Snowball 02 | The Great Houdini

This is an ABC podcast.

This episode contains occasional coarse language, and we've used some voice actors to bring emails to life.

The last time my brother saw Leslie Minoukian, she was getting on a plane.

He thought she was just taking a holiday to see her family in the US.

But just before Leslie turned to go through the gate, she said those words: The snowball is about to hit you.

And Greg was so shell-shocked.

We didn't really know what that meant.

No.

Well, how it would manifest itself.

What snowball.

Within a couple of months, my parents had lost more than a million dollars, their home and their retirement.

And Greg was heartbroken.

As paperwork surfaced from the failed Dragonfly Cafe, Dad started to find some hectic stuff that didn't make sense.

Lis Le Minukian had left behind a trail of clues about what she had done.

And the more my dad discovered, the more obsessed he got about investigating.

Dad even sort of turned himself into a 60-something year old hacker.

And he eventually uncovered a web of deception so strange that it's kind of funny.

Welcome to Unravel Season 4.

I'm Ollie Wards, and this is Snowball.

I need to clear this up.

Don't call yourself Houdini.

Held it up to the light, and everything merged.

That person has a ball of earth placed on it.

It's just like a finger, isn't it?

It's a big metal finger.

So weird.

It is weird.

It is weird.

Oh my fucking god.

Are you serious?

We pointed that out.

Oh my gosh.

When Leslie left forever, the Dragonfly Cafe had only been open for five months.

Dad and Greg could finally look at the books.

Felt like it was a bit of a relief that she was out of the way so we could start trying to work out what the fuck was going on.

What Greg and Dad found wasn't pretty.

The dragonfly was in serious debt.

If the business didn't get turned around quickly, the whole thing would collapse.

My family pulled together to save the dragonfly.

Mum worked as a waitress, my dad behind the counter.

My brother Simon and his chefmates were in the kitchen.

When mum and dad came up, I just remember it being like, whoa, and then whoa, but like, and then after like two or three woes, as the woes keep on getting worse, even though they were getting worse, it wasn't really a surprise.

You're like, I wonder what the next woe is going to be.

They tried their best to turn things around, but the business debts weren't getting paid down fast enough.

Mum, Dad and Greg were worried and they didn't want to do anything wrong, so they voluntarily handed control of the business to administrators, some suits from Auckland who would do whatever they needed to for the debts to be repaid.

It was the administrators who ended up pulling the pin.

The cafe, gift shop, and the house were all sold.

The bank also got my family home.

The house I grew up in.

The day mum and dad were told it was all over, they went for a walk along the beach.

That was a terrible time, and we were walking along the beach looking at this Putakawa tree, and in a way, sort of jokingly saying,

There's a lot of foliage up there.

It would be sort of

weatherproof.

We could live under this tree.

We sat down on the wharf at Warkworth and had a little cry about it.

We both sunk to our knees and sat on the wharf.

We cried.

We just were destroyed.

We weren't

angry.

We were just destroyed.

To make things worse, the global economy was going into meltdown.

It was a parallel with the world economy at that time as well.

Turmoil in the United States housing market has spread across the international stock markets around the world are bracing for a potential meltdown.

The Dragonfly wasn't worth what Leslie had bought it for just a few months ago.

Selling it all, even including our house, didn't cover the more than $1.5 million loan.

The debt to Kiwibank was short about $150,000.

My parents had less than nothing.

My auntie Robin and Uncle Merv renovated their basement so my parents could move in.

If we hadn't had the backing of families, our families,

I don't know where we would have ended up.

Mum and dad even went to ask if they were eligible for any welfare payments.

At one stage we went to

see if we could get a flat to live in and work an income which is so

hard to deal with.

We had a young lady of about 21.

I'm only guessing at 21.

She said to us, What are we going to do?

And she said, I don't know.

You just got to sort it.

And we've lived with that saying ever since.

It's been quite good.

If you don't know, you just thought it.

If this was a hard time for my parents, it was even harder for Greg.

He had to watch mum and dad get turfed out of our family home.

The house that, you know, we all sort of spent 20 20 odd years as a family was well in the past.

Everyone was split.

I was off,

I don't know where I was, I think I was flatting in Mount Eden.

Simon had gone his way, mum and dad

were living at someone else's house as well.

