Hollywood Con Queen | 10. Curtain Call
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Campsite Media. Hello? What is this? What do you want me to say? Oh, it's just a chameleon. Chameleon. Okay. You're listening to Chameleon, a production of Campsite Media. So you've been along on this ride with me and Vanessa for a couple months now, following our steps. And while we can't be certain of this, it seems Gobind Tahil Rahmani has been following along too.

At first, he had a bunch of social media accounts. But over the past few weeks, he's been closing them down as quickly as we can uncover them. The last one we found was called, I kid you not, I spin the tails. And the day we found it, it went dead. And yet, the con queen still wasn't quitting. As we're making this episode, literally as we were tweaking our scripts and gathering tape and passing a Google Doc back and forth, we heard that he's still at it.

Except he's not doing his usual thing where he pretends to be some powerful woman. Maybe because he's figured out that everyone has the con queen pegged as a woman, he's doing something else. This exact second as we're working, he's posing as the power director Doug Liman, a serious force in Hollywood. Liman has directed all kinds of huge movies, like Born Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

But this is the fake Doug calling an actor about a role. I'm filming a film called Lockdown here in the UK. I don't know that one. Oh, no, we're just filming with Anne Hathaway and Ben Kingsley and Mindy Kaling. So it's a bit busy here. So anyways, yeah, we don't get into readings until late November.

This is a real movie, by the way. The actual Doug Liman was shooting in London this fall with Anne Hathaway. But that's not what fake Doug was calling about. He claimed to be casting his next project, a Tom Cruise movie. And this is quite a project. A Hollywood star is getting set to defy gravity. Actor Tom Cruise, Elon Musk's space axe, and NASA have teamed up to shoot a movie in outer space.

So the con queen is pretending he's casting actors for a movie that is literally shooting in outer space. What happens when they show up at the launch pad and there's no flight to space that day? We push back on the SpaceX project, but it's good to hear that you're working out.

This fake Doug Liman the con queen is doing here, it's so much more normal sounding than his regular impersonations. For comparison, here's the real Doug talking about a real movie. The particular power that the aliens have and the reason why the aliens are beating us is that they have the ability to control time. And the impersonator. Did you get a chance to speak to my casting director? I'll have her reach out to you tomorrow and then we can go from there.

Pretty close. But the impersonation isn't working. And you know why? Because this actor's caught on. That's why we have the recording. We were playing along with him, trying to catfish our catfisher. Great. Sounds good, Doug. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, David. Unfortunately, the con queen got cold feet here. He's pretty well attuned to signals and I guess intuited that something wasn't quite right. The casting director never called.

But we talked to five other actors who also talked to the fake Doug. One of them was even asked to wire money via Western Union for what fake Doug's casting director claimed would be stuntman lessons on Zoom. Another of these actors had a very interesting recording. If you have kids nearby, you might want to switch over to headphones. Because when this actor told the fake Doug Lyman he wanted a video call to confirm his identity, it did not go over well.

You want me to verify who I am? I'm going to fuck you over. If I have to fuck your family, I'll do it. What did you say? The UK has no productions? Read up on Mission Impossible 7 right now. Where is it being produced? You can call the FBI, the police. I'll find you over just because you're fucking racist. And if you have a career again, my name isn't Doug Liman. Wow. This is the first time in a year of following the con queen that we've heard him unhinged. He's so angry that he's not even making sense.

The fake Doug is using some convoluted logic to say that an actor doubting he was filming in the UK is somehow racist. I mean, why would Doug Liman, an American, care what anyone said about England? The next time you say something like that, my attorneys will be on call with you. If your dick is still there in a couple of days, I won't kill you, but I want you mutilated. Is this a man who knows his web of lies is collapsing all around him? I mean, this was happening right as our show bore down on the con queen's identity.

And as the FBI was surely on his trail... It was all starting to fall apart for him. Give me a couple of days. I promise upon my mom and dad, if something doesn't happen to your cock, my name's not Doug Liman. From Campside Media, this is Chameleon. The story of the Hollywood con queen. I'm Josh Dean. Chapter 10, Curtain Call.

It's a pretty bizarre feeling to be tracking the mastermind of a long-running international scam who just continues to work that same plan with minor variations, even as it seems like he's about to get caught. Nicole and the FBI were surely closing in. It seemed like they'd just run into problems getting their case wrapped up because of COVID and international jurisdiction issues.

