The Athlete Whisperer: Ep. 2, Victoria Secret
33:54 Share

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I am Lacey Lamar. And I'm also Lacey Lamar. Just kidding. I'm Amber Reffin. What? Okay, everybody, we have exciting news to share. We're back with season two of the Amber and Lacey, Lacey and Amber show on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. This season, we make new friends, deep dive into my steamy DMs, and we'll be right back.

answer your listener questions and more the more is punch each other listen to the amber and lacy lacy and amber show on will ferrell's big money players network on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts just listen okay or lacy gets it do it

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Previously on Queen of the Con. My name's Peggy, and I'm the CEO of King Management. King Management is a company I founded because I wanted to help professional athletes manage their finances. Professional athletes like NBA superstar Dennis Rodman, who hires this beguiling money manager in 2009 to take the reins of his financial life.

She said she's a Harvard grad. She said she made millions of dollars on Wall Street. She said she's creating generational wealth for Dennis Rodman with savvy investments she's making all over the world. She said a lot of things. She mentioned to us to call her Raquel.

But three years after Raquel, aka Peggy, gets power of attorney and takes full control of all of Dennis Rodman's bank accounts and finances, things start going off the rails. Dennis would call me and say, my cable is off or my power is off. He was renting out this place in Aventura. The landlord would call me all the time like, the rent is late. And I'm like, what are you talking about? The rent is late.

He's got plenty of money. The rich shouldn't be late. I'm Jonathan Walton, and this is Queen of the Con, The Athlete Whisperer. Episode 2, Victoria's Secret. ABC News. This is Today with Savannah Guthrie. It's 2013, and Dennis Rodman is on the Today Show, being interviewed by Lester Holt about all the headlines he's been making for not paying child support.

At this point, the public perception is that Dennis Rodman is broke, struggling with his addiction to alcohol and can't afford to take care of himself or his family.

Part and parcel with all your legal problems, the people around you have said that you're sick, that you're not well, and they've talked specifically about your struggles with alcohol.

What Lester Holt has no way of knowing here is that while Dennis Rodman does have a well-documented drinking problem, according to his manager at the time, he's still making a lot of money doing movies, TV shows, and public appearances. We'd go to events, and sometimes they'd pay us in cash. We could have $100,000 in cash. It wasn't a lot of money to us.

Regardless, all that money would go straight to his financial manager Peggy to supposedly pay all of Dennis' bills, especially his child support. She's the one with power of attorney. She's the one depositing every dollar into his bank account, a bank account he no longer has access to. That was the arrangement he made with Peggy years earlier.

Dennis Rodman didn't trust himself to be a good steward of his money, so he put all his trust in Peggy and insisted everyone around him trust her too. You have to remember, Prince Marketing Group has to send the money to wherever Dennis wants them to.

Prince Marketing Group was one of the companies getting Dennis Rodman endorsement deals at the time and booking him lucrative public appearances. Their fiduciary responsibility is to Dennis. It's his decision. It's his money. He can send it anywhere he wants. I was advising him very strongly not to send it anymore to Peggy because I just didn't have any trust in her.

And at the height of his public money woes, Dennis Rodman's girlfriend at the time, Gigi, steps in and tries to get to the bottom of things. I'm calling Peggy going, what's going on? Where's the money? I know that he just did a gig. She's like, well, you know, he has back taxes. All that money had to go to the IRS. He doesn't have any money, Gigi. He has no money. And I would say, how is that possible?

According to Gigi, Dennis is getting numb to it all at this point and resentful. But he's not necessarily angry at Peggy, he's just fed up with the situation in general. So he would go to work and he felt like he was working for free.

You know, he'd go and work, do the job, and then wasn't rewarded for it because it was all, according to Peggy, oh, I'm sorry, Dennis, I'm sorry, honey, but you don't get anything this time because all this had to go here, here, and here, and here. So he was going like, why do I even try? ♪

And Gigi wasn't the only one taken aback by Dennis' cash flow problem. His manager at the time was also growing very, very suspicious of where and how Peggy was supposedly investing all of Dennis' money. So he did some snooping. I had a buddy of mine who worked for a private investment bank have a meeting with her. And he went and met with her, and he called me right after. And he's like,

When he went to try to ascertain, okay, well, exactly what are you doing? Like, how are you handling it? She just couldn't speak on a very competent level as to, like, finance. She just didn't understand, like, basic finance.

