Charming, glamorous, and ambitious. Anna Delvey was a wealthy German heiress who would one day inherit a large trust fund from her father who was a wealthy entrepreneur. But it was all just a facade.
In the final part of our mini-series on Great American Con Artists, we’ll learn about the fake German heiress who managed to trick New York City.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of our three-part mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:00:28] In case you missed them, in part one we looked at Billy McFarland and Fyre Festival, the festival in the Bahamas that promised to be an unforgettable experience of luxury and supermodels and then…wasn’t.
[00:00:40] Then in part two, we looked at a man called Liver King, a man who claimed to have discovered the secret to true health and happiness by returning to an ancestral lifestyle, which involved having ice cold baths and eating raw bull testicles.
[00:00:55] But there was one secret that he was keeping close to his chest, that he wasn’t telling people.
[00:01:01] And in part three, today’s episode, we are going to be talking about Anna Sorokin or Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress. It’s an amazing story that sounds too good to be true, and involves New York high society, social media of course, celebrities and lots and lots of money.
[00:01:23] OK then, the story of Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress.
[00:01:30] On April 25th, 2019, a young girl stood in New York’s City criminal court, ready to learn her fate.
[00:01:40] She was not the typical occupant of the courtroom.
[00:01:44] She spoke in a soft, European accent.
[00:01:47] She had well-kept long brown hair, and large glasses. Several times during the month-long trial, she had even come in wearing designer clothing, not the prison-issued orange jumpsuit.
[00:02:03] And, like the occupant of the dock, the charges were unusual.
[00:02:09] Not petty theft, not stealing or assault.
[00:02:14] She was accused of multiple cases of what’s called “grand larceny”, in other words, stealing large amounts of money.
[00:02:25] It would later be revealed that she stole up to $275,000 from a mixture of hotels, restaurants, shops, and individuals.
[00:02:36] The jury deliberated for two days, but the verdict was clear. Guilty. She was led away to prison, and would spend three and a half years behind bars for her crimes.
[00:02:52] Now, to understand how she got to this point, we must go back six years, to 2013.
[00:03:00] It was New York fashion week, a time where the who’s who of the fashion world comes together. People from all over the world fly to the city for fancy dinners, champagne, and the opportunity to meet and network.
[00:03:17] One such person was a young lady called Anna. She told people that she was a wealthy German heiress, that her father was a wealthy entrepreneur, and that she would inherit a large trust fund when she turned 25.
[00:03:34] She wore expensive clothes, stylish but not over the top. She was clearly someone who knew and understood fashion. She seemed like she came from a wealthy background, and was very accustomed to there being large amounts of money flying around.
[00:03:52] She talked about the most fashionable bars and restaurants, she knew the places to go. This wasn’t someone who had just read up on some Buzzfeed list of “The most expensive places to eat in New York City”; she really knew. She had taste.
[00:04:09] She had been working as an intern at a French fashion magazine called Purple. The pay wasn’t good, in fact, she was only paid €400 a month–a pittance for Paris–but the connections she made were priceless.
[00:04:25] She knew people, she had taste, and the assumption of people who met her was that there was something else she had: money, and bucketloads of it.
[00:04:38] Over the following year or so, she would be seen at the most exclusive parties and social events in New York City. She seemed to know everyone, and would introduce people as “her dear friend X or Y”, despite only having met them a few times.
[00:04:55] The impression was that this girl was connected, and that she had money coming out of her ears.
[00:05:04] Even back in the early days, though, there were strange signs that something was off, something wasn’t quite right.
[00:05:13] In 2015 she met a Chinese socialite and art collector called Michael Xufu Huang, and asked him if they could go together to the Venice Biennale, a cultural festival in Venice, in Italy.
[00:05:27] Sure, Huang said, it would be fun. Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel, which was a bit weird because she clearly had a lot of money, but he did so anyway. They went to the Biennale, had a lot of fun, Anna paid for everything in cash, and tipped generously, as she always did.
[00:05:49] But when they returned to New York City, Anna seemed to just forget about paying him back. It wasn’t a huge amount, by Huang’s standards, two or three thousand dollars, but it was a sign of things to come.
[00:06:05] So, what was this Anna actually doing in New York?
