took from her investors, which is a nice idea, but I don't think anyone believed her. I don't.

And if anyone in the future calls to check on it, I think they'll probably get the old, sorry, Don's in China routine. Don is obviously a woman who's comfortable with duality in her life. A straight-laced conservative businesswoman who was also a secret practitioner of magic with a K. And I can't quite pin down which side of her was driving the bus. Was she so obsessed with wealth and status, as many in high-end financial services are, that she embraced increasingly risky behaviors until things got out of control? Or was she just a scammer from the start and an old-fashioned flimflam artist who in another life might be running a three-card Monty racket

in the subway station. I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle of those. Regardless, it's good that she's behind bars for 20 years, which is actually a really robust sentence for something like this. And if any other good comes from this case, aside from a bunch of Indian priests getting a steady income for a couple of years, good for them, it's hopefully that a lot of people learn some extra caution, that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is,

especially if a lot of your own personal money is involved. By the way, just to do y'all a little solid because we love you, we're going to post a link on our social media about how to find a financial advisor who won't, you know, do this shit. And Dawn, if you're listening to this and get any bright ideas about putting that beef tongue shut up spell on us, good luck.

Nobody in the history of either of our lives has ever succeeded in getting us to shut up for more than five consecutive seconds. So I'm pretty sure it's not physically possible. Do your worst. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights,

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