[SPEAKER_07]: I've always been a huge believer in signs.
[SPEAKER_07]: In my experience, before something extraordinary happens, good or bad, there are always signs that it was going to happen.
[SPEAKER_07]: Tells, ways people give themselves a way before they do what they ultimately do.
[SPEAKER_04]: Milwaukee Police found body parts in a north side apartment and now they wonder if they've uncovered some kind of death factory.
[SPEAKER_07]: Jeffrey Dahmer was a serial killing cannibal responsible for the death and dismemberment of 17 victims.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were human heads and bones and very drawer we opened every cabinet we opened there was body parts.
[SPEAKER_07]: But long before he ever murders anyone, he exhibits signs, disturbing signs that something is seriously wrong with him.
[SPEAKER_07]: As a young kid, he enjoys killing and mutilating animals.
[SPEAKER_07]: That was a really bad sign that should not have been ignored, but tragically, it was.
[SPEAKER_06]: In 1985, grad student John Houser picked up a booby-trapped notebook, the blast blew his fingers off.
[SPEAKER_07]: And before Unibommer Ted Kaczynski starts sending out letter bombs in the mail, and winds up killing three people, and injuring twenty-three others, there were signs that something was seriously wrong with him.
[SPEAKER_07]: Years earlier, he quits his job as a math professor out of the blue with no explanation, moves to Montana, becomes a hermit, and writes extensively about the dozens of detailed murder fantasies he's having.
[SPEAKER_07]: All signs that something is really a skew with Ted Kazinsky, but no one in his life picks up on it until he actually starts killing people.
[SPEAKER_07]: Con artists oftentimes give themselves a way too when they're young.
[SPEAKER_08]: Maris Smith, Pastor Salfoff, is an Irish Eris and a member of nobility to cheat hard-working entertainment industry insiders out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
[SPEAKER_08]: But it was Swindle TV producer Jonathan Walton, who'd become a close friend who finally brought Smith's condays to an end.
[SPEAKER_07]: The conwoman who scammed me out of almost 100 grand as a child would go out of her way to convince other children to do weird and unusual things.
[SPEAKER_07]: like going into a stranger's house by convincing another little girl that it's her house.
[SPEAKER_07]: That was actually one of my scammers first cons.
[SPEAKER_07]: She didn't get any money from it.
[SPEAKER_07]: She was only 11 years old, but she did get the thrill and the practice of tricking someone into doing something they would otherwise never do.
[SPEAKER_07]: and that's Con artistry 101 right there.
[SPEAKER_07]: In reality, the signs that a child or teenager will grow up to be a con artist are all there from day one.
[SPEAKER_07]: You just have to know what to look for.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm Jonathan Walton, and this is Hardcore Con.
[SPEAKER_07]: Episode 4, The Homeless Billionaire.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's the early 1980s now in Alberta, Canada.
[SPEAKER_07]: There's this really creepy funeral home off 5th Street and 16th Avenue, and the 18-year-old kid named Darrell Hiluxitzer is its director.
[SPEAKER_07]: In fact, Darrell is the youngest funeral home director in Western Canada, but he really shouldn't be.
[SPEAKER_07]: because his moral compass is off, away off, and his sense of right and wrong appears to be non-existent.
[SPEAKER_07]: He was embalming bodies from a very young age.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's Glenn the Toes, author of the books, Spinning on a Barstool, and Spun.
[SPEAKER_07]: She's known Daryl for a long time, and knows him better than most at this point, as does a woman named Sandra Beard.
[SPEAKER_02]: So Sandra was Daryl's childhood friend.
[SPEAKER_07]: And one day, when Sandra and Darrell are teenagers heading out to go skiing, a workfing pops up for Darrell.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's like, I've got some paperwork I need to drop off at the funeral home to mind if we stop there first.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she's like, yeah, okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: They get in his Toyota truck.
