Alan Todd May passed himself off as an oil magnate, insinuated himself into West Palm Beach high society, and conned people out of millions.
In January, 2023, a retired style-magazine editor whom I’ll call Maria was heading to lunch at the National Croquet Club, in West Palm Beach, Florida, when she spotted two men who seemed like fun. The older of the pair introduced himself as Jacob Turner. He was tall, in his fifties, with gleaming white teeth and blondish hair. “A major figure with a major belly,” Maria, an elegant, sharp-eyed widow, told me recently. Turner’s name appeared on the breast pocket of his all-white croquet outfit, and he wore a chunky gold neck chain that she soon urged him to lose. Kevin Alvarez, Turner’s boyfriend, was around thirty and smaller—“a sweet shadow,” Maria said. She invited the men to lunch with her and her friends, and Turner amused them all with stories that emphasized his extravagant generosity—including one about how he’d met Alvarez. “I was buying shoes, and Kevin was my salesman,” she recalls Turner drawlling. “I told him I’d buy shoes for everyone in the store if he went out with me.”
Turner was from Texas and told Maria that he was an oilman. He claimed to own several wells. “Royalties come in all the time,” he told her. Maria was intrigued: she knew famous people, but she’d never met an oilman before. A few weeks after their lunch, Turner came to her birthday dinner, at Bice, a white-tablecloth place downtown. When the bill arrived—likely amounting to around two thousand dollars—Turner pulled out his platinum credit card and paid it, before another man at the table, who appeared to be courting Maria, could contribute. Then he handed Maria a bottle of “spring flower” perfume from Saks Fifth Avenue. “Five hundred dollars,” she told me. “And it’s not even that good.”
Turner quickly made friends at the club. A man I’ll call Jack, a retired book publisher, met him through Maria. “A generous man with a face full of sun,” Jack said, of Turner. “But even with lessons, he couldn’t play croquet.” Turner was a lavish giver. He showed up late to an Easter-weekend dinner with gift bags containing mini bottles of Veuve Clicquot and chocolate bunnies. Jack invited him to brunch a few days later, where Turner gave a young woman a hundred-dollar bill for taking a picture of them. “He always tipped well, unlike a lot of these people,” Jack told me. “And he never asked me for anything.” (Maria and Jack both requested pseudonyms, expressing concern about social repercussions for discussing the private club. Members had heard rumors that someone was once penalized for bringing penis-shaped “party whistles” onto the grounds. When I asked the club about this, they referred me to someone at the National Croquet Center, who said that she couldn’t comment on club matters.)
That March, Turner invited Maria to a boutique hotel where he had booked a suite for the weekend, to have a sumptuous meal of caviar and champagne. “Who buys half a pound of caviar?” Maria asked me. “But it was just heaven.” Next, she visited the couple’s penthouse apartment on South Ocean Boulevard, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. She was surprised to find that the building didn’t have a doorman. In his apartment, surrounded by new furnishings, Turner was grilling steaks he said he’d bought at eighty dollars a pound. “He murdered the meat,” Maria sighed. “But the company was divine.” When she left, she passed by the couple’s twin Mercedes-Benzes. She saw the men at a nineteen-twenties-themed club luncheon, wearing top hats and tailcoats. Turner seemed to especially relish dressing up and mingling with bigwigs. At one fund-raiser, he reportedly bought a table for ten thousand dollars, then raised his paddle at the auction and pledged a hundred thousand more.
When the first heat of summer arrived, West Palm Beach emptied out. As soon as Maria returned, this past August, she called up Turner to arrange a drink. His number wasn’t working, which seemed odd. Then one of her friends told her to Google “Alan Todd May.” Maria was soon staring at a mugshot: May, the man in the photo, was slimmer, and his hair was darker, but he was clearly the person she knew as Jacob Turner. He had escaped from a federal prison almost five years earlier, she read, while serving a twenty-year sentence for an oil fraud that had netted him millions. She called Alvarez, and he started crying on the phone. “Kevin, the truth: did you have any idea?” she asked. He replied, “I had no clue.”
