Something’s Up at the Villa Carlotta | 8

a lifelong New Yorker, born and raised, but I've spent a lot of time in Los Angeles.

Now, LA is a city that plays by its own set of unwritten rules, especially if you're trying to make it in the TV or film industry.

Fake it till you make it.

See and be seen.

It's not what you know, it's who you know.

And if you're telling people you have a project with Marty, there is no requirement that you clarify which Marty that might be.

Now, I'm not saying that I personally subscribe to any of these ideas, but this next story is about a guy who definitely did.

In fact, this is the first con man I have come across who seemed to make Hollywood's unwritten rules the entire basis of his operation.

Which is how you get to today's episode, Something is Up at the Villa Carlotta.

I'm Steve Bassemi, and you're listening to Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media, in association with Olive Productions.

Reporter Marshall Heyman is here to take it away.

The residents of the Villa Carlotta apartments first remember seeing David Bloom in the summer of 2021.

The neighbors were excited just to be near each other again.

Every gathering felt like a party, and everyone was welcome.

Nobody was masking as much.

We were sitting out together, and I had ordered some Joe's stone crab to the villa.

This is a film editor we're gonna call Gina.

We were just sitting out at the pool basically cracking open crabs and eating crab and laughing and looking like we were having a grand time, which we were.

There was this guy, this new guy who had moved in.

He's sort of a, I would say older gentleman, but older compared to most of the people at the villa.

And he was sort of milling around with a drink in his hand, and it looked like he was just trying to make friends.

I, of course, had ordered a key lime pie along with the Joe Stone Crab, and he kind of moseied over and said, you know, could I have a piece of pie?

And we had plenty of pie, so I said, sure.

Then he just sat down with us and started talking.

And he was quite a talker.

David Bloom introduced himself as a businessman, a Duke grad, an art lover.

He had just moved into the Villa Carlotta.

He was small, about 5'2 ⁇ , always well-dressed, always carrying a drink.

All he did was talk about himself.

And even if someone in this little group as we were smashing the stone crap would tell something about themselves to introduce themselves to David, David would turn that into a story about him.

That's another Villa Carlotta resident we'll call Alexander.

He works in marketing.

Someone knew someone in politics.

Well, David's ex-wife worked for Hillary Clinton.

Like, okay, David, this is random.

And I thought to myself, like,

this guy does not listen.

This guy just loves talking about about himself, and that's it.

What strikes me about the way people from the Villa Carlotta talk about David Bloom is that no one really seemed to like him, even before he allegedly scammed them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But David had something even more important in Hollywood than likability.

David had connections, connections that he promised would lift everyone up around him.

The Villa Carlotta apartments really are for people on the up and up, people who already have some money but are passing through Los Angeles to make some more.

It's a cross between a chic hotel and a luxury apartment building.

Every unit's fully furnished.

It has a saltwater pool in the courtyard.

There's a high-end fitness center and a concierge.

You get daily housekeeping.

and a palm garden that's also, quote, a tranquil urban refuge.

Studios cost about $4,500 a month and a two-bedroom, two-bath will bring you just over $7,000.

Julia Roberts lived there.

Gary Oldman lived there for a while.

Jennifer Coolidge lived there for a while.

Are you guys friends?

She's hilarious.

No, she talks to my dog.

She doesn't talk to me.

What a funny-looking dog.

David Bloom told his new neighbors he had a house by the Chateau Marmont with two cars and a swimming pool.

But he felt lonely there after his girlfriend left him.

He wanted to live closer to the center of things.

And very quickly, David put himself in the middle of the social scene at the villa.

He seemed to know just what to talk about to win over everybody.

So in my case, it was painting and food.

I'm an amateur painter.

He would ask me if he could lend some of my paintings to beautify his unit in the Villa Colotta, and he was gonna help me sell my paintings.

I've never sold a painting.

David made it known he'd studied art at Duke.

So of course I feel flattered.

David told another resident who had a tomato sauce line that he knew the head of Whole Foods.

He'd set up a meeting for her to get her product on the store shelves.

With Gina, it was as simple as getting a table at a popular restaurant.

