Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Lady Mafia | 3. Sell Fire to the Devil

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

When Sara’s mentor vanishes, she poaches his clients and becomes a hard money lender, earning the nickname Lady Mafia. After she falls for a Prince, she takes risks to prove her love, including buyi...ng real estate for a marijuana enterprise. A friend sues Sara to get her money back. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season we are looking at the life of the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. It's fair to say he's a complex and controversial character. Almost 150 years since his birth, how does his legacy hold up today? Follow Legacy now wherever you get your Listen to all episodes of LadyMafia ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Visit The Binge channel on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. The Binge.
Starting point is 00:00:46 Feej our true crime obsession. When Sarah meets Cameron Pahlavi, she reveals a different side of herself to me. He's a prince. Her prince. Nephew of the last Shah of Iran. Saira's marriage was crumbling. She met Cameron at a hotel restaurant in Beverly Hills. He was just so smooth. A gentleman. When the food came to the table, he would serve me first. He was just very elegant about the way he handled things, very nice to all the waitstaff. Cameron was the total opposite of her ex, which is what she needed. That night, nothing happened.
Starting point is 00:01:35 I just said, okay, well, good night. But I felt it. At that moment, I felt excited. I had the feeling that this could actually be something. She found in Cameron all the things she wanted in a partner. We could have endless hours of conversation. I've never felt anything like what I was with Cameron. It was like a fairy tale.
Starting point is 00:01:54 She got the sense they were more than friends, and one night confirmed it. That's when he told me, he's like, I have no money, all my watches are fake, I have nothing to my name. So if that's what you're interested in, like please just walk. I have my own money, so I didn't need his.
Starting point is 00:02:11 He came clean about everything, saying I have a lot of baggage. I have three ex-wives, I have kids, I have this whole gamut of issues, and I have no money, but I want to make something of myself. And I said, well, let's try and do that. Let's start a business.
Starting point is 00:02:24 That was the night he first kissed me at the bar at the montage in Beverly Hills. No money, a laundry list of problems, living on hopes and dreams. So what was Sarah thinking? Oh my God, I was head over heels for this guy. Are you kidding me? He was, it was like, you know,
Starting point is 00:02:42 I didn't ever felt any of that with my husband, my first husband. So it felt like we you know, I didn't ever felt any of that with my husband, my first husband. So it felt like we knew each other for years and it felt like it's something out of a movie. It didn't, it felt like when I was watching a rom-com because it was, it was that intense and that passionate. But it wasn't the stuff of movies. Sarah just couldn't see it at the time.
Starting point is 00:03:03 He had said to me one morning, I forget what it is, but he said, you know, you're not a supermodel, it's just a fact. And ever since he had said that to me, I was like, wow, that's really real in his circumstances because he's dated the real deal, the real supermodels. Cameron took her down a peg. And sadly, it worked. Ever since then, I just I had, I already have low self-esteem. So the fact that that happened to me, when he said that, it just,
Starting point is 00:03:30 it was always in the back of my head. Any super hot girl in the room, I would get paranoid and jealous and upset. And so everything basically that Jar did not have, I saw in Cameron that he had. And that just blinded me to the bad parts. We've reached out to Cameron Pallavi multiple times. Finally, this fall, he responded to questions we emailed him. In the couple of pages he sent, he sounded warm and a bit world weary. Cameron didn't want to give his full account for the podcast, but he did say plenty.