The thing is, as you heard at the top of this episode, the con queen has not stopped grinding. He continues to rack up victims of his various psychological warfare routines and was still going with this Doug Liman impersonation campaign. Luckily, once we finally had a real name to work with, it was like cracking open a vault. We have so much to share, I almost don't know where to start.

And while our primary suspect, the guy you heard about last week, didn't want to sit for an interview, you will hear from him anyway. Because we found our friend Gobind waxing poetic in a long interview all about, well, himself. We also dug up old records, spoke to officials at the prison where he served time, even talked to his old college debate team buddies. In the meantime, Hargobind Tehill Romani wasn't even trying to lay low.

He was out there playing yet another role, the role that Saifa told us about, being the chic food blogger and influencer dude in London. Vanessa took a look at his social media accounts. So Gobind seems to spend a lot of time hanging out in these restaurants with chefs he clearly idolizes. He takes videos of himself talking to them.

Like, this is a chef from a seafood restaurant who is kind of holding court, and Gobind is listening. So we went to Cornwall to see the fishmonger. It was amazing, connie's crab. So this is the inspiration behind the restaurant. In these videos, like most influencers, Gobind's tone is kind of superficial and chatty, very, I'm in the know. This is a video that he made. Beneath the Malaysian consulate is this hidden gem. Where?

Only Malaysians can eat. He has thoughts on all kinds of food on his blogs, and to be honest, he sounds pretty sophisticated. Oh my god.

Everything from the kofta to the sesame cookies even. The texture is so organic and nice. He even made a trailer for a show he claimed he was making on Netflix. It's all about chefs. Hey guys, as you can see, fresh, new, hip, Bahrainian restaurant in London. When I came in yesterday for the first time ever, I fell in love. Oh my god. This is my home away from home every day now. Thank you. It's fantastic.

This persona, sort of inane, is one that Gobind plays very well. But as we dug deeper into his social media, we found something even more insightful about who he is than what he typically shares. I don't mean that the words are so insightful, but rather the implication of what he's saying. We found a video chat of Gobind talking about himself, revealing, it seems, who he really is, or at least who he wants this particular audience to think he is.

Gobind's talking to an upper-class Indonesian lifestyle influencer. She calls herself a gastroconnoisseur. Her name is Hasina Nurensparata. This evening, we have a very, very special guest. Someone from our very own Jakarta who is a survivor and finding peace with himself. Hey, how's it going?

Hey, hi there. I'm used to calling you Gobin because I've known you from childhood. You know, our parents used to dine and wine together, work together in fact. Yes, exactly. Yes, they do. Okay, so there's a lot of chit chat at first. First, I'm going to have my cup of coffee because I'm all about my flat white with oat milk. So cheers to that. He really does sound like those women whose voices we heard throughout this podcast. True. I mean, if you close your eyes, you can totally hear it. But he's not acting bossy here.

A lot of this interview is just awkward chatting, particularly about Gobind's fitness regimen. He keeps talking about CrossFit, which I think is a membership requirement of CrossFit, and about how he's very careful with his body. Also, he says he cooks a lot. So I read books. I love The Lord of the Rings. I read Harry Potter. And I see, what are they eating like in the Arabian Nights? They're cooking a Persian feast.

I envision it, I smell it, and then I cook. But after the small talk, Gobind starts to go deeper. He introduces the central trauma in his life, the thing, he claims, that's defined his life. Maybe I enjoyed watching films that other boys wouldn't watch. Maybe I didn't like soccer so much, and I appreciated literature. And people would laugh at me and call me bungee and faggot and all that.

Banshee is a slur for guys who act feminine and Indonesian. Gobind explains that he wanted to get away from all that. My mom was born in Hong Kong, and she inherited a British passport. So I came to London and I worked with a refugee or immigration lawyer. And now I'm a citizen, but most importantly, I'm with people that are like-minded. I believe that believing in yourself is first.

But here's the thing. We heard very different stories about Gobind and his parents.

More on that after the break.

We'll be right back.

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Hi, I'm Dan Jones, and This Is History: A Dynasty to Die For is back for a brand new season. This time, we meet Edward II, a larger-than-life character who starts out as the party boy prince and ends up... well, I don't want to give too much away. He's got one thing on his mind: not war, not ambition, but love. And it's a love that will get him in burning hot trouble with his barons, his family, and his queen.