[SPEAKER_07]: and Darrell Drive's Sandra to the funeral home where he works, and as she's sitting there on the drive over in the passenger seat of that Toyota truck with the radio blasting the Steve Miller band.
[SPEAKER_07]: Sandra's feeling a little uneasy.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean, she's just a teenager, and she's never been to a funeral home before.
[SPEAKER_07]: She knows that there are dozens and dozens of dead bodies there.
[SPEAKER_07]: Then the whole thing kind of freaks her out.
[SPEAKER_02]: They get to the funeral home.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's there, he's got his own keys to the funeral home.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's like, come on in, I'll show you around,
[SPEAKER_07]: And when they get inside, it almost looks like the lobby of a hotel.
[SPEAKER_07]: Almost.
[SPEAKER_07]: Sandra looks around, nothing seems too scary or out of the ordinary, but then.
[SPEAKER_02]: he took her through the chapel and to the urn room and then he took her to the embalming room and there was a body on a gurney with a sheet covering and she was kind of grossed out.
[SPEAKER_02]: She was like, this isn't right.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, this isn't right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's like, come on in.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, don't worry about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, don't just come on in.
[SPEAKER_07]: Have a look.
[SPEAKER_07]: The smell of that embalming room is enough to make anyone sick to their stomach.
[SPEAKER_07]: And Sandra is thoroughly disgusted.
[SPEAKER_07]: But the more she resists wanting to look at that dead body under the sheet, the more Darrell implores her to, almost forces her to.
[SPEAKER_07]: Sandra is really put off by all the tubes and laboratory equipment and scalples.
[SPEAKER_07]: And he's like, don't worry about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: None of this hurts them.
[SPEAKER_07]: At this point, for the first time in her teenage life, Sandra is now standing over a dead body.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's covered with a sheet, but it's terrifyingly obvious what's under that sheet.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean, you can see the toes poking up and the outline of a head and shoulders.
[SPEAKER_07]: Sandra suddenly realizes that the very premise that got her here in the first place, Darrell claiming that he had to drop off some paperwork at the funeral home, is a lie.
[SPEAKER_07]: A clever rose disguised to trick Sandra into standing, exactly where she's standing.
[SPEAKER_07]: Over a dead body.
[SPEAKER_07]: Literally, the last place on earth she'd ever want to be.
[SPEAKER_07]: In a sense, Darrell got her here, Tricter here, against her will, which is the exact reason he did it, because Darrell knows Sandra would never want to be standing six inches from a corpse, but the challenge of getting her to do just that excites him and makes him feel powerful and then all of a sudden.
[SPEAKER_02]: He lifted up the sheet and exposed the waxy leg of the dead person, put his hands into a fist and punch the leg.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Sandra's like, Daryl, don't do that.
[SPEAKER_02]: And he's like, why?
[SPEAKER_02]: He can't feel anything.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she was no Daryl, you just punched somebody's grandpa.
[SPEAKER_07]: somebody's grandpa.
[SPEAKER_07]: Remember, Darrell is only 18 years old at this point, physically and adult, but mentally, still a child, blissfully unaware that his utter lack of morals, then ethics, is on full display for Sandra and everyone else in this life to bear witness to.
[SPEAKER_07]: Darrell hasn't learned how to conceal his true nature yet.
[SPEAKER_07]: Oh, but he will,
[SPEAKER_07]: There's another time, not long after this disturbing incident with Sandra, where Daryl reveals his egregious lack of empathy and morality to his close friends.
[SPEAKER_02]: Daryl had been working on a teenage girl who had died in a car accident, and then he phoned up his two buddies and he said, hey, I'm working on her.
[SPEAKER_02]: She's naked.
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you want to come and see?
[SPEAKER_02]: So the two bodies are like, okay, this sounds cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's go see a dead teenage girl.
[SPEAKER_02]: Anyways, they get there.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're down in the embalming room.
[SPEAKER_02]: Then hold the set in, they three of them here, steps, footsteps, and muffled voices in Darrell quickly shoves the two bodies in a closet because of course, they're not supposed to be there.
