A Deal with the Devil

by Blake Ellis

  Throughout our investigation, PacNet repeatedly claimed to us that it never knowingly facilitated fraud, despite the fact we found scam after scam that was processed by the company. But the US government ultimately found that PacNet was part of a massive global network of shady businesses and con artists that made their fortunes from mail fraud. Many of the schemes were remarkably similar, raking in millions each year by sending out letters that tricked people into thinking they’d won the lottery or found a psychic adviser like Maria.

  Over time, we began to notice familiar faces and suspicious connections among the scammers and the businesses that helped them. We called these individuals “the mail fraud mafia.” In this world, people connected to the Maria Duval letters just kept popping up.

  Every year, many of them rendezvoused at an annual gathering in some of the world’s most exclusive resort towns. The conferences, sponsored by PacNet, were held in such settings as a five-star floating “yacht hotel” in Gibraltar; around the mountains of Whistler, British Columbia; and the beachfront of Marbella, Spain, and they featured activities like Sangria-making competitions, Flamenco performances, and extravagant dinners lasting into the early morning. We let our imaginations run wild thinking of what these gatherings must have been like, picturing fraudsters trading sucker lists full of victims like candy and toasting future million-dollar scams over flutes of expensive champagne.

  Old attendance lists from the conference contained key executives of the Canadian Infogest (the company that had been in charge of the Maria Duval operations in North America), the curly-haired copywriter who’d written some of her letters, and a number of other names from the sprawling business web we’d pieced together months earlier. It was in the records of this conference that Jacques Mailland’s name showed up as an attendee of the Marbella gathering.

  Once again, there was a connection everywhere we looked.

  The Dark and the Strange

  THE MARIA DUVAL story had led us to the colorful astropsychologist Dr. Turi, with his own story of how he had been conned, to all the Maria Duval copycats out there hawking their own psychic services, to the company cashing the checks, and to the mail fraud mafia. And now it was leading us in a direction that seemed a whole lot darker.

  It all started with an email that left us particularly unsettled. Throughout the following months, the cryptic messages and inquiries would continue, making us feel less and less like journalists on the outside looking in. Instead, we were becoming a central part of the story ourselves.

  I have information that will shed a lot more light onto this mystery, though, I regret to say, the truth is far more frightening than you might have imagined. Please confirm that I’ve reached the correct person and that this is your best email. Then I will elaborate further. Thank you.

  That was the first email we received. It came out of nowhere and we couldn’t figure out if it had any connection to our investigation, but it added to the growing sense of darkness surrounding this scam.

  Intrigued and slightly terrified, we quickly responded to the sender, letting him know he had reached the right people. In the days that followed, we exchanged emails and talked at length on the phone. The sender, who claimed to be a documentary filmmaker, told us an outlandish theory that was unlike anything else we had heard.

  When he read our stories, he said they had immediately reminded him of something he’d learned years ago while working on a documentary on the history of cults. While conducting interviews for the film, he was introduced to a European therapist who allegedly helped cult victims recover from trauma. The therapist was in his eighties when they met. He told the filmmaker about the times when he’d gone undercover to study the inner workings of cults and religious organizations. He mentioned something else that the filmmaker says was shocking and impossible to forget.

  According to the fantastical and unsubstantiated story he had heard, the Maria Duval scam was linked to a highly secretive organization dedicated to the dark arts dating back to the 1800s and concentrated mainly in Europe. He didn’t know how to spell or pronounce the name, but said he believed it was something like “Krinig.” Its main mission? “They intently want to create negative acts, reverse karma. They believe that if you do bad things, good things will happen,” he said. Given the group’s interest in astrology and black magic, psychics like Maria had unknowingly become ensnared in its web—the perfect vehicles to help the organization prey on the weak and make money in the process.

  According to this theory:

  When the organization came into Duval’s life, they further reinforced and enabled her delusional belief of being a psychic. At that point, getting her to partake in [the] scam was easy—because she didn’t see it as a scam. Brainwashing an average person into believing and doing certain things is far less efficient than reinforcing an existing delusional self-image. Why bother creating a Maria Duval from scratch when they could empower and enable an existing one?

  Based on what he had been told, the filmmaker doubted that Maria had any idea what she was getting herself into, and he suspected that only the organization’s highest members understood the full picture and magnitude of what was at play.

  Each person has a specific task to make it work. Each person gets a certain amount of limited information. None of them see the big picture. They never have enough information to bring it down. It was all very strange. . . . To this day I have no idea what happened to him. I finally decided to put all of it behind me and went on with my life.

  It almost sounded like the Illuminati, the mythical society we’d stumbled across after looking into the other secretive organizations Maria’s son, Antoine, was involved with.

  At the time the filmmaker was told this story, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and he asked the therapist why he hadn’t gone to the authorities.