I visited Maria recently in West Palm Beach, just as the heat was arriving again. We lunched at the croquet club, whose halls were filled with portraits of former club presidents and display cases full of trophies. I borrowed a mallet and stepped onto the club’s grass with a Texan named Gerry, who’d made his money in the jingle-writing business. The wicket was smaller than I’d expected. “It takes a while to catch on,” Gerry said, demonstrating how to “stalk” the ball. At dinner that evening, Maria showed me photos from her phone. There was May: standing with her on the croquet court, sitting with her at fancy meals, smiling brightly. She noted his apparent eagerness to move up in society. Earlier, I had skimmed a copy of the Palm Beach Daily News, whose society pages document galasbenefitting the restoration of castles and dish about which millionaire bachelors are off the market. “That’s all anyone here wants,” Maria told me. “To be in those pages.”
Alan Todd May was born in 1964, in Houston. His father, Albert, worked at a copy machine-rental-and-repair shop, and his mother, Mary Kathryn, dabbled in selling flowers. Albert’s grandfather was a cotton ginner, who had managed to secure a small oil-and-gas interest in Nacogdoches, Texas, worth a hundred dollars a month, before his death, in the late nineteen-forties. The claim had been passed down to Albert, teasing at a life larger than the one he led. “Todd was smarter than everyone, and, I guess, he wanted more than what we had,” May’s middle brother, Chris, told me. In 1984, both May and his mother were incarcerated, separately, for passing bad checks. (May’s mother could not be reached for comment, and Chris told me that she wouldn’t be interested in speaking to me.) From his cell, the twenty-year-old filed a class-action lawsuit against the county, arguing that inmates should have access to newspapers. He also sued the county and the federal government for a total of eight million dollars, alleging that his parole officer had used his power to “manipulate” him to “indulge in various sex acts.” The officer resigned, but May soon dropped the suit, saying that he had willingly participated in the tryst (The parole officer could not be reached for comment.) May had previously noted that he had “homosexual tendencies” and promised a judge that he would go to church, marry a woman, and make an honest living. He married in 1986, but divorced a year later, on the same day that he was sentenced to six years in prison for another check-fraud conviction.
Incarceration did little to dampen May’s ambitions. By the early nineteen-nineties, he was out and living in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, with a second wife. Beth Morean, their landlord, said that they replaced her rental beach house’s wicker furniture with mahogany and marble, hung English hunting scenes on the walls, and laid out issues of Forbes and Fortune. “His whole aesthetic was expensive, but not nice,” Morean told me. “Very new-money.” Dozens of stray checks addressed to May were scattered around, Morean recalled, “like Chevy Chase in Caddyshack.” He was a charming young man with red hair, who told her that his family had oil money, and were “high society” in Texas. He claimed that he was a graduate of Rice University, whose logo appeared around the house. He noted that he’d come to the area to organize a women’s expo. He frequently rented limos, taking Morean and others out for extravagant steak dinners. He bought Louis Vuitton neckties for Morean’s then-partner, and expensive pottery for another new friend named Chelley Tighe. “He had us over to these buffets of caviar and champagne,” Tighe told me. “It was all out of proportion.”
Not long after the Mays’ stay in St. Petersburg Beach began, they crammed a U-Haul with their paintings and expensive glassware and left in the middle of the night. (May’s second wife did not respond to requests for comment.) In the coming days, Morean found checks in their mailbox and red hair dye in the trash. She spoke with the police and the F.B.I. May had been signing convention-center rental agreements using false identities, soliciting venders with slick brochures and newspaper ads, then disappearing with their booth deposits. He’d been at these types of scams since his early twenties, one detective subsequently said. May was arrested a month later, in Indianapolis, where he was advertising a “Cosmopolitan Women’s Show.” A newspaper described May as a “high-roller who used charm and financial smarts to play people like a pinball machine.” A woman at an answering service in St. Petersburg, whom May owed money, described him as “a handsome guy with a college boy look. Any woman young or old would be infatuated with him.”
