A Deal with the Devil

by Blake Ellis

  “Yes, but that was part of the contract. From the moment she is bound by the contract, she cannot do otherwise, whether she liked it or not.”

  “What was the last time she made an appearance?”

  “About two or three years ago in Russia.”

  “Do they still ask her to do appearances?”

  “I’m not sure, I think there have been problems, I can’t tell you what problems.”

  “There are currently horoscopes with her name running in Russian newspapers. Is she making those predictions?”

  “No, it’s a company. She can’t use her name. It’s delicate. We can’t stop this contract, or it’s preferable not to.”

  “When she sold her name, did they explain the terms of the contract to her?”

  “I don’t think so. No, no, no.”

  We had heard, albeit in less detail, this same story earlier in the week, from Maria’s sister and friend, and we were still struggling to wrap our heads around how someone could enter into a contract that would cede all control over how her very own name was used without understanding the risks or repercussions.

  “Was she ever afraid of being involved in lawsuits relating to the letters?”

  “Of course, but what could she do? She was very upset, and also with the way they used her name.”

  “Did she ever try to get out?”

  He laughed. And from there, the conversation began to take a more sinister tone.

  “It’s not the kind of contract you get out of. It’s better to not try to get out of it.”

  “Because she’d have to return money?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  As we pressed Antoine about this, why she was so afraid of getting out of her contracts, he became noticeably more uncomfortable and tight-lipped.

  “Does she still receive any money?”

  “I don’t think she receives any more money, no.”

  “Because in the US lawsuit they mention $180 million,” we said, referencing the bare minimum investigators said the scam raked in from victims in the United States.

  “That’d be nice,” he said, laughing. “You need to differentiate two things. Like I am Antoine Palfroy, that’s my name. If I sell it, I am still Antoine Palfroy, but the name doesn’t belong to me any longer, commercially. If tomorrow my mother wanted to open a store under the name Maria Duval, she couldn’t. It’s a brand. So if the company is making millions of dollars, that’s not hers.”

  “Do you know how much she has received?”

  “No, that I don’t know.”

  “Just to clarify, she never wrote any of these letters?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Right there was his answer to one of the biggest questions we had. Could it really be true that she had nothing to do with creating the content of these letters even though the whole scam depended on her personal story—a personal story that we’d discovered had a lot of truth to it? If Maria wasn’t the one directly dictating the details of her life to include, maybe the copywriters had acquired all these personal details and anecdotes from newspaper articles. Or maybe they came straight from one of the businessmen who knew her personally, like Jacques Mailland.

  “And what do you think of that?” we asked, still perplexed by the idea that he was saying she had so little input in the letters bearing her face and name.

  “It’s business, you sell your name, it’s no longer yours.”

  “But the whole situation?”

  “Well, she’s more of a victim than an active agent in all of this, even if she’s in the company filings, it’s just the name. . . . Even if she doesn’t agree with what is being done, she can’t do anything about it. She would need to sue the companies to recover her own name. From the moment she sold her name, they could have been selling condoms with her name on it.”

  “Was this upsetting for you?”

  “I’m not sure; I think for about a year and a half there have been problems. Now, they sell little medals that make you win the lotto—so for this past lotto in the USA that was a genius move. These little medals will also help you with hair loss, ingrown nails, stomach problems.”

  We were confused by this at first, but we realized he must have been referring to the cheap talismans sent out as part of the scam to supposedly help people win big sums of money.

  “These are companies based in Switzerland. . . . They do things that are not right, with the letters you’ve seen, they’re not right. But my mother cannot do anything about it. She can’t help but go to Italy, Russia, and Japan to represent them, she’s bound by a contract. In the contract, there’s the actual name and there is the representation of the name, so they need a physical person, not just the name of a product; she needs to link the image and name.”

  This is exactly what the whistleblower had told us that Jacques was so good at—finding real people to plaster on these letters and show off to the world to make the scheme that much more believable.

  “When you said there were risks, there were risks for you and your mom too? Financial?”

  “Just risks.”

  “Have you ever spoken to these businesspeople? What do you think of them?”

  “I have, yes. They are money people, who make money to make money, and more money.”

  “Have you spoken recently to your mother about this? Does she know we are looking into it?”

  “Yes. She has her suspicions, yes.”

  “Suspicions? So she hasn’t received our letter and phone calls?”

  “Yes, but she doesn’t want to respond. Like I said, she’s very, very tired, very sick, and truly this has seriously affected her. It’s true that after a few years she’s been a little exhausted with the whole story, but she didn’t have another option. She has many contracts.”

  “She has defended the letters in the past. Was that because of the contracts?”

  “Yes, yes. Just like you are at CNN, you can’t go around criticizing CNN, or you’d be sued. It’s the same.”

  “What would happen if she tried to leave the contract?”

  “She’d have to pay.”

  “Do you know the last time she signed a contract?”