Starting point is 00:04:03 He confirmed he told Sara that he didn't have any money. We had a friend of the podcast read his email. He spent part of his childhood in France, hence the accent. This is what he told me. My whole life, women have been interested in my status and my family's wealth. Sara talked a lot about money when we first met. I didn't want her or anyone else to get involved with the false idea of me that wasn't the truth. What's the point of lying to someone you're supposed to build a life with? At this point, I think Sarah was riding high. She had a brother in Brian Quinn. She was sitting at the tables with the big boys. She had a new
Starting point is 00:04:45 love that was everything to her. Business was promising. Sarah was on top of the world. When she tells me about all of the risks she took, it's like she thought she could pull anything off. It only took a few short years for it to all go to hell. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Lady Mafia, the story about going from lawyer to lawless, living high and blowing millions. I'm your host, Michelle McPhee. This is episode three, self-fire to the devil. Here's something I'm really looking forward to
Starting point is 00:05:25 as the weather turns cooler. Football games, pumpkin spice lattes, and slipping into a cozy sweater from Quince. Quince is known for their Mongolian cashmere sweaters from $50 and it's not just that. All Quince items are priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. That includes beautiful leather jackets, cotton cardigans, soft denim, and so much more. I travel a lot and I was looking for some airplane essentials. The Italian leather glove ballet flat, perfect. But the best was the featherweight cashmere silk frayed edge scarf. Get cozy in Quince's high quality wardrobe essentials.
Starting point is 00:06:07 Go to quince.com slash mafia for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's quince.com slash mafia to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash mafia. Did you know that after World War II, the U.S. government quietly brought former Nazi scientists to America in a covert operation to advance military technology? Or that in the 1950s, the U.S. Army conducted a secret experiment by releasing bacteria over San Francisco to test how a biological attack might spread without alerting the public? These might sound like conspiracy theories, but they're not. They're well-documented government operations that
Starting point is 00:06:48 have been hidden away in classified files for decades. I'm Luke Lamanna, a Marine Corps recon vent, and I've always had a thing for digging into the unknown. It's what led me to start my new podcast, Redacted Declassified Mysteries. In it, I explore hidden truths and reveal some eye-opening events like Backing up for a moment. In 2018, Sara was being taken around town and introduced to the high life of Orange County. She was Brian Quinn's sister. Around that same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, was looking into Quinn's associates. The SEC is the
Starting point is 00:07:45 government agency that protects the market from being riddled with frauds and scams. And the SEC was looking into Brian Quinn and his friends because they were embroiled in a million dollar scheme to the fraud investors. Here's how it worked. They secretly owned controlling shares of companies through shell organizations. One of them was called Cure Pharmaceuticals. So we basically have a broad platform drug delivery technology. They marketed the hell out of the company's stock. Then once the price ballooned, they offloaded their own shares and got rich. This old trick is called a pump and dump scheme.
Starting point is 00:08:25 It's a classic. You might have seen something like it in the Wolf of Wall Street. The main target of the SEC's investigation was a guy named Maury Tobin. He's a colleague of our man Brian Quinn. Early 2018, federal agents locked in. They raided Tobin's French chateau-style mansion in LA. Tobin turned himself into the feds and started rolling on everybody. He told the feds everything he knew, singing like a canary as they say.
Starting point is 00:09:11 This is where our story branches though. Part of it you may have already heard. Maury Tobin was facing the possibility of years in prison for securities fraud, but he had a get out of jail free card, reportedly telling investigators about a Yale University coach who was willing to take a bribe, and that led to the largest college admission scam in the nation. Yeah, the college admission scandal,
Starting point is 00:09:35 also known as Operation Varsity Blues. 33 parents, nine coaches. The FBI uncovered what we believe is a rigged system. Meantime career fallout for actress Lori Loughlin. The scheme focused on bribing coaches and administrators to label students as recruited athletes to boost their chances of getting into schools. It was a big deal. You likely heard about it, but here's the other part you probably haven't heard, the part that's important
Starting point is 00:10:05 to our story. It appears that Maury Tobin also gave the feds Brian Quinn, and he was added to the SEC complaint about the original pump and dump scheme. Mr. Mafia Lite was screwed. Throughout all of this, Sara stuck by Quinn's side, even though by now, Quinn hadn't paid back what she'd invested in his company with her ex. Even with all that baggage, Sara helped her brother out. It's baffling. Obviously, that's her story. We could not reach Brian Quinn for comment, and trust me, we tried.