[SPEAKER_02]: Leave them in the closet, goes running upstairs.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can hear him talking with whoever it is upstairs.
[SPEAKER_02]: In the meantime, the two buddies are in the closet Went, oh man.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is so stupid.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why did we agree to this?
[SPEAKER_02]: This is dumb.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're gonna go to hell for this We're really gonna go to hell for this.
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't care when Darrell comes back.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm leaving nothing is worth doing this and besides They were like in an embalming room surrounded by dead bodies, so
[SPEAKER_02]: Short while later, Darrell comes back down the stairs, he's ready to show him the 14-age girl, and the buddies are like, no, man, we're out of here.
[SPEAKER_02]: This is just really fucked.
[SPEAKER_07]: Keep in mind, Darrell is not just some teenage punk who breaks into this place.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's the funeral director here.
[SPEAKER_07]: This is his place of business, but clearly he doesn't care about the concept of
[SPEAKER_07]: and a disturbing harbinger of what Darrell would become years later.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's 2020 now at Korki's Irish pub in Chilawak, Canada.
[SPEAKER_07]: The smell of their famous bangers and mash fills the air.
[SPEAKER_07]: Sadly, though, they're making less bangers in mash than they used to because they're hurting for business.
[SPEAKER_10]: It was a pandemic.
[SPEAKER_07]: We were at half capacity.
[SPEAKER_07]: Glendatose is working as a waitress at Quarkies for more than a decade at this point.
[SPEAKER_10]: I am a high school dropout, a waitress in a pub.
[SPEAKER_10]: I live in a fifth wheel in a forest.
[SPEAKER_07]: What's it like living in a fifth wheel in the forest in Canada?
[SPEAKER_07]: I imagine the winters are brutal.
[SPEAKER_10]: Yes, the worst part about that is you're plumbing freezing.
[SPEAKER_10]: So we have heaters underneath the RV.
[SPEAKER_07]: Chiloac is a small, bucolic Canadian city about 20 miles north of the U.S. border at Washington State.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's surrounded by a series of tall mountain peaks, dissected by huge rivers and lakes.
[SPEAKER_07]: The air is clean and fresh here, and everywhere you turn, looks like a painting by Claude Monet or Thomas Cole.
[SPEAKER_07]: The beauty and grandeur of Chiloac will take your breath away.
[SPEAKER_07]: But Glenda Toes can't appreciate any of that now, she's stuck inside waiting tables at corkies, hoping for business to pick up as the pandemic drags on.
[SPEAKER_07]: All of a sudden, a man walks in.
[SPEAKER_07]: A man she's never seen before.
[SPEAKER_07]: He looks to be in his late 60s or early 70s.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's got thick gray hair and kind eyes, and he moves slowly and deliberately as he takes a seat at the bar.
[SPEAKER_07]: What was your first impression of him?
[SPEAKER_10]: When he walked through the door in the pub, our pub is huge, right?
[SPEAKER_10]: And I was at the back patio door, and he was walking in towards the park.
[SPEAKER_10]: And he sort of walked in with a limp.
[SPEAKER_10]: He was kind of trying to grab my very first walk was that she was homeless because that how the homeless people interact, carry themselves.
[SPEAKER_10]: So, and then I went closer to him, and then I felt bad because he was very clean and he snelt good.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the homeless people aren't making it so.
[SPEAKER_10]: Then I felt that.
[SPEAKER_10]: I was like, oh, you know, and then he sat down.
[SPEAKER_10]: He was very polite.
[SPEAKER_10]: He's making a fit here.
[SPEAKER_10]: Very polite, very ordinary.
[SPEAKER_10]: He didn't wear jewelry.
[SPEAKER_10]: He wasn't flashy.
[SPEAKER_10]: He wore ordinary clothes.
[SPEAKER_10]: Like, he was just not married because he had a need to defend.
