How a con artist posing as an Irish heiress scammed me out of thousands – Independent.ie

“It was the summer of 2013,” he recalls, setting the scene. “I was living in a nice apartment building in downtown LA and I’d just finished up work on Shark Tank [the American version of Dragon’s Den].

“We were sharing a big pool with another apartment building. The pool was closed because there was a dispute with the other building about who would pay for repairs. The residents in my building were very angry and I kind of spearheaded a meeting about banding together and getting the pool back.”

At that meeting there was a new face: a woman with an unplaceable accent who introduced herself as Marianne Smyth. She was extremely charming and warm.

As the night wore on she became the star of the evening and she said she had a boyfriend who was a partner in a law firm who could help the residents of the building to get back the use of their pool.

“Everyone was dazzled by her, she was going to be our saviour,” Johnathan recalls. “It was like Eva Peron on her balcony, addressing the crowd.”

Mair, as she called herself, said that she had grown up between Ireland and the US, which accounted for her strange mixture of a brogue and an American drawl.

“Eventually she said she came from a wealthy Irish family with IRA lineage and that her grandmother would teach her how to throw Molotov cocktails at British soldiers,” Johnathan remembers. “She had this framed Irish Constitution in her home and she said her great-uncle had signed it. It was on parchment and had this squiggly writing. I’m sure a quick Google would have verified it was fake [there were no signatories to the 1937 Constitution].

“But you have to understand this was a very decent building with professionals living in it. She seemed to fit into that. There was no reason at that point to be suspicious at all.”

The pair became friends. She claimed to be pals with the actors Ashley Judd and Jennifer Aniston and showed Walton a closet with an Imelda Marcos-sized collection of designer shoes. She told him she stood to inherit $5mfrom her family in Ireland, her share of a family estate worth $25m.

“She would show me emails from her cousins Tristan and Fintan and another name I couldn’t pronounce – Deer Mood.” Diarmuid? “Yeah that’s it, I’d never heard it in my life. Never in a million years did I think she’d invented all these personas online and that she was emailing herself. It was like a soap opera plot.”

As time went by they became closer and Johnathan shared a lot of his life story with her. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica where his family lived before moving to the States, where he went to school. “When I told her that part of my family had disowned me from being gay, we had a bond. I’ll be the first to tell you I loved her, as much as a gay man could love a woman. I double dated with her and her boyfriend.”

Fourteen months after they first became friends, she began asking him for money. By that point Mair was working for a high-end travel agency, Pacific Island Travel, work she only undertook, she told him, because the owners were family friends and she loved the Pacific Islands, having holidayed there as a child.

“She had shown me a piece of correspondence from her barrister saying that if any beneficiary of the will was convicted of a felony, it would invalidate their inheritance,” he explains. “That got me thinking. I told her, ‘Your cousin is friends with the owner of the company you work for’ – this was what she’d told me – and I said, ‘you’d better be careful, they don’t set you up.’ She said, ‘you’re crazy, Johnathan, they’re bad but they’re not that bad.’”

Ten days later, while Walton was in the midst of filming 10 Things You Don’t Know About with Henry Rollins, he got a call from Mair. “She was upset,” he recalls. “She said, ‘Johnathan you were right. They’ve set me up.’ She was in jail at that point and they set the bail at $75,000. I found a bail bondsman for her who would get her out of prison for $4,200.

She paid me back the next day, or so I thought. In reality the married politician she was dating sent me the cash. She was scamming him too.”

Mair was alleged to have stolen $200,000 from Pacific Island Travel. “I warned her that her family would set her up so when they did I felt justified, like, oh I saw that coming,” he explains.

“In every con they let you wet your beak first. They let you see a bit of your money back so you feel confident to continue. I’ve been helping women my whole life. I’m gay, but a damsel in distress, I’m there.”

For nearly a year they spoke almost daily about her pending travel agency case. He found her doubled over crying on one of these days. She told him that her family had paid off the District Attorney, who had in turn frozen her bank accounts.

“I loaned her over $20,000 in cash over a period of time. I wasn’t worried because she had paid me back before. She told me that the DA would dismiss the case if I paid $50,000. At that point I did up a promissory note but I later found out that they are useless.

“By then I was in the hole for $75,000. Anyway it looked like the DA was going to dismiss the charges and that she would get her bank accounts unfrozen and inheritance and everything would be fine.”

The judge in Mair’s travel-agency case gave her a 30-day jail sentence, to take place in February 2017 for “money laundering” – using Walton’s credit cards to pay the plea agreement, she claimed.

Johnathan continued to be taken in by her tall tales, but the scales fell from his eyes when he logged into the prison website to schedule a visit to her. “It told me what she was in there for: felony grand theft. She had told me it was just a slap on the wrist. I was so shocked.

“I went down to the courthouse and read the documents on the case and I realised that she lied to me about everything; that she had pleaded guilty to stealing the $200,000, that she had paid the money she scammed from me to the travel agency in restitution and it was that which enabled her to only serve 30 days in jail.”

When Mair got out of jail Johnathan confronted her, but she maintained her denials. “My last text to her was ‘I’ll see you in criminal court’,” he recalls. He went to the police to report her but it was an “uphill battle”.

