November 10, 2025 • 49 mins
We’re sharing a preview of another podcast we think you’ll enjoy, Deep Cover Presents: Snowball. Snowball follows journalist Ollie Wards as he unravels the wild story of how his own family was taken in, and taken down, by a charming con woman from California…and tries to find out where she is now. He embarks on a question to find out how she did it, why she did it, and where she is now. Financial ruin, shattered trust, and a mystery that stretches across continents and decades—it’s got all the twists and turns you'd expect from a high-stakes crime thriller…only it's all true. Here’s a preview of Snowball by the Unravel Podcast team.
If you can’t wait to find out what happens, binge episodes of Deep Cover Presents: Snowball early and ad-free with a Pushkin+ subscription. Find Pushkin+ on the Deep Cover show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Hush Ken.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey listeners, I'm Jake Halburn, host of the deep Cover podcast.
I'm dropping by to share an episode of deep Cover
Presents Snowball. It's the tale of a family who lost
everything due to one ruthless scammer. Snowball follows journalist Ali
Ward's as he unravels the wild story of how his
(00:39):
own family was taken in and taken down by a
charming conwoman from California, and he tries to find out
where she is.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Now.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
We're talking financial ruin, shattered trust, and a mystery that
stretches across continents and decades. It's got all the twists
and turns you'd expect from a high stakes crime thriller,
only it's all true. Here's a preview. I hope you
enjoyed the story, which was meticulously investigated by Ali Ward's
(01:10):
and the Unravel podcast team in Australia. And if you
can't wait to find out what happens, binge episodes of
deep Cover Presents Snowball early and ad free with a
Pushkin Plus subscription. Fine Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover
Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
(01:30):
slash Plus.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
This series contains occasional course language.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I was the MC at my brother's wedding. I did
all the usual stuff, housekeeping, toasts, I tried to crack
a few jokes, But inside I had a nagging sense
of unease about my brother's charismatic Californian bride. It was
a feeling that some things just didn't add up. I
(02:03):
didn't tell anyone how I felt. Probably couldn't have explained
it anyway. My brother was happy. That's what matters, right,
But maybe I should have paid more attention to that feeling,
because within a few months she had taken off to
the US. It wasn't just my brother's marriage that fell apart.
(02:24):
My whole family went down with it, and none of
us ever saw her again.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
This woman's a bit kind of like, you know, not
what she claims to be.
Speaker 6 (02:36):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin and look
to her.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I guess when you marry someone, you feel like you
really know them.
Speaker 7 (02:48):
And that was her allure.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
You just followed her.
Speaker 8 (02:53):
She a manipulative con artist.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Stand by we call her the Black Widow.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
This snowball is about.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Day when my mum and dad found out that they
had lost everything. It was during the Sunday lunchtime rush
in a Country, New Zealand cafe. They had ended up
(03:21):
running that cafe and that day Dad was serving behind
the counter.
Speaker 9 (03:26):
Taking orders, passing them back to the sheefs at the
back next order editor.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Then he noticed a guy joined the back of the line.
It wasn't a random customer. Dad recognized him. And when
this guy got to the front of the queue, he ordered.
Speaker 9 (03:41):
And he said to me, I'll have a so and
so and so and so, and I've come today to
tell you that we are going to liquidate you. I
almost fainted. I went blank. I could feel the draining
of blood from my face. I must have been as
(04:03):
white as a sheet.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
My Mum realized something was up.
Speaker 6 (04:06):
I'm busy bringing in dishes and doing whatever. And then
I looked at Dad. He'd stepped to one side and
he came to me, and he looked absolutely dreadful, utterly drained,
and I just carried on. We didn't have time to
(04:29):
reflect on things till later in the day.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
And what they all meant.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What it all meant was Mum and Dad had lost
their life savings more than a million dollars, and a
few days later they found out they were homeless.
Speaker 9 (04:46):
A court bailiff presented us with a paper saying our
house was to be forfeited to the bank, and I
said to the guy, I'm not going to sign that,
and he said, it's going to happen. You don't need
to sign anything. You need to throw it on the
desk and walked out.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
My parents, in their six went from living in a
leafy Auckland suburb to squatting in the basement at my
auntie's house. As my family tried to understand what had happened,
they realized they might have been the victims of an
elaborate con job. I was living overseas through most of this.
Recently I started learning about what happened, and I kind
(05:30):
of felt guilty. I wasn't there when the walls fell
down around everyone, so now I want to help figure
things out. I normally work behind the scenes at an
Australian radio station, Triple J, helping other people tell stories,
but I knew I needed to investigate the story of
my own. It was like the plot of a movie,
one you'd never expect to feature a pretty average ki
(05:52):
Wei family. Things got weird, and some of it's kind
of funny.
Speaker 9 (05:59):
There's also a lot of randomness there with the story.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Smuggled out of Armenia?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
What well explain?
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Oh my fucking god, are you serious?
Speaker 4 (06:12):
I mean, can I talk about drugs?
Speaker 10 (06:13):
This is weird, This is not how normal friendship works.
Speaker 7 (06:18):
We were like her little duckling's following behind.
Speaker 9 (06:20):
Her, lots of little intrigues.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Thirty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I don't know where this money went. They kind of
knew that there was some some fuckery.
Speaker 11 (06:30):
We joked that they were hired at.
Speaker 7 (06:32):
Its personality bubbly.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
She was rather lovely, he was rock.
Speaker 8 (06:37):
She took every fucking thing ye out.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
The stranger things get, the more questions I have about
what happened, like why did this American woman conn my family?
How did she just get away? And who really is
Leslie Minuchian? In this season of unravel, I'm going to
find some answers, and to do it, I'm going to
(07:05):
have to travel across the world to track Leslie down.
I'm Molly Ward's and this is Snowball.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
So this is recording?
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Is it?
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Is there an option to edit it afterwards?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
It's not a test. Surely there's no better subject than yourself.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
So it's one or two sentences to describe who I am. Yeah, okay,
I'm a key we mail, late thirties, probably quite typical,
trying to pay the mortgage and all the bills and
look after as everyone as best I can in the process.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I guess my brother Greg is typical in lots of ways.
He'd be happy with a ten dollar haircut, short back
in sides, but he definitely has his quirks, Like he'll
read a street map of a foreign city before bed
like it's a novel. The other thing to know about
Greg that partly got us into all of this is
that he loves everything to do with America.
Speaker 4 (08:28):
There's a term for people interested in Europe, which is eurofile.
I think I was an American a file.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
So like one night recently, I was brushing my teeth
and I got a surprise show and tell Greg, you've
just come out and shown something. What do you got here?
Speaker 12 (08:45):
It's a two dollars US note and I'm told that
they're quite rare and they're lucky for either the I
think it's the North Koreans anyway.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
That's me. Now, this whole thing starts when Greg went
off on his OI back in two thousand and six
in New Zealand, you'r oe or overseas experience. It's kind
of like a gap year after school or UNI. It's
where kiwis live abroad, drink foreign beer and have people
laugh at us for the different words we have for
stuff like chilibin. That's an eski if you're in Australia,
(09:19):
or a cool box pretty much anywhere else chilibin. Anyway,
as a kiwi, it was easier for Greg to work
in the UK than in the US, so he put
his American dreams on hold and set himself up in London.
One night, he was at a house party wearing his
favorite American football style jacket that makes him look like
(09:40):
a high school jock. So he's wandering through the party.
He steps outside to a courtyard and his ears prick up.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
North American accents used to catch my attention.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
In the corner of the courtyard, there's a woman with long,
dark hair smoking a cigarette. She's leading a conversation with
a confidence just oozing out of her Well, let's.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Throw in there, Kim Kardashian look alike, sophisticated female operative
ready to woo me as well.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
That sophistication might have been to do with her being
a fair bit older than Greg. Leslie was late thirties,
Greg was mid twenties. Greg's not a smoker, but he
thought he had smoke too. He wanted to talk, and
so he met Leslie. As they chatted in the dimly
lit courtyard, Greg started to see the world in her. Literally,
it was more.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Liked the concept of America, as you know, it's the
biggest economy in the world. What they do actually matters
to most people on the planet.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
I've never heard of another guy describing being attracted to
a girl because of the size of her economy. But
that's my brother.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
You know, if you're interested in politics, they are a superpower.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Bit of a leap to a girl you meet at
a house party, though, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Well, I guess that's how naive I was.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Greg was also taken in by Leslie's wild story about
why she was in London.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
So it originally was to escape from Hawaii because some
bad people in Hawaii were trying to attack Earth, you know,
because that frauded her and we're trying to do bad
stuff to her, and her mum and dad sent her
to Europe to escape them.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Leslie would tell everyone some version of the story. I
actually heard it myself. It went like this. Before she
was in London, Leslie owned the coolest bar, restaurant and
nightclub on the island of Maui and Hawaii. The bar
was called The Breakwater. Things were going well until one
day Leslie caught the head security guard dealing drugs out
(11:54):
of the back entrance. When she confronted him, he told
her he planned to keep selling drugs she shouldn't try
to stop them. From there, things deteriorated with the locals,
like the electricity got cut off at the restaurant at
the power company. Leslie said it all culminated one night
when she was at home hearing people breaking in. She
(12:17):
head under the bed. From there she saw the head
of security with some other guys come in carrying sugarcane knives.
While they looked for her, they were talking about burying
her in the fields. She was lucky though they didn't
look under the bed. As soon as they left, Leslie
went to the airport. Her dad charted a plane and
(12:41):
she escaped to Europe. So, according to Leslie, that's how
she ended up laying low in London, and all of
this was fascinating to Greg. He started introducing Leslie to
his mates. Their relationship seemed a normal, enormal relationship, aside
(13:04):
from the fact that it got very intense very quickly.