[SPEAKER_07]: The man introduces himself as Darrell Schmidt, but he's lying.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's not Darryl Schmidt at all.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's Darryl Hiluxetzer, who decades earlier is that 18-year-old funeral director, sneaking his friends into the embomming room to poke and prod and desecrate the bodies of dead people.
[SPEAKER_07]: Word on the street is, he actually gets drummed out of the funeral home business and is blacklisted after he's caught stealing.
[SPEAKER_07]: But waitress Glendatose has no way of knowing any of that now.
[SPEAKER_07]: To her, Darrell is just a new customer at Corkeys, and she waits on him, again and again, over the course of weeks.
[SPEAKER_07]: While he's not a great tipper, he is a great storyteller.
[SPEAKER_10]: He would just tell me little stories.
[SPEAKER_10]: In Canada, we have a one restaurant called the Hackers Club.
[SPEAKER_10]: Everyone on the West Coast knows it.
[SPEAKER_10]: Basically, he's like, oh, well, you know, me and my friends started that.
[SPEAKER_10]: He knew all of the ins and outs of the business next going on with children.
[SPEAKER_10]: Like, people would come in.
[SPEAKER_10]: I can't really talk about things, but I already knew that because they're already told me.
[SPEAKER_07]: Darrell appears to have his finger on the pulse of everything business related.
[SPEAKER_07]: Turns out, he's kind of a mogul, or so it seems.
[SPEAKER_10]: He owned casinos.
[SPEAKER_10]: He got his start, actually, in came in islands.
[SPEAKER_10]: Again,inos came down and visited him one day.
[SPEAKER_10]: And he's like, I want, you know, I saw here, how you run your businesses.
[SPEAKER_10]: I'd like you to consider coming to Vegas and running MGM.
[SPEAKER_10]: And went on from there.
[SPEAKER_10]: So MGM was his first casino he was running.
[SPEAKER_10]: And then he had lots of stories of revolving these experiences.
[SPEAKER_10]: And then he just started buying casinos all over the world.
[SPEAKER_07]: Daryl has a lot of what I call stories from faraway places.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's a major red flag.
[SPEAKER_07]: I write extensively about in my book, a anatomy of a con artist.
[SPEAKER_07]: The kinds of stories from faraway places that Daryl's telling here are hard to prove false off the top of your head.
[SPEAKER_07]: And the way the mind works, when you can't prove something's false, you just accept it as true.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's what Glenda does.
[SPEAKER_07]: Darrell says he's a billionaire, a casino magnate, a restaurant tour, a philanthropist.
[SPEAKER_07]: And he's got a ton of living, breathing stories from faraway places to confirm everything.
[SPEAKER_07]: And all of these stories just roll off his tongue with a palpable certainty and confidence.
[SPEAKER_07]: There's no hesitation, there's no stutter, there's no searching for words, Darrell effortlessly talks the talk.
[SPEAKER_07]: But, when Glenda makes an off-handed remark to Darrell, telling him that he doesn't look like any billionaire she's ever seen, he's got the perfect comeback.
[SPEAKER_10]: He faded wealthy people who flaunted themselves.
[SPEAKER_10]: So he's like the real wealthy people going to hide.
[SPEAKER_10]: Like they don't want people to know they're wealthy, they don't shout it out.
[SPEAKER_10]: And to me that made sense, because if I was wealthy, yeah, I don't want people to know.
[SPEAKER_07]: And there are people like that famously, Sam Walton, the, you know, he is dead now, God rest his soul, but he started Walmart and he became a billionaire very quietly and he was notorious for,
[SPEAKER_07]: going into his stores dressed like a, like a schlob, almost like a homeless old man walking around just to see how customers were reacting to the stuff, to see how his employees were acting and no one would have ever suspected this guy's a billionaire.
[SPEAKER_07]: So there is some truth to what he told you.
[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_10]: So on to me, it made perfect sense.
