A Deal with the Devil Read online

  Not long after this triumph, the agency solved “the last known robbery” of a horse-drawn mail carriage; these robberies had been one of the country’s earliest forms of mail crime. And then, in 1920, postal inspectors were tasked with putting an end to a much more sophisticated crime. This time, they attempted to unravel the pyramid investment fraud run by Charles Ponzi, the infamous conman who gave Ponzi schemes their name. Inspectors discovered that Ponzi had used his alluring charm to convince thirty thousand people to join a complicated foreign investment scheme. Yet it would turn out that Ponzi’s supposed investment miracle was all a mirage. Instead of going to investors, much of the $10 million he brought in went to fund his own flashy lifestyle, complete with a gold-handled walking stick and piles of $10,000 bills he showed off to admirers, as he paid old investors with the money brought in by his newest victims. Ponzi was ultimately charged and convicted of mail fraud because he’d sent physical letters to victims encouraging them to reinvest in his scheme. The five-year prison sentence he received was just the beginning. Ponzi would go on to dupe people into investing in Florida swampland, and he later unsuccessfully tried to flee the United States disguised as a ship worker. He then spent more time in prison before being deported to his native Italy, where he would steal from the state treasury. He eventually died broke and alone in a charity hospital in Brazil. His name, however, as the USPIS explains on its website, lives on in infamy as a label used to brand the present-day frauds of men like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford (the case our USPIS source, Clayton, had worked on and compared to the Maria Duval scam).

  In the 1920s there was an international manhunt for three “train bandits” who killed four men and blew up a mail car as it exited a tunnel in southern Oregon. The DeAutremont brothers had been convinced that the train was transporting half a million dollars in gold, but in fact they found nothing of value inside. Using excessive amounts of dynamite, the brothers killed one person in the blast, and they shot three others as they fled the scene. Postal inspectors eventually apprehended the bandits after more than three years of intense searching.

  This same agency, almost a hundred years later, now had its sights set on the Maria Duval letters, today’s version of a heartless crime relying on the mail to prey on its victims.

  It all started with a postal inspector named Thomas Ninan. An unassuming middle-aged man, Thomas had been with the agency since 2003 and had worked on countless wire and mail fraud cases over the years. At the time, he was part of a special mail fraud task force that worked in conjunction with the US Department of Justice.

  One day in March 2014, Thomas was paging through bank records subpoenaed for a completely different investigation when he noticed something out of the ordinary. An alarming number of withdrawal requests were being denied for payments to one business in particular, with an intriguing name: Destiny Research Center.

  Thomas didn’t know it at the time, but Destiny Research Center was the company used to send letters from both Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin. Registered in Hong Kong, Destiny Research Center was supposedly headed up by Martin Dettling, a Swiss man who the US government would later learn had opened the mailboxes we visited in Sparks. It was this company that would soon take over much of Thomas’s days and nights, as he became wrapped up in the very same mystery we were now trying to solve.

  • • •

  The US government’s investigation started much like ours.

  “I performed a simple Google search for Destiny Research Center and was immediately struck by vast numbers of consumer complaints on websites and Internet bulletin boards, describing the fraud that had been committed by Destiny Research Center for many years,” Thomas said in a court filing. “Based on my initial review of these consumer complaints and evidence gathered later in the investigation, it appears that many, if not most, consumers who receive solicitations are vulnerable victims, including the desperate, elderly, ill-educated, and infirm.”

  Using subpoena powers we wished we had, Thomas and his colleagues were then gradually able to zero in on the complicated business network behind the letters and uncover all the layers used to obscure the flow of money from its victims. With enough evidence of an illicit mail operation, the USPIS teamed up with prosecutors from the Department of Justice to take legal action against the people and businesses they believed were at the heart of the scheme. The accused included both American and Canadian companies directly involved with the distribution of the letters, though it was unclear if they were their true source. The government’s lawsuit and related criminal investigation were already well under way when we started looking into the scam, but it took until mid-2016 for the government to secure a court order from a judge to permanently bar the letters from going out in the United States.

  It turned out that the name Maria Duval wasn’t new to the US government. Back in 2007, the USPIS filed a cease-and-desist order against her operation and a company called Zodiac Zone, which appeared to be nothing more than a name used when sending her letters. Instead of following the order, the people in charge of the mailings appear to have simply changed the company’s name to Destiny Research Center and continued to send the letters out en masse.

  The documents from the most recent government lawsuit provided us with crucial information about how these businesses had evaded US and Canadian authorities for so long. They were also some of the most fascinating court documents we had ever read, providing a step-by-step look at the twisted path the letters took before reaching each victim. It was a colorful story of deception not unlike the wild tales told about Charles Ponzi.