But you would expec out of Greg.
Speaker 13 (13:10):
He's not a game player and he wears his heart
on his sleeves. If he's into you, you'd find out
pretty quickly.
Speaker 14 (13:16):
My initial thoughts was that she was really open and friendly,
maybe a bit too friendly, But.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 6 (13:25):
She just gave a lot like she just.
Speaker 14 (13:30):
Was pretty quick to chat and want to hang out
and make plans. And I remember thinking it was quite
full on that she was so open so quickly.
Speaker 9 (13:40):
Maybe that's it.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
In London, Leslie managed a couple of bars.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
She was very vivacious, bubbly, kind of eff avescent personality,
bubbly California and it's like manner, you know, she was
kind of quite engaging, very chatty.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
You know, she knew how to sort of work people.
Phil owned one of the bars Leslie worked in. He
saw my brother coming in all the time.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
I can remember Greg. I remember Leslie bringing him into
the bar and introducing me to him. Hell of alize guy,
typical sort of keeping in London working hard, and then
he'd come into the bar during the in the evenings
to wind down a bit, and he had a you
know what. I'd probably described a certain litivity about him
at the time, and I remember sort of thinking, you know,
(14:28):
you had Leslie who was this sort of very confident
kind of you know thing, and there was Greg who
was quieter and kind of you know, so you could
see the dynamic there.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Leslie would hook Greg and his mates up with drinks.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
We suddenly were invited to a part and his plenty
blackets of beer being brought to our VIP table in
the corner in the city of London with business people around,
and it was like, I can'm a Beckpecker and I'm
(15:01):
one of the words financial capitals getting beer rained on me.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So you felt like a bit of a rock star
or something.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yes, Greg's friend Andy did wonder where it was all coming.
Speaker 13 (15:12):
From, and she said, oh, it's all going on the
tabs of different local law firms, so you know that
all come to settle up and there'd be a few
extra platters and bottles of wine. It was just one
of her crafty ways of showing all her friends a
good time.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
I suppose things were getting pretty serious between Greg and Leslie,
and as the saying goes, first comes love, then comes me,
wanting to meet your new bay. I flew to London
to meet my brother's American dream girl. My first impression
(15:45):
was that Leslie knew stuff. She had been everywhere and
done everything. I started saying, all the time, Leslie knows,
and she loved that. We joked about getting t shirts made.
I was only partly being sarcastic. Leslie told me about
how she was from Orange County, California. She said that
she was a trust fund type kid, and so were
her friends. And she said that her dad was rich
(16:07):
from selling tanks to the US Army. So it was
all pretty impressive. But I have to admit I was
nervous that I'd end up together. Somehow, Leslie seemed to
have a power over Greg, like he wasn't himself. I
wondered if it was because she was so much older
than him, but I didn't really dwell on that stuff though,
because I remember seeing how much Greg loved her. His
(16:28):
arm was constantly around Leslie, so I was happy for him.
After only a few months they moved in together. Things
were going quickly, but they were about to go into hyperdrive.
The winter after they first met, Greg proposed to Leslie.
It was snowing on Christmas Day and they were at
Disneyland in Paris.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
She honestly was buying everything like Donald Duck, Key Ring's,
Sherberts Elf, bloody hats. We had a really nice dinner
at I think that movie Johnny Depp was in parts
of the Caribbean, so they've got a really cool restaurant,
(17:11):
beautiful food.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
But so you had a ring burning a hole in
your pocket.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
Honestly, I don't even remember if I had a ring
or I didn't.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I don't think I did, But you remember the Johnny
Depp Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Look, Ollie, the whole thing is the entire time I
was in Europe. I was on a bit of a
cloud nine anyway, and it had been a great year.
It was romantic, it was snowing, everything was cool, and
I thought this is the right thing to do.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
How did she react?
Speaker 4 (17:48):
I think a little bit surprised, but also I said
yes pretty quick as well, So yeah, we were in love.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Just after he proposed, Greg followed his Beyonce back home
to the superpower he had all wanted to visit. Yeah,
first time in the United States. They expected New York
to be paved in gold. Instead, it was dirty. That
was my first Impressionationly was this. This is rough as guts.
Then it was to the West Coast to stay in
Leslie's childhood home in Orange County, California. Leslie always said
(18:28):
that she was from a rich background, so you might
imagine her house to be like a mansion off Laguna Beach. Nah,
it's as.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
Middle income America as you could possibly find.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Leslie was warm and social, but it turned out that
her mum and dad were the kind of parents that
will make you feel like you have to be on
best behavior. Her mum, Betty with almost permanently pursed lips,
and her dad Andrew, had a squint through glasses that
was somehow at the same time suspicious and disinterested.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
I was put in a room next to her parents,
and she was put in her old room that she
grew up in, be in this same place with the
same TV VHS cassettes underneath the TV.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Remember, Leslie was nearly forty years old at this point,
but it was a separate bedroom situation.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
At this house. There was a camera above the front door,
like a CCTV camera, and I thought, ah, Okay, asked
about it. You know why you guys got security, and
I remember the answer was the Hawaiians.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Something about that didn't add up for Greg, but he
was on his best behavior and let it go. He
had bigger things on his mind. He was about to
get married. To make immigration and paperwork stuff easier, as
well as to avoid any discomfort with Leslie's conservative parents,
they arranged to get hitched quickly at a courthouse in
Santa Anna. Betty and Andrew seemed happy for them. Betty
(19:57):
put on a nice dress, Andrew put on a jacket,
and he drove them to the courthouse in his Cadillac.
The ceremony was brief. The registry office was no frills,
just a vase of flowers and the corner. Greg was happy,
but he was feeling far away from home. And also
Greg thought making things official would change the sleeping arrangements,
(20:19):
but it didn't get separate.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
Bad situation. I was quite keen to not have that situation,
but I respected it. But you were married, now, Well
that's what was.
Speaker 7 (20:33):
Sort of you know.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
I thought, Hey, what else do I need to do here.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
A man, I've done the deed, but I want to
do the deed.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
Her parents were very, very conservative.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
It didn't matter too much though, because they weren't planning
on staying. As much as Greg was intrigued by America,
he thought it'd be easier to settle at home and
the zed where they were going to have a proper wedding.
But when it came time to leave California, it seemed
like Betty and Andrew didn't really want their daughter to go.
They took us out.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
To the airport to lax, and they cried shitloads.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
When we left, But it was all moving to New
Zealand for a new life. What was their thoughts on that?
Speaker 6 (21:16):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Look, mate, I don't remember ever any optimism of Leslie
moving to New Zealand. I honestly distinctly remember them being
really sad her leaving America again. Yeah. Now, whether that's
because you know it's a loved one leaving to another
(21:38):
land or another reason, who fucking knows, Like, what do
you mean by that? What would another reason be? Like
knowing that she's going to get in trouble again somewhere
else They can't keep an eye on her. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
It's late at night as Greg and I talk on
the couch. We've never talked about all this stuff. I've
kind of just wanted to help them forget. But now
that we're talking, the more we get into what happened
with Leslie, the more tangled up we get. I remember
that the story was her dad worked in the armaments industry,
and you know, we've heard that she's a trust fund baby,
(22:17):
and there's all this money in her family, and you
know she's from the sort of rich background and everything.
So none of that is true.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Say that again, Well, none of that's true, less the
part that and her dad told me that he built
water tanks for the US Army, not armaments. It was
water tanks.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I think she told me he built tanks for the
US Army, which is which, to be fair, is kind
of true. But when somebody says that they're building tanks
for the army, you don't think water tanks.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
Look, he was smart guy. He was an engineer, so
he was Iranian. He was born in Sorry he was
actually he was born in Tehran, but he was Armenian.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Leslie's bad.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
Yeah, sorry, no adopted father. I never no one's as
far as I know, well at least of all us
has meant the biological parents.
Speaker 15 (23:24):
She was adopted, right, Okay, I don't know that, But ma'am,
that brings in the other piece that actually is where
the trust fund supposedly came.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
From, was from her biological parents and what she got
left behind and then she was adopted out.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
So somebody adopted a baby with a trust fund.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
Well, this is where, like you know, there's so many
facets to someone's personality or stories all or otherwise. Eventually
you actually just kind of give up asking and accept
some of it and and live in the moment and
(24:11):
move on.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
It's just it just seems like bullshit.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
You know, well most of it is.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
I knew this story had lots of strange tentacles, but
as I'm asking Greg this stuff, every answer seems to
sprout more bizarre limbs for me to understand, even just basic,
really basic questions like how old is Leslie?
Speaker 4 (24:36):
Yeah, she's obviously a bit older than me.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
How much older?
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Well, sheared two birthdates, so I never actually know you
what do you mean she had two birthdays?
Speaker 1 (24:49):
I feel like I ask, what do you mean? A lot?
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Yeah, that's fine, in this situation, you should it was
either eight or ten years. I think, what do you
mean she had two birthdays? She had two different passports
as well. What well, we'll explained point so there was
(25:13):
a US passport, but that there was other documentation with
different birthdays.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
You didn't think that was strange?
Speaker 4 (25:24):
Well yeah, sure, but there was you know, plausible reasons which.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Were what.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
Uh, I think for memory?