And while all this was happening, he was coming to terms with the fact that his marriage was over.

Did you miss her?

I mean, like, you know.

Yeah, I did.

I sort of thought that maybe things could be worked out and she'd come back down.

But then each week,

it got more and more

out of the realms of possibilities.

And does she know about everything that happened?

I mean, I don't even know if she knows that the house got sold and everything.

I think I probably yelled at her once on the phone and

said a few things like that.

And

yeah,

yeah.

But

obviously not the whole.

She didn't live it, did she?

So she wouldn't know.

But would it even be fair to say it was all Leslie's fault anyway?

After all, my parents kicked in money to a business venture that failed.

Like dad said, they stuck their neck out.

It didn't pay off.

They weren't forced to back Leslie's loan.

It would be fair to say that my parents and Greg were naive to put so much into the deal just on trust.

They made a bad call investing in the Dragonfly, and in 2008, people all over the world were going bankrupt.

But as my dad found out, this was no ordinary business failure.

After everything that could be sold was gone, Kiwibank sent dad a bunch of all the documents.

While this was happening, I was still living overseas.

But now that I'm back in NZ, I've finally heard the crazy story about what happened when dad started digging through that box of documents.

When Kiwibank loaned $1.5 million to Leslie, one of their conditions was Leslie had to prove she really had that big trust fund she always talked about.

Because she was an equal partner, a guarantor of the loan, along with Greg and my parents.

She was supposed to be taking on the risk of the investment alongside them.

In the box of stuff from Kiwibank, there was a document Leslie had given them showing her trust fund had more than 5 million US dollars locked up in it.

It was a statement from Bank of America.

The Bank of America statement was crucial to the bank, recognising that Leslie had funds to be able to sustain the business.

Dad hadn't seen any of this when the deal was done.

Leslie had her own dealings with Kiwibank, but as soon as he found this Bank of America statement, he could tell it looked dodgy.

Looking at the statement now, it's pretty sketchy.

The numbers on the closing balance of more than 5 million sort of trail off on a slight angle.

The ins and outs of the transactions don't even add up properly.

The closing balance is wrong by $616.

There's heaps of empty lines.

It looks like a photocopy.

It's not signed or stamped by anyone.

But for Dad, things didn't really fall into place until he stumbled on something else Leslie had left behind.

When mum and dad moved out of our house and closed up the dragonfly, my aunties and uncles helped pack up everything they could keep.

Furniture, mum's china plates that we never used.

It was all squashed into a small suburban storage unit, a tight square, tin walls like a shed, with boxes stacked to the roof.

Sometimes I'd go to the store and sort of reminisce about how it was with my own stuff around me.

And I was just sort of

sitting in this little storeroom with all of our household goods.

Everything was there, totally packed in.

And for some reason, I was just going through the drawers of this chest of drawers.

And I found

a Barclay bank statement.

And then I found a copy of the America Bank of America statement.

And they looked similar.

I put one on top of the other and held it up to the light and

everything merged.

The wording was the same, same font, same size.

The barcode on it was the same

and that sort of locked it in.

She had actually produced the Bank of America statement by modifying the Barclay Bank statement.

This might not have been the first time Leslie had made good use of a photocopier.

Last episode, we heard someone say that Leslie had admitted to twinking out photocopying and faking up her driving record.

But this took it to another level.

It looked like she had faked up a bank statement showing the balance of her trust fund.

That was a fundamental wow moment for me.

That was the ultimate and fraudulent activity when you present that to a bank and they accept it.

I was sitting there on the stall just looking at the stuff and it was a moment where suddenly everything seemed to fall into place.

We'd been done.

Dad couldn't believe this hadn't been picked up and honestly I can't either.

Some people have suggested to me that Leslie would distract people with flirting, but I wondered if it was really possible with all these professionals like at the bank.

Could they be influenced by that kind of thing?

I asked Dad what he thought.

Well I think she certainly pursued that line with a lot of people including the bank people.

One of them I was quite astounded to see her give him a big gobby kiss.

What do you mean a gobby?

Mouth-to-mouth job.

as we were leaving a meeting.

Gobby means something different in Australia, but that's okay.

Anyway, when my parents figured all this out, they knew that it was time to go to the bank and show them the fake documents that had been under their noses the whole time.

