Snowball 01 | The Girl With The Dragonfly Tattoo

Speaker 1 This is an ABC podcast.

Speaker 2 This series contains occasional coarse language.

Speaker 3 I was the MC at my brother's wedding. I did all the usual stuff, housekeeping, toasts.
I tried to crack a few jokes.

Speaker 3 But inside, I had a nagging sense of unease about my brother's charismatic Californian bride.

Speaker 3 It was a feeling that some things just didn't add up.

Speaker 3 I didn't tell anyone how I felt. Probably couldn't have explained it anyway.

Speaker 3 My brother was happy. That's what matters, right?

Speaker 3 But maybe I should have paid more attention to that feeling. Because within a few months, she had taken off to the US.

Speaker 3 It wasn't just my brother's marriage that fell apart. My whole family went down with it.

Speaker 3 And none of us ever saw her again.

Speaker 5 This woman's a bit kind of like, you know, not what she claims to be.

Speaker 7 She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin look to her.

Speaker 9 I guess when you marry someone, you feel like you really know them.

Speaker 11 And that was her allure.

Speaker 9 You just followed her.

Speaker 5 She's a manipulative con artist.

Speaker 6 Stand by.

Speaker 5 We call her the Black Widow.

Speaker 6 The snowball is about to hit you.

Speaker 3 When my mum and dad found out that they had lost everything, it was during the Sunday lunchtime rush in a country New Zealand cafe.

Speaker 3 They had ended up running that cafe. And that day, Dad was serving behind the counter.

Speaker 12 Taking orders, passing them back to the chefs at the back, next order, da da da, da da da da, da da da.

Speaker 3 Then he noticed a guy joined the back of the line. It wasn't a random customer.
Dad recognised him and when this guy got to the front of the queue he ordered.

Speaker 12 And he said to me, I'll have a so-and-so and so-and-so

Speaker 12 and I've come today

Speaker 12 to tell you that we are going to liquidate you.

Speaker 12 I almost fainted.

Speaker 12 I went blank. I could feel the draining of blood from my face.
I must have been as white as a sheet.

Speaker 3 My mum realised something was up.

Speaker 13 I'm busy bringing in dishes and doing whatever.

Speaker 13 And then I looked at Dad. He'd stepped to one side and he

Speaker 13 came to me

Speaker 13 and he looked absolutely dreadful, utterly drained.

Speaker 13 And I just carried on.

Speaker 13 We didn't have time to to reflect on things till later in the day and what they all meant.

Speaker 3 What it all meant was mum and dad had lost their life savings, more than a million dollars. And a few days later, they found out they were homeless.

Speaker 12 A court bailiff presented us with a paper saying

Speaker 12 Our house was to be forfeited to the bank.

Speaker 14 And

Speaker 2 I said to the guy, I'm not going to sign that.

Speaker 3 And he said, it's going to happen.

Speaker 12 You don't need to sign anything. He just threw it on the desk and walked out.

Speaker 3 My parents, in their 60s, went from living in a leafy Auckland suburb to squatting in the basement at my auntie's house.

Speaker 3 As my family tried to understand what had happened, they realised they might have been the victims of an elaborate con job.

Speaker 3 I was living overseas through most of this. Recently, I started learning about what happened and I kind of felt guilty I wasn't there when the walls fell down around everyone.

Speaker 3 So now, I want to help figure things out. I normally work behind the scenes at an Australian radio station, Triple J, helping other people tell stories.

Speaker 3 But I knew I needed to investigate this story of my own. It was like the plot of a movie, one you'd never expect to feature, a pretty average Kiwi family.

Speaker 3 Things got weird, and some of it's kind of funny.

Speaker 12 There's also a lot of randomness there with the story.

Speaker 8 Smuggled out of Armenia?

Speaker 10 What?

Speaker 15 Whoa.

Speaker 17 Explain.

Speaker 18 Oh my fucking god.

Speaker 15 Are you serious?

Speaker 19 I mean, can I talk about drugs?

Speaker 20 This is weird.

Speaker 21 This is not how a normal friendship works.

Speaker 1 We were like her little ducklings following behind her.

Speaker 12 Lots of little intrigues.

Speaker 22 $30,000.

Speaker 3 I don't know where this money went.

Speaker 18 They kind of knew that there was some fuckery.

Speaker 19 We joked that they were hired.

Speaker 7 Personality, bubbly.

Speaker 7 She was rather lovely.

Speaker 13 He was broke. She took every fucking thing he had.

Speaker 3 The stranger things get, the more questions I have about what happened. Like, why did this American woman con my family?

Speaker 12 How did she just get away?

Speaker 3 And who really is Leslie Minoukian?

Speaker 3 In this season of Unravel, I'm going to find some answers. And to do it, I'm going to have to travel across the world to track Leslie down.

Speaker 3 I'm Ollie Wards, and this is Snowball.

Speaker 17 So this is recording, is it?

Speaker 23 Is there an option to edit it afterwards?

Speaker 25 It's not a test.

Speaker 3 Surely there's no better subject than yourself. So it's one or two sentences to describe who I am.

Speaker 26 Yeah.

Speaker 22 Okay, I'm a Kiwi male, late 30s,

Speaker 16 probably quite typical, trying to pay the mortgage and all the bills and look after everyone as best I can in the process.