Speaker 9 (25:38):
It was.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Smuggled out of Armenia.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
The passport was smuggled out of.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
Know she was Wow, so we've got that piece plus
all the Hawaiians attacking her.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Mate.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
She's an enigma.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Oh hey, bro, yeah, I want you to meet my
older brother, Simon.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
My names Simon. I'm your brother.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I'm the youngest of us brothers. Greg is in the middle.
Simon's the oldest. Simon can be intimidating, but he's also charismatic,
like he'd gate crash your party and then be the
life of it. He's got a shaved head, thick black beard.
Can you get like get in a few sentences, just
describe yourself for people listening, Like, you know, how would
you in a couple of sentences sum yourself up?
Speaker 3 (26:47):
I don't know. I'm an artist, a lover. Not no,
I'm a brother. You're like, what are you men for?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Kiwi's at home like Simon. When Leslie Minuchian turned up,
she was pretty full on. She was a real different
character to have around. It was it was just it was.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
It was a bit weird. And to tell you the
true the only interaction I've ever had with an American
I think, like a proper American, Like she's like the
quintessential kind of Kelly chick with that strong accent. I'd
just seen that on TV. Just interactions with her. I
remember it feeling a bit like TV, just because you know.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
What I mean, sort of like an intensity.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Yeah, man, wicked intensity. It didn't seem like this huge
love affair. But Greg's quite indreduced anyway. He's quite a
dreusing guy. So something that may seem strange in another situation,
I'm like, oh, this is just Greg.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
This is my brother, Gregg's ke We mates also found
Leslie quite buzzy.
Speaker 11 (27:53):
You were very quick to get wrapped up in Leslie
because she was like the life of the party. She'd
roll up with, you know, her Jaegermeister. And to be honest,
back then, I was so I was ten years ago.
I was twenty four. So here's this check? Who like
just paying for everything? Like she was always I mean,
can I.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
Talk about drugs?
Speaker 11 (28:13):
She was always supplying weed and jaeger myster.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
It's a quick way to a twenty four year old's heart.
Weed and jaga mustard.
Speaker 7 (28:20):
Oh one hundred right.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Most people were like sweet ass, but for some others
it was a.
Speaker 16 (28:26):
Bit much like for instance, she said come over, we'll
have a drink of wine. We'd go over there and
have a really expensive bottle of red or something, and
I'll mention all you that's a really nice bottle. She'd
turn up the next day with like a whole case
of this stuff and be like, this is for you.
Speaker 10 (28:41):
Every time we caught out, she was always showering us
and gifts, like giving us literally gifts, paying for everything,
free alcohol. This is amazing. But when it was every
catch up, I started to be like, this is weird.
This is not how a normal friendship works.
Speaker 7 (29:07):
Don't put it near me.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
What needs to come near you to record? You're just
looking at me? What that's my mum Julie describing my microphone.
Mom's a tall lady. She used to be self conscious.
As a teenager, one time she danced with her friend
in the girl's bathroom because she didn't think any of
the boys would want to dance with a taller girl.
But now she owns it. She's pretty sassy and sarcastic.
Speaker 7 (29:32):
Could you just put it sort of over there, down there?
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Can you stop by? Just why don't you tell me
a little bit about yourself? Hello?
Speaker 6 (29:43):
I'm the mother of three boys who I thought I
would not survive their upbringing. I love the three of
them to bits. The one we're going to speak of
is our lovely Greg, who is a kind, fast seeing, intelligent,
(30:09):
good looking young man, and that people used to even
say he looked like Tom Cruise, so that must be
a measure. But in that it seems there's been a
bit of vulnerability.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
My brother is kind, but I got to say, he
doesn't look like Tom Cruise. I reckon. Mom thought Leslie
looked like a movie star too.
Speaker 7 (30:30):
She was rather lovely.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin and look
to her personality bubbly, very yah yah American.
Speaker 7 (30:46):
You know how Americans have the accent where they going
Yeah yeah yah, yeah yeah yea yeah yeah yeah. I know,
I just know. So I said, oh, yes, it's just
American and we got on with it.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Mum ended up hanging out with Leslie like every day.
Speaker 7 (31:02):
Each day.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
She would get up and make me take her somewhere,
like let's go, and I was happy to do it
for goodness sake.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
What was the kind of plan though, I mean, what
were they going to be doing.
Speaker 6 (31:13):
It's going to buy a business in New Zealand of
a hospitality nature. One day, she'd been trawling through things
up in a bedroom and she came down and she said,
I've found it. I've got it. She said, this is
(31:35):
a sign I have to buy this place.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
And what was the sign? The sign was that she had.
Speaker 6 (31:42):
A big dragonfly tattooed across her back.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
And so the cafe is called the Dragonfly. She's got
a dragonfly tattoo.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
It's a sign meant to be.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
The Dragonfly Cafe was in a small town called Maticana,
an hours drive north of Auckland. Around Medicana, lush native
bush and farms sit next to sandy white beaches. There's
a farmer's market. Vibe sometimes ducks around town from the river,
which is lit up by fairy lights at night. The
Dragonfly was on the main road leading into Mattakana. At
(32:17):
the front, a gift shop sold scented candles and beach
house knickknacks. On the back patio, the cafe looked down
a slope towards a natural waterfall, all surrounded by native bush.
If you looked back up towards the cafe, you'd see
a house with a log cabin feel to it, with
exposed wooden beams. This is where Greg and Leslie would live.
Speaker 7 (32:38):
It was lovely, super staff.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
And you remember how much it was going to be.
Speaker 7 (32:44):
Worth over a million.
Speaker 6 (32:52):
Because it had the house with it in the beautiful
land and the business.
Speaker 9 (33:02):
Okay, you ready to rock and roll?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
And finally from our fam, this is my dad, David.
Speaker 9 (33:08):
I am a Kiwi fellow who has had lots of jobs,
met lots of people. I feel fairly comfortable in myself.
I have developed a fairly strong Christian faith and I
think that's served me very well my whole life.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Dad has looked the same. He's got a round, warm face,
incapable of showing anger, square glasses, silver gray hair, just
only on the sides. Maybe it's because I've been away
from home for so long. But sometimes I hear Dad
like Murray the manager from Flight of the Concords. Oh,
you're like a cool looking pair of it. It's Dad
was there to help Leslie get set up when she
(33:48):
came to New Zealand.
Speaker 9 (33:49):
So she needed a lawyer in order to look at
properties and do some conveyancing. And I thought, poor girl,
she doesn't know anybody. She can have our lawyer, So
I introduced her to our lawyer.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
This Auckland based lawyer had been acting for mom and
dad for twenty five years. When my parents bought their
house in nineteen eighty two, he was there. Dad bought
a business that hired out party equipment. He worked on that.
It made sense to get him on the job for
Leslie too, now that she was part of the family.
With that sorted, Leslie went to New Zealand's state owned bank,
(34:23):
creatively titled Kiwi Bank, and she asked for a loan.
The conditions included Leslie proving to Kiwi Bank that she
had a trust fund. She was able to show the
bank that she had five million US dollars in her
trust fund and five thousand coming to her each month
for life. But Leslie had only just come to New
Zealand and she was still on a tourist visa. Another
(34:45):
condition of the loan was having a keywi garanteur. Dad
had just sold his party higher company and retired, so
it seemed natural for them to get involved.
Speaker 9 (34:53):
There were a lot of people that were sort of
saying things. She're cautioning us, are you sure that's a
huge thing to do? And I was thinking, Leslie seems
to be on top of all this. She has all
this fantastic references from running restaurants over in America and
(35:16):
in Hawaii. She talks to talk. She convinced our lawyer
that it was a good thing to do.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
I tried to talk to this lawyer, but he didn't
want to be interviewed. And in case that happened later,
he said he never told mom and Dad that it
was a great venture. He said he doesn't give that
kind of advice to his clients. But Dad remembers things differently.
Speaker 9 (35:37):
He said to me, you don't have to do anything, David,
because I would say she's a human dynamo. It his words,
she is a human dynamo. We're thinking every now and again,
you've got to stick your neck out. You stick your
neck out and it'll pay off. So we guaranteed alone
(35:59):
one hundred percent loan to purchase one and a half
million dollars worth of property and business. Was a lawful
lot on trust here on my part and our part
huge amount we did stick our niques out.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Greg and Leslie moved into the house at the Dragonfly
over the last few months of two thousand and seven.
Greg wouldn't have much to do with the cafe. He
had his own job. Leslie was in charge. But soon
my brother Simon got roped in on the food side
of the business.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
So I may embellished the story, but I remember it
being just a few days before the cafe opened, shared
a blue with the chef and so and then so
I was just like the chef.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Isn't he some French? Go? And he quit. When the
cafe reopened, there was a lot of buzz around it.
Things were going well. Leslie was making an impact on
the chilled out Matticana community. Here was this California power
business lady shaking things up. The local magazine did a
write up Now under its new owner, Leslie Minuchian, who
(37:08):
was previously owned rest staurants and Lake Tahoe in the
US and in Hawaii.
Speaker 7 (37:12):
Dragonfly is getting better by the day.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Meanwhile, preparations were underway for a massive wedding, but it
soon became clear that none of Leslie's trust fun friends
from America were going to make it. She said none
of them could hack the thirteen hour flight to Auckland.
So key, we girls that Leslie had known for only
a matter of months started getting the call up to
the bridal party, like Carla, who was back in London.
Speaker 14 (37:35):
I remember sitting at my desk in Hoxton and at
my office and I remember thinking, fuck, this is so
weird and sort of saying to a few of the
girls in the showroom, like, so I've just asked to
be a bridesmaid to this girl I barely know. In
New Zealand in January.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
One of the other bridesmaids, Alisha, hadn't known Leslie for
long either.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
I was asked to be a bridesmage, which was quite surprising.