The king's affection for his favourite knight kicks off a wild rollercoaster reign full of love and hate, war and grief, famine and just about all the horsemen of the apocalypse. Along the way we'll meet tiger mums, Scottish legends, murderous cousins, a herd of camels and one extremely hot iron poker. Listen to and follow This Is History A Dynasty To Die For, available wherever you get your podcasts.

So Gobind was doing it up in the food-fluencer world in London. Vanessa assumed that if he was a food influencer, it was just another grift, that he was doing that in part to get things for free, because that's what many influencers do. But Itamar Shrulevich said that's not the case. Shrulevich is a celebrity chef with real bona fides.

He ran the kitchen at a legendary restaurant, Odalengi, and now knows Goban from his many visits to Honey & Co., Itamar's popular restaurant, which he owns with his wife, Sarit Paker. He always used to say, "Oh yeah, the minute I come from LA, this is the first place I go. I just go to have a session with a personal trainer, and then I come here." Itamar says Goban didn't ask for a free ride or even free drinks. He always pays. With us, he always pays.

So Gobind wasn't scamming these restaurants necessarily. It was more about being seen for him and being known. He wasn't just dining in these places. He talked openly about his life with these restaurant people. But he didn't say that his parents were wonderful, the way he had in those video clips we played a few minutes ago.

Here's what he told Paul Hanson, a highly respected photographer in the food and restaurant world. He'd called to hire Paul to take some portraits of himself for Instagram. So he called up saying, you know, "My name is Gavin Ambani, you know, from the great Ambani family in India." Which I looked up and thought, "Wow, okay." So at this point, Gobind is pretending to be a relative of one of India's richest men, Mukesh Ambani. And he's talking about how growing up gay in Indonesia was traumatic.

He told Paul about it one afternoon as they were planning their shoot over tea. So tea takes me back from when I used to come back from school and I'd been bullied and, you know, I want that to come from. I got tea from my mom and it felt so comforting. And also, you know, because I'm gay, I want this to come out in the imagery and all that kind of stuff. So this Instagram thing was supposed to be a way for him to gain acceptance from his family.

That seems plausible, that he's looking for acceptance from his family, even if he was claiming this alleged truth all under an assumed name, Gavin Ambani. I mean, we heard a version of this from Gobind's friend Saifa last week. Well, he always tell me that I want to be success. I want to show people, I want to show my family who dumped me. You know, I think that's the motivation. But I don't know that he's going too far with this kind of criminal thing.

Hmm, meaning that the criminal thing is also a way of getting attention and being successful? I guess that's possible. But a lot of the video interview with this family friend is a discussion of Gobind's struggles with himself. I'll tell you, when I was a kid, people called me banshee. So they put me in a mental hospital and wanted to convert me from being banshee to being straight. But they didn't know I'm not banshee because I'm not gay.

Okay, we can't possibly know Gobin's sexual orientation. But this is odd, because almost everyone else we spoke with, from old friends to prison officials to these chefs and photographers in London who knew him very recently, they all say he was gay and opened about it. Anyway, Gobin claims that this place he was sent changed him. There was conversion therapy happening for me because society was so, you know, forceful.

The therapist there in the mental hospital in Indonesia said to me, from one to ten, how gay are you? And I said, ten, just to give him, you know, to make fun of him. And he gave me ten medications. The after effects are crazy. That had a long-term effect on me. It made me like stoned. I mean, anybody can go through anything in life. I was shocked.

Is he, though?

Gobind can't even be truthful about what city he's in. Because we did yet more detective work and actually took the background images in this video, as well as other angles taken from photos on his Instagram page, and laid those landmarks over a map. And we figured out that he wasn't in London at all. He was talking to this old friend from Manchester. I mean, is he truthful about anything? And you're lucky you're in London because in London you have a lot more people that you can trust, right?

Well, yes and no, because again, it depends on the people. And you just have to build a relationship. So it didn't seem like Gobind was doing any scamming within the food fluencer world. But at the same time, he's not being upfront and honest with them either. And it's weird to offer such personal information to people about conversion therapy or being bullied as a kid right away. That's the stuff you usually reserve for after you get to know people.

Our investigation had come up with so many different sides of Gobind that he didn't talk about publicly that it just seems like it's so hard to separate fact from fiction with this guy. Here's what we know: Hargobind Tahil Rahmani was born on October 31st, 1979. Halloween. Which is obviously not a thing he chose, but kind of notable considering who he grew up to be: a man who likes to wear disguises and be other people.

His father, Lal Tehill Rahmani, was a screenwriter, producer, and film distributor. He actually wrote three romantic films, including one called Hello Sweetheart.

Gobind has two sisters and grew up with money. According to a neighbor, he was a spoiled boy who was very close to his mother. But after she passed away of cancer, he, quote, lacked affection. His father, this neighbor says, was quite stern. All three kids attended a private high school, Gandhi Memorial International School in Jakarta. Then Gobind went to America for college, settling first around L.A., where he has some family.

But in America, he called himself Harvey. And we learned a lot about what Harvey was like in America that made us think that he's been the same strange, angry person for a long time. We tracked those years in the United States, and they were really telling. Harvey landed first at LA City College and began to compete in forensics, which is basically the competitive speech and debate circuit. His favorite event? Persuasive speaking.

But in 2000, Harvey left LA and enrolled in a different college, Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. I think how Harvey found out about Bradley is that Bradley has a very, very strong tradition of we have won a significant amount of national championships. The Bradley speech team is the most successful extracurricular activity in the whole history of extracurricular activities, like including football teams, baseball teams, all of that.

People are very proud of being on this team, even 20 years later. That was Marianne Legreco speaking. Harvey, she said, gravitated to her. I think there were several people who were always, I think, a little suspicious of him. People were always cautious because he would seem to want to become best friends with the people who he perceived to have the most amount of power. So, like, he tried to immediately become friends with all of the people who were seniors and officers on the team.

Among Bradley grads of that era, Harvey is notorious. Vance Pierce was also a member of the team. I will say that Harvey was a good competitor who had a lot of ideas and creativity, especially around events like poetry. I think in terms of creativity, he always had an eye for bringing out characters, and we appreciated that.

Harvey left Bradley pretty quickly. He transferred out after one semester and landed at another college, Cal State Long Beach. And Marianne Legreco, she graduated from Bradley and went on to grad school at Arizona State. She was also a forensics coach there. And when the ASU team arrived at a tournament in California that fall, Harvey was there.

Now, Mary Ann wasn't at this event. She was back on campus in Arizona. But she started getting calls from her students, like John Parsi. John is sort of a lovely guy with a deep sense of right and wrong. He was there, sitting with all those nervous undergrads as they prepared frantically for their times on stage.

And he noticed Harvey lurking around, waiting to be noticed. He would come by and say hi to the ASU team. This eventually turned into something very awkward with him. How would you describe him? Demure. He would always kind of have his chin tucked in slightly. He would look up at you through the top of his eyes, like,

And at the beginning of that year, he just became a real ASU fanboy. This is the best way to describe it. He would come to us and just say, "You guys are the greatest speech team. You guys all look great." On the first day of tournaments, we would all wear black suits. He said, "Oh, you're the ASU mafia." And it was very uncomfortable. On day one of that tournament, Harvey did well. He won the overall competition.

And on day two, things got interesting. Harvey was doing a speech in a competitive category that he'd been mentored in by Mary Ann back at Bradley. He said that he was interested in doing one of the events that I did particularly well at. It's called rhetorical criticism. And it's kind of complicated. For the most part, you are...

doing a speech about interesting and important communication events and artifacts. So I sat down with him and I went through the step-by-step guide and then I gave him a copy of my speech and I went over with him like all of the pieces of it and I said, you can use this next year when you're putting your own speech together.

Harvey sure did put those lessons to use. And right after his round, Mary Ann started hearing from her students. They immediately called me after the round. They said, Mary Ann, you're going to need to sit down. And they said, Harvey's doing your speech. And I said, oh, you mean he took my topic? And

And they said, no, no, he's doing your speech. And so he had taken the speech that I gave him, and he was literally doing it verbatim. The guy who caught Harvey doing this, along with a teammate, that was John Parsi. I listened to his speech and said, oh my gosh, this is Mary Ann's speech from last year. Harvey was disqualified from the tournament, and John thought, either kicked off the Long Beach team or he quit.

But later that fall, John ran into some of Harvey's former teammates. They told him that Harvey was extremely upset and acting erratically. Then the phone call started. And I started getting calls. And the calls were kind of in, you know, it was to my parents' home line at that point and to the

It got worse.

Jennifer LaHoda, that teammate John was referring to, explains. I remember that John and I were called into a meeting with the dean of the communication school and our speech director. And John and I are both very kind of like rule follower type of people. And so when we got called in, it was like, oh my gosh, like, are we in trouble? Like, what happened?

What happened is that Harvey had sent the school a suicide note in which he specifically blamed John and Jennifer. Our names were in this note about how we had ruined Harvey's life and that he could not go on living any longer and that it was our fault specifically. They honestly believed he had killed himself, which is just Jesus. It was horrifying. It was incredibly upsetting, to say the least.

And so then we tried to like find out from people and no one could confirm anything. Like they just didn't know where Harvey was. Obviously, this was a twisted lie. Harvey, Gobind as we know him, was not dead. It was just more emotional terrorism. There's a point where we find out that Harvey did not kill himself.

And then I start getting voicemails. Some of these calls were in a distorted voice, as John said earlier. But some were allegedly made by supporters of Harvey, angry on his behalf.

One of the people he pretended to be was Cate Blanchett. How odd it was for someone to believe that they could kind of fool us by pretending to be Cate Blanchett who had heard from Harvey or someone who was friends with Harvey that we had mistreated Harvey, right? Treated him poorly. Cate Blanchett, the actress. Cate?

Cate Blanchett, the actress. Yeah, it was exactly like, why is Cate Blanchett interested in this? How does Harvey know these people? But he always detailed his family life in Indonesia as being, you know, well-to-do, highly connected. It was strange and funny enough, but there was a certain menace underneath it all.

Some of these voicemails were really creepy. And he would leave them as if like, how dare you do this to this poor Harvey, this poor person. Like, it would be so unfortunate if something bad happened to you. And then there was one that mentioned like a bomb going off at a tournament. Parsley and La Jolla called the police and they traced the threatening emails back to Indonesia. But other than that, there wasn't much cops in Arizona could do about it. Once

Once the threats came, I was, you know, I was pissed off. Because it was this person who for no good reason was trying to do really bad things. He was trying to make me afraid of going to a tournament that maybe I shouldn't attend. I couldn't ever be 100% sure he wasn't going to act on it. It's been 20 years now, but these people weren't shocked to hear from us, contacting them out of the blue. Because this Harvey thing, it had been so odd and disturbing.

Then they listened to the podcast. His voice is just so recognizable. I actually listened to the trailer for your show, and I was like, oh my gosh, that's him. Vance Pierce hadn't thought a lot about Harvey in recent years, but my call and questions had him thinking about this old teammate all over again.

To be good in forensics technically gives you a lot of bad traits if you use them for evil. We call it the dark side. We're like, for instance, an intert. When you are doing what you're supposed to do, you are invested in your characters. You live as your character. You talk as your character. And we teach stance. We teach gestures. All of that in order to embody the character. And I'm like, yeah, that would work perfectly for a con artist.

John Parsi saw something darker in all this. The way I described it to my wife, there's nowhere near the same, but it's like someone who maybe is a serial killer or the Unabomber or something that you talk about like when they were younger and people are always like, oh, I never knew, you know, I never knew. With Harvey, you kind of knew. Yeah.

You just had this suspicion that he was going to be up to bad things. And really my hope had been that all of this stuff with copying the speech would make him stop and reassess things and become a better person, I guess. Well, that's interesting. It's how a well-adjusted person might react to these circumstances.

It was just so crazy. Like, who threatens to kill someone who does speech and debate? Who gets so angry about being disqualified for a speech tournament? John chafed a little when I spoke of Gobind's work, or whatever you want to call it, as impressive. He's an Iranian immigrant himself. As a kid, he was called every insult in the book. He understands what it's like to grow up feeling like an outsider. So he doesn't have much sympathy for Gobind using that line.

I was listening to your podcast where someone says, oh, he's genius. He must be highly intelligent. And those aren't ever things I would think of Harvey as. It's more like this manipulative, bumbling person. He fetishizes people who are more successful than he is. And

And he tries to step in and get his way and put people in bad situations. I think he really likes the idea of making people suffer for his real or imagined wrongs that he's suffered.

Parsi sees these same tendencies in the con queen scam, too. I think part of what is broken in him is he had these huge aspirations and those aspirations did not necessarily align with reality. And so he sought to destroy other people's dreams in the way he thought his own had been destroyed. Right. Even though that wasn't what had happened.

I think about the Hollywood side of it. It's someone who hasn't had that success, isn't an actor, isn't doing anything major. And so he's taking these people who still have that wonder and desire and are starting to see some success and looking at them and saying, how do I destroy you? How do I make you feel small and miserable? That does make sense. But it's almost like Gobind never really tried hard to become somebody big.

If he was already plagiarizing speeches in college, it's like he never took those big swings in life. So he's blaming all of these people for failing, even though he wasn't actually willing to put in the work it takes to succeed. Well, he did put in a lot of work, just on the wrong stuff. More after the break. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media.

What's so interesting about the con queen, what we were starting to understand from all these little bits of information, plus what we heard from victims, was that he had a deep need to feel loved. Even as he did all these bad acts, he would tell the marks that he wanted them to make him feel safe. Do you remember that? I hung up. She called again. Well, I just want to know that you'll make me feel safe and comfortable. And that was the biggest thing. I had the safety and trust. Oh, yeah.

This was maybe the heart of the matter for him. He needed to pull people close and make them feel like they were taking care of him. He had to feel warm and safe and cozy and loved, and somehow he was doing all that through hurting other people and feeling control over them.

Maybe the trauma that he experienced over being gay was the central trauma, the thing that overarched his life. But feeling like you need to get back at people over and over for something you've suffered is just not the way civilized people live their lives. I also do think he's kind of a bumbling guy, to be honest.

But he's also a very good catfisher. Yeah, it's interesting. Like, there's just no way this guy sat down seven years ago and said, I'm going to make a million dollars by pretending to be a series of female Hollywood executives. Right. And I'm going to call people and tell them to fly to Indonesia and start handing envelopes of cash to strangers. It's just such an absurd premise. It must have been just one of those things like he did it as a one-off joke and it worked. So he did it again and then he did it again. And then it just became his job somehow.

He accidentally stumbled upon the perfect crime. Well, almost perfect. Con artists often get away with scams because they're just not big enough scams for the FBI to care. And they probably wouldn't have cared about this one either. Except he pissed off the wrong women.

The women we've talked about all season, the .001% of powerful women in the world, had enough money to pay Nicole, an expensive PI, to work on this all the time until she had enough to get the attention of the FBI. Plus, the con queen was just a little too clever. He was too good of an actor, too good of a storyteller. The details of most scams are just kind of boring. But this one is just so entertaining, it couldn't possibly fly under the radar. And that may just be his downfall. ♪

We kept looking for what might have happened to Gobind in his life to explain what he had become. We don't know a lot about the circumstances in Jakarta after he returned home from his years in the U.S., except that by 2008 or so, he was in trouble again. This time, it was a financial crime, some misdeed with his inheritance, which allegedly caused his family to press charges. That landed him in Chippenang Prison, where he met Rudy Satopo and, we think, refined his criminal ways. You heard about that last episode.

Our stringer in Jakarta, Devianti Fareedz, is a freelance reporter and TV producer who worked with us for months on this show. At one point, she literally wandered streets knocking on shop doors in search of Gobind's family and spent weeks on end chasing records of bureaucrats. But all that hard work panned out because she managed to track down two very high-level officials from Chippenang prison, where Gobind served time a decade ago. Unbelievably enough, both remembered Gobind well. Here's Devi.

Gobin had been involved in multiple attempts to fraud people and that the family found out about it and they were so distraught. And so, yeah, that's what he remembers.

One of those officials she spoke to was the head of admissions at Chippenang. Her name is Chatur Fathiani, and she's the person who identified Gobind as the likely suspect in the bomb threat at the U.S. Embassy. Police traced the call to the prison and showed up asking who might have done it. And when the anti-terrorist police team interviewed him, he eventually admitted and confessed that he was the one who made the prank call. And I remember Chatur saying that

Plus, Gobind loved to hang out with the officials. He would walk through the halls of the prison to get to Chatur's office to gossip. Because of his proficiency in English, they often asked Gobind to help them translate documents. He would entertain them with jokes and voices. He even played ping pong with the prison staff.

He sounds almost like a mascot. He was very suave, a very versatile person. He was very gentle and very soft-spoken to the prison staff, but he was very stern and he can even bark towards the inmates when he didn't like them.

The other official, Samsul Hidayat, was the head of rehabilitation at Chippenang. He told Debbie that he was not surprised to hear what this former inmate may have been up to since leaving, which is a truly revealing thing for the person in charge of rehabilitating convicts to say. Because he's always had the tendency to continue being a con artist. He has an obsession with

for those working in the film industry, an obsession and admiration, I guess. Chippenang is a maximum security prison, home to many terrible people, murderers and rapists and terrorists. But con artists were considered to have a special kind of insidiousness. Prison officials would keep their distance with con artists. They would limit interaction with them because they cannot be fully reformed.

She said they'll always try to take advantage of us if we let our defense down. We can be friends with them, but we should never allow ourselves to be lulled by what they say. So what's the big takeaway here? That our suspect, Gobin, should never be trusted and is not rehabilitatable? We'd hate to accept that. We're people who believe in rehabilitation. But at the same time, he's done this for so long and has so far exhibited zero remorse.

During the show, we repeatedly heard shock, even awe, at what a waste of a smart mind this was. How, if our scammer had just applied himself to some honest work, he could probably have achieved success. Maybe he would have become a real producer. Here's Greg Mandarano, the screenwriter who went to Jakarta six times. He's not going to be in jail forever. He'd probably get, what, 10 to 20? Less, right? He has an opportunity to be a producer now.

in the future, after he's quote-unquote rehabilitated. And after the con queen is rehabbed, Greg, the guy who's out six figures, sounds like he's somehow still open to working with him. He certainly has a love for film, I would think, skills that other people don't.

The key word in a con is confidence. It's a confidence game, right? They give confidence to their marks. And I was certainly given that confidence through the process.

In fact, Greg has written a script about this experience, a biopic about the scammer, titled Hollywood Con Queen. The ultimate ending to this story would be that, like, the guy goes to prison and serves 10 years and then gets out and then actually produces the movie that you pitched to him. Thanks to some additional exposure. Come on now, Josh. If there is a trial, a lot of the people I've spoken to, you know, are going to look at him and be so angry in the courtroom. Like, if you're testifying there...

Looking across the courtroom at this guy. So you're not going to be angry. Like, do you think you would say anything to him? It would be awesome. Are you kidding? I'd ask. I'd tell him he wanted to read his movie. Read the biopic that I wrote on you, man. You know, what better person to receive feedback and development notes than, you know, the criminal himself?

I feel like it's not immoral for me to have a degree of professional respect for him and to be able to get past any negative feelings that I might have had from it, you know? This gets at the incredible effectiveness of the Conqueed scam in a way that's hard to overstate.

This kind of ambition, this blind desire to succeed, can be so powerful that it blocks out reason. Even when Greg knows for a fact that Gobind is a phony, he still can't help but hold on to some hope that maybe, just maybe, Gobind's the guy who can get his movie made, who can provide the break Greg so desperately needs.

Hope is a powerful thing. When we started this, we heard a lot of people asking the question, how could you fall for this? How could all these victims miss every red flag waving in their face? But that's exactly it. They didn't want to see the red flags. And Greg still doesn't want to look at them. For all of Gobind's other twisted beliefs, he certainly understands the power of positive thinking. First things first is you.

We tried, of course, to contact Goben. Repeatedly. By the six emails we have for him, including two with Doug Liman in the address.

None of the emails we sent bounced back as undeliverable. So, those accounts are live. We also tried to call him on the three phone numbers we turned up from people he'd recently talked to, mostly via WhatsApp. One number was defunct. One went straight to a mailbox, which wasn't accepting messages. And the third just rang and rang. Whoever was on the other end just wouldn't accept the call. If you've been with us now from the beginning, you've heard us puzzle a few times over what the Con Queen's life is really like.

We've tried to teleport into his lair, and now we've got a pretty good idea of what we'd find. It's this one sad guy in an apartment in England, alienated from his family, running around pretending to be important. It's actually a lot like the image Omri Rose, the actor we met back in Chapter 3, imagined for us. I picture quite a lonely person, an angry person, you know, and they do this stuff and they feel that power trip.

But it's like a junkie. I mean, that's what it seems like to me. It's a junkie. Gets the power trip from doing this. But then when it's done, there's an emptiness. Every month, that apartment has to feel smaller and smaller. The stress has to be building. I mean, think about that Doug Liman tape.