Mum and Dad went to Kiwi Bank's head office in Wellington.

So this guy said, Look, he said, I know it's bad news, but you got to go home and live with it.

And I got so angry.

I said to him, You are talking about a family that have no home, and you're telling us to walk out of here.

And by this stage, David had presented the form showing the fraud and how easy it was to pick up.

And he actually said to these managed men, he said, Look at it.

He said, I found it.

He said, Your janitors should have found it.

Why didn't you find it?

And what did they say?

Uh-uh, ooh-a, ooh-ah, ooh-ah.

They were totally embarrassed, very, very embarrassed about this.

And I suddenly realised that I was in command here.

And I can remember saying, now,

we'll go home now, but we'll reconvene the meeting tomorrow, all right?

Tomorrow afternoon, I'll present you with my claim and

we'll see where we go from there, right?

And he said, okay, so off we went.

And we went off to a pub and had a rub and coke

and a lot of laughter because we thought, ah, bastards, we've got them.

Well,

it didn't quite turn out that way.

Kiwi Bank did initially offer some compensation to Mum and Dad, but later the offer was retracted.

The bank's lawyers had decided that they didn't owe Mum and Dad anything.

Mum and Dad had been relying on the bank to make sure Leslie's finances were sound, but the bank basically said that they should have been doing their own checks.

I wanted to talk to KiwiBank about all this, but they just said, we do not comment publicly on specific consumer issues and won't be doing so in this circumstance.

The person my mum and dad would usually get to help with this kind of thing was their lawyer of 25 years.

This lawyer had helped them to buy their house and helped dad set up his party hire business, but they couldn't talk to him.

Because back when Leslie was still in New Zealand, before this fraud had been discovered, the lawyer dumped Dad.

My lawyer rang and told me he had a conflict of interest situation.

He was dealing with Leslie and he was dealing with us, and he saw the two starting to split apart.

Did you find that ominous?

You're the longest

client in the scenario.

Why are you going?

Yes, I did.

Think that was a bit odd.

Then I thought he was obviously enamoured with Leslie.

She was the future.

We were the present, but not not so much the future.

Not knowing where else to turn, mum and dad took all the documents to their local member of parliament, a guy called Rodney Hyde.

And it just so happened that Rodney Hyde had quite a profile.

He was the leader of a political party called ACT.

And he didn't just act,

he also danced.

The Honourable Rodney Hyde was a surprisingly popular contestant on New Zealand's Dancing with the Stars.

Up next, Rodney Hyde.

And after that first foxtrot, the question is, has he got a little cheeky cha-cha-cha left in him?

Dancing the cha-cha, will Rodney Hyde and Crystal Stewart please take to the floor?

Mum and Dad felt like they were finally getting somewhere because Rodney Hyde took a keen interest in their case.

Rodney wrote a strongly worded letter to the bank, suggesting that their lax checking of Leslie's documents was negligent and asked them to reverse their position.

But the bank didn't budge.

The only other thing my parents could do was report the whole thing to the police.

You have reached the New Zealand Police non-emergency line.

Dad had a couple of meetings with Auckland's top fraud cop, a Welshman.

So I'm Harold Jones.

I'm Detective Inspector at the moment.

At the time when this file came in, I was the

acting detective senior sergeant in charge of Auckland City Fraud Squad, as it was then.

Certainly, if the suspect were in New Zealand, it would be something that we would have allocated and looked at.

Unfortunately, with her already having left the country, it's standard practice at that point that we wouldn't take it any further.

It's unfortunate that by the time this fraud or you know or the likely fraud was realised, she was already well gone.

But what we did do is ensure that that person has a border alert placed on them.

So if they were to re-enter the country, I would get a notification and at that point we would look at the file again.

Unless Leslie came back to New Zealand, the cops wouldn't do anything.

By skipping the country, Leslie could leave it all behind.

Is it any part of the practice as well to sort of let the US authorities know that they've done something like that?

I'd only do that if I were expecting to transfer a file that had sufficient evidence on it to warrant an investigation in America.

The problem with a lot of fraud files is to get to that level, you actually need to speak to the suspect because you're looking at bank accounts, handwriting samples.

To get to that point, it's quite a long road.

It seems like kind of a loop.