May went to prison, but his scamming continued. In 1995, he advertised a Christian family expo in Dallas, and Joleen Tropp Mullins, an author who hoped to sell her children’s book about a virtuous superhero there, spoke to him by phone. (An accomplice on the outside placed conference calls for May, to avoid the automatic disclosure that came with calls from prison.) “He said how well I was going to do,” Tropp Mullins told me. May had a floor plan overnighted to her, and she sent a deposit for a few hundred dollars to an address that he provided. But when Tropp Mullins phoned the convention center, she learned that the expo had never been scheduled. He carried out the same scam all over the South and the Southwest. Even the I.R.S. reportedly fell for the con, and paid for a booth at a women’s trade show that he’d made up.
Around 2000, May met a high-school senior named Jason in an AOL chat room. He was now out of prison, and they dated for the next three years. May, then in his mid-thirties, was magnetic, Jason recalled, and took the eighteen-year-old shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. He bought a fake Ph.D. online to burnish his résumé, according to Jason, and eventually opened several businesses, including a dry cleaners in a tony neighborhood of Houston that he opened in his and Jason’s names; they took the clothes to another cleaner and returned them to their customers at a markup. “I naïvely went along with his plans, which kept getting crazier,” Jason told me. May used Jason’s credit card to buy dozens of Prada shoes for himself, as well as gifts for others. “He bought me an electric razor for graduating high school,” Jason recalled, still incredulous. “With my own damn Sears card.” For reasons Jason didn’t initially understand, May kept them moving: Dallas, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Atlanta. At one point, the authorities showed up at Jason’s parents’ house to ask about suspicious accounts opened in Jason’s name. Eventually, authorities tracked the couple down in Decatur, Georgia, and found May hiding in the bathtub. Jason told me that his credit score was ruined. (He requested that I use only his first name, for fear of retribution from May.) “Not the ideal first boyfriend,” he said.
May went to prison again for a few years, occupying his time, in part, with an inheritance dispute. His father, Albert, had died the year before, and left two wills: in one, he bequeathed everything to May’s stepmother; in another, he left everything to his three sons. Everything did not amount to much: a truck, a small home, and a modest business. Also: the oil and gas rights, worth a hundred dollars a month. But May coveted this. His youngest brother, Joe, urged him not to fight, writing, “You have chosen money and vengeance over justice and mercy.” But for May, the oil rights seemed to be symbolic. “The only interest we have and have had all along is the oil and gas royalty my father inherited from his mother,” he wrote to a probate judge, in his cursive hand. “That’s it. Just the legacy from our great-grandfather.” Both from prison, and eventually back on the outside, May wrote letters to Jason. In one of the few that Jason told me he actually read, May referenced living in England. At one point, Jason recalled, May said that he was considering changing his name to David Abercrombie. (He had previously used “Johnathan Fairchild,” and had mentioned trying out “Joe Rothschild.”) May had also succeeded in the inheritance dispute. The oil-and-gas interest had been divided into four equal shares, one for each of Albert’s sons and one for his adopted daughter. Alan Todd May was now, in the vaguest possible sense, an oilman.
The discovery of oil at Spindletop field, in 1901—the first big gusher in Texas—helped usher in, along with climate change, an era of cars, planes, and countless other conveniences. It also brought about one of the great American archetypes: the Texas oilman, who was aggressive, charismatic, and unabashed. He often came from nothing. Michel Halbouty, the son of a Lebanese immigrant and grocer, had, according to the Horatio Alger Association, “made and lost two fortunes” by 1939, when he was thirty. Glenn McCarthy, a poor wildcatter, became Diamond Glenn, the owner of newspapers, a radio station, a major hotel, and a chemical company, and the creator of a brand of bourbon. Oilmen were American aristocrats, of a sort, and they wielded considerable political influence. In 1962, The Nation declared that “virtually every Radical Right movement of the postwar era has been propped up by Texas oil millionaires.” The oilman Hugh Roy Cullen was the largest contributor to one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaigns; T. Boone Pickens bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry. The fantasy of the American oilman was that, with a little ingenuity and will, you could become a titan. In 1952, the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists published a paper titled “Toward a Philosophy of Oil-Finding,” noting, “Where oil fields are really found, in the final analysis, is in the minds of men.”
