December 8, 2025 • 49 mins
We’re sharing a preview of another podcast, Deep Cover Presents: Snowball, that Maria participated in. Snowball follows journalist Ollie Wards as he unravels the wild story of how his family lost everything after their brush with a charming Californian con woman. He embarks on a question to find out how she did it, why she did it, and where she is now. Here’s a preview of Snowball. 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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey, it's Maria. I'm dropping in today to share
with you another podcast I think you'll enjoy one that
I appeared in as an expert on con artists. It's
called Snowball, presented by deep Cover. In It, journalist Ali
Ward's unravels the wild story of how his own family
was taken in and taken down by a charming con
(00:37):
woman from California. We're talking financial ruin, shattered trust, and
a mystery that stretches across continents. Snowball looks at both
the ways con artists operate and how far people will
go financially and emotionally when they get roped into a
scammer's web. I joined Ali as he narrowed in on
his family's scammer to talk about what her motives might
(00:58):
have been and how to use her own tricks to
get her to talk. That's an episode six of the series,
so you'll have to keep listening over on deep Cover
Presents Snowball for now here's episode and if you can't
wait to find out what happens beinge episodes of deep
Cover Presents Snowball early and ad free with a Pushkin
Plus subscription. Find Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover show
(01:21):
page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
This series contains occasional course language.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
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
(01:57):
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 at ten into
that feeling, because within a few months she had taken
off to the US. It wasn't just my brother's marriage
(02:17):
that fell apart. My whole family went down with it,
and none of us ever saw her again.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
This woman's a bit kind of like, you know, not
what she claims to be.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin that looked
to her.
Speaker 6 (02:37):
I guess when you marry someone you feel like you
really know them.
Speaker 7 (02:43):
And that was her allure.
Speaker 8 (02:45):
You just followed her.
Speaker 9 (02:48):
A manipulative con artist stand by we call her the
Black Widow.
Speaker 8 (02:53):
This Snowball is about day.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
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 running
that cafe, and that day Dad was serving behind the counter.
Speaker 9 (03:20):
Taking orders, passing them back to the chefs at the back,
next order editor up.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Then he noticed the 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.
Speaker 9 (03:35):
Ordered 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 liquid ap.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
I almost fainted. I went blank.
Speaker 9 (03:52):
I could feel the draining of blood from my face.
I must have been as white as a sheet.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
My Mum realized something was up.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
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
(04:24):
reflect on things till later in the day. And what
they all meant.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
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 (04:41):
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 3 (05:02):
My parents, in their sixties, 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
(05:24):
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 Kiwi family.
(05:49):
Things got weird and some of it's kind of funny.
Speaker 9 (05:53):
There's also a lot of randomness there with the story.
Speaker 10 (05:57):
Smuggled out of a mania? What whoa explain?
Speaker 11 (06:02):
Oh my fucking god, I mean, can I talk about drugs?
Speaker 12 (06:08):
This was weird.
Speaker 13 (06:09):
This is not how normal friendship works.
Speaker 7 (06:12):
We were like her little duckling's following behind.
Speaker 10 (06:14):
Her, lots of little intrigues. Thirty thousand dollars. I don't
know where this money went.
Speaker 11 (06:21):
They kind of knew that there was some some fuckery.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
We joked that they were hired as personality bubbly. She
was rather lovely. He was rock.
Speaker 14 (06:32):
She took every fucking thing get out.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
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
(06:59):
have to travel across the world to track Leslie down.
I'm Olly Ward's and this is Snowball.
Speaker 10 (07:35):
So this is recording?
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Is it?
Speaker 10 (07:37):
Is there an option to edit it afterwards? It's not
a test.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Surely there's no better subject than yourself.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
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 3 (08:03):
I guess my brother Greg is typical in lots of ways.
He'd be happy with a ten dollar haircut, short back 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 6 (08:22):
There's a term for people interested in Europe, which is eurofile.
I think I was an American a file.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
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 15 (08:39):
It's a two dollars UIs 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, that's.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Me now this whole thing starts when Greg went off
on his OI back in two thousand and six in
New Zealand. Your OI 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 have for stuff like chilibin.
(09:11):
That's an eski if you're in Australia, or a cool
box pretty much anywhere else chilibin. Anyway, as a kei,
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
(09:33):
football style jacket that makes him look like a high
school jock. So he's wandering through the party. He steps
outside to a courtyard and his ears prick up.
Speaker 10 (09:42):
North American accents used to catch my attention.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
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.
Speaker 10 (09:56):
Well, let's throw in there.
Speaker 6 (09:57):
Kim Kardashian look alike, sophisticated female operative pretty to woo
me as well.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
That's sophistical. 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.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
More 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 3 (10:39):
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 10 (10:46):
You know, if you're interested in politics, they are a superpower.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Bit of a leap to a girl you meet at
a house party, though, isn't it.
Speaker 10 (10:55):
Well, I guess that's how naive I was.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Greg was also taken in by Leslie's wild story about
why she was in London.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
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 3 (11:26):
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 in Hawaii. The bar
was called the Breakwater. Things were going well until one
day Leslie caught the head security guard dealing drugs out
(11:49):
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 through
a cousin at the power company. Leslie said it all
culminated one night when she was at home hearing people
(12:11):
breaking in. She 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
(12:33):
charted a plane and she escaped to Europe. So according
to Leslie. That's how she ended up playing low in London,
and all of this was fascinating to Greg. He started
introducing Leslie to his mates.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Their relationship seemed a normal and normal relationship, aside from
the fact that it got very intense very quickly. But
you would expect that of Greg. He's not a game
player and he wears his heart on his sleeve, so
if he's into you, you'd find out up pretty quickly.