Speaker 3 I guess my brother Greg is typical in lots of ways. He'd be happy with a $10 haircut, short back and sides, but he definitely has his quirks.

Speaker 3 Like he'll read a street map of a foreign city before bed like it's a novel. The other thing to know about Greg that partly got us into all of this is that he loves everything to do with America.

Speaker 9 There's a term for people interested in Europe which is Europhile.

Speaker 24 I think I was an Americanophile.

Speaker 3 So like one night recently I was brushing my teeth and I got a surprise show and tell.

Speaker 22 Greg, you've just come out and shown something. What do you got here?

Speaker 11 It's a $2 US note

Speaker 25 and I'm told that they're quite rare and they're lucky for either the

Speaker 11 I think it's the North Koreans.

Speaker 11 Anyway, that's me.

Speaker 3 Now this whole thing starts when Greg went off on his OE back in 2006. In New Zealand, your OE or overseas experience is kind of like a gap year after school or uni.

Speaker 3 It's where Kiwis live abroad, drink foreign beer, and have people laugh at us for the different words we have for stuff.

Speaker 12 Like chili bin.

Speaker 3 That's an eski if you're in Australia or a cooler box pretty much anywhere else.

Speaker 12 Chili bin.

Speaker 3 Anyway. As a Kiwi, it was easier for Greg to work in the UK than in the US.
So he put his American dreams on hold and set himself up in London.

Speaker 3 One night he was at a house party, wearing his favorite American football style jacket that makes him look like a high school jock.

Speaker 3 So he's wandering through the party. He steps outside to a courtyard and his ears prick up.

Speaker 9 North American accents used to catch my attention.

Speaker 3 In the corner of the courtyard, there's a woman with long dark hair smoking a cigarette.

Speaker 3 She's leading a conversation with the confidence just oozing out of her.

Speaker 17 Well let's throw in there Kim Kardashian lookalike sophisticated female operative ready to

Speaker 23 woo me as well.

Speaker 3 That sophistication might have been to do with her being a fair bit older than Greg. Leslie was late 30s.
Greg was mid-20s. Greg's not a smoker, but he thought he had smoked too.
He wanted to talk.

Speaker 3 And so he met Leslie. As they chatted in the dimly lit courtyard, Greg started to see the world in her, literally.

Speaker 24 It was more

Speaker 9 liked the concept of America as,

Speaker 9 you know, it's the biggest economy in the world. What they do actually matters to most people on the planet.

Speaker 3 I've never heard of another guy describing being attracted to a girl because of the size of her economy. But that's my brother.

Speaker 16 You know, if you're interested in politics, they are a superpower.

Speaker 3 Bit of a leap to a girl you meet at a house party though, isn't it?

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 24 I guess that's how naive I was.

Speaker 3 Greg was also taken in by Leslie's wild story about why she was in London.

Speaker 11 So it originally was to escape from Hawaii because some bad people in Hawaii were trying to attack her.

Speaker 9 you know, because they'd frauded her and were trying to do bad stuff to her. And her mum and dad sent her to Europe to escape them.

Speaker 3 Leslie would tell everyone some version of the story. I actually heard it myself.
It went like this.

Speaker 3 Before she was in London, Leslie owned the coolest bar, restaurant and nightclub on the island of Maui in Hawaii. The bar was called the Breakwater.

Speaker 3 Things were going well until one day Leslie caught the head security guard. dealing drugs out of the back entrance.
When she confronted him, he told her he planned to keep selling drugs.

Speaker 3 She shouldn't try to stop him. From there, things deteriorated with the locals.

Speaker 3 Like the electricity got cut off at the restaurant through a cousin at the power company.

Speaker 3 Leslie said it all culminated one night when she was at home. Hearing people breaking in, she hid under the bed.

Speaker 3 From there, she saw the head of security with some other guys come in carrying sugarcane knives. While they looked for her, they were talking about burying her in the fields.

Speaker 4 She was lucky though.

Speaker 3 They didn't look under the bed. As soon as they left, Leslie went to the airport.
Her dad chartered a plane and she escaped to Europe.

Speaker 3 So according to Leslie, that's how she ended up laying low in London. And all of this was fascinating to Greg.
He started introducing Leslie to his mates.

Speaker 29 Their relationship seemed

Speaker 29 a normal sort of relationship, aside from the fact that it got very intense very quickly.

Speaker 3 But you would expect that of Greg.

Speaker 29 He's not a game player and he wears his heart on his sleeve. So if he's into you, you'd find out pretty quickly.

Speaker 30 My initial thoughts were that she was really open and friendly, maybe a bit too friendly, but

Speaker 3 what do you mean by that?

Speaker 30 She just gave a lot. Like she just

Speaker 30 was pretty quick to chat and want to hang out and make plans. And I remember thinking it was quite full-on that she was so open so quickly.

Speaker 13 Maybe that's it.

Speaker 3 In London, Leslie managed a couple of bars.

Speaker 5 She was very vivacious, bubbly, kind of effervescent personality.

Speaker 5 bubbly Californian type manner. You know, she was kind of quite engaging, very chatty.

Speaker 17 You know, she knew how to sort of work people.

Speaker 3 Phil owned one of the bars Leslie worked in. He saw my brother coming in all the time.

Speaker 5 I can remember Greg. I remember Leslie bringing him into the bar and introducing me to him.