  “She’s signed many contracts. It’s not just one contract, there are many with many companies. Companies would have contracts with her on the name, the image, and the retention of title—I don’t know how to say it in English—which is when you don’t have the right to publicly or privately criticize the company. . . . She could be sued. If she wanted to buy back her name, she’d have to buy it from the company.”

  “And it’s been twenty years since she sold it?”

  “More than that—thirty years maybe. It was in the eighties. And in the beginning it was fine, the products were good.”

  “And why did it get bad?”

  “Because of greed—because of money. When they saw the products were selling well, that the name was flourishing. . . . They started with astrology charts . . . you gave them your hour and day of birth, and it was done electronically, but she wrote the text.”

  “If she was in better health, do you think she’d sign another contract if she was approached?”

  “I don’t think she would, but does she have the choice to not sign another contract?” Again, the way he said this—his tone, his face—seemed ominous.

  “If she did [have a choice]?”

  “If she did, no. These companies, they are like the Godfather: ‘I have an offer you cannot refuse.’ ”

  “How quickly did she start regretting?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think ten years or maybe even more. But then it was a spiral. There were things they’d ask her to do, and she couldn’t say no, so it goes. You have a contract to honor, an image to care for, you have to defend the contract and the image. The great problem in this whole affair is the contract that binds her to the name, the image, and the representation.”

  “So you coming here to speak to us, was that a risk?”

&nbs
p; “It depends. The things I said to you are public, but there are names, things I cannot say. . . . I don’t want my mother to have any problems.”

  “We found in our research that this couldn’t have been just one person. . . . We met people who knew your mother, and they didn’t seem to describe an evil person. But all paths lead to Maria Duval.”

  “All paths lead to Maria Duval, the name, not the person. Between the name and the person, they’re different things. Maria Duval is my mother, but physically it’s her, but commercially it’s not.”

  From everything he was telling us, we found it hard not to start feeling a tiny bit sad for Maria, a sick and elderly woman seemingly stuck in a horrible fraud. The only thing that kept us pushing back was the victims. We reminded Antoine of the millions of people, many sick and elderly just like his mother was now, who had sent their savings away in response to letters they believed were signed by her.

  “It’s terrible. It’s terrible. But differentiate the name from the person. My mother never touched this money. There’s a company and that goes to another company, and the third, and the fourth, and in the end there is no more money. There’s no more.”

  Hearing Antoine tell it, Maria really did sound like a victim. But when Julia relayed this claim of his to us after the interview, that Maria never touched any of the money, we knew this was a flat-out lie. Unless the business filings we found were somehow mistaken, Maria had received at least several hundred thousand dollars from the scam, and she could have received far more.

  And then, despite the fact that Maria had claimed in interviews that she was able to establish psychic contact through the mail, Antoine essentially acknowledged that this was not possible.

  “You can’t get a psychic reading from Facebook, Skype. You have to have face-to-face time, to talk to them, touch them, establish real contact. And it’s not contact you can establish by mail, even though you might think about them.”

  While we remained skeptical of all psychic contact, even in person, it was heartening to hear that Maria Duval’s son agreed it was impossible to give a true reading by mail. The crux of the US government’s lawsuit rested on this fact, that the letters were a fraud because they sold this very kind of psychic contact.

  “Has she ever been contacted by government authorities?”

  “Yes and no. Yes because they’re looking for Maria Duval, but then she tells them that Maria Duval is in fact these companies, and they go seek them.”

  “Physically she has spoken to them?”

  “I think so, yes. Very quickly there were lawyers from the companies that would come and take over.”

  Our minds immediately went to our friend in Monaco. “Andrea Egger?”

  “Yes, yes. And others.”

  “If Duval was here, what would she say to us?”

  “That you have it all upside down. She’s very affected by it, and she gets angry also. She’s had journalists come see her, and she’s said one thing and they print another. So now she doesn’t want to do it anymore. She also doesn’t have the right to do it.”

  “We think we know who started the letters—Mr. Reuille and Mr. Mailland. Is it true?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And Mr. Mailland has passed away?”

  “Yes, yes. And it hasn’t been long. . . . When was it that we went?” Antoine turned and asked his daughter. “September, October, December? Wasn’t it in June? June, yes. In Paris—but he was buried outside Paris.”

  “We spoke to someone who said Maria Duval is finished and Infogest is finished. Is that true?”

  “The name will exist forever, and the name of the company doesn’t matter.”

  “Patrick Guerin—do you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has Madame Duval ever met him?”

  “I believe so, yes. He was well known in France, and I think he also sold his name. It’s the same case.”

  We had considered that Patrick might be in the same boat as Maria. Jacques Mailland’s Google+ profile showed Patrick as a connection. If Patrick signed some sort of contract, it made sense that Jacques could have been the one who brokered the deal.

  “What did Madame Duval do with her time while she couldn’t operate under her own name?”

  “She couldn’t do anything with her name, so she had her royalties, which is normal, but no right to use her name to do psychic readings, or work on any projects, or be on TV, if the company didn’t agree with it beforehand. They asked her to do a lot of tours.”

