by Blake Ellis
For Willem, actually getting to Jacques wasn’t as easy as Gerard and the businessman made it sound. Willem was given his name and contact information only after calling all the companies connected to the scheme in the Netherlands and insisting that he needed to talk to someone in charge. When he did finally reach Jacques by phone, he said that Jacques acknowledged his involvement with the Maria Duval operations, referring to himself as Maria’s personal secretary and website manager. And, from Willem’s recollection, the Frenchman didn’t seem to think he was doing anything wrong:
“He said, ‘Who could be against it? That we put people in the position to feel better than they did. Even medics recognized the placebo effect exists and can have a healing role.’ ”
There were even more telling quotes in the years-old notes from Willem’s call with Jacques, which he was nice enough to share with us. “In a way it is our purpose to make money, but life improvement is a higher purpose. . . . You have true people and you have crooks,” Jacques had said to him. “When you don’t use an ethical standard, your business doesn’t last. When you cheat people, that is wrong. We have everyone refunded, if they aren’t satisfied with our products.”
All these years later, Willem was still disturbed by how these men were able to justify such a heartless scheme so easily—and get away with it. “It’s a world that I’ve never come across in my work,” he told us.
We too tried to speak with Jacques. Over and over again. Desperate to track him down, we called every phone number we could find, at one point speaking with an angry woman who yelled at us in French, and almost every other time hearing the familiar sound of a disconnected line. We emailed a number of possible addresses with no luck. We obsessively monitored his Facebook page, looking for any new posts. And we even contacted women who appeared to be his daughters.
We were left with nothing but silence. Until this.
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2015 12:22 PM
To: Ellis, Blake
Subject: Re: Looking for Jacques Mailland
Hello
Sorry but he is dead!!!
He had an accident in France tin [sic] may.
It was a Monday in early December, almost two months into our hunt, and we were just planning to grab lunch when this message appeared in our inbox.
It came from a Brazilian kitesurfing school we’d contacted as a last resort after seeing photos of Jacques on its Facebook page. We’d never expected to hear back.
Sitting next to each other at our newsroom desks, we stared at our computer screens in disbelief. Jacques Mailland, the man we were so desperate to speak with, was dead? And he’d died just months before we started trying to reach him?
News of his death was quickly corroborated by one of his business colleagues who was unaffiliated with the Brazilian kitesurfing school. He was someone whom we’d emailed during our earlier stalking phase, before learning of his death. “Sadly Mr. Mailland died in a motorbike accident in May this year,” he wrote. This business associate later told us the accident occurred outside Paris, and that the funeral took place on May 7, 2015. For weeks we tried to find an accident report or other official record of his death but were unsuccessful.
There were so many questions we wanted to ask Jacques, like how such a seemingly fun-loving family man could be involved in such a heartless scheme.
Whether he was dead or alive, we would never know for sure.
The Bizarre Businessman
THE OTHER PERSON we believed was central to the scheme was Jean-Claude Reuille. Aside from learning that he was still alive and living in Thailand with a new wife, our online sleuthing and interviews with those who had worked with him revealed a very peculiar individual.
Jean-Claude was a serial entrepreneur who hawked all kinds of weird products reminiscent of those on late-night television infomercials: shoe insoles that help you lose weight, a device that instantly ages wine, a little box that can heat an entire home, a knife that can cut anything, an asparagus pill that helps dieters shed pounds immediately, and a breast-firming cream.
When it came to the Maria Duval letters, he hadn’t been in the public eye like Jacques, and we’d been told he’d conveniently kept his name off key business filings. He had also managed to steer clear of any of the government actions we had come across and was never named or convicted of any wrongdoing. But there were just too many connections between Jean-Claude and the businesses and people involved with the scam, down to office buildings, attorneys, auditors, and a curly-haired Colorado copywriter, for them all to be mere coincidences. The various clues we were able to dig up indicated that this man had long been in the shadows of the operation. Most telling of all was the fact that Infogest, which had publicly acknowledged its direct involvement with the letters, had once clearly been owned by Jean-Claude.
The weirdest stuff came from an article in a Swiss magazine, L’Hebdo, from 1994—around the same time we were told that Jacques had hatched the Maria Duval mail scheme, allegedly for Jean-Claude’s company.
Jean-Claude Reuille is a happy and feel-good kind of guy—because he is a user of all his products. At 44, he demonstrates surprising sexual vitality due to the guarana remedies that he sells. He is never in pain, thanks to his pain-relief bracelet. He is constantly losing weight due to his Dr. Metz shoes, which he also sells. In his cellar, bottles age five to ten years in only 20 seconds, thanks to a light tube made by one of his companies.
Jean-Claude Reuille is a generous guy: he wants to share with all Swiss the things that have contributed to his happiness. “I only sell a product once I deem it good for my clients.”
This is how the article, which was published in French, starts out. From there, it goes on to tell a story of a spiritual man who found huge success through selling these New Age products, with its author citing supposed annual revenue figures of 41 million francs (or a little less than $30 million US dollars at the time) from three of his companies, which seemed to us to be an astronomical figure for someone selling such random products.