Speaker 12 (13:10):
My initial thoughts was that she was really open and friendly,
maybe a bit too friendly.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
But what do you mean by that.
Speaker 10 (13:20):
She just gave a lot like she just.
Speaker 12 (13:24):
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. Maybe
that's it.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
In London, Leslie managed a couple of bars.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
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 3 (13:53):
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 4 (14:01):
I can remember Greg, I remember Leslie bringing him into
the bar and introducing me to him. Hell of aized guy,
typical sort of keew 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 lativity about him
at the time, and I remember sort of thinking, you know,
(14:22):
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 3 (14:32):
Leslie would hook Greg and his mates up with drinks.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
We suddenly we're invited to a part and there's plenty
buckets of beer being brought to our VIP table in
the corner in the city of London with business people around,
and it was like.
Speaker 10 (14:51):
I'm a beckpecker.
Speaker 6 (14:54):
And I'm one of the words financial capitals getting beer
reigned on me.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
So you felt like a bit of a rock star
or something.
Speaker 10 (15:02):
Yeah, to be sure, yes.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Greg's friend Andy did wonder where it was all coming from.
Speaker 16 (15:07):
You.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
It's all going on the tabs of different local law firms,
so you know that'll 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
his friends a good time.
Speaker 10 (15:19):
I suppose.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
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
was that Leslie new stuff. She had been everywhere and
done everything. I started saying all the time, Leslie knows,
(15:46):
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
from selling tanks to the US Army. So it was
all pretty impressive, but I have to admit I was
(16:07):
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
arm was constantly around Leslie, so I was happy for him.
After only a few months they moved in together. Things
(16:29):
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 6 (16:44):
She honestly was buying everything like Donald Duck, key rings,
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,
(17:05):
beautiful food.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
But so you had a ring burning a hole in
your hocket.
Speaker 10 (17:10):
Honestly, I don't even remember if I enter ring or
I didn't. I don't think I did, But you remember.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
The Johnny Depp Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant.
Speaker 6 (17:19):
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. How
(17:41):
did she react, I think a little bit surprised, but
also said yes pretty quick as well, So yeah, we
were in love.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Just after he proposed, Greg followed his Beyonce back home
to the superpower he had always wanted to visit. Yeah,
first time in the United States. He expected New York
to be paved in gold. Instead, it was dirty. That
was my first Impressionationly was this. This is rough as cuts.
Then it was to the West Coast to stay in
Leslie's childhood home in Orange County, California. Leslie always said
(18:22):
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 6 (18:32):
Middle income America as you could possibly find.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
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 6 (18:54):
I was put in a room next to her parents,
and she was put in her old room that she
grew up in. Be it in the same place with
the same TV VHS cassettes under the TV.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Remember Leslie was nearly forty years old at this point,
but it was a separate bedroom situation.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
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 iron,
But the answer was the Hawaiians.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
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 discomfit 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
(19:52):
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 in 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,
(20:14):
but it didn't.
Speaker 10 (20:15):
Get separate bad situation.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
I was quite keen to not have that situation, but
I respected it, but you were married.
Speaker 10 (20:24):
Now, Well that's what was sort of, you know, I thought, Hey,
what else do I need to do here?
Speaker 3 (20:34):
A man?
Speaker 10 (20:35):
I've done the deed, but I want to do the deed.
Her parents were very, very conservative.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
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
then 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.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
They took us out to the airport to lax and
they cried shitloads when we left.
Speaker 10 (21:05):
But it was all, you know, moving to New Zealand
for a new life. What was there thoughts on that? Oh?
Speaker 6 (21:11):
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.
Speaker 10 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
Now, whether that's because you know, it's a loved one
leaving to another land or another reason, who fucking knows, Like.
Speaker 10 (21:38):
What do you mean by that? What would another reason.
Speaker 6 (21:39):
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 3 (21:51):
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 him forget. But now
that we're talking, the more we get into what happened
with Leslie, the more tangled up we get.
Speaker 16 (22:04):
I remember that the story was her dad worked in
the armaments and street and you know, we've heard that
she's a trust fund baby, and there's all this money
in her family, and you know she's from the sort
of rich background and everything.
Speaker 10 (22:19):
So none of that is true.
Speaker 6 (22:22):
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.
Speaker 10 (22:37):
It was water tanks.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
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 10 (22:53):
Look, he was my guy. He was an engineer, so
he was Iranian.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
He was born in Sorry, he was actually he was
born in Tehran, but he was Armenian.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
Leslie's that yeah, sorry, no adopted father. No one's as
far as I know.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Well at least of all us has meant the biological parents.
Speaker 10 (23:18):
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.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Came from, was from her biological parents and what she
got left behind and then she was adopted out.
Speaker 10 (23:40):
So somebody adopted a baby with a trust fund.
Speaker 6 (23:43):
Well, this is where, like you know, there's so many
facets to someone's personality or stories.
Speaker 10 (23:53):
All or otherwise.
Speaker 6 (23:56):
Eventually you actually just kind of give up asking and
accept some of it and.
Speaker 10 (24:04):
Live in the moment and move on. It's just it
just seems like bullshit, you know, well most of it is.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
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 10 (24:31):
Yeah, she's obviously a bit older than me. How much older? Well,
sheared two birthdays, so I never actually know.
Speaker 6 (24:41):
You what do you mean she had two birthdays? I
feel like ask, what do you mean a lot? Yeah,
that's one more 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?
Speaker 10 (24:59):
What well, wait, we'll explain. Explain.
Speaker 6 (25:05):
So there was a US passport, but that there was
other documentation with different birthdays.
Speaker 10 (25:16):
You didn't think that was strange?
Speaker 6 (25:19):
Well yeah, sure, but there was you know, plausible reasons which.
Speaker 10 (25:25):
Were what.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
Uh, I think for memory?