I think she said something about her cousin couldn't come,
so I think I was kind of filling in, like
she didn't really have any family here. And yeah, I
mean I guess I was happy.
Speaker 10 (38:13):
To do it because we were you know, we were
close at the time.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
After everything that went down, my mum stopped referring to
it as the wedding. She renamed it, and our family
it's now known as the Event. The event happened on
a blue sky summer day, just after Christmas in a
small colonial era church with painted white arches and stiff
wooden pews.
Speaker 9 (38:37):
And it just was really surreal. It was like I
was kind of acting.
Speaker 14 (38:40):
I was acting in a sitcom or something like that
was my role to arrive and then then I was going.
Speaker 4 (38:45):
To go walk, you know, down Ireland.
Speaker 6 (38:47):
It was.
Speaker 7 (38:48):
It was so weird.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
The ceremony was pretty standard a priest, those Bible readings
from every church wedding ever, Love is patient, Love is kind.
After that, the party started straight away in a hall
next door. I was living in London by this point
and I had flown home especially for the wedding. I
was happy to be the MC. I remember making a
(39:10):
joke like Geez, I go away for a couple of
months and I come back and Greg's got a cafe,
a house and a waterfall. I can't find any recordings
of that night. Pretty much everyone we know in New
Zealand was there. More than one hundred and fifty people came.
There were even wedding crashes watching from the deck. But
(39:31):
here's the weird thing. Almost all the guests were from
Greg's side. The only guests that weren't already friends or
family of Greg's were Leslie's parents, Betty and Andrew.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
There was two people, yeah, no friends, no family. I
think the weirdest thing, and I think the weirdest thing
for everyone just about the event was the parent thing.
Her parents and just how I think there was a
lot of this. They would just stand offish, they were
just like, I don't know, it was just fucking weird.
(40:05):
I don't remember really being able to talk to them
at all. There was no really interaction.
Speaker 6 (40:09):
They were very quiet and you couldn't raise a lip
of a smile.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
You couldn't get a word out of them.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
They looked.
Speaker 7 (40:21):
Very she looked very pale and colorless.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
The best man, Nat made a special effort with Leslie's parents.
Speaker 13 (40:32):
They were very, very hard to try and make them
feel welcome.
Speaker 9 (40:36):
So I just remember at one point just walking away thinking,
oh well.
Speaker 8 (40:40):
I remember joking with Matt about the fact that potentially
you know Leslie's parents, even her real parents, or did
she just ring in a couple of actives.
Speaker 16 (40:49):
They seemed a little bit standing like, because they were
sort of a bit there.
Speaker 7 (40:53):
But not there.
Speaker 11 (40:53):
We joked that they were hired actors because yeah, I
don't know, they just because they definitely didn't fit the
profile of like who you think her parents would be,
and they were kind of weird and quiet, and there
wasn't like a lot of love and like vibe being
relationship between the two like you would expect from a
parent and child.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Like I didn't like.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
I honestly, like to this day, I have no idea
if that's appearance, no idea. I wouldn't be surprised if
that as not. I don't remember seeing any kind of
love go on.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
I remember Betty and Andrew they brought me a pair
of Levi jeans as a gift. That was cool, but
they didn't really talk to me either. I still don't
know what they knew about what was going on or
what their role was in all of this.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I think they kind of knew that there was some
some fuckery involved, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
It wasn't long after the wedding that people started to
notice some of that fuckery.
Speaker 11 (41:48):
I was up in room or sharps, and I bumped
into Leslie and she had just come out of the
public library and she was showing me this document that
she had sent over from the US because she was
trying to get her driver's license in New Zealand, but
she had to submit like.
Speaker 4 (42:06):
A driving record from the US.
Speaker 11 (42:08):
And we were having a laugh because she had all
these duy and some like suspended licenses or something like
a She had like a few things, and she was
in the public library, no joke, she was twinking out
these from her record that obviously she had asked for
and been sent over from the US, twinking these out
and then rephotocoppying them and then touching them up and
(42:29):
rephotocopping them until it looked legit.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
By the way, twink is one of those words that
people laugh at us Kiwi's about it's wide out liquid
eraser twink.
Speaker 11 (42:39):
And I just remember standing on the road with her,
like so vividly, just her showing me the document in
her and not having a laugh about it, and I
was thinking, wow, like that I think was the first
time I was like, she's like she's got some secrets,
you know, like you're hiding some stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
End up at the Dragonfly Cafa. Things were starting to
go wrong.
Speaker 8 (42:59):
We ran out of water, so we didn't have access
in the kitchen to water, and so Gregan likewise were
kind of running back and forward to the house trying
to get like bottles of water, trying to get stuff
to wash dishes. And there were just so many days
like that where something was going wrong and there was
just no fixing it. I don't think Leslie was around
(43:22):
for much of that. I remember coming in really strong
at the beginning and then kind of not being around
and all that stuff were like what's happening.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
There was one moment where it was a bit of
a watershed moment for me, and that's when the milk
supplier for the cafe arrived and then I said today,
how are you? And he basically said that he had
never been paid for milk. It wasn't his first attempt
(43:54):
at getting money. I could tell that it was a
bit worked up about it, and you know, I thought,
this is this is, this is not right. And I
recall talking to Leslie about it and she said, as
she did with lots of things, I'll take care of it,
don't get involved, leave it to me.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
The Dragonfly was becoming a total cluster. A bunch of
people were saying they weren't getting paid.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
I became very frustrated that I couldn't access and information,
couldn't I couldn't ever get to the bottom of anything.
Leslie almost got angry at me for attempting to try
and help and get more involved. The more it happened,
(44:41):
the more angry she got at me, the more frustrated
I got, and that became a real strain.
Speaker 9 (44:46):
I started to feel very uneasy, and we needed to
find out what was going on. We weren't able to
find out a heck of a lot from the bank.
We weren't actually owners of the business, we weren't a
signatories to anything. Even Greg wasn't able to find out
(45:09):
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
But you were the guarantees, and you know, you guys
would put money on the line, but you would signed
up to be the guarantees, but not signed up to
be able to see anything. Isn't that weird?
Speaker 9 (45:22):
You could say it like that, But I did follow
my lawyer's advice that she knows what she's doing. She's
a human dynamo.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Leslie would spend most of the day locked in the house,
which had become a sanctuary from the outside world and
the questions people were starting to ask. A date was
set for a meeting where an accountant was going to
start combing through the books, but Leslie didn't show up.
Greg knew he needed to do something, so he came
up with a plan.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
If she was here, she would block us learning about
what the reality was. I told her to go and
see appearance and go over holiday, get out of the country.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
And you actually thought that would be an opportunity to
look around.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Probably it was the only way, yep.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
And what was you know, if you don't mind me asking,
what was the kind of relationship like at that point.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Frosty, I'm just completely untrusting on both sides.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
At pretty short notice, Leslie booked a flight to America
to visit her family, so my mum and dad would
have to step up and look after the cafe. As
Greg drove her to Auckland Airport, things were tense. There
was a lot unset, but Greg wanted to work this
whole mess out and get back to life with Leslie
when she got back from the States.
Speaker 4 (46:50):
So we're parked, checked and formalodies are done. It's me
and Leslie now walking upstairs to the actual departure gate,
where there's not a lot of love going on. There
(47:11):
was probably a nervous but cold hug. I hope to
see you again. Let's try and work this out, and she,
right at the last moment, put it right out there
(47:31):
that Greg, the snowball is about to hit you.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Next episode, the Snowball hits. We cried.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
We just were destroyed.
Speaker 9 (47:51):
That was a fundamental wow moment for me when you
presented that to a bank and they.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Accepted adrenaline is my best friend.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
That's quite calculated. That's fucking out there.
Speaker 15 (48:06):
Somebody has been wronged using my name and rightfully believes
that the person who wrong them is meat.
Speaker 6 (48:11):
I found it, he said, your janitors should have found it.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
How often would you go in there and look?
Speaker 9 (48:17):
At least once a week.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
It's so weird.
Speaker 9 (48:24):
It is weird.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
It is weird. Snowball is hosted and produced by me,
Polly Warts. Big ups to my brave brother Greg and
my entire family for letting me tell this story unravels
totally stoic and awesome. Supervising producer is Tim Roxborough. Our
super diligent audio producer is Emma Lancaster. Assisting with audio
(48:50):
production is Shane Anderson, who is also our whit smart
fact checker. Sound designed by the very creative Left and
Right Panning John Jacobs and Tim Jenkins. A big thanks
to my prolific and legendary mates from Flight Facilities for
the funky ass Unravel theme song. Additional music by the
(49:12):
talented Chunsmith Brice Holliday. You can check out some behind
the scenes stuff over at my Instagram at Olly Ward's
O l l i e WRDS. Unravel is a product
of ABC Audio Studios, led by the abuliant, thoughtful and
patient Kelly Reardon and Unravels expert and excitable Executive producer
(49:39):
is Ian Walker.
Hush Ken.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hey listeners, I'm Jake Halburn, host of the deep Cover podcast.