The trinkets of happiness are in high demand. Jean-Claude Reuille hasn’t always been this happy. When he was only 20 years old, sick of living in a narrow-minded and petty country, Reuille left for the United States. “I learned simple rules to achieve my personal goals.” Shortly after arriving, he became a member of the Raelian movement and communicated with aliens before coming back to earth and launching his business career.
Huh? All these business ventures were already crazy enough. Now aliens were involved?
With a quick Google search we learned that Raelism is a “UFO religion” centered on the belief that humans descended from aliens. The group claims to have more than 85,000 members in 107 countries, and its website boasts a swastika-inspired Star of David as a logo, though the group says the image symbolizes peace. The movement is led by a man named Rael, who has an equally colorful biography.
At the age of 27, on the morning of December 13, 1973, while he was still leading his successful racing-car magazine, RAEL had a dramatic encounter with a human being from another planet, at a volcano park in the center of France, known as “Puy de Lassolas.” This extra-terrestrial gave him a new detailed explanation of our origins and information on how to organize our future. . . . After six consecutive meetings in the same location, Rael accepted the mission given to him, to inform humanity of this revolutionary message and to prepare the population to welcome their Creators, the Elohim, without any mysticism or fear, but as conscious and grateful human beings. After a few months considering this huge task, Rael almost developed a stomach ulcer before finally deciding to give up his much loved career as a sports-car journalist and devote himself fully to the task assigned to him by Yahweh—the extra-terrestrial whom he met.
Curious to know how long Jean-Claude had been a member of this supernatural religion, we searched around and discovered that his name was listed in 2001 as the publisher of a Rael book, Yes to Human Cloning: E
ternal Life Thanks to Science.
We also stumbled on Swiss government filings that showed Reuille owned his own publishing business, offering such titles as Le massage erotique. The Swiss magazine article discusses this company as well, detailing the kinds of books that were being published and how this activity was just the beginning of Jean-Claude’s growing reputation.
His books shed light on how to become a millionaire, how to memorize easily, how to communicate, how to master the power of your subconscious, and how to perform erotic massage for couples. Jean-Claude Reuille doesn’t stop there. In 1989, his name spread around the world. He’s the businessman who bought a page in the daily “La Suisse” to invite the woman of his dreams to a weekend of her dreams. The editor received over 500 letters in response.
The article takes a more skeptical tone from there, detailing how chemists in the Swiss town of Nyon complained that Jean-Claude’s water purifier ads were wrongly convincing residents in the area that the municipal tap water wasn’t safe to drink. It also describes how a consumer filed a complaint in Switzerland about false advertising surrounding Jean-Claude’s “healing stones,” which his ads claimed would “make disappear most health problems without any medication, diet, or treatment to follow.”
Jean-Claude didn’t seem fazed. “It’s not in my interest to sell junk, because my expenses are much higher if my customers are unhappy,” the magazine quotes him as saying. “The county doctors, the county pharmacists, the Office of Drug Control (OICM), they are constantly bothering me. These good people are mistakenly attacking me, because I don’t set out to heal; what I do is prevention.”
More details about Jean-Claude would come from a man who had worked for him in Switzerland but claimed no involvement with the Maria Duval letters. He told us that Jean-Claude lived in a villa on La Côte, “the best coast in Switzerland.” Located on the north shore of Lake Geneva, La Côte is famous for its lush vineyards and mountain views. Jean-Claude’s house, he told us, was “all white, clean, and strange.”
“He was a strange guy,” the former employee said, telling us that he wasn’t surprised to hear that Jean-Claude could be wrapped up in such a massive scam. “I remember every Sunday, he was working all day. He drove his Mercedes. The car was always there,” the source told us. “It was always kind of shadowy. There was always a shadow around the whole thing. It was all really hardly legal. They operated on the edge of what’s legal.”
• • •
We needed to talk to Jean-Claude.
We tried to call him at every number we could find. Most were disconnected, and one led us to a generic French voice mail. After we’d just about given up on ever reaching him, we received an email from the man himself. He was responding to a written letter we’d sent halfway around the world to his beachfront villa in Thailand, where we’d discovered he had moved almost a decade earlier.
To our surprise, he was very friendly and courteous. He claimed to be severely misunderstood. His email contained a confusing list of what he called “biographical facts,” including an assertion that he hadn’t had any contact with Raelism since 1989. But one thing was clear: he was adamant that he was “NOT” involved in a business with Maria Duval or any other psychic. He wouldn’t provide a phone number where we could reach him, saying English wasn’t his first language and he didn’t want to be taken out of context. He did agree, however, to answer some of our questions by email.
We compiled a long list of all the connections we’d found and asked him to explain how he could possibly claim to be uninvolved, pointing out that Infogest (his company) even admitted to representing Maria Duval’s business operations in 2005. In his reply email, he acknowledged that Infogest had once been one of his companies, but he said he had given up his management role many years ago and officially retired in 2006. He remained insistent that he had nothing to do with the Maria Duval letters.