  “No consultations?”

  “She did it anyway because it was her passion, but only to close friends and people she had a relationship with for a while.”

  “So that’s why we couldn’t find anyone who had a consultation with her.”

  “No, no, but they wouldn’t tell you anyway, they wouldn’t say, ‘Yes, I met with Madame Duval because I have a heart problem, or a work problem.’ ”

  “Is this why she became so isolated?”

  “It’s been a few years now [that] she’s been more distant from the world, when she moved to Callas, and it’s because she’s had so many terrible experiences with people. Over the past three years she’s been very sick, so it’s harder for her to move, and to talk, and she also has never liked to talk about her own life. It’s not her thing. She liked working with people but also to do her own thing, go buy her bread unbothered. And now that’s impossible. Everybody would come over to her and say, ‘Maria, can you help me? Can you give me money?’ There’s all that.”

  “So were you sad to see her not able to do what she loved?”

  “I was sad for her, but I knew that there was no other choice. I tried to not talk about it.”

  • • •

  We hadn’t expected our conversation at such a beautiful French café to get quite so dark.

  Antoine was adamant that his mother was yet another victim of the scam—and that her name had become a runaway train that had lost its way years ago. But could that really be the case? We weren’t sure what to believe.

  On one hand, we knew that at the very least Maria had earned roughly $200,000 from the scam. While this was just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions taken in by the letters over the years, it was proof that she had received some sort of financial benefit. And for all we knew, that $200,000 could very well have been just the tip of the iceberg. That payment had been made in 2008, many years after she first started appearing on the letters. We had no way of knowing just how much she made before or after that. Antoine even admitted that he believed that his mother had been lured in with some sort of big payment to sign that first contract and that she had gone on to sign more.

  Antoine remained insistent throughout the interview that his mother’s main motivation was always altruistic in its intent. We suspected that her involvement could be more about her desire for fame and fortune than it was about helping people with her supposed powers. At least from all the videos and news clippings we had seen, she seemed to enjoy the attention. Antoine also claimed that Maria didn’t know how to use a computer, making it plausible that Maria didn’t realize how big the scam had grown.

  Either way, if Antoine’s story was even partially true, it explained a lot.

  It explained why employees of the companies sending out the letters claimed to have seen only glimpses of Maria. Why the letters were sent in languages she didn’t speak. Why she became so elusive and isolated. And why she was afraid to talk to us.

  Before our meeting with Antoine, we had answered the main question we’d originally set out to find. From the town hall sighting of her with the pot of jelly and the man who claimed to have installed her pool to our conversations with her sister and her son, we were now confident Maria was a living, breathing person. It was her name that had become a multimillion-dollar work of fiction.

  The three of us walked in silence through the dark alleys of Toulon as we made our way back to our car. At one point, we noticed a group of young men who seeme
d to be following us and for a moment, we worried we were about to be mugged and would lose all our notes from the trip and the precious audio recording of the conversation with Antoine. But Julia was undeterred, yelling curse words at them in French, which seemed to do the trick.

  On the drive home, Julia played the recording of our interview with Antoine from the back seat of the car, stopping it every few seconds to give us direct translations. We had apparently missed some interesting details during the actual meeting, as Julia had become so enthralled by the conversation that her English translations were less and less frequent. She told us something that thoroughly intrigued us that we hadn’t caught before: Maria had been close enough to Jacques to be invited to his funeral, and, as we learned, so was her family. This made us even more curious about the nature of Maria and Jacques’s relationship. Was Antoine more involved with the businessmen than he’d made it seem?

  Our time in Callas tracking down the mysterious Maria Duval had come to an end. As we boarded our flight back home we couldn’t stop agonizing over the competing theories we had formed about Maria Duval.

  Had the woman at the center of this scam really become its most unexpected victim, as Antoine had told us? Or had she been an eager participant in the scheme all along, preying off other people’s grief, fueled by her own greed and ego?

  At the time, we were convinced it could be only one or the other, forgetting that in life there are often shades of gray.

  The Myth

  MARIA’S LETTERS ALWAYS made a huge deal about her supposed ability to find missing people. In France we were stunned when the archivist from the local newspaper pulled out the decades-old article claiming she’d found an elderly man using only a photo that his family provided.

  We were dubious about the claim, though the clipping at least showed that she really did make headlines as someone who could locate the missing. We still hadn’t seen any evidence of the one story that kept popping up: the unbelievable rescue of the missing person in the ritzy resort town of Saint-Tropez. Her website had detailed the story, as told by a so-called skeptic, who had also been mesmerized by her catlike eyes. This person had described Maria and this discovery in great detail, but we were never able to track down his or her identity. In a YouTube video Maria told a similar story, which Antoine had seemed to mention again in the Toulon café. But there was one big discrepancy between their versions and the one from her website. Maria and Antoine talked about her finding a man, while the website recounted the rescue of a missing dentist’s wife.