You want me to verify who I am? I'm going to fuck you over. If I have to fuck your family, I'll do it. You can call the FBI or the police just because you're fucking racist. Go fuck yourself and go fuck your fucking whatever country you came from. That sounds like the anxious yelp of a desperate man. One who's hunted by investigators, whose phone is probably tapped, who's stuck in a country locked down by COVID with a passport that's almost certainly been flagged.

He's not a master criminal or Osama bin Laden. He can't run to a place where he's unreachable by cops. He's a man who has tried so long to be important, but not by actually adding anything to society. Except, I guess, as a cautionary tale. So what now? We're stuck in a weird, drawn-out endgame that seems to have only one logical conclusion. The con queen behind bars. Like I said, he doesn't pick up when I call. But that doesn't mean we're not getting through to him.

For all we know, he could be sitting in his apartment right this second, listening to our podcast, alone in the dark. So, if you are listening, Goban, how are you feeling? Are you lonely and angry? Are you proud? Are you ashamed? Are you scared? Drop us a line. Let us know. But make it quick. I don't think you have much time. Fuck the what's next. Go and cash your bad checks. Chameleon is a production of...

Actually, hold on. Gobind had even less time than we thought. Tonight, just hours before this episode published, we learned that Hargobind Tahil Rahmani, the suspect we identified in Chapter 9, was in police custody in the UK. It's interesting. I actually got a tip last week that he was going to be arrested. It came from one of the chefs we talked to in London, but it was secondhand and I called around and couldn't confirm it. The FBI didn't return my calls, and it was hard to imagine he'd gotten arrested and the news hadn't gotten out more broadly.

But in fact, newspapers didn't hear about this until tonight, which is why I'm recording this at 9 p.m. in a corner of my office so that we can add it to the episode at the 11th hour. So it turned out that tip was right, and so were we. Hargobin Tehill Rahmani was grabbed by Manchester police that night, in the early hours of the morning, and he's now waiting for a hearing on his extradition to the U.S. so that he can face charges in California based on the FBI's case, which, of course, was based in large part on the work of Nicole and K2.

Obviously, Vanessa and I feel a great sense of relief. This case is finally going to be closed. But we're sure his victims feel even better. So I'm happy for them. Stay tuned to this feed for more updates starting next week. And thanks for listening.

Chameleon is a production of Campside Media. It's developed, created, and written by Vanessa Grigoriadis and me, Josh Dean. The executive producer is Mark McAdam. Our associate producer is Abakar Adan. Fact-checking by Callie Hitchcock. Editorial support by Doug Slawin, Natalia Winkleman, Rod Sherwood, and Ashley Ann Craigbaum. Our technical consultant is Ben Decker of Mamedica. Our theme song is Bad Checks by Houses. Sound design and additional music by Mark McAdam.

Our consulting producers are Andy Horwitz at Atlas Entertainment and Charles Mastropietro at Circle of Confusion. The executive producers at Campside Media are me, Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scherr. If you enjoyed Chameleon, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners like you find the show. Make sure to subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's get to it.

Since this is the last chapter of Campside Media's first show, at least for now, I want to say first, thanks for listening. The response to Chameleon has been amazing and we appreciate every one of you.

I also want to say a few extra thanks. First, to all the victims who trusted us with their stories. We couldn't have made the show without them, and I hope the end result and what comes next helps ease the sting of the trauma the con queen caused them. Thanks to all the freelancers who've helped us out this season. Monique Laborde, Megan Shube, Emma Barnaby, and especially our dynamic duo in Jakarta, Bintang Lestada and Deviante Faridz.

And to K2 Intelligence, especially Nicole, who deserves a ton of credit for making the Con Queen case a priority. Thanks to everyone at Sony Podcasts for helping us get this show into the world. Especially Charlie, Emily, Tom, and Dennis for embracing Campside even before we produced the show. And thanks to the whole crew at Sister Pictures, especially Stacey, Jane, and Liz. There'd be no Campside without Sister, and what started over some drinks in LA has become an incredible partnership. So much more to come.

And one more thing. Obviously, the Con Queen story isn't completely over either. We expect developments and will react accordingly. Stay tuned to the feed for updates on the case and also bonus material. We even have something new for you next week. Thanks for listening.