  The US letters all started with a small Canadian firm named Infogest Direct Marketing. Officially known to the Canadian government by the generic name 9097-9394 Québec Inc., this company was located in downtown Montreal and had a small staff of no more than five employees. Thomas ultimately discovered that Infogest managed the Maria Duval mailings dating back to the 2000s. From 2006 to 2014, the company was behind at least fifty-six million Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin letters, mailing an average of seven million a year. (It was hard for the US government to separate the two psychics when counting all the letters, since many of them included the names of both individuals. We determined from our research that Patrick was just a sidekick who first appeared in the letters in recent years.)

  In an attempt to avoid detection, Infogest sent the letters zigzagging around North America before they landed in victims’ mailboxes. First, an unnamed company in Canada was hired by Infogest to print the letters, which the US government says were addressed to thousands of mainly elderly Americans whose names and addresses had been found on lists bought from data brokers. While these lists can be used by legitimate retailers, marketers, and charities, the information on them can end up in the hands of criminals, who use such lists to find the perfect victims for their schemes. For example, a senior who repeatedly sends money in response to charity solicitations may be passionate about a cause. But scammers see something entirely different; they see a sign that a person’s memory might be failing. Maybe such a person is unable to remember how frequently she is donating her money. If this is the case, maybe she will respond to other, less charitable offers as well.

  We also learned that advertisements placed in newspapers in the United States and around the world have solicited personal data. Some of these ads claimed to be offering Maria’s services for free, while others didn’t mention her name at all. Instead they asked readers to send in everything from their zodiac sign and time of birth to their marital status, all under the guise of a research study in which the participants were eligible to win large amounts of money. This personal information was then automatically incorporated into the letter, making the correspondence feel even more believable to its victim, who would be amazed that Maria somehow knew his or her birthday or hometown.

  Government documents showed that after being printed and addressed, the letters were then shipped by truck across the Canadian border (by the same un
named company that printed the letters) to Albany, New York, where they were mailed out in batches of as many as fifty thousand at a time.

  Once the letters arrived and were opened, recipients were instructed to mail their payments, personal information, photos, and locks of hair to Maria or Patrick, in the care of Destiny Research Center at one of its US or Canadian addresses (including the one we visited in Sparks). We suspected that Destiny Research Center was nothing more than a shell company used as another layer to obscure the operation. And, as we found in Sparks, the return addresses for Destiny Research Center turned out to be just commercial mailboxes opened by the mysterious man from Switzerland, Martin Dettling.

  The path didn’t end there. At these mailbox locations, employees were instructed to bundle the mail from the scam’s victims and send it all to a completely different company located in Long Island, New York. This mail ended up at an office suite in a boxy bank building in an industrial park with a single tree out front and an American flag hanging from a flagpole in the parking lot, just across the street from a 1-800-Radiator, among other run-of-the-mill businesses. When we looked up the building on Google Street View, we even saw a US Postal Service truck parked out front. The company had a generic name, Data Marketing Group Ltd., and it was run by a woman named Keitha Rocco, who was once honored as Woman of the Year by a local chapter of the American Cancer Society. In an archived version of its website, the company said it helped marketing clients manage databases full of customers, blast out promotions by email, and open and track payments and product orders. It allegedly did exactly this for the Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin letters, as well as for several other psychic services that were also shut down by the US government.

  Data Marketing Group’s employees would open responses from victims, take out the payments, and throw everything else in the envelope away—allegedly processing as much as $500,000 every two weeks. As soon as an individual payment was received, victims were then added to a comprehensive database, and new letters asking for additional payments were triggered, starting the cycle all over again. We imagined that the process within this concrete box looked something like that of an old-school factory assembly line.

  Starting in May 2014, as money from victims continued to pour in, the company began being closely monitored by investigators. At one point, even its office trash cans were scoured for evidence. This glamorous Dumpster-diving mission was conducted by Thomas and several lucky colleagues. On three separate occasions, they staked out the Dumpsters outside the office building and dug through bags of rotting garbage, eventually recovering twenty-four boxes, or three weeks’ worth of trash. Among all the debris, investigators found key pieces of evidence: twenty-two versions of the Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin solicitations, dozens of talismans, internal emails, business records, and around twenty thousand responses from victims, which included more than one hundred unsealed green envelopes full of photos and locks of hair (requested by Maria to allow her to feel victims’ energy)—all of which ended up being integral to the government’s case.

  The discarded mementos the postal investigators retrieved gave the US government solid proof as to how these letters were a clear case of mail fraud. Instead of being used to establish psychic contact with Maria Duval as promised, all the heartfelt letters and special materials that victims sent in were being tossed out with half-eaten sandwiches and used coffee grounds. Not only that, but the supposedly personalized messages, lucky numbers, and predictions from these psychics were part of nearly identical form letters sent to millions. They differed only in the recipient’s name and certain personal information placed throughout a carefully designed template.

  “Destiny Research Center states clearly that the solicitation is derived from ‘Duval’s’ or ‘Guerin’s’ individual psychic vision about the consumer,” Thomas said in his declaration. “When in fact Destiny Research Center is merely sending to consumers mass mailings of substantively identical solicitations containing identical visions.”