So there's no way she was invested this money because she couldn't even explain what she was doing. Nor did Dennis get any reports. And that was the other troubling thing. Peggy was just not leaving any kind of paper trail at all. She didn't appear to be documenting anything.

It was so ambiguous. I could never get a straight answer from anybody. And I talked to Dennis and he would say, oh, well, you know, she's handling my stuff and I'm paying her to handle it. I go, well, how much are you paying her? Like he could never really communicate to me what the arrangement was.

Because I would ask Peggy, like, Peggy, what is the arrangement you have? Where are the documents? Where are all the bank statements? And she would always have an answer for everything. And when Peggy was asked where Dennis Rodman's child support payments were or his tax payments or his rent money...

All of a sudden, one by one, the people in Dennis Rodman's life try to warn him about Peggy. And he would just kind of blow it off.

Dennis' girlfriend at the time, Gigi, makes plea after plea after plea. I was like, Dennis, I've been telling you that this doesn't make sense. I've been telling you that I feel like Peggy's stealing.

He kept saying, nah, nah, nah. And I'd say, she's stealing from you. Like, literally, where's this money going? Dennis Rodman is flat out refusing to believe Peggy is doing anything wrong. After all, she's like a mother to him at this point. Even though he's getting blasted in the press for not making his child support payments, which was entirely Peggy's responsibility. She's supposed to be paying all his bills, especially his child support.

It's just kind of a heartless move. My buddy, Evan Goldstein. Like steal the other shit, but like, how about you at least like stick to the paying for the little kids? You know, it's like as a father, like shit like that pisses me off, man. So I spoke to Michelle Rodman, Dennis Rodman's ex-wife, and she agreed to do interview. Then she backed out of the interview. But in the half hour or so I spoke to her, she did tell me

She knew Peggy was a scammer from the get really said the minute Peggy entered their lives the money stopped She would get evicted. She'd be staying in motels the money for their kids. She couldn't buy them groceries like she talked about being in constant desperation for money from Dennis to support the kids and her that just stopped coming when Peggy came on board so she knew Peggy was up to no good and

And Michelle Rodman blew the whistle early and often, but nobody was listening, including Dennis Rodman. And maybe it's because by then she was his ex-wife and even that title alone, it doesn't engender much like trust or belief. You think she's got an ax to grind. But Dennis Rodman's manager at the time remembers all too well Michelle Rodman's concerns. We're standing in the foyer of the house and Michelle pulled me aside.

She said, you know, Peggy's stealing from Dennis. That's the first time anyone like said out loud what I was thinking. Like there's something off here. But she was the first one to come out and say it. And that's what started the ball rolling as far as my mindset. And it was just maddening because I'm like, Dennis, listen, man, you have got to do something about this. And he just wouldn't do it.

We tried for years, years to get him to fire her. He just wouldn't do it. At this point, Peggy, in an attempt to share responsibility with Dennis' manager or share blame, tries to include him on Dennis' financials. Peggy wanted to add me onto Dennis' accounts. And I said, absolutely, under no circumstances will I be listed on any of his accounts.

Little does Peggy know she's about to be found out. We'll explain how after the break. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down from unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast, There and Gone.

It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes, he's innocent.

But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Queen of the Con.

Dennis Rodman's financial manager, Peggy, is doing some shady things, and it's all about to catch up with her. Peggy wanted to add me onto Dennis' account, and I said, absolutely, under no circumstances will I be listed on any of his accounts.

Around this time in 2013, Dennis Rodman hires a new attorney to go to court and make the case that his child support payments should be reduced because he's not making the kind of money he was making back in the heyday when he was playing in the NBA. He's making much less now, so his child support payments should be based on his current income and not what he was making a decade or so earlier.

But by Peggy defaulting on his current child support payments, it causes a bunch of problems for Dennis that no one sees coming, according to the family attorney Dennis hires. One of the major issues is when he would have to travel.