[SPEAKER_07]: And in case you're wondering, what the hell a billionaire like Darrell is doing in Chilawak, Canada instead of, say, Central Pay, or the Maldives, or the Seychelles, or any other billionaire playground, Darrell has a perfectly logical explanation for that, too.
[SPEAKER_10]: He told me he was from the Cayman Islands, and he is whitest Canadian, and they came up
[SPEAKER_10]: They couldn't get back to the Cayman Islands because she wasn't a Cayman citizen.
[SPEAKER_10]: So, he could go back, but the pandemic, they had shut the island down so he decided he's going to stake it with his wife.
[SPEAKER_07]: Did you meet his wife?
[SPEAKER_10]: So, it was his
[SPEAKER_10]: lady friend.
[SPEAKER_10]: I kind of think she was also being fun.
[SPEAKER_07]: So it's this situation where he's with this woman and he's telling you it's his wife or even better and we're clever on his part.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's with this woman in previous conversations he told you he had a wife and now you're just assuming that's his wife.
[SPEAKER_10]: Oh, though she never said I'm his wife no now you just to same so he's like my wife blah blah blah she would kind of he's like she's just had foot surgery so you know and she would come in on a knee scooter
[SPEAKER_07]: Daryl's stories have so many intricate details, which makes them sound really believable, because when a regular person lies and you question them incessantly, they run out of details pretty quickly.
[SPEAKER_07]: And at that point, you can usually tell their line, but when a professional con artist lies, the more questions you ask, the more intricate details they spew.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's their innate skill, details, details, details, details.
[SPEAKER_07]: They give the impression he must be telling the truth.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's got so many details.
[SPEAKER_07]: The Cayman Islands, the daughter of the culinary school, she can't get back.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's the pandemic.
[SPEAKER_07]: Cayman Islands, what letter back it?
[SPEAKER_07]: Like so many details, which make you think, oh, this is all true, but no.
[SPEAKER_10]: And I think that the almost the more stranger the detail, the more you believe it, because you'd be like, you'd have to be insane to lie about that.
[SPEAKER_10]: I don't, you know, you're like, who would lie about something like that?
[SPEAKER_10]: Like you would get caught lying about that.
[SPEAKER_10]: It must be true, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: And the other thing that makes Darrell a brilliant con artist is his pensions for performing.
[SPEAKER_07]: For months, every time Glenda walks by Darrell's table, he's talking on his phone.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean, he's pretending to be talking on his phone about million-dollar deals.
[SPEAKER_09]: About turning away desperate investors.
[SPEAKER_09]: We're at market saturation now.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm not taking any more money.
[SPEAKER_09]: I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_07]: About trying to help a less fortunate friend turn $1,000 into a million dollars with his latest investment opportunity.
[SPEAKER_09]: I love you too, man.
[SPEAKER_09]: You don't need to thank me.
[SPEAKER_07]: Glenda is impressed with Daryl's apparent, Midas Touch.
[SPEAKER_07]: She witnesses these dramatic phone calls for four months.
[SPEAKER_07]: And now that his latest investment, Glenda Eavesdrops is blowing up big.
[SPEAKER_10]: If I hear and talk to him about it again, I'm going to ask him about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: And at that point, Glenda gets up the nerve to ask Darrell if she can invest in his latest venture.
[SPEAKER_09]: Of course you can, Glenda.
[SPEAKER_09]: I can say to you a friend now, I'm happy to help you anyway I can.
[SPEAKER_07]: So, it's important to note here that Darrell never asks Glenda for money.
[SPEAKER_07]: Instead, he creates just the right kind of fictitious scenario to trick Glenda into offering to give him money.
[SPEAKER_07]: My con artist did the same thing to me.
[SPEAKER_07]: And this tactic actually helps a lot of professional scammers avoid criminal prosecution.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because police will oftentimes say, you offer to give them your money, so it's not a crime.
[SPEAKER_07]: But they're wrong.