  The Business Web

  IT WAS STARTING to become clear that what US investigators had called one of the most notorious mail frauds in history was hardly the work of one woman. Over the years, the scam had infiltrated countries all over the world: Japan, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, and more. When one country shut it down, it quickly popped up in another.

  Although the US government conducted a comprehensive investigation into the North American businesses involved in the worldwide scheme, it found that the roots of the letters went far deeper than the United States. And US investigators hadn’t come close to pinpointing (at least publicly) the true brains behind this fraud, in large part due to the lack of enforcement power in other countries. In fact, we still couldn’t find a government enforcement agency anywhere in the world that had been able to find the original source of the letters, as officials instead seemed to have zeroed in on nothing more than middlemen and fronts. Many of these governments hadn’t even realized Maria Duval was a real person, something we now knew to be true. So we decided to try to find the masterminds of this unstoppable scheme ourselves, armed with nothing more than an oversize notepad and an already unhealthy obsession with Maria.

  In our fluorescent-lit crowded New York City newsroom, we continued to pore through government documents, domain registries, and trademark applications, this time looking for the businesspeople behind the letters. We soon began to piece together a massive network, mapping out the players, companies, and connections on our giant notepad. Our crude map, covered in more than a dozen names, strikethroughs, different-colored highlights, and large question marks, looked like a CIA crime board out of a television show like Homeland. We were falling deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole, much to the confusion and curiosity of our coworkers.

  At first it seemed to make little sense. There were so many different people. And so many different businesses. Slowly we began to notice patterns and overlaps among the many players in this decades-long operation. A wild cast of characters began to emerge as we scrawled name after name on a piece of paper.

  Early in our investigation we were convinced that an Australian man by the name of Joseph Patrick Davitt and Listano Limited, the company he directed, were key to unlocking the mystery of Maria Duval. Listano’s name appeared in the domain registrations of MariaDuval.com and MariaDuval.net, which became inactive shortly after we started our investigation. Listano was also listed as the current owner of the international trademarks for Maria’s name—the same trademarks that had allegedly once been registered by the woman herself. This meant that it was now Joseph’s firm, and not Maria, that had the ability to use the Maria Duval name for business purposes.

  As we dug further, we considered whether Joseph—though never named in the US government action or convicted of any wrongdoing—might have had a role, whether intentional or not, in concealing the identity of the scam’s real ringleaders. First we came across his LinkedIn profile, which showed that he ran his own marketing firm in Australia. The firm’s low-budget website featured a smiling Joseph Davitt with short-cropped brown hair and dimples wearing a white business shirt and tie. Next to his photo was the outline of a kangaroo (in case we ever forgot he was based in Australia).

  We were dying to talk to him, but our many efforts left us confused at best. We called his marketing firm. He quickly answered the phone by saying, “Joe Davitt,” but the line went silent as soon as we mentioned we were reporters looking for Maria Duval. After hanging on the line for a minute or so in silence, he hung up entirely. We called back multiple times only to get a recording in a woman’s voice. Within weeks, his firm’s website had gone down for maintenance and eventually disappeared altogether. Then his LinkedIn profile vanished.

  A week later, the same woman’s voice was on the answering machine, but the greeting had been changed to say we had reached SuperGreen Lawn Seed. A quick search for SuperGreen Lawn Seed revealed a site for anoth
er one of Joseph’s businesses, this one advertising a special lawn fertilizer supposedly designed for Australia’s “harsh and contrasting climate.” We were bewildered.

  Later we found what appeared to be his most recent address. All Google Street View showed us was a large, empty grass lot. Another address, from an old business filing, seemed to be his actual home, a large two-story, walled-in house with what looked like floor-to-ceiling windows, balconies, and a three-car garage. Located only seven minutes away from his other address and a few miles from the beach, the home was nestled in a small seaside town in Victoria, Australia. It looked like a beautiful place to visit, and we would have loved to try to confront him in person, adding to what would become a long list of all the exotic reporting trips we could take for this investigation if only our budget allowed. Instead, we remained on the fifth floor of our New York high-rise emailing and calling him over the following months to no avail.

  • • •

  At a dead end, we gathered everything we could about the company that had led us to Joseph in the first place, Listano Limited. And that’s when something peculiar emerged.

  Listano’s address was listed at 37 Greenhill Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. We both knew of Stratford-upon-Avon as a tourist destination famous for being Shakespeare’s birthplace. Why, though, would an Australian business have a physical location in this quaint British town on an entirely different continent? Again we turned to Google Street View, which zeroed in on a nondescript building above a fabric store across the street from a kebab shop. The street looked like a mix of old and new, containing a noodle shop and cell phone store housed in traditional Tudor-style and classic redbrick buildings. We zoomed from every angle we could, searching for a sign.