Speaker 5 Hell of a nice guy, typical sort of Kiwi in London, working hard, and then he'd come into the bar during the evenings to wind down a bit.

Speaker 5 And he had a, you know, what I'd probably describe as a certain naivety about him at the time.

Speaker 5 And I remember sort of thinking, you know, you had Leslie, who was this sort of very confident kind of you know thing and and there was Greg who was quieter and kind of you know so you could see the the dynamic there.

Speaker 3 Leslie would hook Greg and his mates up with drinks.

Speaker 9 You know we suddenly were invited to a bar and there's bloody buckets of beer being brought to our VIP table in the corner in the city of London with

Speaker 11 business people around and

Speaker 11 it was like, fuck I'm a backpacker

Speaker 32 and I'm in one of the world's financial capitals, getting bear reined on me.

Speaker 24 So you felt like a bit of a rock star or something.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I did, to be sure.

Speaker 9 Yes.

Speaker 3 Greg's friend Andy did wonder where it was all coming from.

Speaker 29 And she said, oh, it's all going on the tabs of different local law firms. So, you know, they'd all come to settle up and there'd be a few extra platters and bottles of wine.

Speaker 29 That's just one of her crafty ways of showing all her friends a good time, I suppose.

Speaker 3 Things were getting pretty serious between Greg and Leslie. And as the saying goes, first comes love, then comes me wanting to meet your new bae.

Speaker 3 I flew to London to meet my brother's American dream girl.

Speaker 3 My first impression was that Leslie knew stuff. She had been everywhere and done everything.
I started saying all the time, Leslie knows, and she loved that. We joked about getting t-shirts made.

Speaker 3 I was only partly being sarcastic. Leslie told me about how she was from Orange County, California.
She said that she was a trust fund type kid and so were her friends.

Speaker 3 And she said that her dad was rich from selling tanks to the US Army. So it was all pretty impressive, but I have to admit, I was nervous that I'd end up together.

Speaker 3 Somehow, Leslie seemed to have a power over Greg, like he wasn't himself. I wondered if it was because she was so much older than him.

Speaker 3 But I didn't really dwell on that stuff though, because I remember seeing how much Greg loved her. His arm was constantly around around Leslie, so I was happy for him.

Speaker 3 After only a few months, they moved in together. Things were going quickly, but they were about to go into hyperdrive.

Speaker 3 The winter after they first met, Greg proposed to Leslie. It was snowing on Christmas Day, and they were at Disneyland in Paris.

Speaker 32 She honestly was buying everything:

Speaker 10 like

Speaker 27 Donald Duck, key rings,

Speaker 16 sherbets, elf, bloody hats.

Speaker 9 We had a really nice dinner at,

Speaker 9 I think that movie Johnny Depp was in Pirates of the Caribbean. So they've got a really cool restaurant, beautiful food.

Speaker 24 But so you had a ring burning a hole in your pocket? Honestly, I don't even remember if I had a ring or I didn't. I don't think I did.

Speaker 22 But you remember the Johnny Depp

Speaker 17 Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant?

Speaker 9 Look, Ollie, the whole thing is

Speaker 9 the entire time I was in Europe, I was on a bit of a cloud nine anyway.

Speaker 11 And it had been a great year.

Speaker 27 It was romantic, it was snowing,

Speaker 11 everything was cool, and I thought this is the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 Um, how did she react?

Speaker 11 I think a little bit surprised, but also

Speaker 9 said yes pretty quick as well.

Speaker 25 So, yeah, look, mate, we were in love.

Speaker 3 Just after he proposed, Greg followed his fiancé back home to the superpower he had always wanted to visit.

Speaker 9 Yeah, first time in the United States.

Speaker 3 He expected New York to be paved in gold. Instead, it was dirty.

Speaker 9 That was my first impression, actually.

Speaker 9 Was this is rough as guts.

Speaker 3 Then it was to the west coast to stay in Leslie's childhood home in Orange County, California.

Speaker 3 Leslie always said that she was from a rich background, so you might imagine her house to be like a mansion off Laguna Beach.

Speaker 15 Nah.

Speaker 9 It's as

Speaker 9 middle-income America as you could possibly find.

Speaker 3 Leslie was warm and social, but it turned out that her mum and dad were the kind of parents that'll make you feel like you have to be on best behavior.

Speaker 3 Her mum, Betty, with almost permanently pursed lips, and her dad, Andrew, had a squint through glasses that was somehow at the same time suspicious and disinterested.

Speaker 9 I was put in a room next to her parents and she was put in her old room that she grew up in.

Speaker 9 Bed in the same place with the same TV,

Speaker 9 VHS, cassettes underneath the TV.

Speaker 3 Remember Leslie was nearly 40 years old at this point, but it was a separate bedroom situation.

Speaker 9 At this house, there was a camera above the front door,

Speaker 9 like a CCTV camera.

Speaker 17 And I thought, oh, yeah, okay.

Speaker 9 I asked about it, you know, why you guys got security, and I remember the answer was, the Hawaiians.

Speaker 3 Something about that didn't add up for Greg, but he was on his best behavior and let it go. He had bigger things on his mind.
He was about to get married.

Speaker 3 To make immigration and paperwork stuff easier, as well as to avoid any discomfort with Leslie's conservative parents, they arranged to get hitched quickly at a courthouse in Santa Ana.