  He said doing so was both useless and dangerous. There was no hard target for the authorities to zero [in] on, and any attempt to expose the people behind it would endanger his daughter and grandchildren. He didn’t allow me to make copies of what he showed me, record it, or even take notes.

  We couldn’t wait to have our own conversation with this therapist, already compiling a list of questions as the wild tale unfolded. We asked the filmmaker how we could get in touch with this man.

  He told us that the therapist had disappeared from his life just as mysteriously as he had entered it.

  About three months after my last conversation I called again and his phone was disconnected. When I called the woman who had introduced us, a family member told me that she had died in a car accident. It was all very strange. . . . To this day I have no idea what happened to him. I finally decided to put all of it behind me and went on with my life.

  Then, years later, he read our stories. Suddenly all these memories came rushing back, leading him to create his own theories about Maria and the scam. While he could offer absolutely no proof of these claims, his theory had become quite detailed.

  There’s nothing surprising about Duval being reclusive. She knows about her handlers and revealing anything would put her family in danger. I think that at some point something occurred that made her “snap out of it” and realize the gravity of what she was part of, but by then it was too late. This is just my opinion. It’s important to think about why an organization would perpetrate such a cruel, sinister scam. Money is merely the end result.

  This sounded a lot like Antoine’s reference to The Godfather when he described why his mother was so afraid to get out of her contracts. Now it seemed more than just a dramatic metaphor.

  The concept of this scam is simple, but making it work without leaving actionable evidence is a complex process that would have to require the cooperation of many people on many levels, and such cooperation requires a mutual belief system. The repercussions of this scam [for] its victims would have to be as important to this organization as the money, otherwise it would never work. If there are copycat scams, they’re managed by th
e same organization in order to confuse and dilute any one potential target, and based on what [the therapist] told me, it’s hardly their only illicit business venture.

  He insisted that we dig deeper. “You found the music, but not the orchestra.”

  Our conversations with the filmmaker were the most alarming yet. Somehow, our investigation into a case of consumer fraud had led us to theories of a satanic cult hiding in the shadows for centuries.

  When we hung up and debriefed, we considered if this could somehow be the missing piece of the puzzle that had eluded us all along. Perhaps it could explain how the scam had managed to last so long, the true motivations of the international fraud, and why Maria felt so trapped—and why she was terrified to tell us what had really happened. After all, the filmmaker had told us that if anyone tried to get out of the tight-knit cult or alert anyone to its inner workings, the consequences would be extreme.

  The cult story was such a far-flung theory that we couldn’t rely on a secondhand account from a man we didn’t even know, about a conversation from years ago. There was always the chance that the therapist had some reason for making up this whole story. Or maybe the filmmaker was simply out of his mind or had his own motivations for duping us. It wouldn’t have been the first time a reporter was purposely taken for ride, and we would need some substantial proof before we would ever label any of this as fact. Still, we weren’t ready to dismiss the idea without making our own attempts to find evidence. And it was definitely one of the more interesting and disturbing detours on this already unconventional journey. Even as we were still on the phone with the filmmaker, we quickly began searching for any trace of the word “Krinig.” We tried every spelling we could think of, but we found nothing.

  In the weeks that followed our April conversation with the filmmaker, we continued to look for Krinig, reaching out to cult experts around the world. One of these experts, a German journalist who had spent decades digging into obscure religions and exposing ritual abuse, polled more than one hundred people in her field, but no one had heard the name.

  We then searched for any information about the therapist, hoping that the filmmaker was wrong and that this man was out there somewhere for us to speak with ourselves. The filmmaker recalled that the therapist was from Europe and was apparently living in California when the two of them met. We proceeded to search public records for his name and looked online for any evidence of his supposed decades of work. In our experience as reporters, we knew that if someone lived in the United States, even for a relatively short period of time, he or she could be traced.

  We found no evidence this man ever existed.

  The journalist and cult expert we’d corresponded with was from Germany, where the therapist had allegedly studied and worked, so we asked her if she had heard of him. On a Skype call with her one morning, we explained that the elderly therapist had supposedly been born in Croatia but had spent most of his career in Berlin and New York. We told her how the filmmaker even claimed he’d brought two official-looking diplomas to their meeting, including one from a German university.

  The German journalist said that she had worked in this very niche field, also helping cult survivors, for many years. She had never heard his name. She also found the details of his biography very suspicious. “This is a bit weird, a Croatian man coming to Germany to study after the war,” she said. “Sounds like a bit of a crazy story. It can happen, but doesn’t sound very likely.” She also told us that as far as she knew, the university where he supposedly studied didn’t have a medical school, but that perhaps it could have in the past. Or it was possible that he had come to Germany with a medical degree from Croatia.

  After we hung up, she did some more digging of her own, even contacting the German university. In a detailed email, she told us she confirmed that there was never a medical school there, only a psychology institute, which focused on business psychology studies. “In principle it would have been possible to study psychology, but shortly after the war they focused on business affairs, not healing and supporting trauma victims,” she wrote.

  “As far as I know it was not uncommon that people from Europe, who moved to the States, did some ‘colouring’ or ‘shape-lift’ with their CVs to find a job and start a new life,” she said in her email. “So maybe he studied psychology for business and started ‘learning by doing’ to work with survivors. Maybe he even made a doctor’s degree on the base of a business psychology education, who knows. As long as he did good work.”

  That was the problem—despite all our efforts, we still couldn’t verify that he had done any of the work he’d allegedly told the filmmaker about. Or that he was even a real person.

  The therapist was a ghost.

  Unable to find any proof of this supposed cult’s existence or that any of the businessmen were remotely involved in a satanic group, we looked back to everything we had gathered about Maria to see if there were any clues we’d missed. Buried in the same article that detailed her alleged Saint-Tropez rescue of the doctor’s wife was a paragraph we’d skimmed over before.

  We now found it chilling.

  She’s at the center of a friend circle of 13 people just as passionate about strange and mysterious things, who all possess indubitable gifts. “We evolve spiritually by using all that we were given by ‘the forces’ to obtain all sorts of things.”

  The paragraph in the article describing Maria’s involvement in a circle of friends “passionate about strange and mysterious things” seemed like a questionable coincidence. The article alone was hardly enough to conclude that Maria was part of a cult or that the organization existed at all. It did, however, give us insight into how she could have justified the letters to herself.

  This quote from her seemed especially telling:

  “Material possessions are not in contradiction with spirituality.”

  • • •

  More creepy messages and warnings continued to land in our inboxes. One came from someone who called himself a “Secret Friend” and emailed from an address that seemed to have been created exclusively to communicate with us. This anonymous tipster told us about a man he believed was the leader of the scam’s business operations in North America.

  “[He is] a little crazy and unpredictable and I’d rather stay safe,” the secret friend wrote. “Dig deeper, Blake. Good luck.—A friend”

  Another message came from someone who claimed to have worked for the Maria Duval operations in the early years. He told us about a man who’d worked closely with Jacques Mailland and was in charge of sending out a number of psychic mailings. He even claimed that this man’s wife was the original face of the Anne Chamfort scam, whose letters we noticed were beginning to resurface. This source didn’t mention anything that was particularly alarming. But when we searched the man’s name online, one of the first comments about him raised our eyebrows.

  “[He] is a dangerous man, ready to pay for detective and will prosecute you if you are too near his business. He drives a Ferrari and a Rolls-Royce,” someone had written many years ago on Astrocat, a trusty forum we had used for months now.

  We’d long thought of the men behind the scheme as nothing more than white-collar criminals. It was from our meeting with Antoine that we began to suspect that they might be far more nefarious. But with these email warnings, now more than ever, we were concerned about our safety, and cautious about the path we were going down.

  • • •

  Another strange missive opened our eyes to an entirely different side of Maria.

  Throughout our investigation, we had come across a number of references suggesting that Maria had a connection to Argentina, thousands of miles away from her home in France. Early in our reporting, as we reached out to government agencies around the world, Australian officials had told us a Singaporean man named Tony had been claiming that Maria spent time in Argentina. Later, Julia had uncovered official government documents suggesting Maria owned some sort of property there.

&nbs
p; We had pictured this property as just another one of her glamorous villas and had never spent too much time trying to get to the bottom of it. But we began to reconsider things after hearing from a man claiming that Maria’s connection to Argentina was in fact an empty field. It started with an email in which he said that he had been scammed by Maria.

  Dear Sirs CNN:

  My name is Luis Alberto Ramos I am from Argentina. I have thoroughly read your truthful investigation about Mme Duval.

  If it were of your interest, I could send you checkable accurate and precise information about the scam I was victim of, and of the consequent legal public processes I had to face against Maria Duval (a flesh and bones person).

  At your disposal.

  Yours,

  Mr. LUIS ALBERTO RAMOS

  By now, we were used to hearing from victims of Maria, but this time, the story had nothing to do with her psychic powers or letters.

  This man, whom we came to call Mr. Ramos, told us he was currently embroiled in a years-long legal battle against Maria, claiming that she had defrauded him. He said he sold Maria a field in Argentina but that she’d never paid him for the property or the machinery on it. Utterly confused and convinced we were misunderstanding him, we asked what kind of field Maria had purchased from him. Mr. Ramos said it was farmland used for raising cattle that came with cows, machinery, and a waterfall, but that Maria used it to con him. Maria’s son, Antoine, disputed this whole story, however, saying that it was the other way around. He said Mr. Ramos actually owed Maria money. Mr. Ramos and his attorney later elaborated on what went wrong with the deal, saying that Maria had bought the property in the late nineties with a significant other and stopped making payments when they split up. They said the payments had been peculiar from the beginning, coming from bank accounts in a number of different countries including Canada, the United States, and France.