[SPEAKER_07]: Grand theft by inducement, or by false pretence, is a felony.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's just a bitch to prove in court.
[SPEAKER_07]: Ask me how I know.
[SPEAKER_05]: In the jury, in the above, the town of action, find it at an interior instrument.
[SPEAKER_05]: Guilty as a crime or a grand theft.
[SPEAKER_10]: The way his investments work, it was a hedge fund out of Seattle.
[SPEAKER_10]: So he's like, well, every hundred dollars would likely Danny says, because Danny's his hedge fund guy in Seattle.
[SPEAKER_10]: Danny says that it will, you know, maybe be about a hundred grand to give or take.
[SPEAKER_10]: And I'm like, wow, I could help so many people student loans and down payments on houses and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_07]: So basically, every hundred dollars will be worth a hundred grand in a year.
[SPEAKER_07]: So, Glenda scrounges together all the money she can get her hands on, which is approximately $70,000, then she hands it to Darrell to invest, and she waits.
[SPEAKER_07]: Months go by, Darrell is still coming into the pub every single day, assuring her that her $70,000 is growing fast.
[SPEAKER_07]: And it'll be worth more than a million dollars before the year is out.
[SPEAKER_07]: And Glenda plans to use some of that money to help homeless people and show up the school system in Shellawak.
[SPEAKER_07]: and started on profit, called the foundation of hope.
[SPEAKER_07]: But nearing the 12 month mark, where Darrell is supposed to hand blend to the first return on her $70,000 investment, it's just not happening, and Darrell's got all kinds of excuses.
[SPEAKER_10]: You know, we're sort of just waiting for the pandemic to...
[SPEAKER_10]: and then, of course, the Ukraine war starts.
[SPEAKER_10]: Danny's his hedge fund guy.
[SPEAKER_10]: Danny's hedge funds are being audited to make sure that there's no oligarchy activity.
[SPEAKER_07]: He would use the news headlines of the day and the calamity happening in the world, in the pandemic, the war breaks out in Ukraine.
[SPEAKER_07]: My financial guy is getting audited.
[SPEAKER_07]: As reasons why you are expecting payments in these payments are not materializing, and that's why.
[SPEAKER_07]: because of, and you could prove these things because you could read about them happening.
[SPEAKER_07]: So it just strikes you as, oh, this is real.
[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, yeah, because everything's falling into, you know, the climate of our, what was going on at the time.
[SPEAKER_07]: And not long after Darrell's excuse of Palusa, someone sends Glenda a news report from years earlier, revealing who Darrell Schmidt really is.
[SPEAKER_01]: A Calgary man, Darrell Highlick Setser, is in jail tonight.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was described by a judge as an economic predator.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he was sentenced a decade ago to seven years in prison for a $1.5 million investment fraud case, and he's now facing similar new charges.
[SPEAKER_07]: You'd think Glenda would be shocked and outraged by this news that the man she gave $70,000 to to invest is a convicted scammer, but Glenda's shock and outrage actually take a back seat.
[SPEAKER_10]: My very first instinct was really, has the name neither.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, because over till that point you're just guessing, guessing, can't figure out where is this money, why hasn't it come?
[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, this was going on for like 15 months.
[SPEAKER_10]: And it's exhausting to be sort of, and you can't plan your future because you think you're gonna be a CEO of this foundation of hope.
[SPEAKER_10]: I was studying our community to find out how best that I could help them, right?
[SPEAKER_10]: Visiting teachers and finding out what we can the best do to serve the community in that way.
[SPEAKER_10]: So I'm doing all of that, thinking this is gonna happen, which added the humiliation at the end of it,
[SPEAKER_02]: He's capable of it, it's a scam.
[SPEAKER_02]: Gosh.
[SPEAKER_10]: Their help is not convenient.
[SPEAKER_02]: No help is convenient.
[SPEAKER_07]: The first con, Daryl is ever convicted of, and serves five years in jail for, is an elaborate investment scam.
