IT WAS STARTING to become clear that what US investigators had called one of the most notorious mail frauds in history was hardly the work of one woman. Over the years, the scam had infiltrated countries all over the world: Japan, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, and more. When one country shut it down, it quickly popped up in another.
Although the US government conducted a comprehensive investigation into the North American businesses involved in the worldwide scheme, it found that the roots of the letters went far deeper than the United States. And US investigators hadn’t come close to pinpointing (at least publicly) the true brains behind this fraud, in large part due to the lack of enforcement power in other countries. In fact, we still couldn’t find a government enforcement agency anywhere in the world that had been able to find the original source of the letters, as officials instead seemed to have zeroed in on nothing more than middlemen and fronts. Many of these governments hadn’t even realized Maria Duval was a real person, something we now knew to be true. So we decided to try to find the masterminds of this unstoppable scheme ourselves, armed with nothing more than an oversize notepad and an already unhealthy obsession with Maria.
In our fluorescent-lit crowded New York City newsroom, we continued to pore through government documents, domain registries, and trademark applications, this time looking for the businesspeople behind the letters. We soon began to piece together a massive network, mapping out the players, companies, and connections on our giant notepad. Our crude map, covered in more than a dozen names, strikethroughs, different-colored highlights, and large question marks, looked like a CIA crime board out of a television show like Homeland. We were falling deeper and deeper down this rabbit hole, much to the confusion and curiosity of our coworkers.
At first it seemed to make little sense. There were so many different people. And so many different businesses. Slowly we began to notice patterns and overlaps among the many players in this decades-long operation. A wild cast of characters began to emerge as we scrawled name after name on a piece of paper.
Early in our investigation we were convinced that an Australian man by the name of Joseph Patrick Davitt and Listano Limited, the company he directed, were key to unlocking the mystery of Maria Duval. Listano’s name appeared in the domain registrations of MariaDuval.com and MariaDuval.net, which became inactive shortly after we started our investigation. Listano was also listed as the current owner of the international trademarks for Maria’s name—the same trademarks that had allegedly once been registered by the woman herself. This meant that it was now Joseph’s firm, and not Maria, that had the ability to use the Maria Duval name for business purposes.
As we dug further, we considered whether Joseph—though never named in the US government action or convicted of any wrongdoing—might have had a role, whether intentional or not, in concealing the identity of the scam’s real ringleaders. First we came across his LinkedIn profile, which showed that he ran his own marketing firm in Australia. The firm’s low-budget website featured a smiling Joseph Davitt with short-cropped brown hair and dimples wearing a white business shirt and tie. Next to his photo was the outline of a kangaroo (in case we ever forgot he was based in Australia).
We were dying to talk to him, but our many efforts left us confused at best. We called his marketing firm. He quickly answered the phone by saying, “Joe Davitt,” but the line went silent as soon as we mentioned we were reporters looking for Maria Duval. After hanging on the line for a minute or so in silence, he hung up entirely. We called back multiple times only to get a recording in a woman’s voice. Within weeks, his firm’s website had gone down for maintenance and eventually disappeared altogether. Then his LinkedIn profile vanished.
A week later, the same woman’s voice was on the answering machine, but the greeting had been changed to say we had reached SuperGreen Lawn Seed. A quick search for SuperGreen Lawn Seed revealed a site for another one of Joseph’s businesses, this one advertising a special lawn fertilizer supposedly designed for Australia’s “harsh and contrasting climate.” We were bewildered.
Later we found what appeared to be his most recent address. All Google Street View showed us was a large, empty grass lot. Another address, from an old business filing, seemed to be his actual home, a large two-story, walled-in house with what looked like floor-to-ceiling windows, balconies, and a three-car garage. Located only seven minutes away from his other address and a few miles from the beach, the home was nestled in a small seaside town in Victoria, Australia. It looked like a beautiful place to visit, and we would have loved to try to confront him in person, adding to what would become a long list of all the exotic reporting trips we could take for this investigation if only our budget allowed. Instead, we remained on the fifth floor of our New York high-rise emailing and calling him over the following months to no avail.
• • •
At a dead end, we gathered everything we could about the company that had led us to Joseph in the first place, Listano Limited. And that’s when something peculiar emerged.
Listano’s address was listed at 37 Greenhill Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. We both knew of Stratford-upon-Avon as a tourist destination famous for being Shakespeare’s birthplace. Why, though, would an Australian business have a physical location in this quaint British town on an entirely different continent? Again we turned to Google Street View, which zeroed in on a nondescript building above a fabric store across the street from a kebab shop. The street looked like a mix of old and new, containing a noodle shop and cell phone store housed in traditional Tudor-style and classic redbrick buildings. We zoomed from every angle we could, searching for a sign.
No Listano in sight.
