WE WERE MOST intrigued by what our whistleblower said about Jacques, the Frenchman who he claimed had turned Maria into the international sensation she was today. We already knew Jacques had long been associated with the Maria Duval letters, and, more important, he appeared to have a direct line to Maria herself, with Jan Vanlangendonck, the journalist from Belgium, telling us that Jacques called himself Maria’s “secretary” and had arranged the 2007 interview in the Paris hotel.
From what the former employee, and later a number of other people who had worked with him over the years, told us, Jacques was a copywriter. It was his job to create the content that would entice people to buy “products.” But instead of writing letters selling vacuum cleaners or furniture, Jacques made his money from psychic mailings. “Jacques Mailland is a famous direct marketing copywriter in the world of psychics,” another anonymous source told us much later in our hunt. This man, who claimed to have been involved with the Maria Duval business in France, remembered Jacques living in New York in the mid-1990s, where he translated piles of the Maria letters. He told us how Jacques and a colleague would recruit well-known psychics for these kinds of scams, convincing them to sign something called a “notoriety exploitation contract” so that their name and photos could be used on letters.
We also discovered an online bio saying Jacques was once a psychotherapist, and we found that he’d written a book in 1998 titled Connais-toi toi-même, which roughly translates to “Know thyself.”
Most of the information that showed up online about Jacques was from a long time ago. We looked for more recent information about him on social media and found a profile picture of a lanky man with deep-set eyes, graying hair, and yellow teeth wearing a white tank top and grinning widely. His Facebook profile showed us all the different groups or pages he had liked, and these included a Brazilian restaurant, the beach town of São Miguel do Gostoso, a series of short films about a Normandy farmhouse in the year 2050, a flying car company in the Netherlands, and a French website dedicated to high-end watches. Other photos from his profile showed him with his grandchildren and kitesurfing and relaxing in Brazil, leaving us to wonder if this was even the right man.
With what felt like glorified stalking, a crucial part of our day-to-day job as reporters, we were able to find a few clues that this lanky man was indeed the Jacques we were looking for and that he might still be involved in Maria’s operations. His Google+ profile, for example, showed a connection to a name we recognized: Maria’s psychic sidekick Patrick Guerin. Was Patrick, the Parisian psychic, Jacques’s latest success story?
An online list of attendees of a 2013 marketing conference held in the resort town of Marbella, Spain, included Jacques Mailland as a representative of a Swiss firm that we’d seen on a number of recent copyright registrations for Maria Duval ads in Russia and Ukraine. This wasn’t your average trade conference. Held in ritzy destinations around the world, it was an annual event at which people and businesses associated with a number of mailing schemes all convened.
Jacques’s name had also been on the radar of other journalists. When a Dutch reporter named Willem Bosma got in touch with us, he shared a wealth of information from his own investigation back in 2007. He spoke with us over the phone at length after work one evening from his desk at the newspaper where he worked in the Netherlands. We frantically tried to take notes and interpret what he was saying through his thick accent as he spoke excitedly about all of his own frustrations and discoveries that were rushing back to him. He was told at the time that Jacques worked closely with Maria.
One of the people who told Willem about Jacques was the angry man whom we’d woken up by calling him in Thailand, Gerard du Passage. “I called him up in London and he said don’t call me, call Jacques Mailland,” Willem said, recounting that Gerard had told him that Jacques handled any press interest. “I asked, ‘What do you want with this business?’ And du Passage said churches do that too. [He said that] although churches want to make money, they bring a lot of good things to people like we do.” Gerard also warned Willem that landing an interview with Maria would be “nearly impossible.” “She has been too often disappointed,” he told Willem.
Willem heard about Jacques again, from a different businessman involved with the scheme. “If you want to contact Maria Duval, please ask Jacques Mailland,” the man told Willem at the time. “He is her personal secretary. She loves giving interviews, as she likes publicity.”
For Willem, actually getting to Jacques wasn’t as easy as Gerard and the businessman made it sound. Willem was given his name and contact information only after calling all the companies connected to the scheme in the Netherlands and insisting that he needed to talk to someone in charge. When he did finally reach Jacques by phone, he said that Jacques acknowledged his involvement with the Maria Duval operations, referring to himself as Maria’s personal secretary and website manager. And, from Willem’s recollection, the Frenchman didn’t seem to think he was doing anything wrong:
“He said, ‘Who could be against it? That we put people in the position to feel better than they did. Even medics recognized the placebo effect exists and can have a healing role.’ ”
There were even more telling quotes in the years-old notes from Willem’s call with Jacques, which he was nice enough to share with us. “In a way it is our purpose to make money, but life improvement is a higher purpose. . . . You have true people and you have crooks,” Jacques had said to him. “When you don’t use an ethical standard, your business doesn’t last. When you cheat people, that is wrong. We have everyone refunded, if they aren’t satisfied with our products.”
All these years later, Willem was still disturbed by how these men were able to justify such a heartless scheme so easily—and get away with it. “It’s a world that I’ve never come across in my work,” he told us.
We too tried to speak with Jacques. Over and over again. Desperate to track him down, we called every phone number we could find, at one point speaking with an angry woman who yelled at us in French, and almost every other time hearing the familiar sound of a disconnected line. We emailed a number of possible addresses with no luck. We obsessively monitored his Facebook page, looking for any new posts. And we even contacted women who appeared to be his daughters.
We were left with nothing but silence. Until this.
From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2015 12:22 PM
To: Ellis, Blake
Subject: Re: Looking for Jacques Mailland
It was a Monday in early December, almost two months into our hunt, and we were just planning to grab lunch when this message appeared in our inbox.
It came from a Brazilian kitesurfing school we’d contacted as a last resort after seeing photos of Jacques on its Facebook page. We’d never expected to hear back.
Sitting next to each other at our newsroom desks, we stared at our computer screens in disbelief. Jacques Mailland, the man we were so desperate to speak with, was dead? And he’d died just months before we started trying to reach him?
News of his death was quickly corroborated by one of his business colleagues who was unaffiliated with the Brazilian kitesurfing school. He was someone whom we’d emailed during our earlier stalking phase, before learning of his death. “Sadly Mr. Mailland died in a motorbike accident in May this year,” he wrote. This business associate later told us the accident occurred outside Paris, and that the funeral took place on May 7, 2015. For weeks we tried to find an accident report or other official record of his death but were unsuccessful.
There were so many questions we wanted to ask Jacques, like how such a seemingly fun-loving family man could be involved in such a heartless scheme.
Whether he was dead or alive, we would never know for sure.