[SPEAKER_07]: A Ponzi scheme back in 2005.
[SPEAKER_07]: whereby Darrell fakes starting a company that buys used hockey equipment on the cheap and resells it to sporting good stores all over the world for huge profits.
[SPEAKER_07]: None of that is real but the intricate details makes it sound really real to investors.
[SPEAKER_07]: And Darrell dupes dozens of victims out of nearly three million dollars.
[SPEAKER_07]: gets busted, goes to jail for five years, and then while he's out on parole, he starts a whole new scam and is busted again in 2015.
[SPEAKER_07]: And he spends four and a half more years behind bars.
[SPEAKER_07]: For Conning $400,000 out of forty-five investors who earnestly believed, Darrell was buying a casino and was going to make them all very wealthy.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's the same kind of story he sells Waitress Glenda Toes over the course of a year coming into quirky Irish pub every day.
[SPEAKER_07]: And did you ever confront Daryl?
[SPEAKER_10]: I sure did, so I actually sent him the newspaper article.
[SPEAKER_10]: His immediate response was, who sent that to you?
[SPEAKER_10]: I am going to go through, I am getting done.
[SPEAKER_10]: His head of security.
[SPEAKER_10]: I'm getting done to go through all of your email Blender.
[SPEAKER_10]: You know I can do it because if I this time,
[SPEAKER_10]: Amazon, Google, whatever, he owned everything.
[SPEAKER_10]: So, and I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
[SPEAKER_10]: So, the next day, he actually came to the club.
[SPEAKER_10]: I would devastated at first point because...
[SPEAKER_10]: The balls on that guy.
[SPEAKER_10]: Yeah, he came to the club and I'm like, you really have to be here.
[SPEAKER_10]: Because I just...
[SPEAKER_10]: He's like, I should have known that.
[SPEAKER_10]: I should not have come in.
[SPEAKER_10]: I understand, I'm so sorry about please.
[SPEAKER_10]: Can you come to a different club?
[SPEAKER_10]: So, if that characters with another pub, we can go to.
[SPEAKER_10]: He's like, can you please come so I can explain?
[SPEAKER_10]: So I finished my shift.
[SPEAKER_10]: I drove over to characters.
[SPEAKER_10]: He was sitting there with me all the way back.
[SPEAKER_10]: And I said, I'm the flag.
[SPEAKER_10]: I am Darryl who sits here.
[SPEAKER_10]: I did go into business.
[SPEAKER_10]: They were dirty cops.
[SPEAKER_10]: I changed my name because I changed my name because people have a stigma with people in prison.
[SPEAKER_10]: And it was going on.
[SPEAKER_10]: And you know, she was so good.
[SPEAKER_10]: I just wanted to vote with you.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that's the thing you did want to believe him.
[SPEAKER_07]: because if he was telling the truth that would mean you hadn't wasted a whole like year of your life pursuing this insanity that was never going to happen and lost all that money.
[SPEAKER_10]: I wanted to believe that I think just.
[SPEAKER_07]: Did you believe him?
[SPEAKER_10]: And I looked at him and I said the newspaper said you were very good.
[SPEAKER_10]: And yeah, I actually kind of like worked a little bit like he was proud.
[SPEAKER_10]: Well, he
[SPEAKER_10]: like, you know, and then it went away and he was devastated.
[SPEAKER_10]: It was just this bleeding little more, right?
[SPEAKER_10]: And I was like, but I caught it.
[SPEAKER_07]: But here's the biggest takeaway from this entire con.
[SPEAKER_07]: And you all need to pay close attention to what I'm about to explain because it can have drastic and powerful ramifications in your own lives.
[SPEAKER_07]: Remember near the beginning of this episode when I asked Glenda,
[SPEAKER_10]: What was your first impression of him?
[SPEAKER_10]: My very first thought was that he was homeless.
[SPEAKER_10]: And then I went closer to him and then I felt bad because he was very clean and he snelt good and put the homeless people to us.