We started to figure out that something suspicious might be going on when the UK company registry database showed that more than one hundred businesses were registered to that very same address. As we scrolled through the names of the different companies, we saw some very familiar people listed as directors. Andrea Egger, the attorney from Maria’s trademark applications, was named on filings for an investment company listed at 37 Greenhill Street. Meanwhile, Martin Dettling, the man who’d opened the Sparks mailboxes, was listed as a former director of a “helisports and megayacht” company at the same address.
Why were so many businesses listed at this same odd address even when there didn’t appear to be a single company in sight? And why were so many of them somehow connected to Maria Duval? Someone had to be behind it. But who?
That’s when we found a curious accountant named Barney McGettigan. His accounting firm was one of the companies listed at the address, so we decided to try giving him a call. A cheerful British man answered the phone and confirmed that his office was the only business physically located at 37 Greenhill Street. When we explained that we were looking for a company called Listano Limited because of its ownership of Maria Duval’s websites and trademarks his tone quickly shifted.
We couldn’t record the call, but here’s how we remembered it from our notes.
US: Do you work with Listano Limited?
BARNEY: Um, I’m not sure. Actually, I would have to look at our records to see what our association with them is.
US: Does this mean they aren’t physically located there?
BARNEY: That’s correct. We offer a service to some of our clients to allow them to use our office as a registered office.
US: We’ve seen a number of companies linked to the psychic Maria Duval that are registered at your address. Can we email you a list so that you can look them up in your records?
BARNEY: I’d rather not give you my email . . .
After this, Barney ended the call with an enthusiastic “Righty-ho!” and quickly hung up the phone.
Confused, we did some research and learned that Barney must be a registered agent, something that is surprisingly common in the business world. These agents help set up businesses and provide them with a physical address to use on public government filings. While these kinds of services are used by legitimate companies, they are also a perfect tool for criminals trying to remain in the shadows. Many fraudsters, we discovered, use registered agents to create so-called shell companies, fake businesses that have no real operations and are simply used to obscure the true nature of their activities.
But back to our call. Barney told us he would look into Listano and let us know what he found. We never did hear from him again.
It was still unclear whether or not Barney was directly linked to Maria or knew anything about her. He did help us solve one mystery, though. We finally knew who’d been helping to churn out all the apparent shell companies at 37 Greenhill Street.
• • •
It seemed that every person who was associated with the Maria Duval letters took us to a dozen more leads. So one day, we decided to hole up in a little conference room with our laptops and a single phone to begin the task of calling people in countries all over the world, in the hopes that someone would point us in the right direction.
Each time we got ready to dial a new number, we practiced our spiel, prepared our questions, and held our breath. Sadly, almost every other phone call was met with nothing more than the dreaded beep of a disconnected phone line. When the phone did actually ring and someone answered, we were often hung up on.
One of the first people we tried was a Danish representative for Maria, who was named in an online news article. According to the article, this man claimed that responses to the mailings from around the world were forwarded to Maria in France and that he had helped arrange the interview between Maria and the journalist who wrote this article.
An elderly-sounding man with a thick accent answered the phone. We told him we were looking for information about Maria Duval, and he quickly said he didn’t know “the lady.” But as we kept asking questions about her, he conceded that he had met her.
“No no no no,” he said, when we asked if he represented Maria. “Nothing to do with that woman. Not at all. I don’t want to talk about that. It is so many years ago. I am out of that business. Thank you very much, bye.” We tried calling him back, but he didn’t answer his phone again.
The angriest person we reached—perhaps in part because we woke him up in the middle of the night—was a man named Gerard du Passage. Jan Vanlangendonck, the Belgian journalist who had interviewed Maria in Paris, told us Gerard was his “first and important contact person” when he investigated the Maria Duval letters a number of years earlier. We first called a US number listed as Gerard’s, but we instead reached a woman who said she was his ex-wife. She told us that Gerard had once lived in New York but that he now lived in Thailand with a new wife. She said that she and Gerard had been married for more than forty years, and that she didn’t really know what he did for work. “He works with individuals, mainly in Europe,” she said. She was about to give us his cell phone number when she stopped herself, saying she had better check with Gerard first. She told us to call her back in a couple of days to get the number, but she never answered her phone again.
Next we tried the number where Jan, the Belgian journalist, had reached Gerard, this one listed in the United Kingdom. But it turned out he was thousands of miles from England. We woke Gerard up at four a.m. in Thailand. Needless to say, he was not excited about talking with us. “I’m not going to answer any questions. I have no idea who you are, and I’m not going to talk about this on the telephone,” he said, before hanging up. We followed up with an email and more calls, but he still didn’t seem to want to talk to us.
By this point, as some of our calls reached people who spoke languages we did not, we became increasingly frustrated by our inability to even figure out if we were speaking to the right person. Between the language barriers, the layers of secrecy, and the sheer number of people involved, there seemed to be a new obstacle around every corner. We were starting to worry that we would never figure out who had created this monster scam.