Starting point is 00:10:41 All I know is he did come to me with a notice of indictment and he asked me for help. Maury Tobin got what he was looking for when he snitched leniency. He was sentenced to a lousy four months in prison for stock fraud. From what we've seen across court records, Brian Quinn decided to cooperate with the feds too. He walked free, but would be kept on a short leash, especially near Wall Street. But do you know who wasn't? Sarah King.
Starting point is 00:11:11 She told me she was free to keep running with the big boys of the OC. Okay, now that we've had that little detour, back to the love story, or whatever you want to call it. Sarah King would have done anything for Cameron. She wanted to show that she was worth it. And for Sarah, that meant showing how brilliant, how resourceful she could be. I was never like the pretty girl sitting at the table. That's how she got things done. I was the smartest. So, you know, that was important to me in business.
Starting point is 00:11:47 When Cameron said that he wanted his own business, Sarah dove right in. Cameron wanted to start a marijuana company called Noble One that would bring boutique strains to market, edibles too, cookies and caramels called Granny B Goods. Cannabis is something that when it was coming legal, I was like, okay, well, Cameron wanted to do vapes, but there was two buildings to buy and I bought those for Cameron because he said he wanted to run this business. Initially, their marijuana venture was off to a good start. Noble One had a killer business plan in 2019. They would offer quality boutique pot,
Starting point is 00:12:24 not the crappy stuff flooding the market. They wanted to sell edibles too. I don't know what's going on with weed. I don't smoke it. I don't grow it. I don't do anything. I was the real estate piece. That's what I came in. I wanted Cameron to love me so badly that I was like, okay, I'll get the building for you. I'll do whatever it takes. It's quite remarkable actually. Just when she was about to get everything she wanted, it seemed to slip through her fingers again.
Starting point is 00:12:51 Because of course, Sara told me there were complications. And the purchase of those two industrial buildings in Long Beach was a pivot point. The first gust in the shitstorm. The buildings were supposed to manufacture, grow, and distribute their product. The purchase price for both was over $3 million. And Cameron was supposed to help with the financing. He told me he had a friend who would pay $250,000, which would have been the down payment on the building. They were in the final negotiations of the purchase,
Starting point is 00:13:25 and Sara would need proof that she could afford the mortgage. The night before that, the guy calls me and says, I don't trust Cameron, I don't want to give him the money, I'm not going to give you guys the money, and I'm just losing my mind because I'm supposed to go to escrow the next day and sign the paperwork. Cameron was just very defeated
Starting point is 00:13:44 after his friend wouldn't pay the money to invest. He told me, just let it go, who cares, just quit. She couldn't. Who the hell really knows why? Oh, and by the way, she said Cameron's investor lost faith in him. But Cameron told me the investor lost confidence in her.
Starting point is 00:14:03 So I go into escrow the next day on a Friday and I signed the paperwork saying that my people just sent the money too late. I totally lied. It was not true. I just was like, okay, it buys me one week to find a lender. First, Sara went to her buddy, Brian Quinn. Brian owed Sara and her ex
Starting point is 00:14:20 drawer almost a million dollars according to their divorce papers. I said, hey Brian, like I need my money back. I want to buy this building. Again, we can't reach Brian Quinn to see what he'd say because no one can find him. He seems to have vanished sometime after his plea deal went through in 2022. Anyhow, instead of giving Sarah her money, she said Brian Quinn referred her to a loan shark to fund the quarter million dollar down payment. They typically charge high interest rates, and if they're not paid, are known to turn to threats and intimidation.
Starting point is 00:15:01 Brian had some handy advice for her first meeting. Look really pretty when you go to meet him, but he'll give you the money. Sara said this 90-something-year-old loan shark is infamous in Hollywood, and Brian Quinn gave her his number. So it was a Sunday at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club, and I was in white jeans and a tight red sweater. So I walked in, sat down, and I said, I need $250,000. And he said, go fuck yourself, kid. And I actually ordered a glass of whiskey on the rocks there.
