by Blake Ellis
No Listano in sight.
We started to figure out that something suspicious might be going on when the UK company registry database showed that more than one hundred businesses were registered to that very same address. As we scrolled through the names of the different companies, we saw some very familiar people listed as directors. Andrea Egger, the attorney from Maria’s trademark applications, was named on filings for an investment company listed at 37 Greenhill Street. Meanwhile, Martin Dettling, the man who’d opened the Sparks mailboxes, was listed as a former director of a “helisports and megayacht” company at the same address.
Why were so many businesses listed at this same odd address even when there didn’t appear to be a single company in sight? And why were so many of them somehow connected to Maria Duval? Someone had to be behind it. But who?
That’s when we found a curious accountant named Barney McGettigan. His accounting firm was one of the companies listed at the address, so we decided to try giving him a call. A cheerful British man answered the phone and confirmed that his office was the only business physically located at 37 Greenhill Street. When we explained that we were looking for a company called Listano Limited because of its ownership of Maria Duval’s websites and trademarks his tone quickly shifted.
We couldn’t record the call, but here’s how we remembered it from our notes.
US: Do you work with Listano Limited?
BARNEY: Um, I’m not sure. Actually, I would have to look at our records to see what our association with them is.
US: Does this mean they aren’t physically located there?
BARNEY: That’s correct. We offer a service to some of our clients to allow them to use our office as a registered office.
US: We’ve seen a number of companies linked to the psychic Maria Duval that are registered at your address. Can we email you a list so that you can look them up in your records?
BARNEY: I’d rather not give you my email . . .
After this, Barney ended the call with an enthusiastic “Righty-ho!” and quickly hung up the phone.
Confused, we did some research and learned that Barney must be a registered agent, something that is surprisingly common in the business world. These agents help set up businesses and provide them with a physical address to use on public government filings. While these kinds of services are used by legitimate companies, they are also a perfect tool for criminals trying to remain in the shadows. Many fraudsters, we discovered, use registered agents to create so-called shell companies, fake businesses that have no real operations and are simply used to obscure the true nature of their activities.
But back to our call. Barney told us he would look into Listano and let us know what he found. We never did hear from him again.
It was still unclear whether or not Barney was directly linked to Maria or knew anything about her. He did help us solve one mystery, though. We finally knew who’d been helping to churn out all the apparent shell companies at 37 Greenhill Street.
• • •
It seemed that every person who was associated with the Maria Duval letters took us to a dozen more leads. So one day, we decided to hole up in a little conference room with our laptops and a single phone to begin the task of calling people in countries all over the world, in the hopes that someone would point us in the right direction.
Each time we got ready to dial a new number, we practiced our spiel, prepared our questions, and held our breath. Sadly, almost every other phone call was met with nothing more than the dreaded beep of a disconnected phone line. When the phone did actually ring and someone answered, we were often hung up on.
One of the first people we tried was a Danish representative for Maria, who was named in an online news article. According to the article, this man claimed that responses to the mailings from around the world were forwarded to Maria in France and that he had helped arrange the interview between Maria and the journalist who wrote this article.
An elderly-sounding man with a thick accent answered the phone. We told him we were looking for information about Maria Duval, and he quickly said he didn’t know “the lady.” But as we kept asking questions about her, he conceded that he had met her.
“No no no no,” he said, when we asked if he represented Maria. “Nothing to do with that woman. Not at all. I don’t want to talk about that. It is so many years ago. I am out of that business. Thank you very much, bye.” We tried calling him back, but he didn’t answer his phone again.
The angriest person we reached—perhaps in part because we woke him up in the middle of the night—was a man named Gerard du Passage. Jan Vanlangendonck, the Belgian journalist who had interviewed Maria in Paris, told us Gerard was his “first and important contact person” when he investigated the Maria Duval letters a number of years earlier. We first called a US number listed as Gerard’s, but we instead reached a woman who said she was his ex-wife. She told us that Gerard had once lived in New York but that he now lived in Thailand with a new wife. She said that she and Gerard had been married for more than forty years, and that she didn’t really know what he did for work. “He works with individuals, mainly in Europe,” she said. She was about to give us his cell phone number when she stopped herself, saying she had better check with Gerard first. She told us to call her back in a couple of days to get the number, but she never answered her phone again.
Next we tried the number where Jan, the Belgian journalist, had reached Gerard, this one listed in the United Kingdom. But it turned out he was thousands of miles from England. We woke Gerard up at four a.m. in Thailand. Needless to say, he was not excited about talking with us. “I’m not going to answer any questions. I have no idea who you are, and I’m not going to talk about this on the telephone,” he said, before hanging up. We followed up with an email and more calls, but he still didn’t seem to want to talk to us.
By this point, as some of our calls reached people who spoke languages we did not, we became increasingly frustrated by our inability to even figure out if we were speaking to the right person. Between the language barriers, the layers of secrecy, and the sheer number of people involved, there seemed to be a new obstacle around every corner. We were starting to worry that we would never figure out who had created this monster scam.
The Sparks Connection
THE SWISS MAN who had opened the Sparks mailboxes was also evading us.
Martin Dettling was named in the US government’s lawsuit because of his role as the director of Destiny Research Center, the Hong Kong company that had been used to send out the letters most recently. We learned from the few sites online where his name surfaced that he was a seventysomething man from Zurich who was a director of a number of other apparent shell companies, including one for which Andrea Egger, the attorney from Maria’s trademark applications, was also listed on its business filings. It also appeared that Martin was behind a website that allowed angry spouses to post photos and reports of infidelity.
Puzzled, we reached out to a number of possible relatives of his, listed in a decades-old obituary for what appeared to be Martin’s brother. The only person from the obituary we managed to get in touch with was a woman who seemed to be Martin’s niece. While she was eager to try to help us find him, she said that neither she nor her sister had any idea where he might be these days and knew little about him. She told us that her father had been born and raised in Switzerland but that he had come to the United States in 1929, leaving behind his younger brother, who she thought was Martin. “I only met him once in 1967 when our entire family vacationed in Switzerland,” she said.
If her dates were accurate, then the Martin Dettling we were looking for wouldn’t have even been born when her father had left Switzerland in 1929. Perhaps this Martin was that Martin’s son? More confused than ever, we moved on from Martin for the time being. But down the road, when Martin’s name kept resurfacing, we turned back to the obituary. We suddenly realized that we had glossed over a huge clue. That Martin’s brother—or
whoever he actually was—had died in Reno, Nevada.
When we had first read the obituary, we’d somehow overlooked this, but now we thought the Reno connection might shed some light on why those mailboxes had ended up in the tiny town of Sparks, less than a fifteen-minute drive away. The US government had found that Martin was the one who opened the mailboxes. Could it be that the reason he picked Sparks, of all places, was actually a lot less random than we’d first thought?
We quickly called her back. While she again said she knew next to nothing about Martin or why he would have opened these mailboxes in Nevada, she did tell us something very peculiar: Her father, from the obituary, hadn’t actually died in Reno. Instead, he died in the middle of playing blackjack—at a casino in Sparks, Nevada.
The Whistleblower
WHISTLEBLOWERS HAVE ALWAYS been a journalist’s best friend.
Former employees are often the ones who know where all the bodies are buried. From our past investigations, we knew that they can also be far more willing to talk than someone who is actively involved with a company. Early on in our investigation into the Maria Duval letters, we blasted out dozens of messages to every person we could find who had ever worked at any of the key companies associated with the scam.
We started by looking for people who worked at Astroforce, a company listed in Maria’s website domain history and as the publisher of many of her books. Astroforce seemed to be some sort of front company with filings in many different countries, so we weren’t expecting an Astroforce employee to be the person to respond to our inquiry. But out of the blue and in the middle of the night, an email broke the investigation wide open.
When I discovered the system, I left. How can I help you?
We responded to the initial email with some specific questions, but this man wasn’t yet ready to share what he knew.
I don’t know who you are.
What do you want to do with these [sic] info?
What do you already know?
What is your goal?
Please tell me more.
Once we finally convinced him to get on the phone, he spoke with us at length. He became tangled up in the Maria Duval scam after accepting what seemed like a great marketing job. All these years later, he was still so nervous about being connected to the scheme or angering its creators that he insisted on remaining anonymous.
He went on to tell us the story of how this massive scam began, starting with two European businessmen in a small luxe town in Switzerland. Showing clear knowledge of the inner workings of the con, he described in detail the way the Maria Duval letters were set up to bombard victims with new solicitations based on how they responded.
He told us he had never met Maria but had seen her on TV once in Switzerland. He described her as “not a smart woman,” and he suggested that in many ways Maria was a pawn in the scheme, having never even seen one of the many letters sent with her face and signature. “She received money for it, but she didn’t know what kind of letters,” he said.
When we asked how much money she was making, he said, “Absolutely no idea; I presume it was royalties or maybe a check at the end.” He also told us he wasn’t sure if she was still alive. And right away he turned the conversation away from Maria and told us to focus instead on the two European businessmen: a French “mailing genius” named Jacques Mailland and a Swiss business titan named Jean-Claude Reuille.
He said that Jean-Claude ran both Astroforce and a company called Infogest. (We already knew about a Canadian company named Infogest Direct Marketing from the US government lawsuit, which named it as the source of the US and Canadian letters. But it turned out that the company our whistleblower was telling us about was the Swiss parent company, officially known as Infogest SA.) Jean-Claude, our source told us, was careful to keep his name off official business filings but was definitely the leader of Infogest, which he said was in charge of the scam’s global operations. And Jacques, he said, was the one who had created the story behind Maria for Infogest, which then allegedly exported the letters to companies around the globe to carry out in their own countries. This franchise-like model helped explain why we saw so many different companies connected to the very same letters. A government source would later describe the system to us as a “fraud in a box.”
