A Deal with the Devil Read online

  We had already seen evidence that Maria Duval’s letters had been going out in Russia in recent years. Could this trip have been some kind of a launch party?

  Curiously, only a few months after all the fanfare of that Russian visit, her global media tour seemed to have come to a halt, suggesting that Maria had entered into a retirement of sorts. In December 2008, a French newspaper celebrated her return to the small town of Callas, the same town listed on all those trademark applications. “Maria Duval: the return that nobody had predicted,” the headline read in French.

  Maria Duval, the return! A great adventurer in the face of the eternal, the lady left Callas after 12 years. Not to retire, in fact, the opposite—to travel the world and immerse herself in different spiritualities while sharing her gifts with the world.

  She must have missed the Var province, since she returned to her Callas home, where she said she wants to put herself at the service of individuals and politicians who would like to know parts of their future.

  The text was accompanied by a photo of the same elderly blond woman wearing the same silver star earrings and the same plumped lips, staring stoically into the distance from behind the leaves of a tree. Most intriguing, the article said that back in Callas, Maria would continue to sell books and amulets through the mail. It was unclear to us how the journalist had sourced the information about Maria, and whether or not the reporter actually had spoken with her.

  The article detailed many of Maria’s travels we had already discovered through our research: Australia, where she reportedly spent time with Aborigines. And Russia, where it said 700,000 apple trees had been planted in her name. It also mentioned two trips that were new to us: a visit to India, where she reportedly discovered yoga and stayed in an ashram, and South America, where it said she was initiated into shamanism, a tradition centered on healing and spirituality.

  She then finally came home.

  For how long will our ambitious globe-trotter keep her suitcases down in Callas? No one can predict, but she puts forward: “I am available for other adventures!”

  • • •

  Even after her reported retirement in 2008, the letters bearing Maria’s name and image continued to relentlessly arrive in victims’ mailboxes. US investigators later found that huge batches of tens of thousands of letters had been going out in the United States and Canada as recently as 2014, while reports detailed the recent existence of letters in many other countries.

  One 2014 Russian news article, for example, reported that retirees stormed the offices of a company in Moscow where they believed they could claim the winnings they had been promised in Maria Duval’s letters. Her letters even fooled a doctor in a remote part of Kazakhstan, according to another article.

  Since the French newspaper article said Maria would still be selling psychic products, we wondered if she could be pulling the strings of this operation from her home in Callas. Or maybe she hadn’t really retired as the article had claimed.

  In late 2009, a series of videos began popping up on YouTube. Six clips with English subtitles showed the same elderly woman from the Russian press conference. They were all published on the same day, October 27, and they were posted again the next day, this time with subtitles in various Asian languages. Each of the videos was posted by a YouTube user named “gd2use.”

  After we watched the videos, we determined that the uploader was either a devoted follower or someone somehow connected to the letters, or both. Before this six-part series, gd2use had also uploaded a number of homemade videos featuring newspaper clips and Maria’s on-camera interviews from various countries.

  And then there was a three-part series with English subtitles. One of these crude videos included nothing more than poorly cropped grainy images and clip art and looked like something an elementary school student would have put together in the 1990s. The video was narrated dramatically by a woman speaking a language we couldn’t immediately pinpoint, and within the subtitles were some interesting claims about the psychic.

  The first time she became aware of her supernatural gifts was when she was given a difficult assignment at school. She closed her eyes and saw the solution in front of her. But she had not explain how she had come by her solution, and was punished for it instead of appreciated. Also at school, she noticed another of her talents when she cured a teacher of a persistent cold. It became clear to her then that she had healing powers at her disposal.

  The letters mostly talked about her seeing better health in people’s futures; this was the first time we had heard anything about Maria being a healer.

  One video in the series even included images of handwritten notes in different languages, which it claimed had been sent directly to Maria by her satisfied customers. One of these testimonials was particularly odd, seeming to suggest that Maria was responsible for the untimely death of someone’s boss, leading to a miraculous promotion.

  Dear Maria Duval,

  Everything you have done for me is great. I was offered a job I enjoyed very much, but when I had worked there for a few weeks, the manager suddenly passed away, and then, miracles, they asked me if I felt up to the challenge, we still have to get used to so much prosperity, but now we are beginning to believe in it, that all the negative waves around us have disappeared thanks to your help.

  Apparently, she could even tell just by looking at someone how much longer he or she would live.

  When she walks in the street she could see faces of passersby change into the faces of old people. Sometimes she sees a face that hardly changes, and she knows this person won’t live long.

  Who was this anonymous person, calling him- or herself gd2use, spending all this time uploading these videos and promoting Maria? Especially after she had allegedly retired? Since YouTube protects the privacy of its users, we attempted our own detective work. Searching the obscure username online brought up nothing else but the videos, so the only thing left to do was watch all twenty-nine videos gd2use had uploaded to see if there were any clues.