I'm dropping by to share an episode of deep Cover
Presents Snowball. It's the tale of a family who lost
everything due to one ruthless scammer. Snowball follows journalist Ali
Ward's as he unravels the wild story of how his
(00:39):
own family was taken in and taken down by a
charming conwoman from California, and he tries to find out
where she is.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Now.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
We're talking financial ruin, shattered trust, and a mystery that
stretches across continents and decades. It's got all the twists
and turns you'd expect from a high stakes crime thriller,
only it's all true. Here's a preview. I hope you
enjoyed the story, which was meticulously investigated by Ali Ward's
(01:10):
and the Unravel podcast team in Australia. And if you
can't wait to find out what happens, binge episodes of
deep Cover Presents Snowball early and ad free with a
Pushkin Plus subscription. Fine Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover
Show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm,
(01:30):
slash Plus.
Speaker 4 (01:34):
This series contains occasional course language.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
I was the MC at my brother's wedding. I did
all the usual stuff, housekeeping, toasts, I tried to crack
a few jokes, But inside I had a nagging sense
of unease about my brother's charismatic Californian bride. It was
a feeling that some things just didn't add up. I
(02:03):
didn't tell anyone how I felt. Probably couldn't have explained
it anyway. My brother was happy. That's what matters, right,
But maybe I should have paid more attention to that feeling,
because within a few months she had taken off to
the US. It wasn't just my brother's marriage that fell apart.
(02:24):
My whole family went down with it, and none of
us ever saw her again.
Speaker 5 (02:31):
This woman's a bit kind of like, you know, not
what she claims to be.
Speaker 6 (02:36):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin and look
to her.
Speaker 4 (02:43):
I guess when you marry someone, you feel like you
really know them.
Speaker 7 (02:48):
And that was her allure.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
You just followed her.
Speaker 8 (02:53):
She a manipulative con artist.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
Stand by we call her the Black Widow.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
This snowball is about.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Day when my mum and dad found out that they
had lost everything. It was during the Sunday lunchtime rush
in a Country, New Zealand cafe. They had ended up
(03:21):
running that cafe and that day Dad was serving behind
the counter.
Speaker 9 (03:26):
Taking orders, passing them back to the sheefs at the
back next order editor.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Then he noticed a guy joined the back of the line.
It wasn't a random customer. Dad recognized him. And when
this guy got to the front of the queue, he ordered.
Speaker 9 (03:41):
And he said to me, I'll have a so and
so and so and so, and I've come today to
tell you that we are going to liquidate you. I
almost fainted. I went blank. I could feel the draining
of blood from my face. I must have been as
(04:03):
white as a sheet.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
My Mum realized something was up.
Speaker 6 (04:06):
I'm busy bringing in dishes and doing whatever. And then
I looked at Dad. He'd stepped to one side and
he came to me, and he looked absolutely dreadful, utterly drained,
and I just carried on. We didn't have time to
(04:29):
reflect on things till later in the day.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
And what they all meant.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
What it all meant was Mum and Dad had lost
their life savings more than a million dollars, and a
few days later they found out they were homeless.
Speaker 9 (04:46):
A court bailiff presented us with a paper saying our
house was to be forfeited to the bank, and I
said to the guy, I'm not going to sign that,
and he said, it's going to happen. You don't need
to sign anything. You need to throw it on the
desk and walked out.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
My parents, in their six went from living in a
leafy Auckland suburb to squatting in the basement at my
auntie's house. As my family tried to understand what had happened,
they realized they might have been the victims of an
elaborate con job. I was living overseas through most of this.
Recently I started learning about what happened, and I kind
(05:30):
of felt guilty. I wasn't there when the walls fell
down around everyone, so now I want to help figure
things out. I normally work behind the scenes at an
Australian radio station, Triple J, helping other people tell stories,
but I knew I needed to investigate the story of
my own. It was like the plot of a movie,
one you'd never expect to feature a pretty average ki
(05:52):
Wei family. Things got weird, and some of it's kind
of funny.
Speaker 9 (05:59):
There's also a lot of randomness there with the story.
Speaker 4 (06:03):
Smuggled out of Armenia?
Speaker 1 (06:06):
What well explain?
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Oh my fucking god, are you serious?
Speaker 4 (06:12):
I mean, can I talk about drugs?
Speaker 10 (06:13):
This is weird, This is not how normal friendship works.
Speaker 7 (06:18):
We were like her little duckling's following behind.
Speaker 9 (06:20):
Her, lots of little intrigues.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Thirty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
I don't know where this money went. They kind of
knew that there was some some fuckery.
Speaker 11 (06:30):
We joked that they were hired at.
Speaker 7 (06:32):
Its personality bubbly.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
She was rather lovely, he was rock.
Speaker 8 (06:37):
She took every fucking thing ye out.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
The stranger things get, the more questions I have about
what happened, like why did this American woman conn my family?
How did she just get away? And who really is
Leslie Minuchian? In this season of unravel, I'm going to
find some answers, and to do it, I'm going to
(07:05):
have to travel across the world to track Leslie down.
I'm Molly Ward's and this is Snowball.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
So this is recording?
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Is it?
Speaker 4 (07:43):
Is there an option to edit it afterwards?
Speaker 1 (07:44):
It's not a test. Surely there's no better subject than yourself.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
So it's one or two sentences to describe who I am. Yeah, okay,
I'm a key we mail, late thirties, probably quite typical,
trying to pay the mortgage and all the bills and
look after as everyone as best I can in the process.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
I guess my brother Greg is typical in lots of ways.
He'd be happy with a ten dollar haircut, short back
in sides, but he definitely has his quirks, Like he'll
read a street map of a foreign city before bed
like it's a novel. The other thing to know about
Greg that partly got us into all of this is
that he loves everything to do with America.
Speaker 4 (08:28):
There's a term for people interested in Europe, which is eurofile.
I think I was an American a file.
Speaker 1 (08:36):
So like one night recently, I was brushing my teeth
and I got a surprise show and tell Greg, you've
just come out and shown something. What do you got here?
Speaker 12 (08:45):
It's a two dollars US note and I'm told that
they're quite rare and they're lucky for either the I
think it's the North Koreans anyway.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
That's me. Now, this whole thing starts when Greg went
off on his OI back in two thousand and six
in New Zealand, you'r oe or overseas experience. It's kind
of like a gap year after school or UNI. It's
where kiwis live abroad, drink foreign beer and have people
laugh at us for the different words we have for
stuff like chilibin. That's an eski if you're in Australia,
(09:19):
or a cool box pretty much anywhere else chilibin. Anyway,
as a kiwi, it was easier for Greg to work
in the UK than in the US, so he put
his American dreams on hold and set himself up in London.
One night, he was at a house party wearing his
favorite American football style jacket that makes him look like
(09:40):
a high school jock. So he's wandering through the party.
He steps outside to a courtyard and his ears prick up.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
North American accents used to catch my attention.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
In the corner of the courtyard, there's a woman with long,
dark hair smoking a cigarette. She's leading a conversation with
a confidence just oozing out of her Well, let's.
Speaker 4 (10:02):
Throw in there, Kim Kardashian look alike, sophisticated female operative
ready to woo me as well.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
That sophistication might have been to do with her being
a fair bit older than Greg. Leslie was late thirties,
Greg was mid twenties. Greg's not a smoker, but he
thought he had smoke too. He wanted to talk, and
so he met Leslie. As they chatted in the dimly
lit courtyard, Greg started to see the world in her. Literally,
it was more.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Liked the concept of America, as you know, it's the
biggest economy in the world. What they do actually matters
to most people on the planet.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
I've never heard of another guy describing being attracted to
a girl because of the size of her economy. But
that's my brother.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
You know, if you're interested in politics, they are a superpower.
Speaker 1 (10:56):
Bit of a leap to a girl you meet at
a house party, though, isn't it.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Well, I guess that's how naive I was.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Greg was also taken in by Leslie's wild story about
why she was in London.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
So it originally was to escape from Hawaii because some
bad people in Hawaii were trying to attack Earth, you know,
because that frauded her and we're trying to do bad
stuff to her, and her mum and dad sent her
to Europe to escape them.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Leslie would tell everyone some version of the story. I
actually heard it myself. It went like this. Before she
was in London, Leslie owned the coolest bar, restaurant and
nightclub on the island of Maui and Hawaii. The bar
was called The Breakwater. Things were going well until one
day Leslie caught the head security guard dealing drugs out
(11:54):
of the back entrance. When she confronted him, he told
her he planned to keep selling drugs she shouldn't try
to stop them. From there, things deteriorated with the locals,
like the electricity got cut off at the restaurant at
the power company. Leslie said it all culminated one night
when she was at home hearing people breaking in. She
(12:17):
head under the bed. From there she saw the head
of security with some other guys come in carrying sugarcane knives.
While they looked for her, they were talking about burying
her in the fields. She was lucky though they didn't
look under the bed. As soon as they left, Leslie
went to the airport. Her dad charted a plane and
(12:41):
she escaped to Europe. So, according to Leslie, that's how
she ended up laying low in London, and all of
this was fascinating to Greg. He started introducing Leslie to
his mates. Their relationship seemed a normal, enormal relationship, aside
(13:04):
from the fact that it got very intense very quickly.
But you would expec out of Greg.
Speaker 13 (13:10):
He's not a game player and he wears his heart
on his sleeves. If he's into you, you'd find out
pretty quickly.
Speaker 14 (13:16):
My initial thoughts was that she was really open and friendly,
maybe a bit too friendly, But.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 6 (13:25):
She just gave a lot like she just.
Speaker 14 (13:30):
Was pretty quick to chat and want to hang out
and make plans. And I remember thinking it was quite
full on that she was so open so quickly.
Speaker 9 (13:40):
Maybe that's it.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
In London, Leslie managed a couple of bars.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
She was very vivacious, bubbly, kind of eff avescent personality,
bubbly California and it's like manner, you know, she was
kind of quite engaging, very chatty.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
You know, she knew how to sort of work people.