[SPEAKER_10]: Aren't trying to make it to us.
[SPEAKER_10]: So then I felt bad.
[SPEAKER_07]: So out of the gate, Glenda's gut tells her Darrell is homeless and the actuality he is homeless.
[SPEAKER_07]: he's recently been released from jail after serving four plus years for that casino investment scam and he's living in a homeless shelter.
[SPEAKER_07]: So when he walks in the corkies Irish pub that day back in 2020, Glandas Gut is right on the money.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's homeless.
[SPEAKER_07]: Her first impression is spot on.
[SPEAKER_07]: But Glenda does what so many of us do, she ignores her instincts, because she doesn't want to be rude or mean or unfriendly, and Daryl has a captivating energy, all professional con artists do.
[SPEAKER_07]: And he gets Glenda to fall in like with him and admire him within the first five minutes of meeting him.
[SPEAKER_07]: Remember, Con artist is short for confidence artist, and Daryl Gaines Glandis' confidence almost immediately that first day, and over the course of a year, she gets really close to him.
[SPEAKER_10]: That was the sort of, the biggest sorrow is my best friend, like died that day, because he didn't exist.
[SPEAKER_07]: He never existed, and that's the double whammy of the, of the punch, because A
[SPEAKER_07]: You got conned, you lost your money, that hurts, but then also this guy that you thought you knew that was your quote unquote best friend who you would have given your life for sworn, and yet none of that was real.
[SPEAKER_07]: He didn't own casinos, he didn't have all this money, he's not a financial investor, do good or philanthropic billionaire, he's a homeless man living at the Salvation Army who
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, yes, very much so.
[SPEAKER_07]: Now, because of the time constraints of this podcast, I'm only giving you 20% of this incredible story.
[SPEAKER_07]: There are so many more crazy details I had to next for time, but Glenn the Toes wrote two whole books about Darrell.
[SPEAKER_07]: The first one is titled Spinning on a Barstool.
[SPEAKER_07]: and the follow-up is called Spon.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm putting a link to both in the show notes and get this.
[SPEAKER_07]: Glenda only writes these books because when she goes to police to report Darrell.
[SPEAKER_10]: They told me there was nothing that I could do.
[SPEAKER_10]: I'm like, well, what can I do?
[SPEAKER_10]: I need to go for them.
[SPEAKER_10]: People know you can't warn people.
[SPEAKER_10]: And I'm like, what do you mean you can't warn people?
[SPEAKER_10]: And I'm like, what can I do?
[SPEAKER_10]: And they're like, you can just tell your experience.
[SPEAKER_10]: And I'm like, so I can tell myself, yeah, they can tell your story.
[SPEAKER_10]: So I'm like, well,
[SPEAKER_10]: I wrote a book, that book went on to win some awards, so now I'm a high school dropout and an award-winning author.
[SPEAKER_07]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_07]: After Glenda goes public with her story, Daryl flees Chilawak, he was last spotted six months ago about 80 miles west in Duncan, British Columbia, and I have no doubt he's probably still scamming.
[SPEAKER_07]: Hardcore Khan was created, written, and hosted by me, Jonathan Walton, for Jonathan Walton Media.
[SPEAKER_07]: Executive producer Evan Goldstein All editing and sound design was done by Jimmy O'Holigan.
[SPEAKER_07]: My book, Anatomy of a Con artist, the 14 red flags to spot Scammers, Grifters and Beaves, is available everywhere books are sold in print and audio, so it's like a podcast.
[SPEAKER_07]: And I recorded my audio book in the same exact West Hollywood sound studio that Meryl streep used to record her audio book, so I feel like you can kind of hear that in my read.
[SPEAKER_07]: Make sure you subscribe to Jonathan Walton Media on whatever podcast platform you're listening on so you can get alerts when new episodes drop and new seasons.
[SPEAKER_07]: And if you've got a story you think deserves its own podcast, pitch it to me at Jonathan Walton.com.