Starting point is 00:15:37 And I said, no, I really fucking need them. I need the money. Like I need to do this building. And he kept telling me no, no, no. And so I drank my whiskey, I left, and I called him for two days in a row. She offered her parents home as collateral. And finally the shark took the bait. And he said, I love who you are, you're just like me, I want to mentor you,
Starting point is 00:15:59 and I'll do your loan. That's how I got it. The whole scheme allowed Sara to put very little cash down on the buildings. Great idea at the time, but her future months would be hell. She had stuck herself in a $22,000 a month mortgage. If she failed to pay, they would lose the family home. And her parents had no idea. What kind of donkey puts their parents' house in the hands of a scary old man loan shark? She wasn't just putting herself in an extremely dangerous situation. She was going to leave her family homeless. She was skating on thin ice. And, well...
Starting point is 00:16:43 A 12th fatality has now been reported here in the United States, and at this hour the number of cases topping 200. When the pandemic hit, everything was gone in a puff of cherry-flavored smoke. Cameron's investors gone, COVID's hitting, there was no more funding, everyone promised they had funding and no one did. But Sauer was locked into two mortgages on the buildings in Long Beach, so they had to keep going somehow. And Prince Cameron, her boyfriend?
Starting point is 00:17:13 Well, Cameron had an idea. He wanted to make gummy bears. These stupid fucking gummy bears. Not exactly. Cameron didn't want to make CBD gummies from scratch. He spends $50,000 on pre-made gummies. And then we have a bunch of fucking gummies like in a trash bag.
Starting point is 00:17:32 Well, that's not going to sell. So they got a packaging machine and bagged those stupid fucking gummies in Sara's parents' black marble kitchen. I mean, it's not a factory, right? This is like a beautiful kitchen. And yeah, they basically packaged everything. We had these big, just huge boxes to throw them into.
Starting point is 00:17:52 But now they had to try to sell the gummies to someone, anyone. Cameron never sold one package. And when Cameron gave up, my parents were like, what the fuck are we gonna do with all this? Now, plenty of boomers are very into the weed gummy lifestyle, but Sara's parents weren't in on the industry. Their style consisted of a very different kind of high life.
Starting point is 00:18:17 They wined and dined. They golfed. I mean, they lived on the grounds of a country club. So they tried to become dealers to the people they knew best. They went to their friends, they're all golfers, right? All their friends are golfers. So they started handing out gummies to them, hoping they would buy it,
Starting point is 00:18:33 but you know, nothing ever happened. Meanwhile, the Noble One team was hard at work. They needed to outfit the grow house, buy equipment. It was a failure. I say it was a failure, but it was a great idea on paper. But me as a woman heading it, I mean I met with everyone I possibly could and I failed. I failed getting the funding too. Sara said she was heading Noble One, but paperwork
Starting point is 00:18:57 filed with the California Secretary of State lists two other managers, both men, and neither of them, Cameron. Sarah did what any reasonable person would do in her position. She started trying to cut her losses and sell the buildings. But this was COVID, and two industrial warehouses just weren't selling. And meanwhile, Sarah was hemorrhaging money. Cameron really let me down there because he doesn't know when you collateralize properties on your personal properties it's dangerous and I did it just to
Starting point is 00:19:32 prove that I love him and he told me to let it all go and I couldn't because it's my parents live in this home that it was collateralized on and they had no idea that I did that. Sarah was in an impossible bind. She was stuck with two buildings she had no way of paying for. The business that should have helped pay for the property was a steaming sack of gummy bears. And if she didn't pay up, her parents would lose their house.
Starting point is 00:19:57 And for a lot of people, losing around a million dollars, having to visit a loan shark to get some cash, well, maybe that would scare them. For some, they might retreat, lick their wounds, get into business that was a little less risky. But that's not Sara. It's a real sickening thing, actually. I'm very lucky, like to the sickening point, like the last second, everything comes together. Sara sees herself as sickeningly lucky.