[00:06:10] She was no longer working for Purple, she was working on her own project. She had a vision for a private members and arts club called The Anna Delvey Foundation.
[00:06:23] Like everything involving Anna Delvey, it would be exclusive, have impeccable taste, and require vast amounts of money.
[00:06:33] To try to make her dream a reality, she started scouting for locations. Now, we aren’t talking about a small house or a disused commercial building, Anna wouldn’t settle for anything less than a super exclusive location, and a giant building. After all, it would be named after her, it had to turn heads, it had to be a prime location.
[00:06:59] The building she settled on was called Church Missions House, which is an amazing historic building in Manhattan with six floors and over 3,000 metres of space. And in the club itself, no expense would be spared. There would be exclusive restaurants, a German bakery, and a luxury hotel.
[00:07:23] But at this stage the idea for the club was only that, it was an idea.
[00:07:30] To turn it into a reality she needed capital, money, and lots of it. The problem was, Anna told her friends and people involved with the project, she would only come into her inheritance when she was 25, so she needed a loan to get the project off the ground.
[00:07:51] And it wasn’t a small loan. She needed about $25 million.
[00:07:57] A lot of money, sure, but it seemed like this was a relatively insignificant amount of money for someone like Anna, someone who would spend thousands of dollars a day.
[00:08:08] Everything about Anna screamed wealth and luxury.
[00:08:14] For starters, she was living in a hotel, 11 Howard, in Soho, Manhattan, in a $400 a night room.
[00:08:23] And among the hotel staff she was known for being an incredibly generous tipper, she would slip a $100 bill as a tip for anyone who did anything for her - brought her shopping to her room, carried her suitcase, or made a restaurant reservation for her.
[00:08:41] Understandably, this made her very popular.
[00:08:45] And she actually grew close with one hotel employee in particular, the concierge, a lady called Neff.
[00:08:53] In fact, a lot about what we know about Anna’s time at 11 Howard comes directly from interviews with Neff, and the long article in a magazine called The Cut that would reveal what Anna was really up to.
[00:09:07] Anyway, Neff and Anna grew close.
[00:09:11] Anna would take her shopping, she would go out to dinner with her, she even offered to finance a film that Neff was hoping to save up enough money to make.
[00:09:20] It was clearly a strange relationship. Transactional, on one level, with Anna giving Neff hundred dollar bills every time she did something for her. But there was clearly something deeper there.
[00:09:35] It turned out, Neff grew to realise that Anna was actually quite lonely. She knew everyone, she would constantly be going out for lunches and dinners at New York’s most expensive restaurants, she would introduce people as her great friend.
[00:09:52] But it was the concierge, Neff realised, that Anna would confide in the most.
[00:09:58] She would spend hours at the desk talking to Neff about her hopes and dreams, taking her on shopping trips, and going out for dinner.
[00:10:07] Anna would always pay for Neff. But one evening, something strange happened. They were out at a restaurant, the bill came, but Anna’s credit card was declined, it was rejected. Anna had a list of other credit card numbers that she asked the waiter to use, but they all came back as rejected.
[00:10:30] It must have been some issue with the card network, Anna said, and she asked Neff to pick up the check. It was a lot of money, by Neff’s standards at least, but the pair were friends, and friends do this sort of thing for each other, right?
[00:10:46] In fact, this was only one of an increasing number of signs that Anna’s financial situation wasn’t quite as she suggested, and that Anna Delvey might not be who she said she was.
[00:11:00] The first sign was relating to the financing of her grand eponymous members-club.
[00:11:07] She had, it appears, managed to convince an investment company to give her a multi-million dollar loan to pay for the start-up costs of The Anna Delvey Foundation.
[00:11:18] There had been multiple negotiations, Anna had put the investment company in touch with a man named Peter Hennecke, who had provided bank statements from her trust fund.
[00:11:30] Peter Hennecke was, according to Anna, her “family advisor”, the man entrusted to look after the family fortune. Essentially, it was Peter who controlled the purse strings.
[00:11:43] There were some peculiarities about this man though. He used an AOL email address, he promised to send financial statements but they were either late or incomplete, and there was no evidence of him anywhere online.