I had always wanted to go to Craigs, this kind of hot spot on Melrose.

And it's a hard reservation to get and I never went.

And he's like, oh, I go to Craigs all the time and I know the hostess and we'll go to Craigs.

There are only a few places in Los Angeles where the CNB scene crowd goes to eat.

Craigs in West Hollywood is one of them.

It's the kind of restaurant that serves a $33 vegan chicken farm and a nearly $50 Sundae named after a TikTok star.

If you go to Craigs, you're bound to see famous people.

They're part of the ambiance, part of the furniture.

So that was our first dinner out.

He and I alone went to Craigs, and we got a great table.

We were sitting next to Elton John.

I just thought it was like, ah, this is great.

And the hostess hugged him hello

as if she knew him well.

He was that kind of guy to make friends with the hosts that mattered.

I think Craig even came over and shook his hand.

It made me believe that that's who he was pretty early on.

Gina and David seemed to have a lot in common.

They talked about art, theater, culture, food.

He's Jewish, we sort of have that background.

We started talking about people we knew in New York and it seemed like some of that overlapped.

He sort of grew on me and we became friends and started going to Craigs once a week and more villa people started coming.

Within a few months, David had a whole little crew with him at Craigs, all from the Villa Carlotta.

We would all pile in.

We'd get six or seven or eight people even and pile into a booth.

And was he the kind of guy who would like order stuff for the table or like what was his sort of order like?

Yeah, well, there were appetizers he loved so he would always order like the pigs in a blanket and the meatballs and a caesar salad and then maybe a pizza but yes he was definitely a guy to order for the table and then everyone would order you know whatever they wanted alexander would join in too he was impressed this guy knows his food I love cooking.

I'm into food.

I'm into restaurants.

Like this guy knows his stuff.

And he would talk about that.

And he always seemed to be able to get a table anywhere, anytime.

Why?

Because he was known around town, and he was a big businessman and a very successful businessman.

And would he pay for dinner?

No, you see, and that should have been my red flag.

You'd always split the bill.

Like, if I invite someone out for dinner, like, I will sometimes pay for dinner for them.

But I don't think I've ever known David.

I'm not even sure David ever bought a bottle of wine.

Gina noticed that David seemed to know a lot of people, powerful executives and CEOs on both coasts.

There were a couple of men that he said he was very good friends with.

They were big names that he dropped constantly.

One of them was Ron Burkel, who was the owner of Soho House and Kroger grocery stores.

And he's a big real estate guy around the country.

And the other was Ted Sarandos, who was the head of Netflix.

So there was an event at Ted's house that was, I want to say it was honoring his wife for something.

And David told us, a bunch of us, that he had bought a table and would we like to go.

And so he invited me.

He invited a bunch of people that I knew who were in the industry who, of course, would want to meet Ted Sarandos.

And so we were all planning to do it.

And as the day got closer, he said that his friend Ron said, you know what?

Because of COVID, no one's going to that event.

And only losers are going to go.

Everyone's coming virtually.

So we're like, well, it's COVID.

All right.

We shouldn't go to a big super spreader like that.

Let's not go.

And then ultimately, he said that they had canceled the event, that no one would be there.

And of course, two days later, we read all about the event in the paper.

And the only people who didn't go were us.

Did you ask him about that or no?

It just.

I really don't remember.

It just made sense.

All right, it's COVID.

Let's not go.

And so that never happened.

Ted felt bad that we didn't come to the event.

And so he said, he wants to meet you guys.

According to David, Ted Sarandos wanted him to bring the Villa Carlotta crew over for dinner.

And I thought, well, why not?

Who's Ted Sarandos?

So anyway, that never happened.

I guess he canceled because again, based on COVID, his gardener got COVID or something.

Still, Gina didn't think much of it.

You're no one in Hollywood if you don't sometimes cancel on people.

David moved on to to wowing Gina with his investment knowledge.

He was also pretty savvy about the world of finance.

I'm interested in the stock market and finance, and it's not really my background, but he seemed to either pick up that I was interested or somehow we just started talking about different stocks and what was doing well in tech and what electric cars should we look into for the future and just stuff like that.