Starting point is 00:20:24 The world is always working out in her favor. So after losing all that money with Brian Quinn, when she had delivered her parents' house, Sarah wasn't discouraged. She was inspired by the loan shark's business model. He gave me the money for it and he said, I want you to get a license so that we can do business together because he knew I had something. So I said, okay, so that's when I applied for my license. And this was the moment when Sarah goes from investing to becoming a hard money lender, someone who preys on the desperate, one of the big boys
Starting point is 00:21:03 and lucky for her, Sarah already knew a lot of people Brian Quinn had worked with. I learned about all of his clients because he always introduced me to everybody. I didn't take over his company, but I did have my own office right next to his of my own company, and he encouraged me to do it as well. She set up shop with a new name, King Family Lending. So King Family Lending I had to because Cameron was supposed to take care of all the cannabis business, right? I set him up with everybody, I paid for everything and he couldn't make it work.
Starting point is 00:21:34 Plus, by now, Brian Quinn was busted by the SCC and out of the hard money lending game, so she could pick up right where he left off. Sarah was desperate for an infusion of cash and she knew she had to work her contacts, that field of wealthy and well-connected people she'd been cultivating for the past few years. First stop was a friend she met at a political group, a woman by the name of Manna Kadar. Because for Sarah, friendship isn't just trading war stories and drinking rosé. When you have to get big investments from rich people
Starting point is 00:22:10 to stay afloat, friendship is a resource. And Sarah's going to frack it up. I'm Indra Varma and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Daphne Park, the spy who killed a prime minister. As the Belgian Congo gains its independence, Officer Park sets out to build a spy network. Together, they're about to go to new extremes to keep Congo free of communists. Follow the Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. The faster money and data move, the further your business can go
Starting point is 00:23:02 to a seamless digital future for Canadians. Let's go faster forward together. In Life, Interact. Hi, my name is Manakadar, founder of Manakadar Cosmetics, and today I'm going to show you how to do makeup. Manah is the CEO of a constellation of beauty brands including Manicadar Beauty, Goddess by Manicadar, Hot Dog, that's H-A-U-T-E, and Manicadar Lux Bath and Beauty. She's a serial entrepreneur, a self-made beauty mogul.
Starting point is 00:23:46 You can imagine why Manna and Sara might have become friends. They've both got that unironic girl boss energy, but their friendship wouldn't last. I had full intention of paying Manna back. I would never hurt her. She was really kind to me. Sara said that before Manna lent her money, she lent Mana money, $100K for her business. We reached out repeatedly to Mana Kadar and her lawyer to speak with them, but they declined
Starting point is 00:24:15 our multiple offers. For her part, Sarah hasn't coughed up any paperwork to show that she lent Mana $100K either. With that in mind, this is what Sarah says happened. She handed me a plastic baggie full of like four diamond rings and a diamond bracelet and said this should be enough to cover the hundred thousand dollar loan. And I said no it's fucking not. You have to have double the collateral for me to give you the loan. But because she was my friend, I gave her the loan and she ended up paying back just fine.
Starting point is 00:24:49 But when Manna lent Sarah money, it turned into a total mess. And Manna ended up filing a lawsuit against her former friend. According to the lawsuit, Sarah first approached Manna in April 2020, requesting a short term 60day loan of 25k. Sarah said that she was having trouble because of all the BS with the marijuana business, but claimed that she had other money coming through and would have no trouble repaying. To secure the loan, she handed Manna a fancy Swiss watch with a brand name that's hard to pronounce. Audemars Piget.
Starting point is 00:25:27 It took a lot of time for the artisan to finish them by hand, which brought the watch to be a steel watch that was costing more than a golden example. Now, as you may or may not be aware, watches are big. There's a whole underworld of crime tourism where people visit big money areas, like the OC, specifically to steal watches off the wrists of the well-heeled. So Sara's far from the only one using a watch as a hard asset. And this timepiece was supposedly worth $50,000. Sarah and Mana just call it the AP watch. I borrowed $25,000 from her and I had a AP watch that was worth it. So it wasn't a problem.