[00:12:00] It was strange, but lots about Anna was a little strange. Eccentric perhaps, but lots of very wealthy people are a little odd.
[00:12:11] In any case, the investment company agreed to finance the loan, they were going to give Anna the money. As part of the due diligence process, and a condition of the loan, representatives of the investment company would go to Switzerland, where her fortune was reportedly being held, to speak with her private bankers.
[00:12:33] When Anna got wind of this, when she heard it, she baulked, she got cold feet and told them she no longer wanted them to provide a loan, she didn't want their money.
[00:12:44] Not exactly the behaviour of someone who is being totally honest…
[00:12:50] Fast forward to March of 2017, things were really starting to go wrong for Anna Delvey.
[00:12:57] It turned out that she had never actually paid her hotel bill at 11 Howard, the $400 a night boutique hotel where she had met Neff. She had been allowed to check into the hotel without having a credit card on file because of who she was - a supposed multimillionaire German heiress who knew the richest people in New York City.
[00:13:20] And it wasn’t only the cost of the room, the $400 a night. There was room service, champagne, and meals at the hotel's Michelin Star restaurant, all billed to her room.
[00:13:33] After a month and a half of living the high life, this bill had reached $30,000.
[00:13:40] Anna had said it would be settled, it would be paid, by her team, but no payment came.
[00:13:47] Clearly, it was somewhat of a delicate situation for the hotel.
[00:13:52] On the one hand, there was this valued and highly profitable guest, a young girl who was spending tens of thousands of dollars at the hotel and who was very generous with her tips.
[00:14:03] On the other hand, she was only valued and profitable on paper, as no money had actually been received.
[00:14:11] Neff, the concierge and the person closest to Anna, was asked to have this delicate conversation. Anna promised that the bill would be settled. Days went past, but no funds appeared.
[00:14:26] The hotel told Anna, in no uncertain terms, that if the bill wasn’t paid they would lock her room, she would be kicked out.
[00:14:36] Finally, as if by magic, the money did appear, all $30,000 of it.
[00:14:43] Anna had some breathing room, she was ok, but she was told by the hotel that she did need to have a valid credit card on file if she wanted to continue to stay there. But no credit card was added, and the bills piled up.
[00:14:58] Eventually, after continued non-payment, the hotel removed all of her stuff from her room and locked her out.
[00:15:08] To detox, to supposedly reset her American visa, and also because she had nowhere else to go, she decided to jet off on a trip to Morocco with a group of close acquaintances. The venue was Marrakech, and Anna had rented the same luxury villa that Khloé Kardashian had stayed in. It would cost $7,000 a night, but it would be worth every penny.
[00:15:34] This trip, it would transpire, would be a total disaster. There were numerous problems with Anna’s credit card, unpaid bills, and the friends only just managed to return to New York without being arrested.
[00:15:48] The net was well and truly closing in around Anna Delvey.
[00:15:53] She couldn’t move back into 11 Howard, and instead moved into another luxury hotel. It didn’t take this hotel long to realise that Anna had no intention of paying, and she racked up an $11,500 bill before being kicked out.
[00:16:11] Things were going from bad to worse for Anna, and even her friends had realised that she wasn’t who she said she was. Worse still, these friends had had to pay for things on Anna’s behalf, and she owed them tens of thousands of dollars.
[00:16:28] All the while, she had been depositing fake checks at banks, and withdrawing the money or transferring it to a different bank before the cheque had time to bounce, to be discovered as fraudulent.
[00:16:40] This, by the way, was where she got all the cash from. It was fraud, pure and simple.
[00:16:47] And clearly, this is a serious crime. By now it was far more than a simple case of some angry hotel owners, the police were after her.
[00:16:58] It wouldn’t be until October of that year that she was arrested, in the fitting location of a luxury addiction facility in California.
[00:17:08] And this brings us back to the start of the episode, her trial and subsequent imprisonment.
[00:17:15] It turned out that Anna Delvey was indeed not who she said she was.
[00:17:21] She wasn’t German; she was Russian, but had moved to Germany when she was 16.
[00:17:27] She wasn’t an heiress; her father was a truck driver who then opened a small energy company, and was far from the multi-millionaire she said he was.
[00:17:37] Her name wasn’t even Anna Delvey; it was Anna Sorokin.
[00:17:42] It was all one giant lie.
[00:17:45] And the amazing thing about this story is that she almost got away with it. It seems like she did work very hard, she did have this big vision for what she wanted to achieve, everyone who met her said that she was smart and determined, and if she had been able to get the investment, she might have been able to pull it off, who knows?
[00:18:09] It was the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it con, and she almost did make it.
[00:18:16] Indeed, at her trial, she was asked whether she was sorry for the damage she had caused. Normally, defendants say yes, of course, I’m so sorry for everyone I hurt, as either they have learned their lesson or they want to pretend that they’ve learned their lesson so their sentence is reduced.
[00:18:35] Anna Delvey, or Anna Sorokin I should say, had an unusual response.
[00:18:42] She said, and I’m quoting directly, “The thing is, I’m not sorry. I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.”
[00:18:54] As you heard at the start, she was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison, and she served three and a half.
[00:19:02] She is now out, a free woman, and has given several interviews about her future.
[00:19:09] Clearly, she is a clever and talented young woman, with big plans, grand ambitions, significant hopes and dreams.
[00:19:18] One only has to hope that her methods of realising these dreams will be a little less fraudulent.
[00:19:26] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress, and with it comes the end of this mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:19:38] I know, you might say, Anna Delvey wasn’t American, but I think her con was even better than the Americans in this mini-series, and it took place in America, so I think it deserves its place.
[00:19:51] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode, and of this mini-series in general.
[00:19:57] Of the three con artists we learned about - Billy McFarland, Liver King and Anna Delvey, whose crimes do you think are the worst?
[00:20:05] Are they all as bad as each other?
[00:20:07] And what do you think the future holds for them?
[00:20:10] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:13] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:21] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:26] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of our three-part mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:00:28] In case you missed them, in part one we looked at Billy McFarland and Fyre Festival, the festival in the Bahamas that promised to be an unforgettable experience of luxury and supermodels and then…wasn’t.
[00:00:40] Then in part two, we looked at a man called Liver King, a man who claimed to have discovered the secret to true health and happiness by returning to an ancestral lifestyle, which involved having ice cold baths and eating raw bull testicles.
[00:00:55] But there was one secret that he was keeping close to his chest, that he wasn’t telling people.
[00:01:01] And in part three, today’s episode, we are going to be talking about Anna Sorokin or Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress. It’s an amazing story that sounds too good to be true, and involves New York high society, social media of course, celebrities and lots and lots of money.
[00:01:23] OK then, the story of Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress.
[00:01:30] On April 25th, 2019, a young girl stood in New York’s City criminal court, ready to learn her fate.
[00:01:40] She was not the typical occupant of the courtroom.
[00:01:44] She spoke in a soft, European accent.
[00:01:47] She had well-kept long brown hair, and large glasses. Several times during the month-long trial, she had even come in wearing designer clothing, not the prison-issued orange jumpsuit.
[00:02:03] And, like the occupant of the dock, the charges were unusual.
[00:02:09] Not petty theft, not stealing or assault.
[00:02:14] She was accused of multiple cases of what’s called “grand larceny”, in other words, stealing large amounts of money.
[00:02:25] It would later be revealed that she stole up to $275,000 from a mixture of hotels, restaurants, shops, and individuals.
[00:02:36] The jury deliberated for two days, but the verdict was clear. Guilty. She was led away to prison, and would spend three and a half years behind bars for her crimes.
[00:02:52] Now, to understand how she got to this point, we must go back six years, to 2013.
[00:03:00] It was New York fashion week, a time where the who’s who of the fashion world comes together. People from all over the world fly to the city for fancy dinners, champagne, and the opportunity to meet and network.
[00:03:17] One such person was a young lady called Anna. She told people that she was a wealthy German heiress, that her father was a wealthy entrepreneur, and that she would inherit a large trust fund when she turned 25.
[00:03:34] She wore expensive clothes, stylish but not over the top. She was clearly someone who knew and understood fashion. She seemed like she came from a wealthy background, and was very accustomed to there being large amounts of money flying around.
[00:03:52] She talked about the most fashionable bars and restaurants, she knew the places to go. This wasn’t someone who had just read up on some Buzzfeed list of “The most expensive places to eat in New York City”; she really knew. She had taste.
[00:04:09] She had been working as an intern at a French fashion magazine called Purple. The pay wasn’t good, in fact, she was only paid €400 a month–a pittance for Paris–but the connections she made were priceless.
[00:04:25] She knew people, she had taste, and the assumption of people who met her was that there was something else she had: money, and bucketloads of it.
[00:04:38] Over the following year or so, she would be seen at the most exclusive parties and social events in New York City. She seemed to know everyone, and would introduce people as “her dear friend X or Y”, despite only having met them a few times.
[00:04:55] The impression was that this girl was connected, and that she had money coming out of her ears.
[00:05:04] Even back in the early days, though, there were strange signs that something was off, something wasn’t quite right.
[00:05:13] In 2015 she met a Chinese socialite and art collector called Michael Xufu Huang, and asked him if they could go together to the Venice Biennale, a cultural festival in Venice, in Italy.
[00:05:27] Sure, Huang said, it would be fun. Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel, which was a bit weird because she clearly had a lot of money, but he did so anyway. They went to the Biennale, had a lot of fun, Anna paid for everything in cash, and tipped generously, as she always did.
[00:05:49] But when they returned to New York City, Anna seemed to just forget about paying him back. It wasn’t a huge amount, by Huang’s standards, two or three thousand dollars, but it was a sign of things to come.
[00:06:05] So, what was this Anna actually doing in New York?
[00:06:10] She was no longer working for Purple, she was working on her own project. She had a vision for a private members and arts club called The Anna Delvey Foundation.
[00:06:23] Like everything involving Anna Delvey, it would be exclusive, have impeccable taste, and require vast amounts of money.
[00:06:33] To try to make her dream a reality, she started scouting for locations. Now, we aren’t talking about a small house or a disused commercial building, Anna wouldn’t settle for anything less than a super exclusive location, and a giant building. After all, it would be named after her, it had to turn heads, it had to be a prime location.
[00:06:59] The building she settled on was called Church Missions House, which is an amazing historic building in Manhattan with six floors and over 3,000 metres of space. And in the club itself, no expense would be spared. There would be exclusive restaurants, a German bakery, and a luxury hotel.
[00:07:23] But at this stage the idea for the club was only that, it was an idea.
[00:07:30] To turn it into a reality she needed capital, money, and lots of it. The problem was, Anna told her friends and people involved with the project, she would only come into her inheritance when she was 25, so she needed a loan to get the project off the ground.
[00:07:51] And it wasn’t a small loan. She needed about $25 million.
[00:07:57] A lot of money, sure, but it seemed like this was a relatively insignificant amount of money for someone like Anna, someone who would spend thousands of dollars a day.
[00:08:08] Everything about Anna screamed wealth and luxury.
[00:08:14] For starters, she was living in a hotel, 11 Howard, in Soho, Manhattan, in a $400 a night room.
[00:08:23] And among the hotel staff she was known for being an incredibly generous tipper, she would slip a $100 bill as a tip for anyone who did anything for her - brought her shopping to her room, carried her suitcase, or made a restaurant reservation for her.
[00:08:41] Understandably, this made her very popular.
[00:08:45] And she actually grew close with one hotel employee in particular, the concierge, a lady called Neff.
[00:08:53] In fact, a lot about what we know about Anna’s time at 11 Howard comes directly from interviews with Neff, and the long article in a magazine called The Cut that would reveal what Anna was really up to.
[00:09:07] Anyway, Neff and Anna grew close.
[00:09:11] Anna would take her shopping, she would go out to dinner with her, she even offered to finance a film that Neff was hoping to save up enough money to make.
[00:09:20] It was clearly a strange relationship. Transactional, on one level, with Anna giving Neff hundred dollar bills every time she did something for her. But there was clearly something deeper there.
[00:09:35] It turned out, Neff grew to realise that Anna was actually quite lonely. She knew everyone, she would constantly be going out for lunches and dinners at New York’s most expensive restaurants, she would introduce people as her great friend.
[00:09:52] But it was the concierge, Neff realised, that Anna would confide in the most.