Obviously, he needed a passport like we all would. And if you don't pay your child support, your passport gets revoked. So that's what was consistently happening. The passport issue took on a life of its own, right? So that was sort of like a case in and of itself. I was dealing with a child support enforcement agency and pretty much begging them, please, like, let him use his passport. Here's the proof. Here's the contract. He wants to make money. He wants to pay everybody.

You know, so he literally would be afraid to go to the airport for fear of being stopped. It's horrible. It is a horrible situation to be in. On the bright side, though, once this new attorney starts looking into Dennis's finances to make her child support payment modification request to the court, things start unraveling for Peggy.

We were just constantly, constantly getting the runaround. It was always, he doesn't have the money, but yet I can't really show it. And then the last minute, these financials, if there was any type of a balance sheet or anything put together, it was just completely half-assed. It was a joke. I mean, this is accounting 101. So she obviously was hiding something.

But exactly what that was would take a while to figure out. What that attorney did know was when Dennis hired Peggy to run his finances in 2009, he was $100,000 in debt. Peggy was supposed to pay that debt down and invest the rest of his money. Instead, by 2012, Dennis Rodman is $800,000 in debt.

and none of his bills are getting paid. And yet Dennis still refuses to believe Peggy is doing anything wrong, leaving his attorney no choice but to drag it out in public. I remember one day sitting in court in Orange County and questioning Dennis and trying to explain, you know, trying to prove his modification.

So picture it. Dennis Rodman is on the stand in family court being asked about all his expenses, all the charges that are showing up on his credit card statements, which are now being shown to the entire courtroom on an overhead projector. Suddenly, Dennis notices several charges on his credit card for thousands of dollars at Victoria's Secret, and it stuns him.

Finally, these random Victoria's Secret charges seem to snap Dennis Rodman out of the Peggy-induced haze he's been in for years.

And he's literally in a courtroom on record and the lawyer's like kind of pulling a fast one, just like, "Let me just, now that I have you sitting still here and not shotgunning a beer off of Top Model's, you know, cleavage, like, here we go. Sit right here, read these." And it took that for him to go, "Huh, wait a second." Yeah, it did. That's crazy.

His girlfriend at the time, Gigi, is there when it all goes down. I remember him coming back and he was just so upset, you know, just so distraught. And in fact, he had called me at one point and said, hey, did you take my credit card? Did you spend $2,000 at Victoria's Secret?

And I said, Dennis, wouldn't you know if I spent $2,000 at Victoria's Secret? Wouldn't you see it? You know? So he was like kind of just caught off guard. And I think that's when he started realizing, wait a minute. I know I didn't do it. She didn't do it. And so that's when he really started going, okay, what's going on here?

It's not long after that California court appearance, Dennis is back in Miami. And he's becoming increasingly frustrated with a lack of money in his life. He's working all the time, and yet he feels like he has nothing to show for it. So Dennis Rodman finally decides to take matters into his own hands. He grabs Gigi and drives to Fort Lauderdale at the crack of dawn.

He and I in the early morning went to Peggy's house because he had no money. He didn't have a dollar. And he was ringing the doorbell, ringing the doorbell, and she didn't come down. She wasn't answering her phone.

And then after a while, she finally came to the window and she yelled out the window. She was just waking up and she had a robe on. She's like, honey, honey, I'm sleeping. You have to come back later. He was like, hey, I have no money. What's up with that? And she was just like, Dennis, Dennis, darling, don't worry. I'm going to fix it. Let me get up and I'll get stuff together for you. And he was irate.

And in a weird twist, Peggy's brother Elkin was Dennis Rodman's road manager at the time and de facto best friend. Remember, Elkin's the one Dennis thanks along with Peggy during his Basketball Hall of Fame speech. Elkin works alongside his sister Peggy at King Management. At least that was the story Dennis' people were told.

It was quite some time after Peggy was in the picture that Elkin was coming to town. Like, I had no idea who he was. And she said it was her brother was coming to town to help her with her business. And there were significant warning signs of what was to come next. Something just did not add up with Elkin's relationship with Peggy.