Starting point is 00:26:18 We chatted through the details of the lawsuit with Derek Lewis. Remember, he's the lawyer and realtor from the OC. You got to assume that Sarah King is an excellent saleswoman. She must know what to say, when to say it, how to say it, and people believe her. Sarah was a lawyer, a realtor, dressed in head-to-toe Chanel. She had a lending license, and they socialized in the same circles. Why wouldn't manna trust her? They socialized in the same circles. Why wouldn't Mana trust her? I can sell anything. I can sell fire to the devil.
Starting point is 00:26:48 I promise you that. According to the lawsuit, even though Sara didn't pay back the original loan, she asked Mana for an additional $37,000. And she showed Mana a picture of a Lamborghini that she said would be collateral for the second loan. When we talk about collateral in this story, it feels big and technical, but the idea is simple. If you don't pay up, the person doing the lending gets to keep or sell whatever you've used as collateral. I mean, you're really talking about, you know, Sarah King operating as a pawn shop, you know, she's, she's, she's going and giving people, you know, watches
Starting point is 00:27:30 and pictures of cars saying, give me money and I'll pay you back girls. So you can have this. So if the collateral is an AP watch and the loan goes unpaid, yeah, technically it's yours and a Lamborghini. You've got a new set of wheels. In between a 50k watch and a Lambo, you will never be late to anything ever again. So congrats on that. But to do this with all the paperwork in order?
Starting point is 00:27:57 That's a lot more complicated. Yeah, that's a picture of a Lamborghini, but what does title look like? Even myself, I'm like, I wouldn't even know how to go out and properly find whether a watch or a car was, you know, collateralized already or already had loans against it. I wouldn't know. I wouldn't know how to get to it. How would I seize it? How would I execute a sheriff's sale against a Lamborghini?
Starting point is 00:28:22 And Sara definitely wasn't checking all the boxes. A lot of the collateral was just in my office and a safe. I did not take good care of collateral. That is 100% true. But every, you know, it was safe anyways. A lot of people had cars, a lot of people had boats. So if it was a car, I'm supposed to take the car and take the title, but I never took the car, right?
Starting point is 00:28:44 I just took the title, but I never took the car, right? I just took the title. And here's the thing. The paperwork Mana signed didn't even mention a Lamborghini. Maybe Sara was sloppy, scatterbrained. Or maybe Sara knew exactly what she was doing. Regardless, Mana signed on the dotted line. And according to her lawsuit, Mana gave Sara more money with a promise of a high rate of interest. Sara acknowledged that she'd been having some trouble repaying.
Starting point is 00:29:15 Sara asked Mana for the AP watch so she could sell it and repay her debt. And Mana trusted that, so she handed over the watch. But selling the watch was not what Sarah had planned at all. Brian Quinn needed that watch all of a sudden because he owed all these people money. I had no money, so I said, well, Manna has my watch. And he gave me a fake one to give to her in exchange. And it's worth pointing out, Sarah is playing hot potato with the blame.
Starting point is 00:29:45 But she told us she knew she was giving Mena a fake watch. In my opinion, I always intended on paying her, so it wasn't the biggest deal. Mena took the fake watch to a jeweler to have it appraised. She found out it was fake and she flipped her noodle. And she's threatening me, suing me, and I said, look, it's not my fault. I don't want to say it's not my fault because it is I agreed with Brian let's go ahead and do this so yeah I fucked up there but I knew I was always gonna pay her. I don't know if I need to point this out but securing a loan with a counterfeit watch is still considered fraud a criminal offense. It didn't
Starting point is 00:30:24 matter that Sara said that she always intended to repay the loan. All of a sudden her lawyers are coming at me and whatnot and I said whatever it's cost Mana to make this lawsuit happen, whatever she thinks I owe her, I'll pay it. This lawsuit settled out of court so it does seem like Sara paid up. No convictions on Sara's record for this one. She got to keep all of her licenses and King Family Lending never came under scrutiny. I think Sara would want me to believe that this was just a misunderstanding between friends. But the way I see it, it could also be something else. A warning sign. It could also be something else. A warning sign.