Speaker 3 Betty and Andrew seemed happy for them. Betty put on a nice dress, Andrew put on a jacket, and he drove them to the courthouse in his Cadillac.

Speaker 3 The ceremony was brief. The registry office was no frills, just a vase of flowers in the corner.

Speaker 3 Greg was happy, but he was feeling far away from home. And also, Greg thought making things official would change the sleeping arrangements.
But it didn't.

Speaker 9 Yeah, separate bed situation.

Speaker 16 I was

Speaker 11 quite keen to

Speaker 16 not have that situation, but I respected it.

Speaker 11 But you were married now.

Speaker 17 Well, that's what was sort of,

Speaker 9 you know, I thought, hey, what else do I need to do here?

Speaker 17 Hey, man,

Speaker 17 I've done the deed, but I want to do the deed. Her parents were very, very conservative.

Speaker 3 It didn't matter too much, though, because they weren't planning on staying.

Speaker 3 As much as Greg was intrigued by America, he thought it'd be easier to settle at home in NZ, where they were going to have a proper wedding.

Speaker 3 But when it came time to leave California, it seemed like Betty and Andrew didn't really want their daughter to go.

Speaker 11 They took us out to the airport to LAX and

Speaker 9 they cried shitloads when we left.

Speaker 2 But it was all, you know, moving to New Zealand for a new life. What were their thoughts on that?

Speaker 9 Oh, look, mate, I don't remember ever any optimism of Leslie moving to New Zealand.

Speaker 9 I honestly distinctly remember them being really sad, her leaving America again.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 17 Now,

Speaker 17 whether that's'cause,

Speaker 9 you know, it's a loved one leaving to another land

Speaker 6 or

Speaker 24 another reason, who fucking knows.

Speaker 22 Like, what do you mean by that? What would another reason be?

Speaker 9 Like, knowing that she's going to get in trouble again somewhere else.

Speaker 9 They can't keep an eye on her.

Speaker 10 I don't know.

Speaker 3 It's late at night as Greg and I talk on the couch. We've never talked about all this stuff.
I've kind of just wanted to help him forget.

Speaker 3 But now that we're talking, the more we get into what happened with Leslie, the more tangled up we get.

Speaker 2 I remember that the story was her

Speaker 2 dad worked in the armaments industry, and you know, we've heard that she's a trust fund baby and there's all this money in her family,

Speaker 3 and you know, she's from this sort of rich background and everything.

Speaker 9 So none of that's true.

Speaker 22 Say that again.

Speaker 9 Well, none of that's true, less the part that

Speaker 11 her dad told me that

Speaker 11 he

Speaker 11 built water tanks for the U.S.

Speaker 24 Army.

Speaker 32 Not armaments.

Speaker 11 It was water tanks.

Speaker 11 I think she told me he built tanks. for the US Army, which to be fair is kind of true.

Speaker 2 But when somebody says that they're building tanks for the army,

Speaker 17 you don't think water tanks.

Speaker 9 Look, he was a a smart guy. He was an engineer.

Speaker 27 So he was Iranian. He was born in.

Speaker 3 Sorry, he was actually.

Speaker 9 He was born in Tehran, but he was Armenian.

Speaker 2 Leslie's dad. Yeah.

Speaker 9 Or, sorry, no.

Speaker 11 Adopted father.

Speaker 24 I never.

Speaker 27 No one's, as far as I know,

Speaker 9 more least of all us, has met the

Speaker 9 biological parents. She was adopted.

Speaker 27 Right, okay.

Speaker 11 I didn't know that,

Speaker 9 but, um, man, that that brings in the other piece

Speaker 9 that actually is where the trust fund supposedly came from, was from her biological parents and what she got left behind, and then she was adopted out.

Speaker 11 So, somebody adopted a baby with a trust fund.

Speaker 10 Well,

Speaker 9 this is where, like, you know, there's so many facets to someone's personality or stories, or all, or otherwise,

Speaker 11 eventually

Speaker 9 you actually just kind of give up asking and accept some of it and

Speaker 9 live in the moment and move on.

Speaker 12 It just says,

Speaker 12 it just seems like bullshit, you know?

Speaker 9 Well, most of it is.

Speaker 3 I knew this story had lots of strange tentacles, but as I'm asking Greg this stuff, every answer seems to sprout more bizarre limbs for me to understand. Even just basic, really basic questions.

Speaker 11 Like, how old is Leslie?

Speaker 9 Yeah, she's obviously a bit older than me.

Speaker 24 How much older?

Speaker 11 Well,

Speaker 9 she had two birth dates, so I never actually knew.

Speaker 9 What do you mean she had two birthdays?

Speaker 22 I feel like I ask, what do you mean a lot?

Speaker 17 Yeah, that's fine.

Speaker 9 Well, in this situation, you should.

Speaker 9 It was either eight or ten years, I think.

Speaker 22 What do you mean she had two birthdays?

Speaker 9 She had two different passports as well.

Speaker 6 What?

Speaker 15 Whoa.

Speaker 33 Wait.

Speaker 3 Explain. Explain.

Speaker 27 Um

Speaker 11 so

Speaker 9 there was a US passport

Speaker 9 but there there was other documentation with different birth dates

Speaker 17 you didn't think that was strange

Speaker 25 well

Speaker 11 yeah sure but there was

Speaker 11 you know plausible reasons.