He was big on lithium batteries, so he wasn't wrong about a lot of things.

You know, lithium batteries was a great place to put some money five years ago.

And this was when his neighbors alleged David made his elevator pitch.

He was ready to cash in on his connections.

He had been showing me texts on his phone from Ron.

Like, look what Ron said.

Look what Ron sent.

Ron Burkle is in a similar stratosphere as Ted Sarandos.

He's the chairman of the board of Soho House, which is an international social club.

Soho House was about to expand, and Ron was offering his friend David shares the initial public offering, the IPO.

And I had been looking at it even before David David brought it up.

And so he said that Ron had offered him shares at,

I remember, he was so specific about the money.

I think $2 a share.

And he was being gifted many, many shares at this low price.

And because he loved me and wanted to help me, would I be interested in taking some of these shares that he was getting at the price he was getting them for?

And he would offer me the same gift that Ron was offering him.

And then he would take care of selling them.

Usually, with an IPO, there's a lockout that you can't sell until a certain date.

And that when that time passed, his guy at Goldman Sachs, who was going to buy us out for 26 and a quarter, that was the number he used, which he was, as I said, he was always very specific about his numbers.

And it seemed like an interesting deal.

And if this was the case, then I thought, why not do it?

Of course, Hollywood is a town about gambles.

Every movie, every TV show, every project is a roll of the dice.

But it just takes one hit, one box office score to take your career to the next level.

And what David was promising here was that for every $2 Gina invested, she would get a little more than $26 in return.

That might not sound like much, but it would be a 13 times return on our money.

So in that risk-reward frame of mind, Gina wrote David a check for tens of thousands of dollars.

Neighbors claim David also pitched the Soho House IPO to other Villa Carlotta residents, including Alexander.

I was in the Villa Carlotta.

It was late at night.

Yeah.

Come over because I got something to discuss with you.

So I met him in an apartment.

He said, like, this is an investment opportunity.

I have this mentor.

It's a pre-IPO, a gift IPO.

Like, I've got this boatload of pre-IPO shares in this company.

And because I care about you, and I love you, and I have an opportunity, I want to share the wealth with you.

And I remember him saying the amount.

And he said it in this New York accent.

And then...

It'll take a couple of weeks for the funds to settle and then I'll pay you back.

Okay.

Let's draft up some paperwork.

And are you typically someone who invests in things?

Like is that something that you've done in the past?

Not like this.

So no, not at all.

And even at the time to me, like it didn't make sense.

But at this point, I am convinced that David is a better businessman than I am.

He's made millions selling to Netflix.

He makes

bucket loads of money selling avatars and billboards all across town.

Like, he's a good businessman.

He claims that the owner, Ron Burkel of Soho House, was his mentor and his friend.

Like, he showed me messages, emails with the guy on his mobile phone.

I didn't quite comprehend it.

I understood some parts of it.

And that was that.

From what Alexander understood, this sounded like a slam dunk.

David made it abundantly clear not to discuss this opportunity with anyone else.

They must have repeated that a hundred times.

Don't talk to anyone else about this.

There was was a lot of talk from David about not telling anyone else.

It was just for me.

He didn't really want anyone else to know about it.

And so I didn't think to.

Did I think maybe there was some sort of nefarious aspect?

I don't know, maybe.

But I never believed he would hurt me.

At this point, I really believed that he would do whatever he was doing to benefit me.

He'd always acted that way with me.

He loved me.

He told me he loved me.

He was my friend.

I was, you know, he was so happy and lucky that he met me.

Oh my God, that sounds so pathetic.

Gina says she trusted David so much that she didn't hesitate when David pitched her a second time.

And he said, Ron's opened up some more shares.

Do you want to get further in?

And I did.

And I gave him a second check.

In total, she says she gave David $70,000.

I still believed him.

I still was with him.

And, you know, yeah, of course, I was, my eyes were, again, a little big in terms of how much my return was going to be.

With the numbers David was giving her, she believed she stood to gain nearly a million dollars from the Soho House IPO.