Phil owned one of the bars Leslie worked in. He
saw my brother coming in all the time.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
I can remember Greg. I remember Leslie bringing him into
the bar and introducing me to him. Hell of alize guy,
typical sort of keeping in London working hard, and then
he'd come into the bar during the in the evenings
to wind down a bit, and he had a you
know what. I'd probably described a certain litivity about him
at the time, and I remember sort of thinking, you know,
(14:28):
you had Leslie who was this sort of very confident
kind of you know thing, and there was Greg who
was quieter and kind of you know, so you could
see the dynamic there.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
Leslie would hook Greg and his mates up with drinks.
Speaker 4 (14:40):
We suddenly were invited to a part and his plenty
blackets of beer being brought to our VIP table in
the corner in the city of London with business people around,
and it was like, I can'm a Beckpecker and I'm
(15:01):
one of the words financial capitals getting beer rained on me.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
So you felt like a bit of a rock star
or something.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Yes, Greg's friend Andy did wonder where it was all coming.
Speaker 13 (15:12):
From, and she said, oh, it's all going on the
tabs of different local law firms, so you know that
all come to settle up and there'd be a few
extra platters and bottles of wine. It was just one
of her crafty ways of showing all her friends a
good time.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
I suppose things were getting pretty serious between Greg and Leslie,
and as the saying goes, first comes love, then comes me,
wanting to meet your new bay. I flew to London
to meet my brother's American dream girl. My first impression
(15:45):
was that Leslie knew stuff. She had been everywhere and
done everything. I started saying, all the time, Leslie knows,
and she loved that. We joked about getting t shirts made.
I was only partly being sarcastic. Leslie told me about
how she was from Orange County, California. She said that
she was a trust fund type kid, and so were
her friends. And she said that her dad was rich
(16:07):
from selling tanks to the US Army. So it was
all pretty impressive. But I have to admit I was
nervous that I'd end up together. Somehow, Leslie seemed to
have a power over Greg, like he wasn't himself. I
wondered if it was because she was so much older
than him, but I didn't really dwell on that stuff though,
because I remember seeing how much Greg loved her. His
(16:28):
arm was constantly around Leslie, so I was happy for him.
After only a few months they moved in together. Things
were going quickly, but they were about to go into hyperdrive.
The winter after they first met, Greg proposed to Leslie.
It was snowing on Christmas Day and they were at
Disneyland in Paris.
Speaker 4 (16:50):
She honestly was buying everything like Donald Duck, Key Ring's,
Sherberts Elf, bloody hats. We had a really nice dinner
at I think that movie Johnny Depp was in parts
of the Caribbean, so they've got a really cool restaurant,
(17:11):
beautiful food.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
But so you had a ring burning a hole in
your pocket.
Speaker 4 (17:16):
Honestly, I don't even remember if I had a ring
or I didn't.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
I don't think I did, But you remember the Johnny
Depp Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant.
Speaker 4 (17:25):
Look, Ollie, the whole thing is the entire time I
was in Europe. I was on a bit of a
cloud nine anyway, and it had been a great year.
It was romantic, it was snowing, everything was cool, and
I thought this is the right thing to do.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
How did she react?
Speaker 4 (17:48):
I think a little bit surprised, but also I said
yes pretty quick as well, So yeah, we were in love.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Just after he proposed, Greg followed his Beyonce back home
to the superpower he had all wanted to visit. Yeah,
first time in the United States. They expected New York
to be paved in gold. Instead, it was dirty. That
was my first Impressionationly was this. This is rough as guts.
Then it was to the West Coast to stay in
Leslie's childhood home in Orange County, California. Leslie always said
(18:28):
that she was from a rich background, so you might
imagine her house to be like a mansion off Laguna Beach. Nah,
it's as.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
Middle income America as you could possibly find.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
Leslie was warm and social, but it turned out that
her mum and dad were the kind of parents that
will make you feel like you have to be on
best behavior. Her mum, Betty with almost permanently pursed lips,
and her dad Andrew, had a squint through glasses that
was somehow at the same time suspicious and disinterested.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
I was put in a room next to her parents,
and she was put in her old room that she
grew up in, be in this same place with the
same TV VHS cassettes underneath the TV.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Remember, Leslie was nearly forty years old at this point,
but it was a separate bedroom situation.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
At this house. There was a camera above the front door,
like a CCTV camera, and I thought, ah, Okay, asked
about it. You know why you guys got security, and
I remember the answer was the Hawaiians.
Speaker 1 (19:36):
Something about that didn't add up for Greg, but he
was on his best behavior and let it go. He
had bigger things on his mind. He was about to
get married. To make immigration and paperwork stuff easier, as
well as to avoid any discomfort with Leslie's conservative parents,
they arranged to get hitched quickly at a courthouse in
Santa Anna. Betty and Andrew seemed happy for them. Betty
(19:57):
put on a nice dress, Andrew put on a jacket,
and he drove them to the courthouse in his Cadillac.
The ceremony was brief. The registry office was no frills,
just a vase of flowers and the corner. Greg was happy,
but he was feeling far away from home. And also
Greg thought making things official would change the sleeping arrangements,
(20:19):
but it didn't get separate.
Speaker 4 (20:21):
Bad situation. I was quite keen to not have that situation,
but I respected it. But you were married, now, Well
that's what was.
Speaker 7 (20:33):
Sort of you know.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
I thought, Hey, what else do I need to do here.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
A man, I've done the deed, but I want to
do the deed.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
Her parents were very, very conservative.
Speaker 1 (20:47):
It didn't matter too much though, because they weren't planning
on staying. As much as Greg was intrigued by America,
he thought it'd be easier to settle at home and
the zed where they were going to have a proper wedding.
But when it came time to leave California, it seemed
like Betty and Andrew didn't really want their daughter to go.
They took us out.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
To the airport to lax, and they cried shitloads.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
When we left, But it was all moving to New
Zealand for a new life. What was their thoughts on that?
Speaker 6 (21:16):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (21:16):
Look, mate, I don't remember ever any optimism of Leslie
moving to New Zealand. I honestly distinctly remember them being
really sad her leaving America again. Yeah. Now, whether that's
because you know it's a loved one leaving to another
(21:38):
land or another reason, who fucking knows, Like, what do
you mean by that? What would another reason be? Like
knowing that she's going to get in trouble again somewhere
else They can't keep an eye on her. I don't know.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
It's late at night as Greg and I talk on
the couch. We've never talked about all this stuff. I've
kind of just wanted to help them forget. But now
that we're talking, the more we get into what happened
with Leslie, the more tangled up we get. I remember
that the story was her dad worked in the armaments industry,
and you know, we've heard that she's a trust fund baby,
(22:17):
and there's all this money in her family, and you
know she's from the sort of rich background and everything.
So none of that is true.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Say that again, Well, none of that's true, less the
part that and her dad told me that he built
water tanks for the US Army, not armaments. It was
water tanks.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I think she told me he built tanks for the
US Army, which is which, to be fair, is kind
of true. But when somebody says that they're building tanks
for the army, you don't think water tanks.
Speaker 4 (22:58):
Look, he was smart guy. He was an engineer, so
he was Iranian. He was born in Sorry he was
actually he was born in Tehran, but he was Armenian.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
Leslie's bad.
Speaker 4 (23:11):
Yeah, sorry, no adopted father. I never no one's as
far as I know, well at least of all us
has meant the biological parents.
Speaker 15 (23:24):
She was adopted, right, Okay, I don't know that, But ma'am,
that brings in the other piece that actually is where
the trust fund supposedly came.
Speaker 4 (23:38):
From, was from her biological parents and what she got
left behind and then she was adopted out.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
So somebody adopted a baby with a trust fund.
Speaker 4 (23:49):
Well, this is where, like you know, there's so many
facets to someone's personality or stories all or otherwise. Eventually
you actually just kind of give up asking and accept
some of it and and live in the moment and
(24:11):
move on.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
It's just it just seems like bullshit.
Speaker 4 (24:17):
You know, well most of it is.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
I knew this story had lots of strange tentacles, but
as I'm asking Greg this stuff, every answer seems to
sprout more bizarre limbs for me to understand, even just basic,
really basic questions like how old is Leslie?
Speaker 4 (24:36):
Yeah, she's obviously a bit older than me.
Speaker 1 (24:40):
How much older?
Speaker 4 (24:41):
Well, sheared two birthdates, so I never actually know you
what do you mean she had two birthdays?
Speaker 1 (24:49):
I feel like I ask, what do you mean? A lot?
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Yeah, that's fine, in this situation, you should it was
either eight or ten years. I think, what do you
mean she had two birthdays? She had two different passports
as well. What well, we'll explained point so there was
(25:13):
a US passport, but that there was other documentation with
different birthdays.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
You didn't think that was strange?
Speaker 4 (25:24):
Well yeah, sure, but there was you know, plausible reasons which.
Speaker 3 (25:31):
Were what.
Speaker 4 (25:35):
Uh, I think for memory?
Speaker 9 (25:38):
It was.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Smuggled out of Armenia.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
The passport was smuggled out of.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
Know she was Wow, so we've got that piece plus
all the Hawaiians attacking her.
Speaker 1 (26:02):
Mate.
Speaker 4 (26:03):
She's an enigma.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Oh hey, bro, yeah, I want you to meet my
older brother, Simon.
Speaker 3 (26:23):
My names Simon. I'm your brother.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
I'm the youngest of us brothers. Greg is in the middle.
Simon's the oldest. Simon can be intimidating, but he's also charismatic,
like he'd gate crash your party and then be the
life of it. He's got a shaved head, thick black beard.
Can you get like get in a few sentences, just
describe yourself for people listening, Like, you know, how would
you in a couple of sentences sum yourself up?
Speaker 3 (26:47):
I don't know. I'm an artist, a lover. Not no,
I'm a brother. You're like, what are you men for?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Kiwi's at home like Simon. When Leslie Minuchian turned up,
she was pretty full on. She was a real different
character to have around. It was it was just it was.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
It was a bit weird. And to tell you the
true the only interaction I've ever had with an American
I think, like a proper American, Like she's like the
quintessential kind of Kelly chick with that strong accent. I'd
just seen that on TV. Just interactions with her. I
remember it feeling a bit like TV, just because you know.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
What I mean, sort of like an intensity.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Yeah, man, wicked intensity. It didn't seem like this huge
love affair. But Greg's quite indreduced anyway. He's quite a
dreusing guy. So something that may seem strange in another situation,
I'm like, oh, this is just Greg.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
This is my brother, Gregg's ke We mates also found
Leslie quite buzzy.
Speaker 11 (27:53):
You were very quick to get wrapped up in Leslie
because she was like the life of the party. She'd
roll up with, you know, her Jaegermeister. And to be honest,
back then, I was so I was ten years ago.
I was twenty four. So here's this check? Who like
just paying for everything? Like she was always I mean,
can I.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
Talk about drugs?
Speaker 11 (28:13):
She was always supplying weed and jaeger myster.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
It's a quick way to a twenty four year old's heart.
Weed and jaga mustard.
Speaker 7 (28:20):
Oh one hundred right.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Most people were like sweet ass, but for some others
it was a.
Speaker 16 (28:26):
Bit much like for instance, she said come over, we'll
have a drink of wine. We'd go over there and
have a really expensive bottle of red or something, and
I'll mention all you that's a really nice bottle. She'd
turn up the next day with like a whole case
of this stuff and be like, this is for you.
Speaker 10 (28:41):
Every time we caught out, she was always showering us
and gifts, like giving us literally gifts, paying for everything,
free alcohol. This is amazing. But when it was every
catch up, I started to be like, this is weird.
This is not how a normal friendship works.
Speaker 7 (29:07):
Don't put it near me.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
What needs to come near you to record? You're just
looking at me? What that's my mum Julie describing my microphone.
Mom's a tall lady. She used to be self conscious.
As a teenager, one time she danced with her friend
in the girl's bathroom because she didn't think any of
the boys would want to dance with a taller girl.
But now she owns it. She's pretty sassy and sarcastic.
Speaker 7 (29:32):
Could you just put it sort of over there, down there?
Speaker 1 (29:36):
Can you stop by? Just why don't you tell me
a little bit about yourself? Hello?
Speaker 6 (29:43):
I'm the mother of three boys who I thought I
would not survive their upbringing. I love the three of
them to bits. The one we're going to speak of
is our lovely Greg, who is a kind, fast seeing, intelligent,
(30:09):
good looking young man, and that people used to even
say he looked like Tom Cruise, so that must be
a measure. But in that it seems there's been a
bit of vulnerability.
Speaker 1 (30:21):
My brother is kind, but I got to say, he
doesn't look like Tom Cruise. I reckon. Mom thought Leslie
looked like a movie star too.
Speaker 7 (30:30):
She was rather lovely.
Speaker 6 (30:32):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin and look
to her personality bubbly, very yah yah American.
Speaker 7 (30:46):
You know how Americans have the accent where they going
Yeah yeah yah, yeah yeah yea yeah yeah yeah. I know,
I just know. So I said, oh, yes, it's just
American and we got on with it.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Mum ended up hanging out with Leslie like every day.
Speaker 7 (31:02):
Each day.
Speaker 6 (31:04):
She would get up and make me take her somewhere,
like let's go, and I was happy to do it
for goodness sake.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
What was the kind of plan though, I mean, what
were they going to be doing.
Speaker 6 (31:13):
It's going to buy a business in New Zealand of
a hospitality nature. One day, she'd been trawling through things
up in a bedroom and she came down and she said,
I've found it. I've got it. She said, this is
(31:35):
a sign I have to buy this place.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
And what was the sign? The sign was that she had.
Speaker 6 (31:42):
A big dragonfly tattooed across her back.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
And so the cafe is called the Dragonfly. She's got
a dragonfly tattoo.
Speaker 4 (31:50):
It's a sign meant to be.
Speaker 1 (31:54):
The Dragonfly Cafe was in a small town called Maticana,
an hours drive north of Auckland. Around Medicana, lush native
bush and farms sit next to sandy white beaches. There's
a farmer's market. Vibe sometimes ducks around town from the river,
which is lit up by fairy lights at night. The
Dragonfly was on the main road leading into Mattakana. At
(32:17):
the front, a gift shop sold scented candles and beach
house knickknacks. On the back patio, the cafe looked down
a slope towards a natural waterfall, all surrounded by native bush.
If you looked back up towards the cafe, you'd see
a house with a log cabin feel to it, with
exposed wooden beams. This is where Greg and Leslie would live.
Speaker 7 (32:38):
It was lovely, super staff.
Speaker 1 (32:42):
And you remember how much it was going to be.
Speaker 7 (32:44):
Worth over a million.
Speaker 6 (32:52):
Because it had the house with it in the beautiful
land and the business.
Speaker 9 (33:02):
Okay, you ready to rock and roll?
Speaker 1 (33:04):
And finally from our fam, this is my dad, David.
Speaker 9 (33:08):
I am a Kiwi fellow who has had lots of jobs,
met lots of people. I feel fairly comfortable in myself.
I have developed a fairly strong Christian faith and I
think that's served me very well my whole life.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Dad has looked the same. He's got a round, warm face,
incapable of showing anger, square glasses, silver gray hair, just
only on the sides. Maybe it's because I've been away
from home for so long. But sometimes I hear Dad
like Murray the manager from Flight of the Concords. Oh,
you're like a cool looking pair of it. It's Dad
was there to help Leslie get set up when she
(33:48):
came to New Zealand.
Speaker 9 (33:49):
So she needed a lawyer in order to look at
properties and do some conveyancing. And I thought, poor girl,
she doesn't know anybody. She can have our lawyer, So
I introduced her to our lawyer.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
This Auckland based lawyer had been acting for mom and
dad for twenty five years. When my parents bought their
house in nineteen eighty two, he was there. Dad bought
a business that hired out party equipment. He worked on that.
It made sense to get him on the job for
Leslie too, now that she was part of the family.
With that sorted, Leslie went to New Zealand's state owned bank,
(34:23):
creatively titled Kiwi Bank, and she asked for a loan.
The conditions included Leslie proving to Kiwi Bank that she
had a trust fund. She was able to show the
bank that she had five million US dollars in her
trust fund and five thousand coming to her each month
for life. But Leslie had only just come to New
Zealand and she was still on a tourist visa. Another
(34:45):
condition of the loan was having a keywi garanteur. Dad
had just sold his party higher company and retired, so
it seemed natural for them to get involved.
Speaker 9 (34:53):
There were a lot of people that were sort of
saying things. She're cautioning us, are you sure that's a
huge thing to do? And I was thinking, Leslie seems
to be on top of all this. She has all
this fantastic references from running restaurants over in America and
(35:16):
in Hawaii. She talks to talk. She convinced our lawyer
that it was a good thing to do.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
I tried to talk to this lawyer, but he didn't
want to be interviewed. And in case that happened later,
he said he never told mom and Dad that it
was a great venture. He said he doesn't give that
kind of advice to his clients. But Dad remembers things differently.
Speaker 9 (35:37):
He said to me, you don't have to do anything, David,
because I would say she's a human dynamo. It his words,
she is a human dynamo. We're thinking every now and again,
you've got to stick your neck out. You stick your
neck out and it'll pay off. So we guaranteed alone
(35:59):
one hundred percent loan to purchase one and a half
million dollars worth of property and business. Was a lawful
lot on trust here on my part and our part
huge amount we did stick our niques out.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Greg and Leslie moved into the house at the Dragonfly
over the last few months of two thousand and seven.
Greg wouldn't have much to do with the cafe. He
had his own job. Leslie was in charge. But soon
my brother Simon got roped in on the food side
of the business.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
So I may embellished the story, but I remember it
being just a few days before the cafe opened, shared
a blue with the chef and so and then so
I was just like the chef.
Speaker 1 (36:45):
Isn't he some French? Go? And he quit. When the
cafe reopened, there was a lot of buzz around it.
Things were going well. Leslie was making an impact on
the chilled out Matticana community. Here was this California power
business lady shaking things up. The local magazine did a
write up Now under its new owner, Leslie Minuchian, who
(37:08):
was previously owned rest staurants and Lake Tahoe in the
US and in Hawaii.
Speaker 7 (37:12):
Dragonfly is getting better by the day.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
Meanwhile, preparations were underway for a massive wedding, but it
soon became clear that none of Leslie's trust fun friends
from America were going to make it. She said none
of them could hack the thirteen hour flight to Auckland.
So key, we girls that Leslie had known for only
a matter of months started getting the call up to
the bridal party, like Carla, who was back in London.
Speaker 14 (37:35):
I remember sitting at my desk in Hoxton and at
my office and I remember thinking, fuck, this is so
weird and sort of saying to a few of the
girls in the showroom, like, so I've just asked to
be a bridesmaid to this girl I barely know. In
New Zealand in January.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
One of the other bridesmaids, Alisha, hadn't known Leslie for
long either.
