Sat 8-4-18 10 Weekend Reads - The Big Picture
VICE Jul 18 2018, 10:01am
The Insane Saga of the Fake Saudi Prince Who Scammed
Miami's Rich and Famous
A career con-artist, Anthony Gignac got busted over and over
again, but kept finding new prey in America's capital city of fraud.
By Francisco Alvarado
Anthony
Gignac spent much of his adult life pretending to be a Saudi prince, worming
his way into free stays at ritzy hotels, pilfering luxury goods from
high-fashion department stores, and even suckering a major university into
wiring him $16,000. Yet, on March 4, 2014, the then-43-year-old Colombian
native told federal Judge George Caram Steeh that his days impersonating Khalid
bin Al-Saud were behind him.
“I have changed,” Gignac told the Detroit
courtroom, according to a hearing transcript. “I was not a threat to the
community, your Honor.... I have history, yes. I have made a lot of horrible
mistakes. The worst mistake that I've ever made was going to prison and not
being there for my mother when she died. I promised my mother that I would
never, ever come back to prison for a new crime.”
A chubby
man with a bowl cut and dark, expressive eyes, Gignac had been released from
prison in 2012 after pleading
guilty half-a-decade earlier to impersonating a foreign
diplomat and bank fraud. Now he was on the hook for violating his probation by
taking a mid-February trip to the Florida Keys without notifying his
probation officer.
Gignac
insisted he traveled to the Keys to alleviate his depression and visit
his brother, his only living relative. However, federal prosecutor Saima Mohsin
told Steeh that Gignac was up to his old tricks again, scouting for fresh
victims to rip off.
“He's
down there meeting with people, representing himself to be someone that he is
not, engaging in meetings all with the goal of negotiating some sort of
fraudulent agreement to purchase real estate costing hundreds of millions of
dollars,” Moshin said, later adding, “He needs to be incarcerated. From our
point of view, less from a punishment standpoint, but really to prevent him
from engaging in additional fraud and victimizing more people.”
Turns
out, the prospect of screwing people over in sunny South Florida was too
enticing for Gignac to resist—even after spending another 12
months in federal prison for the probation violation.
Four
years later, the career con-artist is currently awaiting sentencing in Miami
after pleading guilty to impersonating a foreign government official, identity
theft and fraud, as the Washington Post reported.
This time, Gignac was popped for hoodwinking the owners of a Miami Beach hotel
into lavishing him with expensive material goods and benefits, as well as
defrauding almost $8 million from 26 victims around the globe, according to a
federal criminal complaint and indictment. Among many other trappings of an
absurd lifestyle, Gignac drove a Ferrari with fake diplomatic plates and had
the nameplate "Sultan" on his island home's door.
For
big-league scammers like Gignac, South Florida has long served as an ideal base
of operations. Others who have pulled off spectacular con jobs down here
include Jimmy
Sabatino, a Staten Island swindler whose most recent caper sent
him to a supermax prison lockup. Another brazen con artist to call Miami
home: Haider
Zafar, who falsely portrayed himself as the member of a wealthy
and influential Pakistani family that owned hotels, textile plants and oil
businesses to investors in the Magic City. Among his victims were then-Miami
Heat playersMike Miller, James Jones and Rashad Lewis, who were
ripped off for a combined $7.5 million.
For
Gignac, Sabatino, Zafar, and other criminals like them, South Florida is the
place where you can fake your way past the velvet ropes into the upper echelons
of business and high society by showing off flashes of luxurious living.
“Miami
doesn’t have the due-diligence culture like Wall Street and New York,” said
Roben Farzad, author of Hotel
Scarface, a tome about the decadence and characters of
The Mutiny Hotel in Miami during the Cocaine Cowboys era. “If you are a
developer and someone is offering you cash with no mortgage or no
documentation involved, you are very happy to take that cash. Miami is the
hot-money capital of the world.”
The
laissez-faire environment makes South Florida especially fertile territory to
prey on local impresarios and dignitaries who, in turn, make a living off
suckers who speculate on real estate.
“If you
are a huckster or a shyster, this is a great place to pull off the jiujitsu of
conning people who think they can con dumb foreigners into coughing up their
money,” Farzad explained. “It is kind of beautiful in its symmetry.”
In
Gignac's case, he scored free gifts from
the Miami Beach hotel owners
by initially convincing them that he was Saudi royalty and wanted to invest
$440 million to become part-owner of their property. According to the Miami
Herald, the victims included members of the Soffer family,
who own the world-famous Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel. The paper reported
his marks realized Gignac probably wasn't legit when at least one witnessed the
fake sultan eat bacon.
The
Sunshine state’s reputation for making scoundrels of all stripes feel at home
isn’t just the stuff of a few high-profile cases, either. In 2016 and 2017,
Florida essentially won the crown for scam capital of America: Both years, the
state was ranked
first and second, respectively, for fraud and identity theft
complaints by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). On average, Florida generated
993 fraud complaints per 100,000 residents, the
report stated.
Florida,
and the Keys specifically, allows anyone to blend in without arousing suspicion
because locals don’t really see newcomers with a skeptical eye, according
to Annette
Robertson, an underwater photographer based in Key West who said
she experienced Gignac’s con job firsthand. “You can come to the Keys and no
one looks at you twice if you don’t fit in the norm,” she told me. “There is no
norm here. I call it the Island of Misfits.”
Robertson
was among the Keys businesspeople Gignac met back in 2014, according to his own
testimony from the probation-violation hearing that year. In an interview, she
recalling meeting Gignac in Detroit with her boyfriend, marine-life
artist Wyland. “He said
he was a sultan and gave us the whole nine yards,” Robertson recalled. “He was
wearing a nine-karat diamond ring and told us that he wanted to build resorts
with us.”
For
nearly two months, Robertson and Wyland spent time with Gignac, viewing three
properties he claimed he was interested in buying, including the exclusive
Cheeca Lodge and Spa in Islamorada. “He was incredible as a con artist,”
Robertson said. “The general manager for the Cheeca Lodge had worked in Palm
Springs, California, and had known certain sheiks. When the GM brought up their
names, [Gignac] would know everything about them. He had done his research.”
Still,
Robertson did notice some oddities along the way. For instance, she recalled
bringing a painting Wyland had made to a house Gignac claimed was owned by his
brother. Robertson estimated the Wyland painting would probably fetch $30,000
in an art gallery, yet the work's new home wasn’t quite right. “There was no
original art in that house, just a bunch of crap,” she said. “And even though
he claimed to be a sheik, he would give me hugs and shake Wyland’s hand. A
sheik would never do that. To touch you is beneath them. He would just explain
it away and say, 'I don’t get caught up with all that.'"
But Robertson
and Wyland didn't find out about Gignac’s true identity—and his criminal
past—until an associate googled his adopted name. The last she heard, in 2014,
Gignac had been picked up by federal agents in the Keys. She was unaware of his
more recent scheme to work over Miami Beach hotel owners.
“That
does not surprise me,” she said.
Follow
Francisco Alvarado on Twitter.
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