With Leslie gone, they couldn't investigate her.

But without an investigation in New Zealand, they couldn't tell the US.

Therefore, no one was going to investigate.

But what all this meant was pretty simple.

Even if Leslie had committed blatant fraud, she was gonna get away with it.

As Dad and the administrators kept investigating what happened at the Dragonfly, they found more shady surprises.

One of the administrators somehow found out that Leslie had been hit with charges relating to check fraud in the US, and she had a conviction.

Dad also found records showing something really dodgy.

Not long after he had put an eye-watering 75 grand in an account for Leslie to set up the dragonfly, she sent over 20 grand to her parents in the US.

And that was before the business had even opened.

Greg tried to confront Leslie about all this, but according to Greg, she continued to blame the failure of the dragonfly on mum and dad and Greg meddling in the business.

Mum and dad wanted answers from Leslie's parents.

They tried calling and then Leslie's dad Andrew replied by email.

This isn't his real voice.

I felt it would be better to respond to you via email as I have difficulty most of the time understanding the Kiwi accent and I apologise for that.

We are extremely sorry for the situation everyone is in.

Betty has been praying for a turnaround of the situation, and we all do care about your welfare and success.

But he goes on to say stuff like, the cafe should never have been sold.

We feel that you should have received advice from at least three or four different experts.

There are many brokers out there that at least would have given you the option to refinance.

Your main concern seems to be that Leslie was not properly regretful of her contributions to the failure of the business.

However, I am not sure what gave you this impression.

As far as our empathy for you, it is more than you realize.

He says they don't appreciate my mum and dad blaming the loss of their home on Leslie.

You are an adult who has had your own businesses in the past, and you must have known the risk involved in this type of business.

Fair enough, dad knew the risks, but based on Leslie saying she had her trust fund to back everything up.

Here's the strange thing.

It seems like Betty and Andrew think Leslie's trust fund is real, or at least they're trying to convince my parents it's real.

Unfortunately, she does not have the freedom to access her trust fund for any amounts to help the dragonfly with the financial distress it was in.

Leslie does not have control of this trust fund, nor do we.

I want to reiterate that we do not want to be involved in any way whatsoever and would appreciate being left out of this situation.

Sincerely, Andrew

Despite the evidence that shows Leslie sending money to Andrew, when my dad reached out to them, it was pretty clear they didn't want a bar of the whole situation.

Leslie warned Greg not to send the documents to her parents.

But then mum and dad did exactly that.

They emailed Betty and Andrew with attachments showing evidence of fraudulent documents and money transfers to them in the US.

Andrew and Betty, some facts.

Shortly after the bank loan for the business and startup funding was obtained, Leslie transferred US $12,500 to you on the 25th of September.

Our conclusion is that you both had knowledge of what was happening and we're a party to the deceit.

Not long after my dad sent that email, Leslie wrote to Greg asking for a divorce.

She said it was the last straw.

I read some of what Leslie said to Greg.

He hadn't seen this divorce letter in over a decade.

Like, I just want to read some of this letter to you.

It says, Dear Greg, I'm filing for dissolution of our marriage and would appreciate your signature as soon as possible.

I am sorry that things have ended this way.

It's just all crap.

There's one particular paragraph here which is,

I am sorry that now you will never really know what was real or not.

But I kept asking and pleading not to push and allow me to do things on my terms.

I didn't run from the mess.

I left because I was not going to sit back and be told what to do by your family.

I do not work with people up in my face making demands.

She's a sociopath.

She's trying to kill the lily, blame other people, manipulation.

So what I make of that is just total crap to be honest.

What do you think she meant by

I'm sorry you'll never really know what was real or not?

Yeah so that's that's the

I guess when you marry someone you really you want to you feel like you really know them.

So to have her say that was quite tough

because

it actually shows that she was holding out.

She said, you know, you don't really know me.

Well, she was the one preventing me from knowing.

And

I think I recall when I read that,

I thought of Hawaii and all of the stories from there.

And I thought to myself, I've just become the new Hawaii.

Hawaii was a mystery, now New Zealand's a mystery, mystery, and now the storm's gone somewhere else.

My dad still had heaps of questions, like, was Leslie's trust fund real?

She seemed to have faked the proof she gave to the bank.

But the weird thing was, Kiwibank also had other documents and even people who seemed to have vouched for the existence of this trust fund.

Some attorney called Eric T.

Weiss,

Esquire, had written to the bank saying, This letter is confirmation that Leslie R.

Manukian receives $5,000

per month allowance for the rest of her life from a trust fund set up by her grandfather.

So who is this guy, Eric T.

Weiss, Esquire?

Well, according to his letterhead, he worked at a place called the Colonial Trust Company in Newport Beach, California.

No, I do not know an Eric T.

Weiss, and my name is Walter Barr.

I'm chairman of Colonial Trust Company, which is a South Carolina state chartered trust company.

We have offices in Spartanburg, Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston, South Carolina.

We have no branches outside of South Carolina.

And that was confusing to be called trust store on the Bank of America statement.

That whole statement looks wrong to me.

We certainly, our Colonial Trust Company,

have had no dealings with either the Weiss individual or the Menetkin, and I don't think these were anything we would have had anything to do with.

So the only company of that name that was open then has never heard of Leslie or Eric T.

Weiss, Esquire.

So who is he?

Dad went looking for him, and he did find an American lawyer named Eric T.

Weiss.

He sent him a fax.

They still love fax machines in the U.S.

Dad was pretty worked up about what had happened, so this fax he sent was intense.

Sir,

you may wonder who it is that is writing to you.

The fact is, you probably know much, much, much more about me than I know about you.

I wish to address this imbalance.

So I think it is time to lay some cards on the table.

Well, you know, the language is

somewhat accusatory, and

I guess in reading the letter, the first thing that comes to my mind is that

somebody's been been wronged using my name and rightfully believes that the person who wronged them is me.

My name is Eric T.

Weiss.

I'm a practicing attorney in the state of Michigan.

One thing I've learned since

when I was a very young child is that your reputation is perhaps the most important thing to you.

And so

just trying to put pieces together, realizing that I need to clear this up as soon as possible and help this person essentially rather than become an adversary.

So this Eric T.

Weiss joined my dad's hunt.

Now they were all looking for Eric T.

Weiss, Esquire.

Being an attorney as long as I've been an attorney, there are ways to find out names of attorneys, where they practice throughout the United States.

There is an Eric L.

Weiss in Atlanta, Eric, Georgia, Weiss in Eric, Jersey City, Eric I.

Weiss, and Eric F.

But there just wasn't any sign of another Eric T.

Weiss anywhere

and an Eric J.

Weiss in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Much to my surprise, I am the only Eric T.

Weiss practicing law in the United States.

It's strange because Kiwibank told Dad they had spoken to Eric T.

Weiss.

He had given his phone number and said to call if the bank needed anything else.

Apparently they did call.

Eric T.

Weiss verified the existence of this trust fund.

So who was on the other end of that phone call?

There was a phone number that I was able to do a reverse check of the number online and was able to determine that it came out of California.

The number is the home number for Andrew R.

and Betty R.

Manukian of California.

And then I concluded that perhaps Eric T.

Weiss, the fake Eric T.

Weiss, was really Andrew R.

Manukian.

The phone number for Eric T.

Weiss, Esquire, given to Kiwibank was actually just the phone number for Leslie's parents' house.

And that wasn't all.

Eric had another illusion to reveal.

Eric knew he shared a name with someone famous.

He sort of casually mentioned to Dad that Eric Weiss

was also the real name of the great escape artist,

Harry Houdini.

Ladies and gentlemen, Harry Houdini takes great treasure in introducing Marietus Inventor.

Oh my fucking god.

Are you serious?

Who pointed that out?

Back when dad was learning all of this stuff, he didn't share it with my brothers.

So I told Simon about Eric T.

Weiss and the great Houdini.

Okay, so that's that's bizarre.

Don't call yourself Houdini, you know, when you're doing your fraud.

Oh, no, it's it's it's it's beautiful.

She's just taking the fucking piss, mate.

So that makes me a lot more angrier.

Like, I didn't know that.

Yeah,

that totally changed the game for me.

Really?

Yeah, that's quite calculated.

And, like, I don't know, it's just like a

finger, isn't it?

It's a big, it's a big middle finger.

That's fucking out there.

Oh my gosh.

I was just gobsmacked as to what's going on here.

How could this be?

It was just

one of those moments where I can't figure it out and I actually still can't.

This whole Eric T.

Weiss thing added a new layer to the mystery.

Dad was keen to get to the bottom of who was in on the scam, who wasn't, and how it all all worked.

More clues turned up.

Leaving in a hurry and under the pretense that she'd be back, Leslie had left a lot of stuff around the house at the Dragonfly.

Nothing valuable, mostly clothes.

But there was a diary and a few documents.

And this one piece of paper that had a word clearly scrawled on it.

When Dad saw it, he had an idea.

He knew that Leslie had been using his laptop to access her email, and it kept prompting him to put in a password.

So he thought, maybe I'll just try this.

And incredibly, it worked.

All of a sudden, he had access to the inner workings of Leslie's world.

Being able to look at her emails, I can tell you there was an awful lot of stuff going on.

I have to say that there were

thousands of emails.

It wasn't any fraudulency on my part.

I acquired a password

and while I didn't tell her I was looking at them,

it did give me an awful lot of information.

So

did you save her emails?

I have saved some of them, the ones that were interesting.

How often would you go in there and look?

Oh,

at least once a week.

Dad.

It's so weird.

It is weird.

It is weird.

Why.

How many do you have?

I only kept the ones that have great interest and I did little sort of excerpts from them.

Dad tells me that for about a year he was copy-pasting the interesting stuff into Word documents until the password got changed.

I can totally understand why Dad did this.

The walls had fallen in around him.

The bank didn't seem to want to act on any of this stuff and neither did the police.

He had no other way of getting more definitive answers about the extent of Leslie's fraud.

And at this point, neither do I.

All of the emails Dad saved are in the box of documents he's given me.

I do feel kind of conflicted about this.

I could have just left the emails in the box and cracked on working things out without them.

But leaving them in the box would have meant not truly understanding what happened.

So I decided to read them.

That means getting a real insight into Leslie's world as we can hear directly from her.

This is a bio she wrote about herself in an email.

I think it's for a course application.

We've got an actor to read Leslie's emails.

I have always been fascinated with fast things.

My closest friends would tell you that adrenaline is my best friend.

I'm always looking for the most extreme high through heliporting off Valdez, kayaking with the glaciers, hiking the backside of Half Dome, to scuba diving with the hammerheads of the Cocos Islands.

I am sad to have a glowing personality, and at times I believe this is true because of all all the great friends that I have.

But I see myself as shy and guarded.

As a bartender, the fun, crazy people, and rushes of mad crowds give me the ultimate natural high.

I traveled for seven years through 52 countries, mostly alone, meeting people along the way.

The experience taught me that I am a go-getter, who's a hard-working, confident woman.

But mostly, I am a survivor.

Those last few words are in capital letters, by the way.

I am a survivor.

She'll often emphasise a line in capitals.

Looking through Leslie's other emails, there's more that sticks out to me.

There's insight into her relationship with her parents.

Mainly Betty, Leslie's mum.

She seems to do most of the emailing.

A lot of the time, Betty seems nice.

She even asks after my parents.

How is everything, Mayor?

Oh, Howard, Julie, and Dave.

Please tell them hello for me.

Love mom.

This makes me think, maybe they don't know about Leslie's tricks.

In some ways, could they be victims too?

Firstly, there's just so much admin going on of Leslie trying to send money to her mum.

It's a constant dance of her explaining holdups and sending cash back to her parents.

I can send you money, Western Union.

I'm going to try to send you a little money first from Greg's account.

Greg was using my computer the other night while waiting for me to call him for a ride, and the rabbit ate my computer cord

again.

It seems like while Leslie was spending the Dragonfly startup money, she was also keeping up appearances in NZ with her mum's credit card.

Here's an email from Leslie's mum, Betty.

Leslie, this is the last time you're going to use our credit card.

I know you are short of of money and that's why I'm giving this to you.

But you are a grown woman with a husband and a business, and we are your poor parents who are in deep shit debt.

So maybe Betty suffers from Leslie's creative approach to money management too.

But what about Andrew?

The phone number provided by Eric T.

Weiss to Kiwibank was their home number.

But the bank manager reckoned he called the number and spoke to Eric.

Could that have been Leslie's Leslie's dad, Andrew, playing the role of Eric T.

Weiss?

If things weren't strange already, they get a bit sideways from here.

Because for a guy who doesn't seem real, Eric T.

Weiss sends a lot of emails.

And a lot of them are to Leslie's parents.

Good morning, Andy and Betty.

Hope this email finds you well.

I have had several lengthy conversations with a banker friend of mine, and the paperwork on the trust money that Leslie received on your behalf is a very tricky situation.

I can see these emails from Eric to Leslie's parents because they seem to show up in Leslie's account.

She's CC'd, or they've been forwarded.

Eric writes a lot like Leslie.

He puts random words in capitals, and he's often explaining delays in money transfers to her parents.

Sarah from the accounting office of Sony did leave a message with my assistant letting us know that the money will be available on Wednesday.

They will FedEx the cashier's check to you to receive by Thursday.

Eric also passes on advice to Leslie's parents about what to do in some situations.

Like here,

Eric suggests what to say to my mum and dad.

If he starts whining about his present financial situation, apologize for his loss, but state you feel that he should have had at least three or four different opinions before making this final decision.

Reading through these emails, something seemed strangely familiar.

I started to recognize some of the words.

In this email, Eric is talking about how the administrators were called into the dragonfly, and he's saying that my family shouldn't have placed the business into voluntary administration.

I realized I've heard that somewhere before.

We feel that you should have received advice from at least three or four different experts.

Leslie's dad said all the same stuff to my parents when he wrote to them.

There are many brokers out there that at least would have given you the option to refinance.

It seems like he's just rehashing what Eric said to say.

Just say there are many brokers out there who would have bailed you out for at least six months.

Yes, maybe at a higher interest rate, but at least they would have made it through the winter and could have put the property up for sale.

Ugh, I feel like I'm playing a game of pickup sticks, just where every stick is actually a thick piece of bullshit.

Okay, so Eric T.

Weiss sends advice to Leslie, who forwards it to her dad, Andrew.

Andrew follows instructions and sends all of this bullshit to my dad.

So it seems like Leslie could be using this fake persona, Eric T.

Weiss, to get her parents to say whatever she wants them to say.

If Eric T.

Weiss is just a character Leslie invented, she's at least made him three-dimensional.

Because Eric writes to Leslie like he's updating a friend.

Hi, Leslie.

Hope this email finds you well.

At the moment, I'm back in Bangkok, still dealing with legal issues.

Leslie, I was happy to hear that you made it back to the States.

I am sorry that things have not gone so well for you.

So is Leslie emailing herself as Eric?

What is going on?

It will be worth it one day, Leslie.

Leslie, do not.

I was happy to hear that you made it to me financially secure for life.

If only Leslie used this much imagination running the dragonfly.

I reckon if she can pull off such complicated lies, Leslie must have had practice.

There must be other people that have been conned.

I need to find them.

And I know where I have to start.

Before Leslie met Greg, she was in Hawaii.

I have to find out what happened there.

Luckily, Greg's given me a head start.

Greg knew now that Leslie's story of being run out of Hawaii by murderous local mobsters probably wasn't true.

So while dad was skulking around in Leslie's emails, Greg was writing to the Hawaiian State Police.

This is obviously not an ordinary crime or set of circumstance.

But from the normal, successful life my family once led, I find myself in a murky world of con artists and swindlers.

We are battling them, and I will find out the truth.

Any information, advice, maybe a point in the right direction would be invaluable.

And before long, Greg got a reply.

Checked the letterbox and an interesting looking

manila folder type envelope, quite chunky in the letterbox and had some US postal marks on it and I thought wow this is this is going to be interesting.

So interesting that it's going to help me discover what really happened in Hawaii.

Chief Faom, can I help you?

Yes, hi Chief Faomu.

It's Ollie Wards here, the ABC journalist at

this town is very small.

We call it the Coconut Wireless, so everyone talks to everyone about everything.

Does the name Leslie Manukian mean anything to you?

Oh, you bet.

Never forget her.

I was to the point where I wanted to punch her in the face.

She had all these fantastic ideas of what was going to happen and was all sewn together by dreams, really.

I don't care whether you're in Hawaii, you're in California, you're in New Zealand, or wherever.

You get what you give.

Oh, the scammer?

And she's lucky she left.

That's next time on Snowball.

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