Speaker 33 Which were what?

Speaker 24 Um,

Speaker 11 I think for memory it was

Speaker 16 smuggled out of Armenia.

Speaker 11 The passport was smuggled out of Armenia? No, she was.

Speaker 6 Wow.

Speaker 11 So we've got

Speaker 11 that piece plus all the Hawaiians attacking her.

Speaker 11 Mate,

Speaker 9 she's an enigma.

Speaker 11 Oh, Oliver.

Speaker 33 Hey, bro.

Speaker 3 I want you to meet my older brother. Simon.
My name's Simon.

Speaker 18 I'm your brother.

Speaker 3 I'm the youngest of us brothers. Greg is in the middle.
Simon's the oldest. Simon can be intimidating, but he's also charismatic.
Like he'd gate crash your party and then be the life of it.

Speaker 3 He's got a shaved head, thick black beard. Can you like in a few sentences just describe yourself for people listening? Like, you know, how would you, in a couple of sentences, sum yourself up?

Speaker 12 I don't know.

Speaker 18 I'm an artist.

Speaker 25 A lover.

Speaker 18 No, no, I'm a brother.

Speaker 15 Like, what do you mean?

Speaker 3 For Kiwis at home, like Simon, when Leslie Manoukian turned up, she was pretty full on. She was a real different character to have around.

Speaker 18 No, it was just a bit.

Speaker 18 It was a bit weird.

Speaker 18 And to tell you the truth, the only interaction I've ever had with an American, I think, like a proper American, like she's like the quintessential kind of Kelly chick with that strong accent.

Speaker 18 I'd just seen that on TV. Just interactions with her.
I remember it feeling a bit like TV, just because, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 Sort of like an intensity.

Speaker 18 Yeah, man, a wicked intensity.

Speaker 18 It didn't seem like this huge love affair.

Speaker 18 But Greg's quite interesting anyway. He's quite an interesting guy.
So something that may seem strange in another situation, I'm like, oh, this is just Greg. This is my brother.

Speaker 3 Greg's Kiwi mates also found Leslie quite buzzy.

Speaker 19 They were very quick to get wrapped up in Leslie because she

Speaker 19 was like the life of the party. She'd roll up with you know her Jaeger meister.
And to be honest, back then I was, so I was 10 years ago, I was 24.

Speaker 19 So here's this chick who was like just paying for everything. Like she was always, I mean, can I talk about drugs? She was always supplying weed and

Speaker 19 Jaeger meister.

Speaker 3 It's a quick way to a 24-year-old's heart weed and Jaeger meister.

Speaker 19 Oh, 100%, right?

Speaker 3 Most people were like sweet as, but for some others, it was a bit much.

Speaker 34 Like, for instance, if she said, come over, we'll have a drink of wine, we'd go over there and have a really expensive bottle of red or something, and I'd mention, oh, yeah, that's a really nice bottle.

Speaker 34 She'd turn up the next day with like a whole case of the stuff and be like, this is for you.

Speaker 35 Every time we caught up, she was always showering us in gifts, like giving us literally gifts, paying for everything, free alcohol.

Speaker 35 This is amazing. But when it was every catch-up, I started to be like, this is weird.

Speaker 21 This is not how a normal friendship works.

Speaker 11 Don't put it near me.

Speaker 3 What needs to come near you to record you?

Speaker 7 Venus looking at me.

Speaker 25 A what?

Speaker 3 That's my mum, Julie, describing my microphone. Mum's a tall lady.
She used to be self-conscious as a teenager.

Speaker 3 One time she danced with her friend in the girls' bathroom because she didn't think any of the boys would want to dance with a taller girl. But now she owns it.
She's pretty sassy and sarcastic.

Speaker 7 Could you just put it sort of over there, down there?

Speaker 3 Can you start by just

Speaker 3 why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Speaker 11 Hello.

Speaker 7 I'm the mother of three boys

Speaker 7 who I thought I would not survive their upbringing.

Speaker 7 I love the three of them to bits.

Speaker 7 The one we're going to speak of is our lovely Greg,

Speaker 7 who is a kind,

Speaker 7 fast-seeing,

Speaker 7 intelligent,

Speaker 7 good-looking young man and that people used to even say he looked like Tom Cruise.

Speaker 7 So that must be a measure.

Speaker 7 But in that, it seems there's been a bit of vulnerability.

Speaker 3 My brother is kind. But I gotta say, he doesn't look like Tom Cruise.
I reckon Mum thought Leslie looked like a movie movie star too.

Speaker 7 She was rather lovely. She had this dark,

Speaker 7 vivacious,

Speaker 8 a surface skin and look to her.

Speaker 7 Personality, bubbly,

Speaker 7 very ya-ya American.

Speaker 7 You know how Americans have the accent where they go, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya. I know.

Speaker 7 I just know.

Speaker 7 So I thought, oh, yes, that's just American, and we got on with it.

Speaker 3 Mum Mum ended up hanging out with Leslie like every day.

Speaker 7 Each day

Speaker 7 she would get up and make me take her somewhere. Like, let's go.
And I was happy to do it, for goodness sake.

Speaker 3 What was their kind of plan, though? I mean, what were they going to be doing?

Speaker 7 They was going to buy a business in New Zealand of a hospitality nature.