I thought he would do this for me and take care of me.

He talked about it so often that he wanted to be able to pay my rent for me.

He somehow wanted to take care of me.

Here, you know, all my daddy issues start coming up.

But, like, why do you think he wanted to do that?

Because I think he touched a nerve and saw it, that that's how to get me to open my wallet.

I think that was his gift, was to find whatever it was in the person

that would give him, that would trust him, that would open up to him, that would let him take care.

But why?

I mean, but I feel like anybody would respond to like someone who was like, I will give you security and make the rest of your life secure.

I don't know.

And a lot of people did.

Right.

I mean, a lot of people did give in to him.

According to Gina and Alexander, a lot of Villa Carlotta residents said yes to David's whole Soho house pitch.

They all just handed over the cash.

And if you're thinking this is when David took everyone's money and ran, that wasn't David's style.

So Labor Day weekend, David thought it would be great if we rented a house in Malibu.

Why don't we get like a two-bedroom house on the beach?

And again, my mindset at that point had changed in that all of this money was about to come in you know it was really gonna be a lot of money and I was gonna be able to rent a house or split a house on the beach and Labor Day weekend I thought how fun and we'll have a party and invite a bunch of people it was a dream of mine to do that and he also made me feel and I think everybody feel like we could live our dreams.

You know, we could, we're going to be able to afford it now.

So just do it.

And so

he rented the Malibu house.

He took care of the logistics.

My understanding later on is that he put it on his girlfriend's credit card.

And what was spending that weekend like in Malibu together?

Was it fun?

So it was fun.

Mostly my friends came out and it was a great house.

It was a shack.

It wasn't a huge place.

But it was on the beach, which I loved.

And my dog came and we went out at dawn and walked on the beach, which is like, you know, I pretend I'm that girl who gets up at sunrise and walks her dog on the beach like I'm in a commercial.

But I did it.

And then, just as the Soho House IPO sale was about to happen, David and his girlfriend go on a trip to Europe.

I thought that was kind of weird.

I thought that was suspicious.

Did you say that to him?

No.

So he posted a lot of photos from Europe, but oddly, they were never in any of the pictures.

It was just like, well, here's the Notre Dame, and here's the beach, here's the Croisette, you know, but no pictures of them.

So literally, they could have been in Glendale and just downloading photos of Europe from the internet.

While David was maybe or maybe not gallivanting on the Coisette in Cannes and drinking Aperol Spritzes in Paris, worry starts to brew at the Villa Carlotta.

A neighbor gathered David's crew for a talk.

Get a text message.

Can you come to the pool?

Okay.

Oh, no, shit.

What does that mean?

It's never good.

Like, when someone says, we got a talk, that's never a good thing.

So I went out and met them at the pool just to visit.

We always did that.

That was normal.

And the minute I got out there, she was sort of pacing back and forth and clearly upset.

And she's like, I don't know how to say this.

I don't know what to do.

My heart is beating so fast.

She said, but I have to say this.

Did you give David any money?

And that was the first time anyone else had ever sort of broken that veil.

Once the floodgates opened, she had a lot to say.

This is the first time they're all realizing that David seems to have sold them on the same bill of goods.

Altogether, they'd claim to have given David more than $200,000, and this one neighbor had some suspicions.

She just started questioning in a way that I hadn't.

It's another rule in Hollywood.

You don't fact-check people.

It only gets you enemies.

And David seemed to have just so many friends.

He could set up big meetings, he could make introductions, he could get tables at fancy restaurants.

But this neighbor and her boyfriend, they'd look David up.

And then they told me we found all these articles about David in the 80s being a scam artist and stealing all this money from people with fake investments.

David had been doing this routine for decades, boasting about his connections and his investment knowledge so that he could take money from the people closest to him.

At 23, he'd already been hailed as, quote, one of Wall Street's new breed of private investors.

But you may never have heard of David Peter Bloom, and you may be lucky you didn't.

They called him a whiz kid.

Now he's known as something else.

After he graduated from Duke in 1985, he started an investment company in New York City.

Within only a couple of years, he collected nearly $10 million from investors.