“They [the police] said to me, ‘you gave her the money, that’s not a crime’ and I said, ‘she lied to get the money, that has to be a crime’. In fact, lying to get money is a crime. I started my own investigation.”

Through his research Johnathan found out more about Mair’s life. She grew up in Bangor, Maine, a small town in the north-east corner of the US. As a teenager she scammed her friends and neighbours and told them that she had cancer, a ruse that was only belatedly uncovered. In adulthood she went to Florida and joined the military.

“She claimed she had Irish lineage from an early age,” Johnathan explains. She had 23 different aliases and would use a variety of different scams – even sometimes pretending to be Jennifer Aniston and other celebrities to try and scam production companies to send her money. “At one point she began an online relationship with a postal worker from Northern Ireland.

“She went on vacation [to the North] with her daughter and she decided to stay. She married the man and worked a lot of odd jobs. She eventually found work at a mortgage company and disappeared with the down payment from six people’s homes and scammed other people there with investment opportunities. She lived there for nine years.”

Chelsea Welch, Mair’s daughter, would later say in court of her mother “I think that she’s a very troubled person who has used her intelligence malevolently and the things that she has been accused of I’m absolutely disgusted by.”

Johnathan also found out from his landlord that Smyth was more than $12,000 behind on rent payments and had used the excuse that she had cancer and her disability insurance hadn’t come through.

He hired a private investigator and found out she had been charged with fraud and forging cheques in Tennessee. He unearthed old images which showed that she had changed her hair many times: from blonde to red to dark. He also set up a blog, in which he detailed the ordeal he had gone through. This helped to put him in touch with other victims.

“Most people are worried about what people will think, but as an openly gay person I had already disregarded what people would think.”

He also had little to lose by that point. The thousands of dollars he had lost to Mair had pushed him toward bankruptcy. When the extent of his losses dawned on him he collapsed into “a whimpering mess”.

“It was devastating for my husband and me. We had planned to buy a house and that’s now on hold. But in the end it was a blessing. So many people told me that I gave them the strength to speak out.”

Eventually the prosecutor in LA took up Johnathan’s case. In 2018, the police finally arrested Smyth. She initially attempted to file a restraining order against Walton – which would have prevented him from being able to testify during the trial – but the judge refused to grant the order.

“There were 25 court dates, I stared her down, I gave her the evil eye. Looking back I drew strength from the passion and fortitude I gathered from other people. Even though they didn’t have the balls to do it for themselves they latched onto me and vicariously kept up with proceedings through me.”

The jury eventually convicted Smyth of theft by inducement and she was sentenced to five years in prison, which was reduced due to overcrowding and the constraints of the pandemic. Smyth’s alleged crimes in Northern Ireland remain under investigation and Walton has been in contact with authorities there.

Meanwhile she has remained something of an obsession for him. He’s written about the case for the Huffington Post and been interviewed for the Hollywood Reporter about it. He also has a forthcoming iHeart podcast series which will discuss the case.

And he still keeps tabs on his sometime friend. He recently saw Mair out and about in LA. “She was very thin, she’s never looked better,” he laughs. “Her hair was long in a ponytail. I don’t want to say I was stalking her but I was intentionally in her vicinity.”

Did he ever, for a moment, feel a little sorry for her? “I don’t feel sorry for her because I feel she’s a sociopath,” he replies. “They are born without a soul. They don’t care about you or anyone but themselves.”

‘Queen of the Con’ podcast will be released on iHeart radio on September 30

Summer of scam: Three of America’s most glamorous cons

Anna Delvey
The strange tale of a woman dubbed “the fake Russian heiress” is already getting the Hollywood treatment – Netflix have adapted the story, which will be available next year.

It tells the story Anna Sorokin, a Russian-born German who moved to New York in 2013 and set herself up with a fake identity as Anna Delvey, supposedly a mega-rich German heiress. Anna was an Instagram queen – she had more than 40,000 social media followers – and lived in the suite of a five-star hotel in Manhattan.

She conned a number of people, including ex Vanity Fair picture researcher Rachel DeLoache Williams who told the Sunday Independent that she “cried on the street” after realising she would not be repaid for a luxury trip to a Moroccan souk. Sorokin was convicted of multiple counts of larceny in the second degree, in 2019, and turned Manhattan’s criminal court into a catwalk with numerous designer looks.

Hargobind Tahilramani
Tahliramani, a 41-year-old Indonesian man, who lived in the UK, went by many aliases, but, for at least seven years, he allegedly scammed hundreds of Hollywood hopefuls by posing as powerful women like Rupert Murdoch’s wife, Wendi Deng.

In November last year Tahliramani, a wannabe food influencer, was indicted by the US on eight charges including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The FBI has stated that he has been arrested in the UK “based on a request for his provisional arrest submitted by the United States with a view towards his extradition.”

Yvonne Bannigan
Dublin-born Yvonne Bannigan moved to New York in 2013 and was an intern at Elle before becoming an assistant to Grace Coddington, US Vogue’s formidable creative director at large.

The two women got on well – Bannigan once appeared in a piece in Teen Vogue, which praised Coddington as a boss – but in 2019 Bannigan was sentenced to two years probation for stealing more than $50,000 from Coddington after the Dublin woman pleaded guilty to one count of fourth degree larceny.