Speaker 8 (37:57):
I was asked to be a bridesmage, which was quite surprising.
I think she said something about her cousin couldn't come,
so I think I was kind of filling in, like
she didn't really have any family here. And yeah, I
mean I guess I was happy.
Speaker 10 (38:13):
To do it because we were you know, we were
close at the time.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
After everything that went down, my mum stopped referring to
it as the wedding. She renamed it, and our family
it's now known as the Event. The event happened on
a blue sky summer day, just after Christmas in a
small colonial era church with painted white arches and stiff
wooden pews.
Speaker 9 (38:37):
And it just was really surreal. It was like I
was kind of acting.
Speaker 14 (38:40):
I was acting in a sitcom or something like that
was my role to arrive and then then I was going.
Speaker 4 (38:45):
To go walk, you know, down Ireland.
Speaker 6 (38:47):
It was.
Speaker 7 (38:48):
It was so weird.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
The ceremony was pretty standard a priest, those Bible readings
from every church wedding ever, Love is patient, Love is kind.
After that, the party started straight away in a hall
next door. I was living in London by this point
and I had flown home especially for the wedding. I
was happy to be the MC. I remember making a
(39:10):
joke like Geez, I go away for a couple of
months and I come back and Greg's got a cafe,
a house and a waterfall. I can't find any recordings
of that night. Pretty much everyone we know in New
Zealand was there. More than one hundred and fifty people came.
There were even wedding crashes watching from the deck. But
(39:31):
here's the weird thing. Almost all the guests were from
Greg's side. The only guests that weren't already friends or
family of Greg's were Leslie's parents, Betty and Andrew.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
There was two people, yeah, no friends, no family. I
think the weirdest thing, and I think the weirdest thing
for everyone just about the event was the parent thing.
Her parents and just how I think there was a
lot of this. They would just stand offish, they were
just like, I don't know, it was just fucking weird.
(40:05):
I don't remember really being able to talk to them
at all. There was no really interaction.
Speaker 6 (40:09):
They were very quiet and you couldn't raise a lip
of a smile.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
You couldn't get a word out of them.
Speaker 4 (40:17):
They looked.
Speaker 7 (40:21):
Very she looked very pale and colorless.
Speaker 1 (40:28):
The best man, Nat made a special effort with Leslie's parents.
Speaker 13 (40:32):
They were very, very hard to try and make them
feel welcome.
Speaker 9 (40:36):
So I just remember at one point just walking away thinking,
oh well.
Speaker 8 (40:40):
I remember joking with Matt about the fact that potentially
you know Leslie's parents, even her real parents, or did
she just ring in a couple of actives.
Speaker 16 (40:49):
They seemed a little bit standing like, because they were
sort of a bit there.
Speaker 7 (40:53):
But not there.
Speaker 11 (40:53):
We joked that they were hired actors because yeah, I
don't know, they just because they definitely didn't fit the
profile of like who you think her parents would be,
and they were kind of weird and quiet, and there
wasn't like a lot of love and like vibe being
relationship between the two like you would expect from a
parent and child.
Speaker 4 (41:14):
Like I didn't like.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
I honestly, like to this day, I have no idea
if that's appearance, no idea. I wouldn't be surprised if
that as not. I don't remember seeing any kind of
love go on.
Speaker 1 (41:23):
I remember Betty and Andrew they brought me a pair
of Levi jeans as a gift. That was cool, but
they didn't really talk to me either. I still don't
know what they knew about what was going on or
what their role was in all of this.
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I think they kind of knew that there was some
some fuckery involved, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
It wasn't long after the wedding that people started to
notice some of that fuckery.
Speaker 11 (41:48):
I was up in room or sharps, and I bumped
into Leslie and she had just come out of the
public library and she was showing me this document that
she had sent over from the US because she was
trying to get her driver's license in New Zealand, but
she had to submit like.
Speaker 4 (42:06):
A driving record from the US.
Speaker 11 (42:08):
And we were having a laugh because she had all
these duy and some like suspended licenses or something like
a She had like a few things, and she was
in the public library, no joke, she was twinking out
these from her record that obviously she had asked for
and been sent over from the US, twinking these out
and then rephotocoppying them and then touching them up and
(42:29):
rephotocopping them until it looked legit.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
By the way, twink is one of those words that
people laugh at us Kiwi's about it's wide out liquid
eraser twink.
Speaker 11 (42:39):
And I just remember standing on the road with her,
like so vividly, just her showing me the document in
her and not having a laugh about it, and I
was thinking, wow, like that I think was the first
time I was like, she's like she's got some secrets,
you know, like you're hiding some stuff.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
End up at the Dragonfly Cafa. Things were starting to
go wrong.
Speaker 8 (42:59):
We ran out of water, so we didn't have access
in the kitchen to water, and so Gregan likewise were
kind of running back and forward to the house trying
to get like bottles of water, trying to get stuff
to wash dishes. And there were just so many days
like that where something was going wrong and there was
just no fixing it. I don't think Leslie was around
(43:22):
for much of that. I remember coming in really strong
at the beginning and then kind of not being around
and all that stuff were like what's happening.
Speaker 4 (43:33):
There was one moment where it was a bit of
a watershed moment for me, and that's when the milk
supplier for the cafe arrived and then I said today,
how are you? And he basically said that he had
never been paid for milk. It wasn't his first attempt
(43:54):
at getting money. I could tell that it was a
bit worked up about it, and you know, I thought,
this is this is, this is not right. And I
recall talking to Leslie about it and she said, as
she did with lots of things, I'll take care of it,
don't get involved, leave it to me.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
The Dragonfly was becoming a total cluster. A bunch of
people were saying they weren't getting paid.
Speaker 4 (44:20):
I became very frustrated that I couldn't access and information,
couldn't I couldn't ever get to the bottom of anything.
Leslie almost got angry at me for attempting to try
and help and get more involved. The more it happened,
(44:41):
the more angry she got at me, the more frustrated
I got, and that became a real strain.
Speaker 9 (44:46):
I started to feel very uneasy, and we needed to
find out what was going on. We weren't able to
find out a heck of a lot from the bank.
We weren't actually owners of the business, we weren't a
signatories to anything. Even Greg wasn't able to find out
(45:09):
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
But you were the guarantees, and you know, you guys
would put money on the line, but you would signed
up to be the guarantees, but not signed up to
be able to see anything. Isn't that weird?
Speaker 9 (45:22):
You could say it like that, But I did follow
my lawyer's advice that she knows what she's doing. She's
a human dynamo.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
Leslie would spend most of the day locked in the house,
which had become a sanctuary from the outside world and
the questions people were starting to ask. A date was
set for a meeting where an accountant was going to
start combing through the books, but Leslie didn't show up.
Greg knew he needed to do something, so he came
up with a plan.
Speaker 4 (45:52):
If she was here, she would block us learning about
what the reality was. I told her to go and
see appearance and go over holiday, get out of the country.
Speaker 1 (46:03):
And you actually thought that would be an opportunity to
look around.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Probably it was the only way, yep.
Speaker 1 (46:10):
And what was you know, if you don't mind me asking,
what was the kind of relationship like at that point.
Speaker 4 (46:17):
Frosty, I'm just completely untrusting on both sides.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
At pretty short notice, Leslie booked a flight to America
to visit her family, so my mum and dad would
have to step up and look after the cafe. As
Greg drove her to Auckland Airport, things were tense. There
was a lot unset, but Greg wanted to work this
whole mess out and get back to life with Leslie
when she got back from the States.
Speaker 4 (46:50):
So we're parked, checked and formalodies are done. It's me
and Leslie now walking upstairs to the actual departure gate,
where there's not a lot of love going on. There
(47:11):
was probably a nervous but cold hug. I hope to
see you again. Let's try and work this out, and she,
right at the last moment, put it right out there
(47:31):
that Greg, the snowball is about to hit you.
Speaker 1 (47:43):
Next episode, the Snowball hits. We cried.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
We just were destroyed.
Speaker 9 (47:51):
That was a fundamental wow moment for me when you
presented that to a bank and they.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Accepted adrenaline is my best friend.
Speaker 3 (48:00):
That's quite calculated. That's fucking out there.
Speaker 15 (48:06):
Somebody has been wronged using my name and rightfully believes
that the person who wrong them is meat.
Speaker 6 (48:11):
I found it, he said, your janitors should have found it.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
How often would you go in there and look?
Speaker 9 (48:17):
At least once a week.
Speaker 1 (48:21):
It's so weird.
Speaker 9 (48:24):
It is weird.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
It is weird. Snowball is hosted and produced by me,
Polly Warts. Big ups to my brave brother Greg and
my entire family for letting me tell this story unravels
totally stoic and awesome. Supervising producer is Tim Roxborough. Our
super diligent audio producer is Emma Lancaster. Assisting with audio
(48:50):
production is Shane Anderson, who is also our whit smart
fact checker. Sound designed by the very creative Left and
Right Panning John Jacobs and Tim Jenkins. A big thanks
to my prolific and legendary mates from Flight Facilities for
the funky ass Unravel theme song. Additional music by the
(49:12):
talented Chunsmith Brice Holliday. You can check out some behind
the scenes stuff over at my Instagram at Olly Ward's
O l l i e WRDS. Unravel is a product
of ABC Audio Studios, led by the abuliant, thoughtful and
patient Kelly Reardon and Unravels expert and excitable Executive producer
(49:39):
is Ian Walker.
Host
Helen Molesworth
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