He'd send them sham quarterly earnings reports.

But the only investment they were really making was in David.

With their money, he bought himself expensive cars, jewelry, art, multiple apartments.

And then, at just 24 years old, he was sentenced to eight years in prison.

When he got out in 1996, he did it again.

A few years later, federal prosecutors accused him of defrauding at least 10 workers at a Manhattan restaurant out of between $50,000 and $200,000.

He spent six years at the Vernon C.

Bain Correctional Center, which is a prison boat in the Bronx.

In 2011, after getting out of jail the second time, he moved to LA where he could start over.

He'd never even changed his name.

The more I read about it, and the more I learned about David Bloom and his history, I realized that this guy went to prison when I was just born.

I was still a baby the first time he went to prison.

Apparently, like you can find this on the internet, the Sultan of Brunei and people more successful than me were victims of this too.

I was really, really upset.

Because I'd always envisaged being scammed is what happens like when a Nigerian prince calls you not a guy that I can see in front of me with my own eyes, who I've been socializing with for months, who lives across the hallway from me, who pretends to be my friend.

I build up some kind of like rapport at this point.

I realize now and after the fact that he's been grooming me to try and win my trust and to try and manipulate into believing what he says and what he tells me and pretending to be something he's not.

The neighbors all believe not only has David made off with their original investment, for most of them, tens of thousands of dollars, but the hundreds of thousands of dollars they were counting on getting in return, they weren't going to get those either.

Did you reach out to David to be like, what is up?

I sent him an email, and I think this is what tipped him off.

Had he been in Europe or Glendale or wherever the hell he was, I wrote an email and I said, you know what?

I'm getting uncomfortable with this.

I didn't want to make him run,

but I said, I don't know what my finances are going to look like.

I'm a little concerned about this, and I'm kind of having buyers' remorse.

Can you just give me my money back and we'll forget about it?

And did he reply?

To me, he said something to the effect of, you know, we'll be back in a few days and we can talk about it then.

Just saying, you know, we'll talk about it when we see each other.

Which made me think he possibly would have given my money back.

Possibly, but now the apparent victims, all drawn in by David's various connections, now have a connection of their own, each other.

And there was a lot of anger at the Villa Carlotta.

At this point, we had amassed about 10 people who had been affected by David one way or another and his lies.

We all were sort of poking the bear a little bit at that point.

When are you coming home?

What's going on?

We were getting closer to the date that was supposed to be the buy date so we could get our shares.

And he gave everybody a different date that he was returning.

So I think he was starting to get a feeling, or more than a feeling, that we all had started talking.

And then the night he returned, we were all sitting out at the pool and we could see his light go on in his apartment.

They decided to use their numbers against him and confront him as a group.

Basically eight or ten of us marched over there, walked up to his door, stood in the hallway, and banged on his door and said, David, come out here.

We need to talk to you.

They have a lot of questions for him, like, what's going on?

Where's our money?

Why did you do this to us he did say sort of whimpering i'll get you your money back i'll pay you all back i'll get you your money tomorrow and so that's all he had like that's all he had to say but he didn't say he didn't do it he didn't say it was nothing was true of what we were saying so he basically admitted to what he did and said he would you know he would get everybody their money back just be patient But being patient hadn't gotten Gina and Alexander anywhere with David before.

At least not anywhere good.

Alexander worried that after this big confrontation, David would slip away into the middle of the night, never to be seen or heard from again.

I considered him a flight risk.

I said, for all I know, David, you're gonna run off in the middle of the night, never to come back.

I said, so well,

what you're gonna do is you're gonna surrender to me your passport, your wallet, with everything in it, and your mobile phone.

And at first he didn't want to do that, but then we said, well, then we'll go to the police.

And that clearly, that, I mean, that scared him.

He said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

And so first he handed over his passport.

Then he handed over his wallet with his bank cards in it.

It was $51 in it too.

And then he handed over his mobile phone.

I said, and you'll get all of this back when you pay us our money back.

Alexander stayed awake outside David's door that entire first night.

It was kind of a stakeout.

The next morning, David did try try to escape the Carlotta, but Alexander wasn't going to let that happen.