Waow, you’ve been told a lots of stories . . .
. . .
I will repeat what I told you previously: I was never involved with Maria Duval business.
I used to travel quite a lot and I used to meet all kind of people including players from the Mail Order Industrie [sic].
Jacques Mailland and Maria Duval were part of them.
They used to travel the world together and I had the chance to share a few lunch or Dinner with them. If I remember correctly, the last one was long time ago in Paris.
However, they never worked for me and they never been on any payroll of any of my companies.
If I remember correctly, they were part of a Group named Astroforce. . . .
I guess it would be easier for you if I would take full responsibility for the Worldwide Mail Order Industry.
But, I’m only willing to take credit for what I did and nothing else.
All the best,
JC
We still couldn’t believe we were emailing back and forth with this man. He even acknowledged he had had dinner with Maria and Jacques, conjuring up a million images in our heads of the trio toasting their success and chuckling over fancy bottles of French wine and escargot. While we still believed he was involved with the scam, it seemed plausible that he had left it behind years ago to enjoy a cushy retirement in paradise.
It was Willem, the Dutch journalist, who eventually gave us solid proof that we had been right about Jean-Claude all along. Willem sent us a copy of an official business filing showing that for a short time in 2002, Jean-Claude himself was listed on public documents as an official shareholder of the Dutch firm previously known as Astroforce. This was the company linked to the letters at which our whistleblower worked, the same company Jean-Claude had claimed had nothing to do with him. Willem had held on to a filing that he’d received from the government years ago. Jean-Claude was usually careful to keep his name out of things, presumably so he could deny any involvement whatsoever. He or someone he worked with must have slipped up.
Months later, when we eventually published this information in a story online, Jean-Claude resurfaced.
Would you be kind enough to send me a copy of this Dutch business fillings [sic]?
As I do not see how this could be possible, I would really like to investigate.
Thank you for your cooperation.
The document he requested was public, so we were happy to oblige. Then Jean-Claude went quiet. And with that, our relationship with him was over. Perhaps he’d had no idea that this public connection existed.
We were convinced we would never hear from him again.
The Copywriter
AS WE DUG deeper into the business web behind the millions of letters sent around the world, we learned that much of their power was the work of “mailing geniuses” like Jacques Mailland, the copywriters behind the stories that hooked victims over and over again.
The US government’s lawsuit contained copies of the letters that went on for pages and pages, using strategically placed details from the recipient’s own lives, such as his or her name, age, and birthday. The letters wove intricate tales of Maria’s history and adventures as a psychic with predictions of the wonderful fortunes that awaited the victim when he or she responded. They also played heavily on their readers’ emotions, painting Maria as a trusted friend and adviser who could fill whatever void they had in their lives.
No matter what letter you picked up, Maria was telling you how she understood you and was there for you. She was always relatable, detailing concerns and events from her own life that elderly, sick, or lonely recipients could have been experiencing too. She was then always quick to provide the perfect solution. “You must no longer go on wearing a blindfold, as if you were in a fog, without knowing what the future holds for you. You are 86 years old, and you still have many years ahead of you,” she said in one letter uncovered by USPIS investigators. “Don’t say: ‘I’ve missed the boat.’ . . . From this point on, I want you to know I am your friend and I share what you are feeling. I sincerely think you have enormous strengths WIT
HIN YOURSELF of which you are unaware, or which you do not know how to use to the maximum. You also have a big heart, but you are often misunderstood by those around you.”
Poring over countless examples of these letters from over the years, we became increasingly curious about the people, the copywriters, who had actually written them. How do you even find a job like this? Did these copywriters realize they were part of an international scam? How did they sleep at night, knowing that everything originated with these very letters? Did they view it just like any other copywriting job, such as writing advertising copy for a magazine or catalog? Or did working on the Maria Duval letters pay so well that the money made it possible to look past the rest?
Unable to speak with Jacques, we were thrilled when we were actually able to find one of the many people who had written some of the letters that had gone out in Maria’s name. A middle-aged Canadian man with glasses and a friendly smile told us he had worked for countless mailing operations. He was surprisingly candid with us and willing to answer all of our questions as long as we didn’t reveal his identity.
He started out by telling us that before he’d gotten wrapped up in the world of lucrative mail-order copywriting, he had been a journalist just like us. He was a radio and television news reporter for a decade, he said, picking up assignments from his bureau and then heading straight to the police station before setting off to cover three-alarm fires, murders, and other horrific news events, always with his police scanner in tow. “After going to my 187th fatal fire where four children were killed, I didn’t want to be in a war zone anymore,” he said.
One day he spotted an ad for an international marketer. Confident in his writing and storytelling abilities, he applied for the job, which turned out to be for a direct-mailing agency. He interviewed with the president of the company, but after forty-five minutes of talking, he was told that the position had already been filled. He was asked, however, if he had ever written advertising copy. At his old job, he’d jotted down the occasional ad script to be read over the radio airwaves, so he said, “Sure.” With that, the president handed him a letter that at the time was being used to sell lottery tickets by mail. “Rewrite this,” the president directed.