Scammers seem to be omnipresent, don’t they? People can’t seem to get enough of them. My editors always want me to write about them, television series about them always seem to do well, and people love to talk about them. But for some reason, over the past couple of months, and especially the past few weeks, they seem to be everywhere.
Scammers and the wealthy go hand in hand. Where there is wealth, there is a scam to be had. After all, scamming the lower middle class isn’t really all that interesting. It’s more just pathetic (and pathetically cruel). There’s not even a chance of a moral debate in those situations. What people really want to hear about is the sheer nerve it takes to rip off the rich. We want to hear about the people who talked their way into places they had no business being and somehow convinced people who thought they knew better to hand over their money. Even better if it’s rich people scamming other rich people.
First, RPS takes a closer look at Gregg Starr, the 38-year-old male escort accused of scamming the 49-year-old “Roblox widow” out of millions of dollars, what he’s been up to lately, and how you, too, can get in touch with him, should you ever find yourself in the market for his, uh, particular set of services.
Then, we head over to Leon Black, who has been hard to avoid this month (and if you spend a lot of time in the Hamptons: all summer while we’re at it). On September 8, William D. Cohan published his 688-page Money to Burn: Leon Black, Apollo and the Remaking of Wall Street. On September 14, BBC One aired Epstein: Money, Power and Abuse, a new Panorama investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein made his money and became so close to some of the world’s richest people. Last week, on September 16th, the House voted to hold Black in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with subpoenas related to its Epstein investigation (not the look of an innocent man, if you ask me…). Black had already sued the House Oversight Committee on September 3, arguing that it had overstepped its authority.
There is plenty about Epstein in Cohan’s book, including the $158 million Black paid him for tax and estate-planning work. But this is RPS, and by Chapter 34, appropriately titled “Getting Really Rich,” we had another question: What does being “Leon Black rich” actually look like? RPS tapped Julie Brener Davich from The Appraisal to dig through the houses, art, boats, bills and billionaire spending habits buried in the book and find out.
We also rounded up a few other big-ticket scams making headlines, from a former Siemens CEO who says he was taken for $2.5 million in a Deepak Chopra-related deal to a Hermès heir who says roughly $10 billion of his fortune disappeared.
If scammers aren’t your thing (who are you?), Wednesday’s edition of RPS will have an exclusive you won’t want to miss, along with plenty of non-scammer stories. (Okay, and perhaps just one scammer story. I can’t help myself.)