Not on his watch, at least.

And David said, I need my phone.

Give me my phone back.

I can't do anything without my phone.

My understanding is David took his phone and then ran out of the building and tried to run.

I guess there was a bit of a chase on the street, and they got caught up in a bunch of homeless people.

We finally, however, this resolved, we finally got David to agree that he had about $22,000 in the bank bank and that he would give that to us.

On this first day, Gina, Alexander, and another neighbor split that $22,000 three ways amongst them.

It was just a tiny fraction of the money they said they gave David.

But David didn't leave the Villa Carlotta.

He wasn't evicted either.

He stayed there for a full month, a snake in the Garden of Eden, surrounded by his angry victims.

I did everything I could to make him as comfortable as possible.

Like what?

We were neighbors, so every time I walked past his door, I'd knock on his door.

Every time I saw him, I'd stick on my finger, my middle finger to him.

He told me in a text message, I said, like, why are you no longer in the villa?

He said, well, I don't want to be there anymore.

I'm sleeping outside.

I come inside at night to shower and get some stuff, and then I disappear again.

Alexander hounded David for the money over text message, over email, whenever he saw him.

He tried everything in his arsenal.

Okay, when are you paying us back?

I know, I'll pay you back tomorrow.

And then, like every day, he would come up with a new story why he couldn't pay us back.

One time he lost his shoes, so he couldn't go to the bank.

And then another time, it was raining, and he got stuck in traffic, and then he got sepsis, and then he got pneumonia, and then it was just one thing after the other why he couldn't do it.

Alexander eventually got a little more money back, but it wasn't nearly enough.

Do you think that have you thought about what the people who he scammed have in common?

We're all gullible.

Well, everyone's gullible, right?

To some extent.

Everyone's gullible up to some point.

No, Marshall, like, no.

David moved into the Villa Colotta for a reason.

And the Villa Colotta, it costs a certain amount.

Every month to live in the Villa Colotta.

The rent is expensive.

So, David moves into a place where there's money to be found and he starts talking about the things that are of interest to you.

But he would do that with different people with different stories.

And he would talk to one person about something, learn from that conversation, and then apply it in a different scam with another person or a different conversation, a different lie.

It can be hard to tell whether the Villa Carlotta residents are more upset that David took their money or that they fell for his fake social connections.

It's bizarre.

To me, it's fascinating.

I mean, it's horrible, and I wish it hadn't happened to me.

And half of me wishes it would just go away, but it doesn't.

But it is fascinating, and I'm also oddly fascinated that I was duped.

You know, I'm pretty savvy, smart person.

And the fact that I could be duped, I'm like, wow, this guy is really good at what he does.

When police finally arrested David for what he'd allegedly done to Gina and the others, it was August 2022, but he was released after posting $45,000 bail and he was let off with just a citation.

While David walked free, the victims of the Villa Carlotta stayed in touch with law enforcement, sharing any evidence that would help build a stronger case against David Bloom.

A year later, in August 2023, the police had enough evidence to issue another warrant for David's arrest.

In the wee hours of the morning on Monday, August 28th, David Bloom was taken into custody.

He was charged with defrauding nine victims out of $250,000 between the years 2021 and 2023.

On January 2nd, 2025, he pleaded not guilty to all charges.

He could face up to 14 years in prison.

As of this recording, David's case is still ongoing, inching along.

We reached out to David's lawyers, but didn't hear back from them.

Alexander's left the Villa Carlotta.

There's just too many bad feelings for him there.

But Gina stayed and feels comfortable.

It's home for her.

And neither of them plans to invest money with friends.

Not ever again.

Next week on big time, never trust a man in a fur jacket.

This has been Big Time, an Apple Original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

It's hosted by me, Steve Bussemi.

This episode was reported by Marshall Heyman and produced by Lane Rose and Danya Abdelamed.

Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.

Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer.

Our production team includes Amy Bedullah, Rajiv Gola, and Morgan Jappe.

Fact-Checking by Mary Mathis.

Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviron.

Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations.

Production help from Alyssa Midcalf.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening.