Hollywood Con Queen | 1. The Hook
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Campsite Media. Hello? What is this? What do you want me to say? What is going on here? Oh, it's just a chameleon. Chameleon. Okay. You're listening to Chameleon, a production of Campsite Media. Hi, I'm Josh Dean. I'm a journalist, author, and more recently, a podcaster. And I want to tell you a story, the story of this really bizarre scam. It's a scam that's been eating away at the movie industry for years now.

crushing dreams and draining bank accounts. And I've been obsessing over it for a while too, since I got a tip last year from someone who got caught up in the middle of it. This con was basically set up to target some of the most vulnerable people in the business. The men and women on the lowest rungs of the Hollywood hierarchy. The ones who aren't sure where their next job is coming from.

When we talk about the movie industry, we usually picture the people we see at the Academy Awards, soaking up the spotlight. Thank you so much to the Academy. This is insane. But if you've ever sat through the credits of a movie, you already have an idea of how enormous the industry really is, made up of thousands of workers you hardly ever hear anything about. In fact, if everyone involved in making movies got to go to the Oscars, you couldn't have the ceremony in a nice mid-sized theater.

You'd need a huge football stadium, like the Rose Bowl. And yeah, the scam, diabolical as it is, went after the working class. The essential, hardworking folks who would be up in the cheap seats in this analogy.

Inevitably, some of the front row red carpet types figure into our story too. But most of the real victims of this scam are the ones a bit further down in the credits, with the gaffers and best boys. We're talking about makeup assistants, bit part actors, chefs and caterers, security guards, and personal trainers. Guys like Eddie Rayburn. I knew I wanted to be in the Hollywood industry. It's something that I'd always wanted to do. Eddie has never been to the Oscars, and he's not the type of guy I come across often in New York, where I live and work.

but he's kind of a staple in Hollywood. Someone who moved out there with a dream. I remember seeing all the actors in the movie 300 there and I was like, man, I would love to be able to do that because all grown up I actually used movies as an escape from my weird childhood that I had and as we all have our dark past, right? We're starting our story with Eddie because he has a unique up-close perspective on how a healthy desire for success can be exploited. He had a goal, he saw a path, and then the whole thing just blew up in his face.

Eddie was sucked into a story he simply couldn't have imagined. One that spans the globe, from Hong Kong to the UK. It involves nefarious bag men, private investigators, phone sex, the FBI, and one of the longest, strangest cons in history. And even three years later, Eddie still doesn't know how exactly to put it all behind him. Oh, everything happens for a reason. Fuck that saying. I hate that saying. Someone said it to my dad's funeral. I was like, coming up saying, hey, well, everything happens for a reason. I was like...

Yeah, it does.

Cool. Right on, dude. I hate that saying, because I like to say we got to give everything purpose. So now what am I doing with this, right? Well, one, I'm going to let my story be told. I'm not going to be embarrassed about it. I don't care. If someone's, oh, you got scammed? Yeah. Also, I bet you've been ripped off too, right? Doesn't really matter. Was there ever a point when you were embarrassed? Absolutely. I'm embarrassed that I fell for it and that I brought in two good friends of mine. Now, you can do whatever you want to me. I don't give a shit. But when you mess with my friends...

That's when it's a whole other story. I just wanted to get, I wanted to get the motherfucker who was doing this by any means. From Campside Media, this is Chameleon, the story of the Hollywood con queen. This doesn't sound quite right. They're out 50k. Please help me. Where are you taking me? The money has never hit our account. So, you know, what's gone wrong there? Look, can you ask that to my finance and we'll talk to her?

Very fucking clever. Very smart. Multiple languages. Master of accents. Highly educated. Whoever does this is a genius. You know, somebody who's sort of a psychopath. Chapter one, The Hook. I have so much to unpack here. A lot of story to tell you. But first, let me explain how we met Eddie Rayburn in the first place.

Last summer, I got a call from a couple guys in Hollywood. One of them was a movie producer named Andy Horwitz. He wanted to tell me about a friend of his who'd gotten caught up in some trouble. That friend was a personal trainer who'd gotten wrapped up in something really big and really weird. The story Andy unspooled for me was about Hollywood and power. But there was just so much to it. A lot more he needed to know. And from the little I heard, there was a lot I needed to know too. So I went to L.A.,

I was there with Vanessa Gregoriotis, another journalist and podcaster. Vanessa is my partner on this podcast, kind of a co-detective. Like me, she's an investigative journalist, originally for magazines. Both of us have been doing this kind of work for 20 years, so we have 40 years of experience between us.

So even though you'll hear my voice telling the story for the most part, she's been with me every step of the way. And she'll pop up here and there. When I absolutely can't keep my nose out of it. We're working together because this is a knot of a story. Not the kind of thing you can easily untangle alone. And believe me, like Eddie, we have our minds set on finding this motherfucker. Anyway, so we were in LA, outside of a tall white building on the legendary Sunset Boulevard. It had movie posters, huge ones, draped down both sides.

We came to this building for a meeting with those guys who'd called me at Andy's office inside this big-time production company called Atlas Entertainment. The meeting had started small, just us and Andy and the other guy who'd called me. He's a talent manager named Charles Mastropietro. But two guys had become five, maybe six people, not including myself or Vanessa.

The best part of this is that I was on an email chain, like, "I'm coming to LA, I'm gonna be there on this date, let's have a meeting." Everyone's like, "Yes, let's have a meeting!" Looping in the assistants to, like, check avails, and I'm like, it's sort of like, why can't you guys check your own schedule? There is something called Google Calendar.

But that's not how it's done here. Not in Hollywood. In this town, assistants are the gatekeepers, protecting the powerful from the aspirational. Assistants answer calls, dial phones, and set meetings. They offer coffee and water to visitors. It's a pretty slick office, with posters of the movies and TV shows that Atlas has produced hanging all over the place.

Like American Hustle, nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Suicide Squad, a big comic book movie. Even Dirty John, a TV series that began as a podcast. And the conference room is especially nice.

Margot Robbie has probably sat in this very chair where I was sitting at a table so big we could have invited all those assistants to join us and take notes. We always laugh because this room is usually not meant for this amount of people. It's usually filled with people. We have a smaller conference room. That's Andy. He's a big shot at Atlas, but he's not at all like the often accurate stereotype of film producers as these arrogant assholes. Andy could not be nicer or more genuine.

When he's not making movies, he does pit bull rescue. Much of Andy's time on the job is spent making deals.

which is more mundane and impersonal than it sounds. Mostly just hours at his desk. And it's crazy, like, people around the world will not fathom that I've done seven-figure deals with people that I don't even know what they look like. Like, it's all through email and phone calls. The story Andy and Charles wanted to discuss with us has a lot to do with the phone and the way somebody out there was using email and calls to hijack Hollywood's supply lines to dupe the industry's lowest class.

So it's about con artists, sure, but on a deeper level, it's a story about people who want to be in this room where deals happen and careers get made. People who are still on the margins of the film industry, who want to be in this room so badly they might believe anything to get in. Basically, people like Eddie. So how did Andy and Charles meet Eddie Rayburn to begin with? They and some other Hollywood guys hired Eddie as a trainer.

Everyone in Hollywood wants to look good. So producers like Andy also tend to work out all the time, just like actors. When I got back from Suicide Squad, we put together this little training group where Eddie would drive down from Ventura. That's what he said like an hour and a half. Yeah. And I think about it, I'm like, that guy's a maniac. Because three days a week he would drive from Ventura to Santa Monica for a 7 a.m. workout in Santa Monica. He'd have to leave at like 5.30 in the morning. And we were like paying him like nothing.

For Charles and Andy, it was just a way to stay fit. For Eddie, it would be the first step toward a larger goal. Our workout group is partially responsible for, like, Eddie going on this journey. This is the journey that would take Eddie halfway around the world and turn his life upside down in the process. And Andy's got a point. Before they were introduced, Eddie's only exposure to show business was through a celebrity training outfit called Jim Jones.

I know it sounds like a person, but it's a company. Spelled G-Y-M, by the way. It is, I think, an obscure and kind of morbid reference. A play on Jim Jones, the cult leader from Jonestown. Anyway, the Jim Jones brand is pretty famous in Hollywood. Jim Jones was always killing it with all these DC movies and all these actors. Eddie, who was, like, based in Ventura, never got a piece of that. So, like, Eddie was never on a movie. He'd never worked as an actor. He just had his own little gym.

Vanessa and I figured we ought to check out this little gym that Eddie had. So one afternoon last fall, we drove up the coast to Ventura to get Eddie's story. The story of that call and everything that came after directly from the source. Ventura is a sun-kissed beach town, halfway between the gilded estates of Santa Barbara and the oceanfront mansions of Malibu. But it's not Hollywood. It is, at its heart, a working-class city. I said 283, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

This is where Eddie lives. He owns a small gym on this block, the kind of block you find all over Southern California. A few industrial warehouses mixed in with some rundown cottages and even a trailer park, a nice trailer park, full of Airstreams. Hi! Welcome, welcome, welcome. Hi. What's up Vanessa? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you guys. A wrought iron gate leads to what looks like an old auto shop because that's what it was. Now it's Eddie's gym.

There's no sign outside. We're very low-key, as you guys should probably tell. Like, is this the right spot, or am I about to get, like, robbed? Eddie's about 35. He's fit but slender with slightly shaggy strawberry blonde hair. He's not tall, but he's one of those guys who just fills the room, a bundle of kinetic energy. He's a super friendly guy, but you wouldn't want to cross him. He used to be in the Navy, first as a gunner's mate, then teaching SEALs hand-to-hand combat.

This place looks a lot like a CrossFit gym. Lots of racks and free weights and kettlebells, plus enormous ropes and tires. I figured we could do it back here. He leads us into the only quiet spot, a little office where his best pal, a French bulldog named Napoleon, hops up on a couch.

We've caught Napoleon in a quiet moment because usually he gets very excited when visitors arrive, especially if they're on bikes. And he hates bikes. Like, he goes crazy over bikes. He's not crazy in a good way for bikes. Yeah, well, no, he wants to... Whoa. You guys... Wait, is that him? Yeah. What's that noise? It sounds like a dragon. Here you go. Whoa.

I've never heard a dog make that sound. Napoleon's a pet, but he's also gotten Eddie through some tough times. He's a great little anchor in my life for keeping me centered. And whenever I start to have like a little episode of like anxiety, depression, anything like that, where I start going inward, he always brings me outward. He knows, he can sense it. He'll come around the corner and like, yo, what's up, dad?

what are you doing back there right what are you doing huh what are you doing so yeah a lot of times a license for an emotional support dog can be just a way of getting your dog on a plane without putting him under the plane in a crate but not for eddie he really needs napoleon he's gonna wear his little jacket no no i don't have my jacket for him or anything because like it's it's not i'm not looking for that but no he's just yeah he's my homie eddie's tough and he doesn't especially like exhibiting weakness but he's experienced a lot of hardship in his life

Both of his parents died within the same year, not long after he left the Navy and moved to Ventura to start his civilian life. And I kind of went through this massive depressive state at that point. Eddie spiraled, but then he pulled himself out of it. And I was like, I need to get back to what I was doing most, right? And that was instructing and teaching people. I said, well, how do I do that? Well, I need to work on myself first, and I started training again. He rebuilt himself. He transformed himself and began to train clients, building his list a little at a time.

So Eddie was doing okay, but his friends, the Jim Jones guys, the ones in Hollywood, they were doing a lot better. Eddie was mostly training cops, construction guys, surfer bums, while they were helping to get Ben Affleck super ripped to play Batman or make Henry Cavill look like Superman. You're scared of me because you can't control me. That doesn't mean I'm your enemy. Or they were turning dudes into human sculptures, like the cast of 300. Eddie wanted to be a part of that.

Hollywood is only 90 minutes away on the 101, but it seemed like another world to him. So when Eddie was introduced to Charles and Andy through the Jim Jones guys, it seemed like a golden opportunity. When I met Andy, he was like, "Oh, hey, I got some friends from Suicide Squad. Let's start working out." So you were training them before you were working on movies? Correct. So I started training them, and I knew he worked in the movie industry, but I didn't know what he did for a long time. So we started training down in Park in Santa Monica.

and I got to know them, and then finally that trust was built in between over time. Eddie could sense that his luck was beginning to turn. Still, it took a while. It was a lot of me waking up at 5 in the morning to get down there for a 7 a.m. workout, right, and then be back up in Ventura, which is about an hour and a half away, for a 9.30 class.

So it was back and forth doing that for about eight months in before I was given an opportunity on a movie. And then was Andy like, I'm producing Suicide Squad and we need somebody? Andy was like, hey Eddie, we're doing reshoots for Suicide Squad here in L.A. And do you want to be able to do it? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. So they brought me in and I worked with... The long drives and exhausting days had finally paid off. And...

This was exactly the kind of opening Eddie had been hoping for. The chance to work on a movie. And a big one. Things were breaking his way. Or so it seemed. We'll get into that after the break.

Hey, Chameleon listeners. It's Josh Dean here, your host of season one, Hollywood Con Queen. And I'm here today to talk to you about food, a thing I love. I also love to cook, but I rarely have time, which is why I love Factors. No prep, no mess meals. These fresh, never frozen meals are dietitian approved and ready to eat in just two minutes, which is about as long as it takes me to do this ad twice.

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You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. Working on Suicide Squad back in 2017 gave Eddie a taste of big-time movie training. The work of shaping actors felt important. It felt like what he'd done to change himself.

It's about that person and getting them to transform themselves. So we take, you know, a theater kid who maybe has never really worked out, and now we have to create this entire persona. Instead of just standing there, like, running lines, just running reps, we actually want to transform their mind because that's the only way that you're gonna actually get this person to come across actually believing that they are this superhero, that they are this character.

Transformation. Like Eddie transformed himself when his parents died. Slowly, over time, Eddie made some inroads and got a few more chances. But it was never consistent work. The field is very small. There's only a few trainers that are actually continuously working in the movie industry itself.

These aren't positions with job security. No health benefits, no union. It's one of those unreliable gig economy jobs. And of course, there's no formal process for breaking into Hollywood either, especially as a physical trainer. It's all about who you know. So how I get contacted a lot is by either other trainers who can't take a job, or I'll get a random call from a producer who's gotten my number from somebody else. In the training world within Hollywood, it's all personal relationships, though. Correct. So it's only...

You get hired based on you have to meet the people who hire the people, right? Exactly. So it's all like, hey, come meet this person, and then let's see if you guys click, and then we'll go do a workout together, and then we'll see about scheduling a few more, and then we'll see if we want to bring on now for the project. So it wasn't easy, but Eddie was willing to put in the work. He was on a path. And then just when it felt like he had a bit of momentum, Eddie had a terrible stroke of luck.

He was just back in the gym after a morning in LA. All of a sudden I felt this sharp shooting pain go through my leg. I felt like somebody was trying to bring a piece of metal, like rebar, like through my leg. I couldn't walk. When it comes to expressing emotions towards like pain, crying isn't one of my emotions that I express to it. But I was like,

In the fetal position, crying, I couldn't stop. And so I called the VA, tried to get him... Eddie had a cyst on his spine. Doctors at the VA hospital recommended surgery. He started to worry that his career was in jeopardy. What's going to happen? I rely on my body to be able to train and to be able to make an income and a living. Eddie agonized about whether or not to commit to the surgery. But ultimately, he felt that he just couldn't risk it. I was like, screw it, I'm not having this surgery. I'm going to fix myself.

And so, fast forward a day or two, I get a call from Mark, saying... I want to stop for a moment to explain who Mark is. Eddie's talking about Mark Twight. He founded that company, Jim Jones, that we were talking about earlier. I'm Mark Twight. And at Jim Jones, we train top tier athletes, we train military... Professionally, Mark is way up the food chain from Eddie. In fact, the guy's a full-on legend when it comes to training actors in Hollywood.

here's a clip of jason momoa you might remember him as the hulking drogo from the early seasons of game of thrones or more recently as aquaman you know he trained all everyone for like 300 and i knew that he was going to do justice league and batman and superman and when i met him i freaked out mark by the way didn't want to talk to us but he's told his side of the story before to vanity fair suffice it to say eddie was excited to hear from him anyway sorry let's go back

Last four to day or two, I get a call from Mark saying, "Hey, we've got this lady, Dee Backish, husband is CEO of Viacom. She's got a movie. She's branching out to be in production, producing this movie." It started being greenlit. This is exactly the call that Eddie had been waiting for. This guy, Twight, is like Eddie's guru, the one who helped shape his training philosophy, leading him to Andy and Charles and everyone else. And now here he was with a job?

He's like, I can't go right now. Would you want to go? And I was like, yeah, I'll do it. He goes, all right, let me put you in contact. On the one hand, the timing was terrible. Eddie could barely walk. On the other hand, this was a job that Mark Twight had been up for, to be the main guy training the whole cast on a set. I don't want to screw this up for me or Mark, right? Mark's been a great mentor of mine and a friend of mine for years, and I didn't want to lose that trust with him. And I was kind of at this point of like,

being desperate of like, well, hey, if I do this, I can make this chunk of money and then I can go in and know that I can have three or four months of downtime, right, to be able to have the surgery that I need to have. Back pain or not, it was an opportunity Eddie couldn't turn down. Dee is one of those powerful, connected people. The wife of a man whose entertainment conglomerate includes Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. She's the kind of person you need to meet in Hollywood. But she's also very private.

Vanessa looked into it. We couldn't find anything about her online. Like, no video clips, no shoot of her in a beautiful house for a fashion magazine, you know, no TED Talk, just no interviews at all. Eddie asked his producer friend, Andy Horwitz, what he thought. She's not a producer as far as I know. She's never made TV or movies. So,

So it's like, okay, I guess I could believe it because her husband is a media mogul. Maybe this is her pet project that he's financing and letting her go make her own thing. Sure. This sort of thing happens in Hollywood all the time. Maybe she's always had aspirations to produce and like this was her first thing. Dee sure sounded eager on the phone when Eddie connected with her. Seems like a lovely lady. You're a little high strung with stuff, but I also understand when you're that rich and have that much going on, you will be kind of high strung.

This was all new. Eddie hadn't dealt with any producers on this level before. On the phone, D-Backish went on to explain that the money would be excellent, far more than Eddie had ever made, and that the job would be entirely on location, 9,000 miles away, in Indonesia. ♪

All he had to do was pay for his plane ticket, and Dee would obviously pay him back later.

She even connected Eddie with her lawyer to get his bank information. So I called Mark, and I, you know, is this normal? He's like, you know, Mark's like, you know, never put your own money up, but sometimes you have to. And I said, all right, well... He checked this with Andy, too. I said to him, you know, I've never seen it done this way before. I've been a part of this business for 13 years. But...

The thing that sort of stopped me from saying, "Do not do that," was I'd never made a movie in Indonesia. So maybe it works differently there, I thought. Maybe that's the process because he didn't have his visa yet, so they couldn't actually... Yeah, who knows about visas? Anyway, Andy knew that Eddie didn't have time to worry about it. The production was behind schedule and Dee wanted him on a plane immediately, within days. So Eddie went ahead and booked his ticket.

Because his back was still killing him, he even sprung for business class. So that was like $6,000. So cool, did that, got the plane ticket out to Indonesia. If it seems strange that Eddie would shell out that much money for a plane ticket, you probably don't work in the gig economy. Because it's not really that strange. As journalists, Josh and I do this all the time.

Magazines and newspapers routinely ask freelancers like us to pay their own travel expenses. I used to work for Rolling Stone before print journalism was in so much trouble, and they would pay for my plane ticket and send me in the taxi to the airport for free. Not anymore. I once flew to Iran for a magazine story based on an assignment I got by email. I paid for my flight and all the expenses and just assumed I'd get paid back. I did, but I think it was almost a year later.

For a lot of freelancers, it's just the price of doing business. You get a call from somebody or an email, and you're off and running. So this isn't a crazy thing to us. Why wouldn't Eddie trust Dee? To get in the room, as they say in Hollywood, you had to be connected to other people. And to truly be connected to people, you have to trust them. Besides, he'd be reimbursed, and six grand was nothing compared with the sweet paycheck he had coming on the other end of this job.

Andy understood why he'd take this leap too. Eddie probably at that time was making, you know, maybe $1,000 a week, maybe $1,200 a week. And all of a sudden, like, you're doing a deal for $3,000 a week. You're doubling your income on this one gig. No one's asking questions about that. You're taking that, you're getting on that plane, you're going. Because you know that you and your mind will tell yourself, if I don't, someone else will.

Eddie would be on his own when he first got there because he was arriving well ahead of the crew. Usually we arrive about two or three weeks before production would start on a movie. That way we can scout for gyms, make contacts for everybody. It was important to get all this stuff nailed down because the film itself sounded really demanding physically. It was some kind of action fantasy adventure.

So it was about this girl who was kind of like a leopard and she's like, not like George of the Jungle or whatever, but Tarzan, sorry. Like Tarzan, but kind of like a female version of that. So they didn't send me a script. They sent me... What was it they sent me? It was just like an outline of it, right? So it wasn't a script yet. It wasn't locked in. Whatever.

Okay, so the project was a few drafts short of a final script. But who was Eddie to judge? He's not a screenwriter, and it didn't affect his job. Dee was anxious to get things moving. She asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. That, if you don't know, is a legal contract better known as an NDA. NDAs are common practice in Hollywood, where people are crazy about protecting the secrets of their projects. Once we sign an NDA, like, my lips are sealed. I don't talk about it.

Right? So I was very, like, having to tiptoe around. Except he had been talking to Mark and Andy about the job, of course. And when Dee caught wind of that, she got extremely testy. I asked Andy about it. Turns out, at one point, he actually got on the phone with Dee to smooth things over on Eddie's behalf. Eddie calls me on my cell phone, and he goes, Hey, so I accidentally let it slip to Dee that I mentioned something to you. Now she's freaking out. She's threatening me. She's saying that I breached my NDA.

"She wants to get on the phone with you "because she wants to ask you what you know about this job." And I was like, "Sure, throw her on the phone." So he connects her to the call,

And she says to me, what has Eddie told you? What do you know about what he's doing? And I go, all I know is that Eddie's got a good opportunity in front of him. And I'm really happy for him. And she goes, okay, I just want to make sure he has not told you anything about the job. He's not told you any details. And I go, no, he hasn't told me anything about the job. I hope it works out. And she goes, Eddie, call me back. And then they both hang up. So Andy thought that was weird.

But he didn't want his friend to blow this huge chance over a technicality. Hollywood has put the fear of God in these trainers because, like, they're a dime a dozen, right? The episode got Eddie properly spooked about keeping quiet. He told almost no one about the job, except for his girlfriend and her dad. Why him? Because Eddie actually needed to borrow some money to cover those upfront costs. Thousands of dollars. A few days later, Eddie was on a plane. ♪

After the break, we're headed to Indonesia, where things get a whole lot weirder. 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 favorite 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. You're listening to Chameleon from Campside Media. After a whirlwind of several hectic days, his life totally upended. Eddie found himself on a plane for Jakarta.

Dee had been all business ahead of his departure. She had the logistics dialed. She's, "All right, there's gonna be a handler on the ground that's gonna drive you around, private driver, your security also. Don't worry about anything." I'm like, "All right." And then she went quiet for a bit.

But when Eddie landed in Jakarta, he heard from her. Big time. I open up my email, I get some Wi-Fi, and I've got like 10 emails from her. She was furious that he'd missed a big conference call with the rest of the team during a layover in Japan. She's very erratic. I can't believe you did this. It's embarrassing. Duh, duh. You understand I'm putting my name out there on the line for the first time. I thought we had trust. And I'm just like, oh, my bad. Like, I...

Eddie felt like he was blowing it, and he was starting to get worn down by Dee's blustery behavior. Still, the job, the money. He went through customs, and then, as promised, a short, stocky guy met him at the airport.

The driver. He seemed nice enough, but Eddie's ex-Navy. He's worked security. He takes precautions. When I got there, immediately what I did is I took pictures of the license plate and took a picture of him. Right? I do this anyways for my safety. If I need to find out the car, if I've been robbed from the car, I've got the license plate and a picture of the guy.

That's something you do anyway? That's what I do anyways, just from my background of like traveling to foreign countries and just always being on the lookout and being aware of my surroundings and just being conscious of what's going on. The guy told Eddie that he was going to need cash to pay for various things, like the driver and some contacts they'd meet along the way. A thousand bucks should cover it. This cash, it goes without saying, would be repaid. But it needed to be exchanged into Indonesian rupiahs.

So I give him like a thousand bucks and I go exchange. And I just looked him in the eye and I said, listen, can I trust you to bring money back? He's like, absolutely. Sure. I'm like, no, can I trust you? And I just kind of lock eye contact. There's a different style of eye contact, right? That you kind of just do that. You lock in, don't mess with me, right? Bring my money back. Then he brought it back like an hourly.

Eddie felt good about that. The guy was trustworthy. And the hotel was pretty sweet. You'd be like walking into a resort in Hawaii. Nice lobby, marble floors. You know, the bellhops meeting you. There's like a nice infinity pool. Very heavily guarded. The concierge shows me like, hey, here's the gym here if you need it.

This was a good place, Eddie thought. He settled in and waited for instructions. She's no longer mad, but she's acting strange.

This was something that happened once before, back when he was making plans to leave for Jakarta. Dee had called late, acting weird, clearly fishing for, well, it seemed like she was about to get sexual. Eddie'd blown it off, figuring he'd misread her signals. But this, again, kind of felt like that. He said, hey, what are you doing? I said, oh, just trying to get in bed. I gotta be up in a few hours. She goes, well, do you have a minute to talk? And I'm like...

Eddie was worried about offending the film's producer and also worried about crossing some line. He politely begged off and tried to get some rest.

Again, Eddie tried to ease himself out of it.

And Dee didn't like it. She got mad and like, well, I just need you to be here in the morning. Don't be late, all this stuff. I need you to show up. I need you to not give the handler any problems. And I, so her aggression would make me work harder for the job, not try to force me to do something in that scenario of like, what am I wearing kind of thing.