Speaker 7 One day she'd been trawling through things up in a bedroom, and she came down and she said, I've found it. I've got it.
She said, this is a sign I have to buy this place.

Speaker 7 What was the sign? The sign was that she had a big dragonfly tattooed across her back.

Speaker 2 So the cafe is called the dragonfly.

Speaker 3 She's got a dragonfly tattoo. It's a sign.

Speaker 11 It's meant to be.

Speaker 3 The dragonfly cafe was in a small town called Matacana, an hour's drive north of Auckland.

Speaker 3 Around Matacana, lush native bush and farms sit next to sandy white beaches.

Speaker 3 There's a farmer's market vibe. Sometimes ducks waddle around town from the river, which is lit up by fairy lights at night.

Speaker 3 The Dragonfly was on the main road leading into Matacana. At the front, a gift shop sold scented candles and beach house knickknacks.

Speaker 3 On the back patio, the cafe looked down a slope towards a natural waterfall, all surrounded by native bush.

Speaker 3 If you looked looked back up towards the cafe, you'd see a house with a log cabin feel to it with exposed wooden beams. This is where Greg and Leslie would live.

Speaker 7 It was lovely,

Speaker 7 superstar,

Speaker 3 and do you remember how much it was gonna be worth?

Speaker 17 Over

Speaker 7 a million

Speaker 7 because it had the house with it and the beautiful land and the business.

Speaker 12 Okay, ready to rock and roll.

Speaker 3 And finally from our fam, this is my dad, David.

Speaker 12 I am a Kiwi fellow who has had lots of jobs, met lots of people. I feel fairly comfortable in myself.
I have developed a fairly strong Christian faith. And I think that's served me very well.

Speaker 3 My whole life, Dad has looked the same. He's got a round, warm face, incapable of showing anger, square glasses, silver grey hair, just only on the sides.

Speaker 3 Maybe it's because I've been away from home for so long, but sometimes I hear dad like Murray, the manager from Flight of the Concords.

Speaker 25 Oh, you're like a cool-looking pair of idiots.

Speaker 3 Dad was there to help Leslie get set up when she came to New Zealand.

Speaker 12 So she needed a lawyer in order to look at properties and do some conveyancing. And I thought, poor girl, she doesn't know anybody.
She can have our lawyer. So I introduced her to our lawyer.

Speaker 3 This Auckland-based lawyer had been acting for mum and dad for 25 years. When my parents bought their house in 1982, he was there.
Dad bought a business that hired out party equipment.

Speaker 3 He worked on that. It made sense to get him on the job for Leslie too, now that she was part of the family.
With that sorted, Leslie went to New Zealand's state-owned bank.

Speaker 3 creatively titled Kiwi Bank, and she asked for a loan. The conditions included Leslie proving to Kiwi Bank that she had a trust fund.

Speaker 3 She was able to show the bank that she had 5 million US dollars in her trust fund and 5,000 coming to her each month for life.

Speaker 3 But Leslie had only just come to New Zealand and she was still on a tourist visa. Another condition of the loan was having a Kiwi Guarantor.

Speaker 3 Dad had just sold his party hire company and retired, so it seemed natural for them to get involved.

Speaker 12 There were a lot of people that were sort of saying things,

Speaker 12 you know, cautioning us:

Speaker 12 are you sure?

Speaker 12 That's a huge thing to do.

Speaker 12 And I was thinking, Leslie seems to be on top of all this. She has all this fantastic references from running restaurants over in America and in Hawaii.

Speaker 12 She talks the talk.

Speaker 12 She convinced our lawyer that it was a good thing to do.

Speaker 3 I tried to talk to this lawyer, but he didn't want to be interviewed. In a case that happened later, he said he never told mum and dad that it was a great venture.

Speaker 3 He said he doesn't give that kind of advice to his clients. But dad remembers things differently.

Speaker 12 He said to me, you don't have to do anything, David, because

Speaker 12 I would say she's a human dynamo. It's his words.
She is a human dynamo. We're thinking, every now and again, you've got to stick your neck out, you stick your neck out, and it'll pay off.

Speaker 12 So we guaranteed a loan, a 100% 100% loan, to purchase $1.5 million worth of property and business.

Speaker 11 It was an awful lot on trust here,

Speaker 14 on my part and our part.

Speaker 12 Huge amount.

Speaker 12 We did stick our necks out.

Speaker 3 Greg and Leslie moved into the house at the Dragonfly over the last few months of 2007. Greg wouldn't have much to do with the cafe.
He had his own job. Leslie was in charge.

Speaker 3 But soon, my brother Simon got roped in on the food side of the business.

Speaker 18 So I may have embellished the story, but I remember being just a few days before the cafe opened, she had a blue with the chef.

Speaker 18 And so, and then, so I was just like the chef.

Speaker 25 Isn't he he quit?

Speaker 4 Some French guy and he quit.

Speaker 3 When the cafe reopened, there was a lot of buzz around it.

Speaker 15 Things were going well.

Speaker 3 Leslie was making an impact on the chilled-out Matacana community. Here was this California power business lady shaking things up.
The local magazine did a write-up.

Speaker 1 Now under its new owner, Leslie Minoukian, who has previously owned restaurants in Lake Tahoe in the US and in Hawaii, Dragonfly is getting better by the day.

Speaker 3 Meanwhile, preparations were underway for a massive wedding. But it soon became clear that none of Leslie's Trust Fund friends from America were going to make it.

Speaker 3 She said none of them could hack the 13-hour flight to Auckland.

Speaker 3 Sakewi girls that that Leslie had known for only a matter of months started getting the call up to the bridal party, like Carla, who was back in London.

Speaker 30 I remember sitting at my desk in

Speaker 30 Hoxton and in my office, and I remember thinking, fuck, this is so weird, and sort of saying to a few of the girls in the showroom, like, so I've just asked to be a bridesmaid to this girl I barely know in New Zealand in January.

Speaker 3 One of the other bridesmaids, Alicia, hadn't known Leslie for long either.

Speaker 20 I was asked to be a bridesmaid, which which was quite surprising. I think she said something about her cousin couldn't come.
So I think I was kind of filling in.

Speaker 20 Like, she didn't really have any family here.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 20 yeah, I mean, I guess I was happy to do it because we were, you know, we were close at the time.

Speaker 3 After everything that went down, my mum stopped referring to it as the wedding. She renamed it.
In our family, it's now known as the event.

Speaker 3 The event happened on a a blue sky summer day, just after Christmas, in a small colonial era church with painted white arches and stiff wooden pews.

Speaker 30 And it just was really surreal. It was like I was kind of acting.
I was acting in a sitcom or something. Like that was my role to arrive.
And then I was going to go walk, you know, down the aisle.

Speaker 35 And

Speaker 30 it was so weird.

Speaker 3 The ceremony was pretty standard. A priest, those Bible readings from every church wedding ever.

Speaker 12 Love is patient, love is kind.

Speaker 3 After that, the party started straight away in a hall next door. I was living in London by this point and I had flown home especially for the wedding.
I was happy to be the MC.

Speaker 3 I remember making a joke like, geez, I go away for a couple of months and I come back and Greg's got a cafe, a house and a waterfall.

Speaker 3 I can't find any recordings of that night.

Speaker 3 Pretty much everyone we know in New Zealand was there.

Speaker 15 More than 150 people came.

Speaker 3 There were even wedding crashes crashes watching from the deck.

Speaker 3 But here's the weird thing: almost all the guests were from Greg's side. The only guests that weren't already friends or family of Greg's were Leslie's parents, Betty and Andrew.

Speaker 18 There were two people.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 18 No friends, no family.

Speaker 18 I think the weirdest thing, and I think the weirdest thing for everyone just about the event was the parent thing, her parents. And just how,

Speaker 18 i think there was a lot of these they were just standoffish they were just like i don't know it was it was just weird i don't remember really being able to talk to them at all like there was no really interaction they were very quiet and um you couldn't raise a lip of a smile you couldn't get a word out of them they looked

Speaker 7 um

Speaker 7 very

Speaker 7 she looked very pale and

Speaker 11 colourless

Speaker 3 the best man nat made a special effort with Leslie's parents.

Speaker 31 They were very, very hard to try and make them feel welcome. So I just remember at one point just walking away and thinking, oh, well.

Speaker 22 I remember joking with Matt about the fact that potentially, you know, are Leslie's parents even her real parents, or did she just ring in a couple of actors?

Speaker 31 They seemed a little bit stand-in, like, because they were sort of a bit there but not there.

Speaker 19 We joked that they were hired actors because

Speaker 18 I don't know, they just, oh because they definitely didn't fit the profile of like who you think her parents would be and they were kind of weird and quiet and there wasn't like a lot of love and like vibing relationship between the two like you would expect from a parent and child like I don't know like I honestly like to this day I have no idea if that's her parents no idea I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised if that's not I don't remember seeing any kind of love going on I remember Betty and Andrew.

Speaker 3 They bought me a pair of Levi jeans as a gift. That was cool.
But they didn't really talk to me either. I still don't know what they knew about what was going on or what their role was in all of this.

Speaker 18 I think they kind of knew that there was some fuckery involved. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 It wasn't long after the wedding that people started to notice some of that fuckery.

Speaker 19 I was up in Remier Shops and I bumped into Leslie and she had just come out of the public library

Speaker 19 and she was showing me this document that she had sent over over from the US because she was trying to get her driver's license in New Zealand, but she had to submit like a driving record from the US.

Speaker 19 And we were having a laugh because she had all these DUI and some like suspended licenses or something. Like a she had like a few things, and she was in the public library.

Speaker 19 No joke, she was twinking out these

Speaker 19 from her record that obviously she had asked for and been sent over from the US, twinking these out and then re-photocopying them and then touching them up and re-photocopying them until it looked legit.

Speaker 3 By the way, twink is one of those words that people laugh at us, Kiwis, about. It's white out, liquid eraser, twink.

Speaker 19 And I just remember standing on the road with her

Speaker 19 so vividly, just her showing me the document and her and I having a laugh about it. And I was thinking, wow, like

Speaker 19 that's, I think, was the first time I was like, she's like, she's got some secrets, you know, like you're hiding some stuff.

Speaker 3 And up at the Dragonfly Cafe, things were starting to go wrong.

Speaker 20 We ran out of water, so we didn't have access in the kitchen to water.

Speaker 20 And so, Greg and likewise were kind of running back and forward to the house, trying to get like bottles of water, trying to get stuff to wash the dishes.

Speaker 20 And there were just so many days like that where something was going wrong, and there was just

Speaker 20 no fixing it. I don't think Leslie was around for much of that.
I remember her coming in really strong at the beginning and then kind of not being around. And all our our staff were like,

Speaker 20 What's happening?

Speaker 26 There was one moment where it was a bit of a watershed moment for me, and that's when the milk supplier for the cafe arrived.

Speaker 16 I sort of said, G'day, how are you?

Speaker 27 And

Speaker 26 he basically said that he had never been paid for milk. It wasn't his first attempt at getting money.

Speaker 3 I could tell that he was a bit worked up about it.

Speaker 27 And,

Speaker 11 you know, I thought,

Speaker 11 this is not right.

Speaker 28 And I recall

Speaker 11 talking to Leslie about it, and she sort of, as she did, with lots of things, I'll take care of it, don't get involved, leave it to me.

Speaker 3 The dragonfly was becoming a total cluster. A bunch of people were saying they weren't getting paid.

Speaker 26 I became very frustrated that I couldn't

Speaker 26 access any information.

Speaker 26 I couldn't ever get to the bottom of anything.

Speaker 17 Leslie

Speaker 24 almost got angry at me for attempting to

Speaker 26 try and help and get more involved.

Speaker 11 The more it happened, the more angry she got at me, the more frustrated I got, and that became a real strain.

Speaker 12 I started to feel very uneasy and we needed to find out what was going on.

Speaker 12 We weren't able to find out a heck of a lot from the bank. We weren't actually owners of the business.

Speaker 12 We weren't signatories to anything. Even Greg wasn't able to find out a lot of stuff.

Speaker 3 But you were the guarantors

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 you know you guys had put money on the line but you

Speaker 3 had signed up to be the guarantors but not signed up to be able to see anything.

Speaker 8 Isn't that weird?

Speaker 3 You could say it like that, but I did follow my lawyer's advice that she knows what she's doing.

Speaker 12 She's a human dynamo.

Speaker 3 Leslie would spend most of the day locked in the house, which had become a sanctuary from the outside world and the questions people were starting to ask.

Speaker 3 A date was set for a meeting where an accountant was going to start combing through the books, but Leslie didn't show up.

Speaker 3 Greg knew he needed to do something, so he came up with a plan.

Speaker 2 If she was here, she would

Speaker 23 block us learning about what the reality was.

Speaker 3 I told her to go and see her parents and go over holiday, get out of the country. And you actually thought that would be an opportunity to look around, probably.

Speaker 2 It was the only way.

Speaker 33 Yep.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 what was, you know, if you don't mind me asking, like, what was the kind of relationship like at that point?

Speaker 16 Frosty.

Speaker 9 Just completely untrusting on both sides.

Speaker 3 At pretty short notice, Leslie booked a flight to America to visit her family, so my mum and dad would have to step up and look after the cafe.

Speaker 15 As Greg drove her to Auckland airport, things were tense.

Speaker 3 There was a lot unsaid. But Greg wanted to work this whole mess out and get back to life with Leslie when she got back from the States.

Speaker 25 So we're parked, checked in,

Speaker 23 formalities are done.

Speaker 9 It's me and Leslie now walking upstairs to the actual departure gate

Speaker 6 where

Speaker 23 there's not a lot of love going on.

Speaker 22 There was probably a nervous

Speaker 6 but cold hug.

Speaker 2 Hope to see you again.

Speaker 9 Let's try and work this out.

Speaker 27 And she

Speaker 23 right at the last moment

Speaker 15 put it right out there

Speaker 25 that Greg,

Speaker 23 the snowball is about to hit you.

Speaker 3 Next episode, The Snowball Hits.

Speaker 10 We cried.

Speaker 13 We just were destroyed.

Speaker 12 That was a fundamental wow moment for me when you present that to a bank and they accept it.

Speaker 34 adrenaline is my best friend.

Speaker 11 That's quite calculated.

Speaker 9 That's fucking out there.

Speaker 5 Somebody's been wronged using my name and rightfully believes that the person who wronged them is me.

Speaker 7 I found it. He said your janitors should have found it.

Speaker 9 How often would you go in there and look? At least once a week.

Speaker 10 It's so weird.

Speaker 17 It is weird.

Speaker 28 It is weird.

Speaker 3 Snowball is hosted and produced by me, Ollie Wards. Big ups to my brave brother Greg and my entire family for letting me tell this story.

Speaker 3 Unravel's totally stoic and awesome supervising producer is Tim Roxburgh.

Speaker 3 Our super diligent audio producer is Emma Lancaster.

Speaker 3 Assisting with audio production is Shane Anderson. who is also our whip smart fact checker.
Sound designed by the very creative, left and right panning John Jacobs and Tim Jenkins.

Speaker 3 A big thanks to my prolific and legendary mates from flight facilities for the funky ass Unravel theme song.

Speaker 3 Additional music by the talented tunesmith Bryce Halliday. You can check out some behind the scenes stuff over at my Instagram at OllieWards, O-L-L-I-E-W-A-R-D-S.

Speaker 3 Unravel is a product of ABC Audio Studios, led by the above, thoughtful and patient Kelly Riordan.

Speaker 3 And Unravel's expert and excitable executive producer is Ian Walker.

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