  The very first video, in early 2007, was simply titled “Maria Duval is real.” It featured a compilation of Maria Duval clips and almost looked like a recording of someone’s computer screen.

  There was only one that wasn’t about the psychic. Titled “Jumping Dog,” this clip had 168 views (partly because we watched it so many times), a small number compared with the thousands of views the Maria Duval videos had received. In the clip you see a man’s blue jeans and hear a woman’s voice saying “Jump” over and over in heavily accented English as a small Dachshund-like brown dog jumps up and down in front of the man’s legs. At the end of the seven-second video, another small white dog partially enters the frame.

  We were hoping this video could give us some clues about gd2use’s mysterious identity. It didn’t. We returned to the six videos the user posted on the same day. The first was “Maria Duval on mail clairvoyance.” Then came “Maria Duval on her Consultation,” “Maria Duval—How she uses pendulum to locate missing people,” “Maria Duval—Interesting encounters in her psychic works,” “Maria Duval—Her magical talisman,” and finally, “Maria Duval—Her natural gift.”

  It appeared that all these videos had been part of the same film shoot, as Maria was dressed in the same outfit for each and was seated at the same desk, with a wooden statue resembling the Virgin Mary looking over her shoulder. These videos were of much higher quality than the crude compilations of media interviews that gd2use had also posted. Whoever shot them, it seems, had been sitting in the same room with Maria.

  In the videos, Maria is wearing a black V-neck sweater, a simple diamond necklace, and pale pink lipstick on the same plumped lips we’d seen in other interviews. We even spotted the same silver star earrings in her ears. In them, much of the time she’s in front of the camera, talking about how she cultivated her special gift, saying it all started when she was a young girl.

  When I was a child I had this gift, but I thought it was something that everybody h
ad. So I wasn’t surprised when I had clairvoyant flashes. It was only after several years that I finally understood that I was different, because I realized I wasn’t like other people. And they made me see there was something in me that was more highly developed than it is in others. So I started to have these visions and little by little I became less worried about having these visions that actually used to frighten me when I was young.

  Maria says she gradually learned to accept—and even embrace—this gift. And as a result, she explains that she has used her powers to succeed in every job she had over the years. She says she scouted talented artists for two Avenue Matignon art galleries in Paris, helped a large bank choose senior executives by conducting astrological tests, and assisted “heads of industry” in starting ventures like atomic power stations.

  She also talks about performing exorcisms, including one of a young woman that left Maria with third-degree burns on her knees. And she says she has long performed individual psychic consultations, even though they sometimes make her feel uncomfortable. In one example, she tells the story of a woman who arrived at her office in disguise and tried to get Maria to tell her whether her dead husband cheated on her with any of the women on a list of names.

  Her true success, Maria says, didn’t come until the media launched her, which she claims was completely against her will.

  I found it so embarrassing to charge money, that for a whole year I saw around thirty people a day and never asked for a single penny, because it seemed to me that this ability I had was a gift and I didn’t want to exploit it. It was only later of course that I became professional. Events overtook me.

  Events overtook her? For someone who was embarrassed to charge for her services, the letters in her name sure raked in a lot of money.

  Some of the other media interviews we had seen were more cryptic about her involvement with the letters. They vaguely mentioned a “commercial structure” and were clearly meant to convince people that she was real, that she was the one giving guidance through the mail. We even found the entire video uploaded by gd2use that was devoted to her so-called talismans, the cheap trinkets that were sent to people once they paid up.

  People very often ask me how I can work by correspondence, and time and time again, people say to me, Listen, there’s no way you can know. No way you can respond to a very specific problem of a person you don’t know who sends you a letter. So how? It’s very simple, it’s the same as when someone comes to see me at my office. First of all, I look at your handwriting, then I take your date of birth—and don’t doubt that the major contours of life are written with the date of birth. There’s a knack I have. I can see through what people say, read between the lines, if you like. I draw on my intuition, and I very often find the solution to problems, even though people aren’t always truthful in their letters. So I’ve developed a knack, I’ve become quite expert. . . . I work with a team of collaborators, men and women in whom I have absolute faith who’ve been working with me for more than ten years, and who are trained, and we make a good team. You can rest assured that I look at the great majority of your letters.

  After seeing this, it was undeniable: we still had no idea how much money this woman actually received from the letters, but she was clearly involved. We quickly ran through all the pieces of the puzzle we had gathered so far:

  The French psychic Véronique told us that back in the 1990s she had had a consultation in Callas with a psychic named Maria Duval. For decades, a blond woman had traveled the globe touting her powers, and sometimes even defending the letters. During this same time, a woman with this name was filing trademarks for some sort of business venture. Now here was the very same woman from the media appearances staring at us through the camera, saying she could establish psychic contact by mail. In the video, she promises that she reads almost all the letters sent to her—the very same letters investigators later found discarded in a Long Island Dumpster. Many of the stories she told in these videos also matched, almost word for word, what we’d read in the letters and seen on versions of her old US websites.

  Through all of this, a constant became clear: It was the same Maria.

  The Dentist’s Wife

  ACROSS ALL THE letters, interviews, and websites we pored over, one key manifestation of Maria’s power was repeatedly touted: her uncanny ability to locate the missing.

  In the videos, she says her efforts have included finding missing children, though she stopped doing so after finding it too painful to inform parents that their beloved child was “dead or gone forever.” And she doesn’t stop at humans, having used her powers to locate missing animals as well. “I successfully located a dog belonging to Brigitte Bardot,” she says in one video. “I’ve found not less famous cats, and I even found a donkey that had got lost. You see, there are no limits on what you can find.”

  One of the most repeated stories of Maria’s telepathic abilities was so fantastical that it was hard to take even remotely seriously. The story, detailed on the archived version of her website, was supposedly recounted by an unidentified writer who described himself as a skeptic of Maria and her powers. This person claimed to have met Maria after she had become the heroine of a “bizarre drama” involving a dentist and his wife, though it was unclear when exactly this all occurred. “I had in fact come to ask her about her powers and to try and understand how someone in this day and age can call themselves a clairvoyant,” the individual stated.

  The story sounded like something out of a movie: A young dentist’s wife disappears in the ritzy French resort town of Saint-Tropez. She is last seen driving off in her car on a weekday afternoon. The next morning, her abandoned car is found by hikers on a treacherous hillside pass with no clues as to where she has gone. Police from multiple seaside towns send out search parties, calling on members of the local fire brigade and even dispatching Drole IV—“the best police dog in the region”—to help with the hunt. Two helicopter teams search from sunrise to sunset, but the woman’s whereabouts remain a mystery. By Friday, all hope is lost.

  That’s when Maria steps in.

  Using only a map of the area and the woman’s photo and birthdate, Maria works her magic. First, she places the photo of the dentist’s wife on top of the unfolded map. She then holds her pendulum, described in the story as a “hanging lamp,” over the map and photo. The lamp starts to move back and forth slowly. Then suddenly it begins to swing in smaller and smaller circles, eventually zeroing in on a specific point that is not far from one of the oldest villages in the South of France.

  The police are skeptical. The dentist, desperate and willing to try anything, pays a helicopter pilot to take him to where Maria is adamant the woman will be found.

  And there she is.

  She lay under fir trees wounded and unconscious. She had lay there for three days and nights without anything to eat or drink and without being able to move. She hadn’t even been able to wave to the helicopters that had flown over her. If Maria hadn’t done anything the young woman would have died of starvation and distress. . . . Maria could not have known, by any means, where the poor woman had fallen. In other words: she had found the woman with her hanging lamp—and with that alone.

  Earlier, we had dismissed this report as just another piece of fantasy, until we suddenly heard Maria herself talking about a very similar story in one of the many YouTube videos posted by the mysterious gd2use. In it, Maria recounts how, after her powers were questioned, she ultimately used a map to locate a missing person, flying by helicopter to find the missing person barely alive.

  But then came an important realization. As we replayed the video, it became clear that even though it seemed that Maria could be talking about the same saga that had been detailed by the skeptic, her version had one big inconsistency: In Maria’s video, the missing person was a male pilot whose plane had crashed. The missing person from the story on the website was a dentist’s wife.

  It was an entirely different missing person.

&nbs
p; The Investigators

  AN INTRIGUING AND little-known branch of law enforcement holed up in a row of Washington, DC, offices was determined to stop the Maria Duval letters once and for all. For the investigators of the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), this case of mail fraud was less about Maria Duval and more about the massive web of businesses behind the scam.

  The USPIS, which falls under the jurisdiction of the US Postal Service, investigates crimes in which the perpetrator has used the mail in some way to carry out his or her illicit activities. Unlike the workers you see at the post office or delivering the mail, US postal inspectors carry guns, surveil and arrest criminals, execute search warrants, and use the power of subpoenas. More than a dozen investigators have been killed in the line of duty, and the agency even has its own forensic crime lab, where scientists test for drugs, analyze fingerprints, and conduct chemical examinations of potential explosives found in the mail.

  Founded by Benjamin Franklin before the United States was even a country, the USPIS has a surprisingly colorful past—which we had never heard anything about before finding it detailed on the agency’s website. In the early twentieth century, the agency was responsible for arresting fourteen suspected members of a secret criminal society known as the “Black Hand.” This group, which had its own school where it trained assassins, was infamous in cities with large populations of Italian immigrants. The extortionists and blackmailers who made up the society were known to send terrifying, threatening letters through the mail, marked by a large hand drawn in black ink. The letters would warn immigrants that their families would be hurt, their children would be kidnapped, their houses would be burned down, and they would end up murdered if they didn’t hand over a specific sum of money, often thousands of dollars. Postal inspectors were crucial to ending this extortion.