Speaker 10 (25:32):
It was smuggled out of Armenia. The passport was smuggled
out of who she was.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Wow, so we've got that piece plus all the Hawaiians
attacking her.
Speaker 10 (25:56):
Mate shoes. She's an enigma.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Oh hey bro, yeah, I want you to meet my
older brother, Simon.
Speaker 11 (26:18):
My name's Simon.
Speaker 10 (26:19):
I'm your brother.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
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 10 (26:42):
I don't know.
Speaker 17 (26:43):
I'm an artist, a lover, not no, I'm a brother.
You're like, what are you men for?
Speaker 3 (26:51):
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.
Speaker 11 (26:59):
It was it was just it was. It was a
bit weird.
Speaker 17 (27:02):
And to tell you the truth, 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 feeling a bit like TV,
just because you know what.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
I mean, sort of like an intensity.
Speaker 17 (27:24):
Yeah, man, wicked intensity. It didn't seem like this huge
love affair. But Greg's quite in dreusd anyway. He's quite
a druceding guy. So something that may seem strange in
another situation, I'm like, oh, this is just Greg.
Speaker 11 (27:42):
This is my brother.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Gregg's ki we mates also found Leslie quite buzzy.
Speaker 18 (27:47):
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 I was ten years ago. I
was twenty four. So here's this chick who was like
just paying for everything. Like she was always I mean,
can I talk about drugs? She was always supplying weed
(28:09):
and Jaeger myster.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
It's a quick way to a twenty four year old's
heartweed and.
Speaker 18 (28:14):
Jaga mustad oh one hundred Right.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Most people were like sweet ass, but for some others
it was a bit much like for instance, she said
come over, we'll have a drink of wine.
Speaker 18 (28:25):
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.
Speaker 7 (28:31):
She'd turn up the next day with like a whole
case of the stuff.
Speaker 10 (28:34):
And be like, this is for you.
Speaker 13 (28:35):
Every time we caught up, 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 (29:02):
Don't put it near me.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
What needs to come near you to record.
Speaker 7 (29:06):
You just looking at me?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
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 (29:26):
Could you just put it sort of over there down there?
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Can you start by just why don't you tell me
a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 10 (29:36):
Hello?
Speaker 5 (29:37):
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,
(30:03):
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 3 (30:16):
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 (30:25):
She was rather lovely.
Speaker 5 (30:26):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin and look
to her personality bubbly, very yah yah American.
Speaker 7 (30:40):
You know how Americans have the accent where they going
Yeah yeah yah yah yah 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 3 (30:53):
Mum ended up hanging out with Leslie like every day.
Speaker 7 (30:56):
Each day.
Speaker 5 (30:58):
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 3 (31:06):
What was the kind of plan though, I mean, what
were they going to be doing.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
It's going to by 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.
Speaker 10 (31:27):
I've got it.
Speaker 7 (31:28):
She said, this is a sign I have to buy
this place.
Speaker 10 (31:33):
And what was the sign.
Speaker 5 (31:34):
The sign was that she had a big dragonfly tattooed
across her back.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
And so the cafe is called the Dragonfly. She's got
a dragonfly tattoo.
Speaker 10 (31:44):
It's a sign meant to be.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
The Dragonfly Cafe was in a small town called Medicana
and 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 waddle around town from
the river, which is lit up by fairy lights at night.
The Dragonfly was on the main road leading into Maticana.
(32:11):
At 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. It was lovely, super staff and do you
(32:37):
remember how much it was going to be worth.
Speaker 7 (32:41):
Over a million.
Speaker 5 (32:46):
Because it had the house with it in the beautiful
land and the business.
Speaker 9 (32:56):
Okay, you ready to rock and roll?
Speaker 3 (32:58):
And finally from our fam, this is my dad, David.
Speaker 9 (33:02):
I am a Kiwi fellow who has had lots of jobs,
met lots of peace. 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 3 (33:21):
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 it's
Dad was there to help Leslie get set up when
(33:42):
she came to New Zealand.
Speaker 9 (33:43):
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 3 (33:57):
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,
(34:18):
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
(34:40):
condition of the loan was having a keywi garranteur. Dad
had just sold his party hire company and retired, so
it seemed natural for them to get involved.
Speaker 9 (34:47):
There are a lot of people that were sort of
saying things, you're cautioning us.
Speaker 10 (34:54):
Are you sure.
Speaker 9 (34:56):
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 a
America and in Hawaii. She talks to talk. She convinced
(35:16):
our lawyer that it was a good thing to do.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
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 (35:32):
He said to me, you don't have to do anything, David,
because I would say she's a human dynamo. It's 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
(35:53):
one hundred percent loan to purchase one and a half
million dollars worth of property and business. It was a
lawful lot on trust here on my part and our part,
huge amount. We did stick our niecks out.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
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 17 (36:28):
So I may embellished the story, but I remember it
has been 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 3 (36:40):
Isn't he some French guy?
Speaker 10 (36:42):
And he quit.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
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 Mattakana community. Here was this
California power business lady shaking things up, the local magazine
did a ride up.
Speaker 18 (36:59):
Now under its new owner, Leslie Minuchian, who has previously
owned restaurants in Lake Tahoe and the US and in Hawaii,
Dragonfly is getting.
Speaker 7 (37:08):
Better by the day.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
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 Kee. 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 12 (37:29):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:45):
In New Zealand in January.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
One of the other bridesmaids, Alisha, hadn't known Leslie for
long either.
Speaker 14 (37:52):
I was asked to be a bridemage, 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 to do it because we were,
you know, we were for the time.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
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, and.
Speaker 10 (38:31):
It just was really surreal. It was like I was
kind of acting.
Speaker 7 (38:35):
I was acting in a sitcom or something like.