[00:09:58] She would spend hours at the desk talking to Neff about her hopes and dreams, taking her on shopping trips, and going out for dinner.
[00:10:07] Anna would always pay for Neff. But one evening, something strange happened. They were out at a restaurant, the bill came, but Anna’s credit card was declined, it was rejected. Anna had a list of other credit card numbers that she asked the waiter to use, but they all came back as rejected.
[00:10:30] It must have been some issue with the card network, Anna said, and she asked Neff to pick up the check. It was a lot of money, by Neff’s standards at least, but the pair were friends, and friends do this sort of thing for each other, right?
[00:10:46] In fact, this was only one of an increasing number of signs that Anna’s financial situation wasn’t quite as she suggested, and that Anna Delvey might not be who she said she was.
[00:11:00] The first sign was relating to the financing of her grand eponymous members-club.
[00:11:07] She had, it appears, managed to convince an investment company to give her a multi-million dollar loan to pay for the start-up costs of The Anna Delvey Foundation.
[00:11:18] There had been multiple negotiations, Anna had put the investment company in touch with a man named Peter Hennecke, who had provided bank statements from her trust fund.
[00:11:30] Peter Hennecke was, according to Anna, her “family advisor”, the man entrusted to look after the family fortune. Essentially, it was Peter who controlled the purse strings.
[00:11:43] There were some peculiarities about this man though. He used an AOL email address, he promised to send financial statements but they were either late or incomplete, and there was no evidence of him anywhere online.
[00:12:00] It was strange, but lots about Anna was a little strange. Eccentric perhaps, but lots of very wealthy people are a little odd.
[00:12:11] In any case, the investment company agreed to finance the loan, they were going to give Anna the money. As part of the due diligence process, and a condition of the loan, representatives of the investment company would go to Switzerland, where her fortune was reportedly being held, to speak with her private bankers.
[00:12:33] When Anna got wind of this, when she heard it, she baulked, she got cold feet and told them she no longer wanted them to provide a loan, she didn't want their money.
[00:12:44] Not exactly the behaviour of someone who is being totally honest…
[00:12:50] Fast forward to March of 2017, things were really starting to go wrong for Anna Delvey.
[00:12:57] It turned out that she had never actually paid her hotel bill at 11 Howard, the $400 a night boutique hotel where she had met Neff. She had been allowed to check into the hotel without having a credit card on file because of who she was - a supposed multimillionaire German heiress who knew the richest people in New York City.
[00:13:20] And it wasn’t only the cost of the room, the $400 a night. There was room service, champagne, and meals at the hotel's Michelin Star restaurant, all billed to her room.
[00:13:33] After a month and a half of living the high life, this bill had reached $30,000.
[00:13:40] Anna had said it would be settled, it would be paid, by her team, but no payment came.
[00:13:47] Clearly, it was somewhat of a delicate situation for the hotel.
[00:13:52] On the one hand, there was this valued and highly profitable guest, a young girl who was spending tens of thousands of dollars at the hotel and who was very generous with her tips.
[00:14:03] On the other hand, she was only valued and profitable on paper, as no money had actually been received.
[00:14:11] Neff, the concierge and the person closest to Anna, was asked to have this delicate conversation. Anna promised that the bill would be settled. Days went past, but no funds appeared.
[00:14:26] The hotel told Anna, in no uncertain terms, that if the bill wasn’t paid they would lock her room, she would be kicked out.
[00:14:36] Finally, as if by magic, the money did appear, all $30,000 of it.
[00:14:43] Anna had some breathing room, she was ok, but she was told by the hotel that she did need to have a valid credit card on file if she wanted to continue to stay there. But no credit card was added, and the bills piled up.
[00:14:58] Eventually, after continued non-payment, the hotel removed all of her stuff from her room and locked her out.
[00:15:08] To detox, to supposedly reset her American visa, and also because she had nowhere else to go, she decided to jet off on a trip to Morocco with a group of close acquaintances. The venue was Marrakech, and Anna had rented the same luxury villa that Khloé Kardashian had stayed in. It would cost $7,000 a night, but it would be worth every penny.
[00:15:34] This trip, it would transpire, would be a total disaster. There were numerous problems with Anna’s credit card, unpaid bills, and the friends only just managed to return to New York without being arrested.