The whistleblower told us that because of Maria’s growing reputation as a psychic who could find missing people, Jacques had decided to hire her to be the face and name of his new mailing campaign in the early nineties, along with two other purported psychics. He said that there was a time when the letters were sent from all three psychics. But it was Maria who became the superstar.
Our source had worked at Astroforce in the nineties. He had heard that the company shut down years ago, which was why he was surprised to hear that the scheme was still in action. “[There] should be some very rich people behind it,” he said.
It was hard to contain our excitement while speaking with him. Not only did he give us some juicy new details, but he was adamant that Jacques and Jean-Claude were somehow at the center of this. Their names were not new to us. Even before our interview with this employee, our investigation of public documents had revealed a trail backing up the idea that these two men were extremely important to the Maria Duval operations.
Yet if Jacques and Jean-Claude were the original masterminds, were they still in charge? Or had they handed off the operations? What were they up to now?
The “Mailing Genius”
WE WERE MOST intrigued by what our whistleblower said about Jacques, the Frenchman who he claimed had turned Maria into the international sensation she was today. We already knew Jacques had long been associated with the Maria Duval letters, and, more important, he appeared to have a direct line to Maria herself, with Jan Vanlangendonck, the journalist from Belgium, telling us that Jacques called himself Maria’s “secretary” and had arranged the 2007 interview in the Paris hotel.
From what the former employee, and later a number of other people who had worked with him over the years, told us, Jacques was a copywriter. It was his job to create the content that would entice people to buy “products.” But instead of writing letters selling vacuum cleaners or furniture, Jacques made his money from psychic mailings. “Jacques Mailland is a famous direct marketing copywriter in the world of psychics,” another anonymous source told us much later in our hunt. This man, who claimed to have been involved with the Maria Duval business in France, remembered Jacques living in New York in the mid-1990s, where he translated piles of the Maria letters. He told us how Jacques and a colleague would recruit well-known psychics for these kinds of scams, convincing them to sign something called a “notoriety exploitation contract” so that their name and photos could be used on letters.
We also discovered an online bio saying Jacques was once a psychotherapist, and we found that he’d written a book in 1998 titled Connais-toi toi-même, which roughly translates to “Know thyself.”
Most of the information that showed up online about Jacques was from a long time ago. We looked for more recent information about him on social media and found a profile picture of a lanky man with deep-set eyes, graying hair, and yellow teeth wearing a white tank top and grinning widely. His Facebook profile showed us all the different groups or pages he had liked, and these included a Brazilian restaurant, the beach town of São Miguel do Gostoso, a series of short films about a Normandy farmhouse in the year 2050, a flying car company in the Netherlands, and a French website dedicated to high-end watches. Other photos from his profile showed him with his grandchildren and kitesurfing and relaxing in Brazil, leaving us to wonder if this was even the right man.
With what felt like glorified stalking, a crucial part of our day-to-day job as reporters, we were able to find a few clues that this lanky man was indeed the Jacques we were looking for and that he might still be involved in Maria’s operations. His Google+ profile, for example, showed a connection to a name we recognized: Maria’s psychic sidekick Patrick Guerin.
Was Patrick, the Parisian psychic, Jacques’s latest success story?
An online list of attendees of a 2013 marketing conference held in the resort town of Marbella, Spain, included Jacques Mailland as a representative of a Swiss firm that we’d seen on a number of recent copyright registrations for Maria Duval ads in Russia and Ukraine. This wasn’t your average trade conference. Held in ritzy destinations around the world, it was an annual event at which people and businesses associated with a number of mailing schemes all convened.
Jacques’s name had also been on the radar of other journalists. When a Dutch reporter named Willem Bosma got in touch with us, he shared a wealth of information from his own investigation back in 2007. He spoke with us over the phone at length after work one evening from his desk at the newspaper where he worked in the Netherlands. We frantically tried to take notes and interpret what he was saying through his thick accent as he spoke excitedly about all of his own frustrations and discoveries that were rushing back to him. He was told at the time that Jacques worked closely with Maria.
One of the people who told Willem about Jacques was the angry man whom we’d woken up by calling him in Thailand, Gerard du Passage. “I called him up in London and he said don’t call me, call Jacques Mailland,” Willem said, recounting that Gerard had told him that Jacques handled any press interest. “I asked, ‘What do you want with this business?’ And du Passage said churches do that too. [He said that] although churches want to make money, they bring a lot of good things to people like we do.” Gerard also warned Willem that landing an interview with Maria would be “nearly impossible.” “She has been too often disappointed,” he told Willem.
Willem heard about Jacques again, from a different businessman involved with the scheme. “If you want to contact Maria Duval, please ask Jacques Mailland,” the man told Willem at the time. “He is her personal secretary. She loves giving interviews, as she likes publicity.”