Speaker 12 (38:37):
That was my role to arrive and then then I
was going to go walk, you know, down Ireland.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
It was.
Speaker 7 (38:42):
It was so weird.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
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
(39:05):
joke like, jeez, I go away for a couple of
months and I come back and Gregg'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
(39:26):
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 Gregs were Leslie's parents, Betty and Andrew.
Speaker 11 (39:37):
There was two people, yeah, no friends, no family.
Speaker 17 (39:44):
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 the would just stand offish. They were just like,
I don't know, it was just fucking weird. I don't
remember really being able to talk to them at all.
There was no really interaction.
Speaker 5 (40:04):
They were very quiet and you couldn't raise a lip
of a smile. You couldn't get a word out of them.
They looked very she looked very pale and.
Speaker 7 (40:20):
Colorless.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
The best man, Nat made a special effort with Leslie's parents.
Speaker 11 (40:26):
They were very very hard to try and make them
feel welcome.
Speaker 9 (40:30):
So I just remember at one point just walking away thinking, oh, well.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
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 actors. They seemed
a little bit standing like, because they were sort of
a bit there but not there.
Speaker 18 (40:48):
We joked that they were hired actors because yeah, well,
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 vibing relationship
between the two like you would expect from a parent
and child.
Speaker 17 (41:08):
Like I didn't, like, honestly like to this stay. I
have no idea if that's appearance, no idea. I I
wouldn't be surprised if that as not. I don't remember
seeing any kind of love go on.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
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 11 (41:29):
I think they kind of knew that there was some
some fuckery involved, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
It wasn't long after the wedding that people started to
notice some of that fuckery.
Speaker 18 (41:43):
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 a driving record from the US.
And we were having a laugh because she had all
(42:04):
these dui and some like suspended licenses or something like.
She had 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 rephotocopping them
until it looked legit.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
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 18 (42:33):
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.
Speaker 10 (42:47):
Hiding some stuff.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
End Up at the Dragonfly Cafa, things were starting to
go wrong.
Speaker 19 (42:53):
We ran out of water, so we didn't have access
in the kitchen to water, and so gregan likewires 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 if something was going wrong and there was just.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
No fixing it.
Speaker 19 (43:15):
I don't think Leslie was around for much of that.
I remember her coming in really strong at the beginning
and then kind of not being around and all that stuff.
We like, what's happening.
Speaker 6 (43:27):
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
(43:48):
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 sort of
and she did with lots of things.
Speaker 10 (44:06):
I'll take care of it. Don't get involved, leave it
to me.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
The Dragonfly was becoming a total cluster. A bunch of
people were saying they weren't getting paid.
Speaker 6 (44:14):
I became very frustrated that I couldn't access in information.
I 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,
(44:35):
the more angry she got at me, the more frustrated
I got, And that became a real strain.
Speaker 9 (44:41):
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
(45:04):
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
But you were the guaranteurs, and you know, you guys
had money on the line. But you would signed up
to be the guarantees but not signed up to be
able to see anything.
Speaker 10 (45:15):
Isn't that weird?
Speaker 9 (45:17):
You could say it like that, but I did follow
my lawyer's advice that she knows what she's doing.
Speaker 10 (45:23):
She's a human dynamo.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
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 6 (45:47):
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.
Speaker 8 (45:57):
Of the country.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
And you actually thought that would be an opportunity to
look around? Probably it was the only way, yep. And
what was you know, if you don't mind me asking
like the kind of relationship like at that.
Speaker 6 (46:11):
Point, Frosty, i'mdiscompletely untrusting on both sides.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
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 unsaid, but Greg wanted to work this
whole mess out and get back to life with Leslie
when she got back from the States.
Speaker 6 (46:45):
So we're parked, checked and formalities 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
(47:05):
was probably a nervous 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
(47:25):
that Greg, the Snowball is about to hit you.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Next episode the Snowball hits.
Speaker 10 (47:42):
We cried. We just were destroyed.
Speaker 9 (47:46):
That was a fundamental wow moment for me when you
presumed that to a bank and they accepted.
Speaker 7 (47:53):
Adrenaline is my best friend.
Speaker 11 (47:55):
That's quite calculated. That's fucking out there. Somebody has been
wronged using my name and rightfully believes that the person
who wronged them is meat.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
I found it, he said, George Janitors should.
Speaker 10 (48:08):
Have found it.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
How often would you go in there and look?
Speaker 10 (48:11):
At least once a week. It's so weird. It is weird.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
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 Rocksborough. Our
super diligent audio producer is Emma Lancaster. Assisting with audio
(48:44):
production is Shane Anderson, who is also our whip 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
(49:06):
talented tunsmith Bryce Halliday. You can check out some behind
the scenes stuff over at my Instagram at Olly Ward's
O l l I E WRDS. Unrevel is a product
of ABC Audio Studios, led by the abuliant, thoughtful, and
patient Kelly Redan and on. Revel's expert and excitable executive
(49:32):
producer is Ian Walker.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
I hope you enjoyed that preview of deep Cover Presents Snowball.
You can find more anywhere you get podcasts, binge the
full season with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Find Pushkin Plus
on the deep Cover show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Pushkin. Hey, it's Maria. I'm dropping in today to share
with you another podcast I think you'll enjoy one that
I appeared in as an expert on con artists. It's
called Snowball, presented by deep Cover. In It, journalist Ali
Ward's unravels the wild story of how his own family
was taken in and taken down by a charming con
(00:37):
woman from California. We're talking financial ruin, shattered trust, and
a mystery that stretches across continents. Snowball looks at both
the ways con artists operate and how far people will
go financially and emotionally when they get roped into a
scammer's web. I joined Ali as he narrowed in on
his family's scammer to talk about what her motives might
(00:58):
have been and how to use her own tricks to
get her to talk. That's an episode six of the series,
so you'll have to keep listening over on deep Cover
Presents Snowball for now here's episode and if you can't
wait to find out what happens beinge episodes of deep
Cover Presents Snowball early and ad free with a Pushkin
Plus subscription. Find Pushkin Plus on the deep Cover show
(01:21):
page in Apple Podcasts, or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus.
Speaker 2 (01:28):
This series contains occasional course language.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
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
(01:57):
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 at ten into
that feeling, because within a few months she had taken
off to the US. It wasn't just my brother's marriage
(02:17):
that fell apart. My whole family went down with it,
and none of us ever saw her again.
Speaker 4 (02:26):
This woman's a bit kind of like, you know, not
what she claims to be.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin that looked
to her.
Speaker 6 (02:37):
I guess when you marry someone you feel like you
really know them.
Speaker 7 (02:43):
And that was her allure.
Speaker 8 (02:45):
You just followed her.
Speaker 9 (02:48):
A manipulative con artist stand by we call her the
Black Widow.
Speaker 8 (02:53):
This Snowball is about day.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
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 running
that cafe, and that day Dad was serving behind the counter.
Speaker 9 (03:20):
Taking orders, passing them back to the chefs at the back,
next order editor up.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Then he noticed the 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.
Speaker 9 (03:35):
Ordered 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 liquid ap.
Speaker 10 (03:48):
I almost fainted. I went blank.
Speaker 9 (03:52):
I could feel the draining of blood from my face.
I must have been as white as a sheet.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
My Mum realized something was up.
Speaker 5 (04:00):
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
(04:24):
reflect on things till later in the day. And what
they all meant.
Speaker 3 (04:29):
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 (04:41):
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 3 (05:02):
My parents, in their sixties, 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
(05:24):
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 Kiwi family.
(05:49):
Things got weird and some of it's kind of funny.
Speaker 9 (05:53):
There's also a lot of randomness there with the story.
Speaker 10 (05:57):
Smuggled out of a mania? What whoa explain?
Speaker 11 (06:02):
Oh my fucking god, I mean, can I talk about drugs?
Speaker 12 (06:08):
This was weird.
Speaker 13 (06:09):
This is not how normal friendship works.
Speaker 7 (06:12):
We were like her little duckling's following behind.
Speaker 10 (06:14):
Her, lots of little intrigues. Thirty thousand dollars. I don't
know where this money went.
Speaker 11 (06:21):
They kind of knew that there was some some fuckery.
Speaker 7 (06:24):
We joked that they were hired as personality bubbly. She
was rather lovely. He was rock.
Speaker 14 (06:32):
She took every fucking thing get out.
Speaker 3 (06:38):
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
(06:59):
have to travel across the world to track Leslie down.
I'm Olly Ward's and this is Snowball.
Speaker 10 (07:35):
So this is recording?
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Is it?
Speaker 10 (07:37):
Is there an option to edit it afterwards? It's not
a test.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
Surely there's no better subject than yourself.
Speaker 6 (07:43):
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 3 (08:03):
I guess my brother Greg is typical in lots of ways.
He'd be happy with a ten dollar haircut, short back 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 6 (08:22):
There's a term for people interested in Europe, which is eurofile.
I think I was an American a file.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
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 15 (08:39):
It's a two dollars UIs 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, that's.
Speaker 3 (08:50):
Me now this whole thing starts when Greg went off
on his OI back in two thousand and six in
New Zealand. Your OI 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 have for stuff like chilibin.
(09:11):
That's an eski if you're in Australia, or a cool
box pretty much anywhere else chilibin. Anyway, as a kei,
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
(09:33):
football style jacket that makes him look like a high
school jock. So he's wandering through the party. He steps
outside to a courtyard and his ears prick up.
Speaker 10 (09:42):
North American accents used to catch my attention.
Speaker 3 (09:46):
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.
Speaker 10 (09:56):
Well, let's throw in there.
Speaker 6 (09:57):
Kim Kardashian look alike, sophisticated female operative pretty to woo
me as well.
Speaker 3 (10:08):
That's sophistical. 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.
Speaker 6 (10:28):
More 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 3 (10:39):
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 10 (10:46):
You know, if you're interested in politics, they are a superpower.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Bit of a leap to a girl you meet at
a house party, though, isn't it.
Speaker 10 (10:55):
Well, I guess that's how naive I was.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
Greg was also taken in by Leslie's wild story about
why she was in London.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
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 3 (11:26):
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 in Hawaii. The bar
was called the Breakwater. Things were going well until one
day Leslie caught the head security guard dealing drugs out
(11:49):
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 through
a cousin at the power company. Leslie said it all
culminated one night when she was at home hearing people
(12:11):
breaking in. She 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
(12:33):
charted a plane and she escaped to Europe. So according
to Leslie. That's how she ended up playing low in London,
and all of this was fascinating to Greg. He started
introducing Leslie to his mates.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Their relationship seemed a normal and normal relationship, aside from
the fact that it got very intense very quickly. But
you would expect that of Greg. He's not a game
player and he wears his heart on his sleeve, so
if he's into you, you'd find out up pretty quickly.
Speaker 12 (13:10):
My initial thoughts was that she was really open and friendly,
maybe a bit too friendly.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
But what do you mean by that.
Speaker 10 (13:20):
She just gave a lot like she just.
Speaker 12 (13:24):
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. Maybe
that's it.
Speaker 3 (13:38):
In London, Leslie managed a couple of bars.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
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 3 (13:53):
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 4 (14:01):
I can remember Greg, I remember Leslie bringing him into
the bar and introducing me to him. Hell of aized guy,
typical sort of keew 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 lativity about him
at the time, and I remember sort of thinking, you know,
(14:22):
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 3 (14:32):
Leslie would hook Greg and his mates up with drinks.
Speaker 6 (14:35):
We suddenly we're invited to a part and there's plenty
buckets of beer being brought to our VIP table in
the corner in the city of London with business people around,
and it was like.
Speaker 10 (14:51):
I'm a beckpecker.
Speaker 6 (14:54):
And I'm one of the words financial capitals getting beer
reigned on me.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
So you felt like a bit of a rock star
or something.
Speaker 10 (15:02):
Yeah, to be sure, yes.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
Greg's friend Andy did wonder where it was all coming from.
Speaker 16 (15:07):
You.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
It's all going on the tabs of different local law firms,
so you know that'll 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
his friends a good time.
Speaker 10 (15:19):
I suppose.
Speaker 3 (15:25):
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
was that Leslie new stuff. She had been everywhere and
done everything. I started saying all the time, Leslie knows,
(15:46):
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
from selling tanks to the US Army. So it was
all pretty impressive, but I have to admit I was
(16:07):
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
arm was constantly around Leslie, so I was happy for him.
After only a few months they moved in together. Things
(16:29):
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 6 (16:44):
She honestly was buying everything like Donald Duck, key rings,
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,
(17:05):
beautiful food.
Speaker 3 (17:07):
But so you had a ring burning a hole in
your hocket.
Speaker 10 (17:10):
Honestly, I don't even remember if I enter ring or
I didn't. I don't think I did, But you remember.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
The Johnny Depp Pirates of the Caribbean restaurant.
Speaker 6 (17:19):
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. How
(17:41):
did she react, I think a little bit surprised, but
also said yes pretty quick as well, So yeah, we
were in love.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Just after he proposed, Greg followed his Beyonce back home
to the superpower he had always wanted to visit. Yeah,
first time in the United States. He expected New York
to be paved in gold. Instead, it was dirty. That
was my first Impressionationly was this. This is rough as cuts.
Then it was to the West Coast to stay in
Leslie's childhood home in Orange County, California. Leslie always said
(18:22):
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 6 (18:32):
Middle income America as you could possibly find.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
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 6 (18:54):
I was put in a room next to her parents,
and she was put in her old room that she
grew up in. Be it in the same place with
the same TV VHS cassettes under the TV.
Speaker 3 (19:10):
Remember Leslie was nearly forty years old at this point,
but it was a separate bedroom situation.
Speaker 6 (19:15):
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 iron,
But the answer was the Hawaiians.
Speaker 3 (19:30):
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 discomfit 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
(19:52):
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 in 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,
(20:14):
but it didn't.
Speaker 10 (20:15):
Get separate bad situation.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
I was quite keen to not have that situation, but
I respected it, but you were married.
Speaker 10 (20:24):
Now, Well that's what was sort of, you know, I thought, Hey,
what else do I need to do here?
Speaker 3 (20:34):
A man?
Speaker 10 (20:35):
I've done the deed, but I want to do the deed.
Her parents were very, very conservative.
Speaker 3 (20:41):
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
then 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.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
They took us out to the airport to lax and
they cried shitloads when we left.
Speaker 10 (21:05):
But it was all, you know, moving to New Zealand
for a new life. What was there thoughts on that? Oh?
Speaker 6 (21:11):
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.
Speaker 10 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (21:28):
Now, whether that's because you know, it's a loved one
leaving to another land or another reason, who fucking knows, Like.
Speaker 10 (21:38):
What do you mean by that? What would another reason.
Speaker 6 (21:39):
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 3 (21:51):
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 him forget. But now
that we're talking, the more we get into what happened
with Leslie, the more tangled up we get.
Speaker 16 (22:04):
I remember that the story was her dad worked in
the armaments and street and you know, we've heard that
she's a trust fund baby, and there's all this money
in her family, and you know she's from the sort
of rich background and everything.
Speaker 10 (22:19):
So none of that is true.
Speaker 6 (22:22):
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.
Speaker 10 (22:37):
It was water tanks.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
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 10 (22:53):
Look, he was my guy. He was an engineer, so
he was Iranian.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
He was born in Sorry, he was actually he was
born in Tehran, but he was Armenian.
Speaker 10 (23:04):
Leslie's that yeah, sorry, no adopted father. No one's as
far as I know.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Well at least of all us has meant the biological parents.
Speaker 10 (23:18):
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.
Speaker 6 (23:32):
Came from, was from her biological parents and what she
got left behind and then she was adopted out.
Speaker 10 (23:40):
So somebody adopted a baby with a trust fund.
Speaker 6 (23:43):
Well, this is where, like you know, there's so many
facets to someone's personality or stories.
Speaker 10 (23:53):
All or otherwise.
Speaker 6 (23:56):
Eventually you actually just kind of give up asking and
accept some of it and.
Speaker 10 (24:04):
Live in the moment and move on. It's just it
just seems like bullshit, you know, well most of it is.
Speaker 3 (24:16):
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 10 (24:31):
Yeah, she's obviously a bit older than me. How much older? Well,
sheared two birthdays, so I never actually know.
Speaker 6 (24:41):
You what do you mean she had two birthdays? I
feel like ask, what do you mean a lot? Yeah,
that's one more 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?
Speaker 10 (24:59):
What well, wait, we'll explain. Explain.
Speaker 6 (25:05):
So there was a US passport, but that there was
other documentation with different birthdays.
Speaker 10 (25:16):
You didn't think that was strange?
Speaker 6 (25:19):
Well yeah, sure, but there was you know, plausible reasons which.
Speaker 10 (25:25):
Were what.
Speaker 6 (25:29):
Uh, I think for memory?
Speaker 10 (25:32):
It was smuggled out of Armenia. The passport was smuggled
out of who she was.
Speaker 6 (25:46):
Wow, so we've got that piece plus all the Hawaiians
attacking her.
Speaker 10 (25:56):
Mate shoes. She's an enigma.
Speaker 3 (26:12):
Oh hey bro, yeah, I want you to meet my
older brother, Simon.
Speaker 11 (26:18):
My name's Simon.
Speaker 10 (26:19):
I'm your brother.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
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 10 (26:42):
I don't know.
Speaker 17 (26:43):
I'm an artist, a lover, not no, I'm a brother.
You're like, what are you men for?
Speaker 3 (26:51):
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.
Speaker 11 (26:59):
It was it was just it was. It was a
bit weird.
Speaker 17 (27:02):
And to tell you the truth, 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 feeling a bit like TV,
just because you know what.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
I mean, sort of like an intensity.
Speaker 17 (27:24):
Yeah, man, wicked intensity. It didn't seem like this huge
love affair. But Greg's quite in dreusd anyway. He's quite
a druceding guy. So something that may seem strange in
another situation, I'm like, oh, this is just Greg.
Speaker 11 (27:42):
This is my brother.
Speaker 3 (27:43):
Gregg's ki we mates also found Leslie quite buzzy.
Speaker 18 (27:47):
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 I was ten years ago. I
was twenty four. So here's this chick who was like
just paying for everything. Like she was always I mean,
can I talk about drugs? She was always supplying weed
(28:09):
and Jaeger myster.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
It's a quick way to a twenty four year old's
heartweed and.
Speaker 18 (28:14):
Jaga mustad oh one hundred Right.
Speaker 3 (28:17):
Most people were like sweet ass, but for some others
it was a bit much like for instance, she said
come over, we'll have a drink of wine.
Speaker 18 (28:25):
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.
Speaker 7 (28:31):
She'd turn up the next day with like a whole
case of the stuff.
Speaker 10 (28:34):
And be like, this is for you.
Speaker 13 (28:35):
Every time we caught up, 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 (29:02):
Don't put it near me.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
What needs to come near you to record.
Speaker 7 (29:06):
You just looking at me?
Speaker 3 (29:07):
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 (29:26):
Could you just put it sort of over there down there?
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Can you start by just why don't you tell me
a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 10 (29:36):
Hello?
Speaker 5 (29:37):
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,
(30:03):
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 3 (30:16):
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 (30:25):
She was rather lovely.
Speaker 5 (30:26):
She had this dark, vivacious, a surface skin and look
to her personality bubbly, very yah yah American.
Speaker 7 (30:40):
You know how Americans have the accent where they going
Yeah yeah yah yah yah 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 3 (30:53):
Mum ended up hanging out with Leslie like every day.
Speaker 7 (30:56):
Each day.
Speaker 5 (30:58):
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 3 (31:06):
What was the kind of plan though, I mean, what
were they going to be doing.
Speaker 5 (31:08):
It's going to by 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.
Speaker 10 (31:27):
I've got it.
Speaker 7 (31:28):
She said, this is a sign I have to buy
this place.
Speaker 10 (31:33):
And what was the sign.
Speaker 5 (31:34):
The sign was that she had a big dragonfly tattooed
across her back.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
And so the cafe is called the Dragonfly. She's got
a dragonfly tattoo.
Speaker 10 (31:44):
It's a sign meant to be.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
The Dragonfly Cafe was in a small town called Medicana
and 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 waddle around town from
the river, which is lit up by fairy lights at night.
The Dragonfly was on the main road leading into Maticana.
(32:11):
At 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. It was lovely, super staff and do you
(32:37):
remember how much it was going to be worth.
Speaker 7 (32:41):
Over a million.
Speaker 5 (32:46):
Because it had the house with it in the beautiful
land and the business.
Speaker 9 (32:56):
Okay, you ready to rock and roll?
Speaker 3 (32:58):
And finally from our fam, this is my dad, David.
Speaker 9 (33:02):
I am a Kiwi fellow who has had lots of jobs,
met lots of peace. 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 3 (33:21):
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 it's
Dad was there to help Leslie get set up when
(33:42):
she came to New Zealand.
Speaker 9 (33:43):
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 3 (33:57):
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,
(34:18):
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
(34:40):
condition of the loan was having a keywi garranteur. Dad
had just sold his party hire company and retired, so
it seemed natural for them to get involved.
Speaker 9 (34:47):
There are a lot of people that were sort of
saying things, you're cautioning us.
Speaker 10 (34:54):
Are you sure.
Speaker 9 (34:56):
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 a
America and in Hawaii. She talks to talk. She convinced
(35:16):
our lawyer that it was a good thing to do.
Speaker 3 (35:19):
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 (35:32):
He said to me, you don't have to do anything, David,
because I would say she's a human dynamo. It's 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
(35:53):
one hundred percent loan to purchase one and a half
million dollars worth of property and business. It was a
lawful lot on trust here on my part and our part,
huge amount. We did stick our niecks out.
Speaker 3 (36:14):
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 17 (36:28):
So I may embellished the story, but I remember it
has been 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 3 (36:40):
Isn't he some French guy?
Speaker 10 (36:42):
And he quit.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
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 Mattakana community. Here was this
California power business lady shaking things up, the local magazine
did a ride up.
Speaker 18 (36:59):
Now under its new owner, Leslie Minuchian, who has previously
owned restaurants in Lake Tahoe and the US and in Hawaii,
Dragonfly is getting.
Speaker 7 (37:08):
Better by the day.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
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 Kee. 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 12 (37:29):
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.
Speaker 11 (37:45):
In New Zealand in January.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
One of the other bridesmaids, Alisha, hadn't known Leslie for
long either.
Speaker 14 (37:52):
I was asked to be a bridemage, 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 to do it because we were,
you know, we were for the time.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
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, and.
Speaker 10 (38:31):
It just was really surreal. It was like I was
kind of acting.
Speaker 7 (38:35):
I was acting in a sitcom or something like.
Speaker 12 (38:37):
That was my role to arrive and then then I
was going to go walk, you know, down Ireland.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
It was.
Speaker 7 (38:42):
It was so weird.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
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
(39:05):
joke like, jeez, I go away for a couple of
months and I come back and Gregg'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
(39:26):
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 Gregs were Leslie's parents, Betty and Andrew.
Speaker 11 (39:37):
There was two people, yeah, no friends, no family.
Speaker 17 (39:44):
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 the would just stand offish. They were just like,
I don't know, it was just fucking weird. I don't
remember really being able to talk to them at all.
There was no really interaction.
Speaker 5 (40:04):
They were very quiet and you couldn't raise a lip
of a smile. You couldn't get a word out of them.
They looked very she looked very pale and.
Speaker 7 (40:20):
Colorless.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
The best man, Nat made a special effort with Leslie's parents.
Speaker 11 (40:26):
They were very very hard to try and make them
feel welcome.
Speaker 9 (40:30):
So I just remember at one point just walking away thinking, oh, well.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
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 actors. They seemed
a little bit standing like, because they were sort of
a bit there but not there.
Speaker 18 (40:48):
We joked that they were hired actors because yeah, well,
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 vibing relationship
between the two like you would expect from a parent
and child.
Speaker 17 (41:08):
Like I didn't, like, honestly like to this stay. I
have no idea if that's appearance, no idea. I I
wouldn't be surprised if that as not. I don't remember
seeing any kind of love go on.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
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 11 (41:29):
I think they kind of knew that there was some
some fuckery involved, you know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (41:38):
It wasn't long after the wedding that people started to
notice some of that fuckery.
Speaker 18 (41:43):
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 a driving record from the US.
And we were having a laugh because she had all
(42:04):
these dui and some like suspended licenses or something like.
She had 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 rephotocopping them
until it looked legit.
Speaker 3 (42:26):
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 18 (42:33):
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.
Speaker 10 (42:47):
Hiding some stuff.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
End Up at the Dragonfly Cafa, things were starting to
go wrong.
Speaker 19 (42:53):
We ran out of water, so we didn't have access
in the kitchen to water, and so gregan likewires 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 if something was going wrong and there was just.
Speaker 3 (43:13):
No fixing it.
Speaker 19 (43:15):
I don't think Leslie was around for much of that.
I remember her coming in really strong at the beginning
and then kind of not being around and all that stuff.
We like, what's happening.
Speaker 6 (43:27):
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
(43:48):
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 sort of
and she did with lots of things.
Speaker 10 (44:06):
I'll take care of it. Don't get involved, leave it
to me.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
The Dragonfly was becoming a total cluster. A bunch of
people were saying they weren't getting paid.
Speaker 6 (44:14):
I became very frustrated that I couldn't access in information.
I 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,
(44:35):
the more angry she got at me, the more frustrated
I got, And that became a real strain.
Speaker 9 (44:41):
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
(45:04):
a lot of stuff.
Speaker 3 (45:05):
But you were the guaranteurs, and you know, you guys
had money on the line. But you would signed up
to be the guarantees but not signed up to be
able to see anything.
Speaker 10 (45:15):
Isn't that weird?
Speaker 9 (45:17):
You could say it like that, but I did follow
my lawyer's advice that she knows what she's doing.
Speaker 10 (45:23):
She's a human dynamo.
Speaker 3 (45:28):
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 6 (45:47):
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.
Speaker 8 (45:57):
Of the country.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
And you actually thought that would be an opportunity to
look around? Probably it was the only way, yep. And
what was you know, if you don't mind me asking
like the kind of relationship like at that.
Speaker 6 (46:11):
Point, Frosty, i'mdiscompletely untrusting on both sides.
Speaker 3 (46:24):
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 unsaid, but Greg wanted to work this
whole mess out and get back to life with Leslie
when she got back from the States.
Speaker 6 (46:45):
So we're parked, checked and formalities 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
(47:05):
was probably a nervous 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
(47:25):
that Greg, the Snowball is about to hit you.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Next episode the Snowball hits.
Speaker 10 (47:42):
We cried. We just were destroyed.
Speaker 9 (47:46):
That was a fundamental wow moment for me when you
presumed that to a bank and they accepted.
Speaker 7 (47:53):
Adrenaline is my best friend.
Speaker 11 (47:55):
That's quite calculated. That's fucking out there. Somebody has been
wronged using my name and rightfully believes that the person
who wronged them is meat.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
I found it, he said, George Janitors should.
Speaker 10 (48:08):
Have found it.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
How often would you go in there and look?
Speaker 10 (48:11):
At least once a week. It's so weird. It is weird.
Speaker 3 (48:20):
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 Rocksborough. Our
super diligent audio producer is Emma Lancaster. Assisting with audio
(48:44):
production is Shane Anderson, who is also our whip 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
(49:06):
talented tunsmith Bryce Halliday. You can check out some behind
the scenes stuff over at my Instagram at Olly Ward's
O l l I E WRDS. Unrevel is a product
of ABC Audio Studios, led by the abuliant, thoughtful, and
patient Kelly Redan and on. Revel's expert and excitable executive
(49:32):
producer is Ian Walker.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
I hope you enjoyed that preview of deep Cover Presents Snowball.
You can find more anywhere you get podcasts, binge the
full season with a Pushkin Plus subscription. Find Pushkin Plus
on the deep Cover show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Hosts And Creators
Maria Konnikova
Nate Silver
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com