But in no time, Elkin becomes Dennis's road manager, and the two are inseparable, traipsing all over the world together doing public appearances. In Russia, in North Korea, in all kinds of profitable places. My responsibilities were to like completely run Dennis. I lived in the same apartment building. I did all of the driving, all of the security, all just basically one-on-one with Dennis.

Dennis' girlfriend at the time, Gigi, never liked Elkin. At all. She had a bad feeling about him.

And I would tell Dennis, like, "I don't want Elkin hanging around you. I don't want him to go on trips with you. He's not the person that should be going on trips with you." I felt like Elkin was definitely riding his coattails. He wanted to be in his realm. He wanted to be able to brag about Dennis. I felt like they were using Dennis in every aspect.

Well, unbeknownst to Dennis at the time, his road manager and best friend, Elkin, was trying to help Dennis get a handle on his money problems behind his back. Elkin would be like, Gigi, you know that, like, we got to control Dennis because he's out of control. And that means we got to control his money. We got to watch what he's doing. He can't know what's in his account. And part of me was thinking, OK, I'm in agreement with that because he was drinking.

And I know that if we would go out, let's say he had money in his pocket, he'd want to go to the strip club and turn those into ones and throw them in the air. I understood that, so I'm in agreement with that.

But shortly after Dennis confronts Peggy outside her Fort Lauderdale mansion in the wee hours that fateful morning, he was like, hey, I have no money. What's up with that? In a fit of rage, Dennis goes over to Elkin's place, grabs him and the three of them, Dennis, Elkin and Gigi, jump in a car and start driving. So he got Elkin and said, we're going to the bank.

Needless to say, Dennis didn't get any money out of the bank that day.

While the bank account was actually in his name, he was not listed as a signatory, meaning he wasn't legally allowed to withdraw money from that account. That's how Peggy had set things up. And not long after that fiasco, Dennis Rodman's attorney sends a letter to Peggy firing her, accusing her of fraud, writing,

Although you claim to have a graduate degree from Harvard, it's more like your resume could be a study in fictional writing at Harvard. That letter gets leaked to the press, and TMZ picks it up and publishes a story about it. Headlined, Dennis Rodman brutally fires business manager, quote, she's a total fraud. And you won't believe what Peggy says after the break.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories. Firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio.

I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil,

They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions.

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone.

It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck, and vanished. Nobody hears anything. Nobody sees anything. Did they run away? Was it an accident? Or were they murdered? A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. It was definitely murder for hire for Danielle, not for Richard. He's your son, and in your eyes, he's innocent.

But in my eyes, he's just some guy my sister was with. In this series, I dig into my own investigation to find answers for the families and get justice for Richard and Danielle. Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Queen of the Con. So TMZ runs a piece calling Peggy a total fraud.

Yeah, the TMZ article. It was like a bomb had gone off. It was the first public announcement that Peggy was stealing. And Peggy responds, publicly accusing Dennis of lying. Dennis Rodman is out more than a million dollars at this point. And according to his manager at the time, Peggy's theft was insanely egregious. Dennis's agency would send Dennis a wire of $90,000 at like, say, 10.30 in the morning.

By 3 o'clock the same day, all $90,000 is swept out of his account and it shows up in Peggy's account. I mean, all of it. She wouldn't even leave him a couple hundred dollars for a loaf of bread. I mean, she took all of it. But the hardest blow and the biggest betrayal comes when Dennis finds out that Elkin, his road manager and best friend, who he thought was Peggy's brother...

is actually her son. Dennis's manager at the time remembers Dennis's pain and anguish when that brother-son revelation came to light. I think it was devastating for Dennis emotionally. I think it was devastating. He had so much faith and trust in Peggy and Elkin, and they so betrayed his trust. I just think he was really hurt by this. I believe that Elkin was her brother at the time.

Remember Chantel Cohen? She worked as Peggy's assistant for a time. And early on, she witnesses a major, major crack in that whole brother-sister story that Peggy and Elkin are telling. We happened to go out and go party one day. And Elkin and I stayed up later than everybody else. And we were just talking very drunk. Drunk.

And he said something, something, my mom. And I kind of like perked up and I was like, wait, wait, wait, what? And he's like, we don't talk our family business. You didn't hear that.

I said, OMG, because when I babysat her kids at a young age, she said that they were her ex-husband's kids with another person. And she just stepped in as a mother, blah, blah, blah. I never had kids. Look at this body I have. You know, she said she never had never had kids. It was crazy. Like, I don't even know how I would feel as a kid. And my mom doesn't want to claim me like that, you know.

It's a mindfuck. It's definitely a mindfuck. It is. Like, yeah, that's the most important relationship you have as a person, your mother and father. So your mother's telling you, tell everyone you're my brother. Yes. And you go along with it. Yes. God, that messes you up. It has to. And shockingly, it's not the first time in Elkin's life where he's pretending to be someone other than who he is. At his mother Peggy's insistence.

Around the man who would become Peggy's fourth husband, Peggy has her own son, Elkin, pretend to be her nephew and implores Elkin to refer to her as Aunt Peggy because she's convinced her fourth husband that she doesn't have any kids. As you can imagine, that charade doesn't end well. They started having problems when he found out that I was actually her son.

I let it slip one day and we were talking about something. I wanted them to bring me somewhere. I was like, my mom's going to bring me. Like it was just a slip of the tongue, you know? I just wasn't thinking. And I came back and it was a whole issue. I think that was the hardest pill to swallow. I really do. We would fight and I would get upset sometimes and it got me drinking a lot. It's like, am I not good enough to be your son?

So while masquerading as other people at his mom's request clearly bothered Elkin, he still knowingly and intentionally pretended to be Peggy's brother for years. But when Dennis Rodman and his girlfriend at the time, Gigi, find out that Elkin is actually Peggy's son, Elkin acts as if he's shocked by it too. But then Elkin, when he was confronted one night when I was there, he went into, you mean Peggy, my sister, is my mother? Yeah.

Elkin was very angry, very disturbed, like he had just found out that Peggy was not his sister like he had thought all these years and found out that she was his mother. Which completely contradicts what Elkin has said publicly, that he knowingly went along pretending to be his mother's brother. So he's in on it, right? My buddy Evan Goldstein again.

Well, I mean, it does beg the question if he will go that far and pretend to be her brother for years, more than a decade by some accounts, what else is he going along with? If you're Dennis Rodman and one day you find out that your best friend, this guy who's been your road manager traveling with you to all these places, this guy you confided in, who you believe to be Peggy's brother, and you find out, no, they lied. He's her son. Like, how would you feel? Oh my God. That's almost worse than the money to me.

It's like our whole relationship is a lie. It's the ultimate betrayal because, you know, it's not that she just said it. He was going along with it. You know, Dennis Rodman confided in this guy. You know, he shared things. They're partying. They're doing things. You know, you know, he told him dark secrets. When a relationship starts with a lie. Yeah.

And not only that, that is perpetuated, that is continued on. It turns into a million lives. It just gets worse and worse and worse and worse. And when Dennis Rodman confronts Elkin about everything, about the missing money, about Elkin being Peggy's son and not her brother. We got into a huge fight. The fight was concerning me and my mother or me and Peggy. We're stealing all of his money. He called my mother a whore. So I punched him.

I uppercutted him. I ain't seen him since. Elkin has insisted time and time again that his mom Peggy is not the scammer she's accused of being. Everybody can make a mistake. If I was to invest your money and let's say Apple went to shits tomorrow, it looks good now, doesn't it? But we lost all our money, didn't we? Am I responsible for that?

I think she just put their money in places that weren't good. And I don't necessarily think it all went in her pocket. I think that Elkin is in damage control and I don't blame him because this is going to be devastating for his family, for everybody. I can't speak for what he did know or didn't know. It just doesn't add up. It doesn't make sense.

Elkin has stated publicly that other than pretending to be Peggy's brother, he did nothing wrong. He didn't steal any of Dennis Rodman's money, nor did he help his mother defraud Dennis Rodman in any way. How can I believe anything you say when you lied about this being your mom? Peggy's former assistant again, Chantel Cohen.