Vanessa recognized a trick here. It was kind of like she was negging him, right? The way that pickup artists talk to girls that they like. They try to get them to go out with them by putting them down. But this was supposed to be a professional situation. It was a job, and Eddie wanted to nail it. The next morning, Eddie was up early and spent the day scouting locations with his driver. So the idea was that we'd go hit this one town, like an hour outside of Jakarta, look at the hotel in that area and the location where they want to film.

It didn't really seem like work. It felt like sightseeing. And every day, plans were canceled. Locations changed. The original idea was to scout a few days around Jakarta, then fly to Bali. But Dee said the schedule was in flux. We were supposed to take a flight on day three, and all of a sudden it was like, "Hey, well, like, we've got another flight that we're going to go on." And it's like, "All right, but now there's a change fee. Can you cover the change fee? And the lawyer will process the rest of it, right?" And now it's like, "All right." And it was only $200.

And I'm like, "Okay, all right, cool." And then it changed and then changed again. And then it was like... Eddie fronted the cash for all these changes and incidental costs, fully confident that he'd be reimbursed. Five to seven business days, they said. Also, Dee started asking if Eddie could recommend a second trainer to fly over and join him. At this point, on day four, I'm kind of like, "All right, what's going on?" Just things aren't adding up. Just something's not clicking right, you know?

as much as eddie wanted this job he forced himself to do a gut check he was supposedly part of a huge production starting immediately but somehow he hadn't met a single person from the crew it didn't make any sense eddie couldn't just hang out in jakarta indefinitely waiting for this tiger girl in the jungle production to start

And to make matters worse, the pain in his back, which he thought he could control, was becoming unbearable. I'm like, I need to get home. My back's killing me. I've got to run a gym, right? And I can't stay another week. But Eddie's a man of his word, not the kind of guy who walks away and leaves a mess. So he called a friend in L.A. to come over and take his place. He even paid some of the costs for the guy. Then, feeling like he was out of options, he got on a plane to head home.

When he landed in Japan again on a layover, Dee called, and she was pissed. I'm like on the phone with Dee, and she goes, "Well, Eddie, I just don't have a good feeling about doing this with you or anybody you've put me in contact with." And she goes, "Don't worry, I'm going to ruin your name in the movie industry." Eddie tried to stay professional. He had been a good soldier. And when he had to bail out, he'd found a backup. I was like, "Listen, I've done nothing to you. I've done nothing but respect. I've bent over backwards. I've come over here. I've sacrificed everything on my physical body.

and means to provide you the service I promised you I would do. There's no reason for you to be acting that way.

Eddie obsessed about it the whole way home. He couldn't understand how a woman in Dee's position could be so unreasonable. After that conversation in Japan where she's like, "Eddie, I'm gonna ruin you." And I was like, "There's no way that this professional woman, married to the CEO of Viacom, is acting this erratic." Right? You know, like, you have gone off the rocker, young lady, and you are in left field, and you're not even facing home plate. Like, you're just gone.

But here's the thing. Eddie couldn't just write D off either. Because what if he was wrong? What if being erratic meant that it'd all just blow over and she'd reach out the next time there was a job? That's the thing about Hollywood. The people at the top can really abuse the lower ones, almost with impunity, and they'll still come back for more most of the time. Look how long it took to catch Harvey Weinstein when he was raping those actresses.

When he got home, Eddie called Andy and that other guy from the workout class, Charles. Charles manages actors, so his job is to be connected to producers and development execs. And he knew an assistant who worked for a producer who supposedly was on the same project as Dee. And so I got her and I wrote an email. I was like, hey, I'm supposed to have a meeting with you, but I can't get in touch with you. She goes, I'm, I don't, we haven't, you know, we're on, on the books. We've never heard of you.

Something definitely wasn't right. Charles especially felt it.

Here's where for me, where like my inspector gadget lights all went off, is he forwarded me an email from Dana Goldberg. But when I saw her email address, I was like, oh, I know Dana really well. That's not her email address. So I called her. I was like, do you know anything about this? Do you know anything at all about this job in Indonesia? She's like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Not only do I know what you're talking about, it's like, why are you calling me to ask?

Alarm bells were officially ringing. Andy and Charles asked Eddie to send over all the correspondence he'd gotten from Dee. And Charles, who happens to know a lot about computers, found that the domain registry for DeeBackish.com, which Eddie's Dee had been using, was registered just two days before she first contacted him. He also found something in the NDA that Dee had asked Eddie to sign.