In 2008, while still on parole, Alan Todd May started an oil company in Dallas called Prosper Oil & Gas, which claimed to be “engaged in the exploration of oil and natural gas in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and North Dakota.” The next year, Dawn Dandridge, a Dallas resident in her thirties, became Prosper’s accountant. The job posting she’d stumbled across had noted the company’s “tremendous growth,” “progressive working environment,” and “paid monthly valet parking.” Dandridge recalled her interview with May, in his office in a high-rise in downtown Dallas. “It seemed like he was trying to intimidate me,” she said, noting that he’d silently stared at her. Through classified ads in the Wall Street Journal, online listings, and billboards, May had attracted more than a hundred investors, including a piano teacher and the president of a small bank, who together eventually put some seven million dollars into Prosper’s coffers. May sold them royalty interests: a percentage of the revenue that his wells produced, which, he said, had historic annual returns of up to thirty-eight per cent on each investment. The bank president, Jon Pope, described May to me as “decked out in a suit, clean-cut, professional. An oil guy.”
The other employees were almost all gay men. May obtained expensive cars for senior staff—a Mercedes, a BMW—and Rolex watches, which he bestowed during parties at his Dallas mansion. “Everyone with a watch would stand in a line with their arm out, and then the new person would get crowned with one,” Dandridge told me. A Dallas County sheriff running for reëlection attended one party. May’s parole officers did, too. (One of these officers was later prosecutedfor taking five thousand dollars worth of bribes to ignore May’s parole violations.) Dandridge also recalled seeing a local preacher visit May at the office. “Todd seemed to know everyone,” she said. May took his employees on trips, including one to Midland, Texas, to see some of Prosper’s wells. Afterward, he proposed flying to Aspen. No one had brought gear, but he told them, “I’ll buy you ski clothes when we get there.” The group was soon in Aspen, though they spent more time in hot tubs and bars than on the mountain; apparently, no one knew how to ski.
In the previous few months, Dandridge had noticed odd things about the company. Investors received their payouts slowly, if at all. Pope, the bank president, received twenty thousand dollars in royalties—about fifteen per cent of his investment—and only after pestering May for it. The piano teacher had to nag him, too. May made excuses—staffing cuts, misplaced checks, and an illness in his family—and told Dandridge to stall, or to say a check was in the mail. One day, in early 2010, Dandridge went to deposit a company check and a banker quietly told her that authorities were investigating Prosper. Dandridge told May. “He said to take the money out and put it in another bank,” she recalled. She did. “But I also started looking for another job.” In March, 2010, she heard a commotion in Prosper’s reception area, and someone shouted, “Come out with your hands up!” Federal agents were there with guns drawn. A court-appointed receiver working with the Securities and Exchange Commission conducted interviews on-site and eventually confiscated more than a dozen Rolexes and luxury cars. Dandridge, who never received a car, was able to drive home.
The Secret Service had received a tip about May months earlier, and began an investigation. He wasn’t allowed to open credit cards or checking accounts while paroled, Chris Walker, a former Secret Service agent who worked the case, told me. This, he said, “would make it pretty hard to run an oil-and-gas company or live like a multimillionaire.” They learned that May had promised prodigious output from Prosper’s wells, but, in fact, most of them were essentially duds. In an affidavit from 2010, Walker wrote that the Texas Railroad Commission tested nine of twenty-eight wells that Prosper was operating on leases; only seven produced oil, and at a rate of roughly one barrel a day. (Good wells often produce fifteen or more.) Prosper was selling more royalty shares on its wells than could mathematically exist, and May was mostly paying investors out of the pool of other people’s investments—a classic Ponzi scheme. To bolster the case, the Secret Service had sent in an agent to pose as a potential investor. One of May’s employees tried to sell him royalties on a well that Prosper didn’t even own. “She lied to my face about it later,” Walker told me. “Said she hadn’t done it, but we had the recording.” Some other employees had dubious records. According to the Supreme Court of Texas, the company lawyer, who’d signed Dandridge’s hiring letter, previously had his probationary law license revoked. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) “But it all ran through May,” Walker told me.
May and his Prosper employees had been spending like oil tycoons: more than six hundred thousand dollars on cars and related expenses, including a Ferrari; more than four hundred thousand on meals, entertainment, and retail purchases; more than three hundred thousand on travel. May acquired a 1965 Piper Aztec airplane apparently once owned Peter Falk, the actor from “Columbo,” and multiple houses and condos in Texas, including one that he’d procured for his mother. His six-thousand-square-foot home in Dallas had a wine cellar, a pool, an elevator, and multiple kitchens. (“Very nouveau riche,” a society columnist formerly with Dallas’s D magazine told me.) After the office raid, Kelly Crawford, the receiver, went to May’s home, to seize Prosper-related assets. He noted erotic statuary, and May’s pet cockatiel, Yanni, named for the composer. He heard that May’s maid had fainted when agents arrived. May, who was at home at the time, was unusually coöperative, Crawford recalled. He promised to meet the agents the next day, near a condo that he kept downtown, for a more thorough interview. He didn’t show up to the sit-down; he was preparing to flee.
May was then dating a twenty-two-year-old named Cody. “He was well put together,” Cody told me. “A smooth-talking, good ol’ country boy with a Texas drawl and thick red hair.” Cody understood that May’s family was connected to oil money. For their first date, May flew Cody to New York, where they stayed at a ritzy hotel, and shopped at Bergdorf Goodman. May soon bought Cody a Range Rover. The couple travelled to Maui, Alaska, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Miami, where May rented a penthouse that he claimed Britney Spears had stayed in. “I never really went home,” Cody said. Cody became May’s assistant, notarizing documents and throwing parties at the mansion. “He was always changing banks and moving money around,” Cody told me. “We had to take the Range Rover back, eventually, because a check bounced.” (Cody also requested that I use only his first name.)
Soon after the raids, May contacted Cody with a plan. “He said everything was messed up and needed to be sorted out, but he couldn’t do it in jail,” Cody told me. May had an I.D. machine, Cody said, which he used to create fake identities. Cody travelled to South Padre Island, off the coast of Texas, to meet May. Then, in an apparent effort to confuse authorities, they turned around. May chartered a plane to San Antonio, then they made their way to California by train. May got them a condo with a lush garden and a koi pond on winding Lombard Street, in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood. “The crookedest street in the world,” Cody told me.
The ruse worked for a while. Crawford thought that May might have headed for Mexico. Authorities found his abandoned Mercedes in South Texas, a few miles from the border, but the trail ran cold after that. For a month or so, Crawford told me, “no one knew where he was.” But, in San Francisco, Cody and May began to bicker. “I was waking up,” Cody told me. He called his mother, against May’s wishes, to tell her he was O.K. Eventually, May bought Cody a ticket home, and authorities stopped Cody as he disembarked in Dallas. “He gave up May immediately,” Walker said. With Cody’s help, agents found May hiding out in a hotel in San Francisco. He was running another oil scam, luring investors with promises of royalties. “Prosper all over again,” Crawford told me. After the agents arrested May, they sat him down to go over the details of his crimes and he complimented their work, saying things like “You got me there,” and insinuating that he had stolen more money than they knew: “You might be a little light on the fraud numbers there.” “It was weird,” Walker told me. May eventually pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud, and gave prosecutors information about two of his former Prosper employees.
May was sent to prison for twenty years—first in Texas, then at a facility in Colorado, which has housed at least two famous convicted fraudsters: Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, who attempted to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama in 2008, a charge which was later overturned; and Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron C.E.O. May updated one of his Facebook pages as if he were still free, posting about charity fund-raisers. In one image that he added to his page in 2018, May holds a polo mallet while standing in front of a Maserati. “I am a Management Consultant in Denver, CO with an amazing boyfriend,” he wrote in another post that year. He created a YouTube channel and uploaded a short clip of himself driving down a gravel road between a lake and a golf course—there’s one next to the prison, whose grounds inmates could sometimes leave while on work detail—seemingly in a chipper mood. That October, he updated his Facebook bio: “Certified Mediator, polo player, author, wine taster.”
May had promised to cease his criminal endeavors. “He told me he was going to be a paralegal,” Crawford said. At one point, he created a blog called dallasmediator, offering his services in “Mediation: Texas Style,” and pulling text from a Web site for the State Bar of Texas. But between 2015 and 2018, according to state business filings, he also registered more than forty companies with the state—“Blackwood Consulting,” “Brookfield Contractors,” “Blue Mesa Holdings”—sometimes filing six in a day. None of them appeared to do anything, except, perhaps, provide a place to hide money or prop up a scheme. According to authorities, May made at least seven hundred thousand dollars from prison around this time by claiming to represent businesses that were owed unclaimed oil and gas royalties. He was indicted in June, 2022, for this alleged scheme. By this time, though, he was a fugitive again.
On December 21, 2018, a few days after posting and liking a grinning selfie on Facebook, May drove a Colorado prison truck off the prison grounds. (Blagojavich told me that escaping didn’t look difficult.) He took it to a U-Haul center, and rented a van, apparently using a fake license. He then ditched the prison truck at a nearby building. Inside the truck, he’d reportedly left behind Walmart and Target bags, as well as his prison uniform, which he’d presumably worn into the stores to buy new clothes and other supplies. May eventually abandoned the rental van behind a Waffle House in Fort Worth, eight hundred miles south of the prison. “May could not have timed his escape any better,” a Denver TV news reporter noted at the time. The day after he fled, the U.S. government partially shut down owing to congressional disputes over the budget, and didn’t fully reopen until January, 2019. A U.S. Marshals Service official told reporters that, given the shutdown, the agency could not pay for “certain investigative techniques.” With the benefit of government gridlock, May was soon on his way to Florida, to resume his life as an oilman.
Somerset Maugham famously called the French Riviera, “a sunny place for shady people.” Some West Palm Beachers have taken up the mantle. “Palm Beach is full of people pierced by sorrows brought on by the pursuit of money,” Laurence Leamer writes in “Madness Under the Royal Palms,” a chronicle of the place’s ample underbelly. “It sets wives against husbands, children against stepmothers, the young against the old, and the healthy against the infirm.” It’s also a place conducive to second acts—and even to third and fourth ones—if you have the funds.
When I visited, in early April, Jack, the retired book publisher, gave me a Jacob Turner tour. We went by Café L’Europe, where customers pay eighty dollars for scrambled eggs and caviar, and, an employee told me, May had regularly spent thousands. We passed the Brazilian Court Hotel, where he ate caviar with Maria, and poked around Trillion, a high-end haberdashery on Worth Avenue, where he had shopped. At the croquet club, I learned, May had once noticed that certain members got special meals of salmon or salads instead of having to eat from the buffet, which made him indignant. “They told our group, ‘We had to know someone,’ ” he later wrote, in a long letter to the club’s leadership. “It was decided to leave the club and spend our lunch and alcohol money elsewhere, since none of us fancied Gruel.” At one point, May sent Jack a photo, without explanation, of him standing with Alvarez, his boyfriend, and Kevin McCarthy, then the Speaker of the House, in the lobby of the St. Regis hotel in New York City. (The photo was real: May, I learned, had bumped into McCarthy, and introduced himself as a Republican from Palm Beach.)
After May’s escape, U.S. marshals had chased leads about him in California, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Texas. For a while, there was a theory that he was living under the alias Cary Bailey, and presenting himself as a mediator in San Francisco, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service. Then one day last summer, someone spotted May in a Palm Beach Daily News society-page photo taken at a charity fund-raiser. He was heavier, with dyed-blond hair, but recognizable nonetheless. Marshals staked out his penthouse, and eventually tracked him down to a home in Fort Lauderdale, where he appeared to be moving, and arrested him. Maria and Jack had recently seen him driving a Rolls Royce.
May is currently scheduled to go on trial this fall for mail fraud, wire fraud, and escaping custody. (He has entered a “not guilty” plea. A prosecutor declined to comment, as did May’s attorney.) “He may go away for another twenty years or more,” Walker, the former Secret Service agent, told me. “But he’ll just continue his schemes from prison.” When I e-mailed May, I got only an automated response: “Thank you for the recent email. As soon as I have the opportunity I will get back with you. Have a BRILLIANT DAY!!” Alvarez declined to speak to me for this piece. I did hear from an older man in Florida describing himself as Alvarez’s representative. They were talking to producers about making a movie based on Alvarez’s experiences with May, he said, and, if I wanted an interview, I would have to sign a written agreement first or give them a co-byline. (I declined.)
May’s brother Chris now runs a copy-machine store, like their father, in Conroe, Texas. He said that his brother had been in and out of jail since he was young. “He’s real brilliant and real smart and knows how to make money, but he’s not smart enough to do it without screwing somebody else out of it,” he told me. Walker told me that May is “one of the most natural salesmen I’ve ever encountered.” Pope, the Prosper investor, said that May “could sell ice to an Eskimo.” Jason called him “scary smart.” Blagojevich, who met him in prison, told me, “He seemed like one of those real slick, white-collar conmen criminals that were in prison with me over the years. When I heard that he escaped and was actually doing well—he hadn’t been caught—I wasn’t that surprised, because he seemed like a real clever guy.” As we cruised South Ocean Boulevard, near Mar-a-Lago, and Bernie Madoff’s former home, Jack floated a theory: perhaps the croquet club was another stepping stone for May. Maybe he’d join Mar-a-Lago, where he’d meet people more monied and connected than Maria and Jack. Perhaps they would introduce him to Donald Trump, or invest in his next scheme, or otherwise solidify his tenuous sense of belonging.
In some ways, May reminded me of Redmond Barry, the protagonist of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel “The Luck of Barry Lyndon,” from 1844, later made into a film by Stanley Kubrick. Barry, an Irish rogue, manages, through evolving deceits, to pass himself off as an English aristocrat. His chief assets are cunning, charm, and brio. He takes part in gambling scams and, by spending lavishly on landed men, ingratiates himself into high society. He seems most concerned with status—with becoming, as an earl in Kubrick’s film puts it, a person “about whom there is no question.” By the end of the novel, though, he is broke and broken, dying in prison. Jacob Turner, the unctuous oilman of West Palm Beach, was also a bourgeois charade—as Maria put it, “an overdone steak.” He fooled plenty of people along the way. But you can see that version of May sloughing off, like snakeskin, in a picture taken of him slumped in the back of a police wagon, after his capture last summer: his hands are cuffed, his face slack, his eyes barely open.
Days later, a Palm Beach Daily News society-page columnist insisted that he’d never belonged. “Look at him,” she wrote, pointing to the grinning charity photo that was his final undoing. “Glen plaid sport coat at an evening event. Gradient aviator glasses. Spray tan. White pocket square. White. Not a Palm Beacher.” I asked Maria about this critique. “I pity him,” she told me. “He didn’t have a background that would solidify his ambition. And he was desperately trying to get it. I think he was lonely.” She missed how he made her laugh. “He was two feet off the ground, but everyone else here is so fucking serious,” she said. “He was funny.” ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-fake-oilman