Yeah, that's a valid. I mean, like, come on. And that's not a little lie. No, that's a huge lie. That's his whole existence. Because he he wants everyone to know that he didn't have anything to do with it and blah, blah, blah. And I'm just like, I want to believe you because I actually like you guys, you know, and I wanted to believe it. But it's like you lied about this. What else are you lying about?

There's no way that you went throughout this whole time not seeing something. Even if you feel like you didn't do anything with your mom, you've seen things. Come on. Come on. You're grown. Dennis Rodman's former manager isn't buying Elkin's explanation either. Elkin was part of the company that was defrauding clients, so that's his burden to carry.

I still can't understand why he would allow his mother to say that he's her brother and just allow that to go on. That to me, it makes everything else tainted. To me, if you're not part of the fraud, why are you participating in it? Dennis Rodman was the pinnacle for Peggy. In her con game of chess, he was the king. He was the checkmate.

And she got to the king by quietly taking out a lot of pawns. Other professional athletes who never told a living soul that Peggy scammed them. You know, it's an embarrassing situation and no one wants to come out and say, I wasn't watching my money and this is what happened. But I feel like, and love, love, love Travis.

Travis was Peggy's first pro athlete and her first victim. If he would have said something then, it wouldn't have been such a domino effect with everybody else. A million percent because victims are ashamed. And what they don't realize is they're enabling the con artist to do it again and do it again and do it again. Like until someone stands up and goes public, which is hard to do, she gets away again and again and again.

It turns out the $1.2 million Peggy tricks out of Dennis Rodman is just a drop in the bucket compared to the millions and millions of dollars. So many millions. Peggy scams from a bunch of other professional athletes in the plain light of day. And how she manipulates one athlete to get the other on board, to get the other on board, and so on, is just a master class in confidence trickery.

Never occurred to you she's doing this to 20 other people? Hell no. Wow. Hell no. Hell no. And that's why I was so like, once I heard that she was doing it to other people and I'm like, Dennis Rodman, we hung out with his homeboy. And she used to brag about these people. And it's like, oh, you was robbing them too? Next time on Queen of the Con. It is what it is. It's not nothing you can take back.

One of Peggy's pro-athlete victims reveals a different side of Peggy entirely. She was a cougar, yeah, a cougar. Was she flirting with you? Peggy was somebody that would probably have sex with one of her clients. If you're enjoying Queen of the Con, leave us a five-star review. Reviews help other listeners find us. And by all means, click that share button and send Queen of the Con to anyone you think might be into it. ♪

Edited and mixed by Zach Hirsch.

Audio Engineer, Justin Longerbeam. Audio Engineer, Chris Desmond. Studio Engineer, Graham Gibson. Mastered by Justin Longerbeam. Legal Counsel for AYR Media, Gianni Douglas. Executive Producer for iHeartMedia, Maya Howard. Voice Acting by Darnell Baldwin, Tyree Saxton Jr., Courtney Hetrick, Milan Faxes, Jorge Farragut, David Teitelbaum,

Terina Pouncey, Kim Gagne, Stuart Chait, Teresa Prindle.

Statements from press reports, public interviews, and from court records were dramatized verbatim on this season of Queen of the Con. BET's American Gangster Trap Queens, TNT's Rich and Shameless, CNBC's American Greed, The Guardian, Sports Illustrated, The Times' Picayune, The Opportunist Podcast, Victim Interviews, and countless court records were the sources used on this season of Queen of the Con.

Am I doing the right thing with my finances? Am I saving enough? Can I buy a house? Am I paying too much in taxes? Will I be able to retire? Putting a financial plan together feels impossible. What if I told you there was another way? Take FACET's free financial wellness quiz to get your score and a snapshot of your current financial health. Visit FACET.com now and discover your financial wellness score today. That's F-A-C-E-T.com.

This ad is sponsored by Facet. Facet Wealth Incorporated is an SEC-registered investment advisor. This is not an offer to buy or sell securities, nor is it investment, legal, or tax advice. Hardy Fiber Cement Siding handles conditions that can cause damage to vinyl. From fire to hail, Hardy Siding stands tall through it all, helping trade professionals look their best when they recommend Hardy Siding and Trim. See the proof at jameshardy.com.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.