The wrong name in the source code. I opened up the source code in Acrobat and I saw in the source code Leslie Linka Glatter's name buried. Which meant the text of the NDA was actually ripped from another document. One intended for a different producer entirely. Specifically, the badass director of Showtime's Homeland, Leslie Linka Glatter.

Charles didn't know Leslie, but he did know her longtime agent. So he called him. And I said, do you know anything about this? You know, and he said, oh my God, this again. As in, not this story again. The story of the fake movie and the wasted trip to Indonesia. It was suddenly very clear. That woman on the phone, the one who sent Eddie to Indonesia, who was supposed to reimburse his expenses, whoever that was, it wasn't D-Back-ish.

It was someone somewhere pretending to be D-backish. Eddie was dumbstruck. Career-wise, he was back to square one.

The money he borrowed from his girlfriend's dad was gone. He had no way to pay it back. Worse, it was hard for him to see how he'd ever trust anyone in the business again. - It's not that I don't trust people now. I've just realized that everyone in Hollywood is only out for themselves, you know? The reality is someone who's smiling to you, to your face, will turn around and cut your throat and watch you bleed out.

But what was actually going on here? Vanessa and I puzzled over this for weeks. We kept coming back to that agent. The one who said, oh my God, not this again. How many other people knew about this scam? How many had fallen for it? And like, who was behind this? The more we learned, the more questions we had. On one hand, you could see this whole story as just some guy flying to Indonesia for a job that didn't work out. On the other hand, it really screwed Eddie up.

Con artists trade on belief, and there's nothing bigger than your belief in yourself. In this case, Eddie's belief that he is a great trainer who should be hired for a high-paying film gig. Losing that faith, it just completely shook Eddie's trust in humanity. But what was the goal? Why would anyone do this?

that's what andy kept asking himself what did they get out of this like i couldn't figure out what they got i'm like anytime you're being scammed they're either taking money or something from you in this he's telling us about this for days and i every time we're talking to him like what did they get from you like why the what's next gonna cash your bad checks

This season on Chameleon, we discover that the Hollywood con queen scam is deeper, wilder, and more dangerous than we first thought. You won't believe how many people have been left in the same state as Eddie. This baffling con has rocked the film industry for years, and we're about to go hunting for whoever's behind it.

I think there's a possibility that there's something that's much, much bigger than any of us really understand. After speaking with you, I could hear how humble and excited you were to get a call from us. And that's exactly what I wanted to hear. I didn't just...

Take the hook, the line and the sinker. I took the whole fucking wharf. Oh, fucking hell. I lost like six and a half thousand pounds. Funny enough too, was at a period in our lives where we were struggling a little bit. And so the timing was perfect. Right, which would explain why you might...

Not that you're willingly ignoring the red flags, but you might want to because the money is that attractive, right? Yeah, definitely. I thought this was the golden goose. I had the brass ring in my hands and kicked me in the balls and then, you know, like, pushed me out off the carousel. I totally thought I was speaking to a 70-something-year-old woman when I was speaking to her, and she starts blowing me kisses into the phone. Quick question about care. Sure. Are you feeling sick?

Was it about drugs? Was it money laundering? Were they going to bloody kill her? At this point, crying my eyes out and saying to the driver, get me back to my effing hotel right now. I'm really scared. There's probably Excel sheets tracking, you know, victims in progress.

- People I'm gonna call today is this person, new personas. - Taking advantage of people, destroying them financially, ruining people's lives. - This criminal mastermind genius whose cons weren't just

logistical they were they were art i'm asking would you be able to do this i believe i believe so i believe so just a yes or no i'm like confident people as you know i i honestly i believe so would you be the right person for me yes or no yes okay we'll leave it as that what's next gonna cash your bad checks chameleon is a production of campsite media

It's developed, created, and written by Vanessa Grigoriadis and me, Josh Dean. The executive producer is Mark McAdam. Our associate producer is Abakara Don. Fact-checking by Callie Hitchcock. Archival research by Megan Shub. Editorial support by Doug Slawin, Natalia Winkleman, and Rod Sherwood. Our technical consultant is Ben Decker of Amedica. 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 Gregoriadis, 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. And make sure to subscribe to the show on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you have any information about the Con Queen scam or were a victim and would like to share your story, please call 203-807-4453. You can also email us at chameleonpod at gmail.com. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. You know, all my life now I've been in the shadows. It's really behind the scenes. I will be there front and center. What I'm not comfortable with sometimes is my own skin.