Starting point is 00:31:10 The lawsuit laid out her MO. The strategy she'd used to swindle other people after mana. She'd go on a charm offensive on the front end, blame other people for losing her money, and then delay, delay, and make excuses on the back end. And, I would soon see, Sarah could be chilling. She could lie straight to someone's face and have little remorse. This was just the first in a series of lawsuits that would grind Sarah's hustle to a halt. Not repaying alone, using fake collateral, backstepping. I'm sensing a pattern. Does it seem natural that she went from being a lawyer
Starting point is 00:31:46 like yourself, who specialized in real estate, to becoming a self-described fixer, who took care of people's problems, and then she gets into hard money lending? You know, these things, I think, tend to snowball. And when I see hard money lenders, that's usually the progression. Initially, they just broke her loans. They have a homeowner that gets a loan from Wells Farenders, that's usually the progression. It's initially they just broker loans.
Starting point is 00:32:05 They have a homeowner that gets a loan from Wells Fargo and I get a commission. Then they start going, well, if I could get an investor, I wouldn't need Wells Fargo. And then they start going, if it was my own money, I could have that entire amount and then I could sell the whole loan to somebody. And then they start going, well, I don't even need a borrower anymore. I'll just tell people I have borrowers and they'll give me money. This was the path that Sarah was on. She was still desperate for money because of the marijuana buildings. And she was scouting for investors for the lending
Starting point is 00:32:35 business. Just like Brian Quinn and his luxury asset lending, now Sarah was the one promising grand returns to investors who wanted to take a chance on her. She met with one of her first investors at a rock star hangout, the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. She gave him the pitch, but all the details sounded really back of the napkin. He said, what do you do? Do you do deals on a chalkboard
Starting point is 00:33:06 downstairs in a basement? And Sara answered with pure bravado. So I said, yeah, I do actually. So do you want to be involved? And he goes, okay, lady mafia. And he did alone and it went great. Sara was the most beautiful shit talker and it worked. People were dazzled and actually bought her line.
Starting point is 00:33:30 And for Sarah, people thinking she was some kind of mafioso was a huge compliment. It meant people respected her. It meant that people would kiss the ring and that people would fall in line. Did you like it? Was there a part of you that was like, well, that's appropriate. This is exactly how I see myself. Love, love that whole thing because I'm totally all about the mafia.
Starting point is 00:33:55 I love everything mafia. I love every movie mafia, everything. I've always been fascinated with mafia because I love the power moves. I always try to be the girl who sits at the guy table. Sarah has become Lady Mafia, and her transformation from law-abiding O.C. lawyer to woman on the edge was complete. Next time on Lady Mafia.
Starting point is 00:34:20 It's a fucking disaster. Pardon my fucking French, but you know, here's what it is. Don't want to wait for that next episode? You don't have to. Unlock all episodes of Lady Mafia ad free right now by subscribing to the Binge Podcast channel. Search for the Binge on Apple Podcasts and hit subscribe at the top of the page. Not on Apple? Head to getthebinge.com to get access wherever you listen. As a subscriber, you'll get binge access to new stories on the first of every month.
Starting point is 00:34:58 Check out the Binge channel page on Apple Podcasts or getthebinge.com to learn more. a podcast or getthebinge.com to learn more. Lady Mafia is an original production of Sony Music Entertainment. It was hosted and reported by me, Michelle McPhee. Odelia Rubin is our lead producer and wrote this episode with a little help from me. Catherine St. Louis is our story editor, Shara Morris and Jonathan Hirsch are our executive producers. Sound design and mixing by Scott Somerville. Theme and original music composed by Hansdale Shee. We also use music from Epidemic Sound, Blue Dot Sessions and APM. Our
Starting point is 00:35:42 associate producer is Zoe Kolkin. Our fact checker is Fendel Fulton. Our production manager is Tamika Balans-Kolasny. Special thanks to Steve Ackerman, Emily Rosick, Jamie Myers, Allie Kilt, and Corey Sesnik, who was the voice of Cameron Polovey in this episode.

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