[00:15:48] The net was well and truly closing in around Anna Delvey.
[00:15:53] She couldn’t move back into 11 Howard, and instead moved into another luxury hotel. It didn’t take this hotel long to realise that Anna had no intention of paying, and she racked up an $11,500 bill before being kicked out.
[00:16:11] Things were going from bad to worse for Anna, and even her friends had realised that she wasn’t who she said she was. Worse still, these friends had had to pay for things on Anna’s behalf, and she owed them tens of thousands of dollars.
[00:16:28] All the while, she had been depositing fake checks at banks, and withdrawing the money or transferring it to a different bank before the cheque had time to bounce, to be discovered as fraudulent.
[00:16:40] This, by the way, was where she got all the cash from. It was fraud, pure and simple.
[00:16:47] And clearly, this is a serious crime. By now it was far more than a simple case of some angry hotel owners, the police were after her.
[00:16:58] It wouldn’t be until October of that year that she was arrested, in the fitting location of a luxury addiction facility in California.
[00:17:08] And this brings us back to the start of the episode, her trial and subsequent imprisonment.
[00:17:15] It turned out that Anna Delvey was indeed not who she said she was.
[00:17:21] She wasn’t German; she was Russian, but had moved to Germany when she was 16.
[00:17:27] She wasn’t an heiress; her father was a truck driver who then opened a small energy company, and was far from the multi-millionaire she said he was.
[00:17:37] Her name wasn’t even Anna Delvey; it was Anna Sorokin.
[00:17:42] It was all one giant lie.
[00:17:45] And the amazing thing about this story is that she almost got away with it. It seems like she did work very hard, she did have this big vision for what she wanted to achieve, everyone who met her said that she was smart and determined, and if she had been able to get the investment, she might have been able to pull it off, who knows?
[00:18:09] It was the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it con, and she almost did make it.
[00:18:16] Indeed, at her trial, she was asked whether she was sorry for the damage she had caused. Normally, defendants say yes, of course, I’m so sorry for everyone I hurt, as either they have learned their lesson or they want to pretend that they’ve learned their lesson so their sentence is reduced.
[00:18:35] Anna Delvey, or Anna Sorokin I should say, had an unusual response.
[00:18:42] She said, and I’m quoting directly, “The thing is, I’m not sorry. I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.”
[00:18:54] As you heard at the start, she was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison, and she served three and a half.
[00:19:02] She is now out, a free woman, and has given several interviews about her future.
[00:19:09] Clearly, she is a clever and talented young woman, with big plans, grand ambitions, significant hopes and dreams.
[00:19:18] One only has to hope that her methods of realising these dreams will be a little less fraudulent.
[00:19:26] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress, and with it comes the end of this mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:19:38] I know, you might say, Anna Delvey wasn’t American, but I think her con was even better than the Americans in this mini-series, and it took place in America, so I think it deserves its place.
[00:19:51] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode, and of this mini-series in general.
[00:19:57] Of the three con artists we learned about - Billy McFarland, Liver King and Anna Delvey, whose crimes do you think are the worst?
[00:20:05] Are they all as bad as each other?
[00:20:07] And what do you think the future holds for them?
[00:20:10] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:13] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:21] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:26] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part three of our three-part mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:00:28] In case you missed them, in part one we looked at Billy McFarland and Fyre Festival, the festival in the Bahamas that promised to be an unforgettable experience of luxury and supermodels and then…wasn’t.
[00:00:40] Then in part two, we looked at a man called Liver King, a man who claimed to have discovered the secret to true health and happiness by returning to an ancestral lifestyle, which involved having ice cold baths and eating raw bull testicles.
[00:00:55] But there was one secret that he was keeping close to his chest, that he wasn’t telling people.
[00:01:01] And in part three, today’s episode, we are going to be talking about Anna Sorokin or Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress. It’s an amazing story that sounds too good to be true, and involves New York high society, social media of course, celebrities and lots and lots of money.
[00:01:23] OK then, the story of Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress.
[00:01:30] On April 25th, 2019, a young girl stood in New York’s City criminal court, ready to learn her fate.
[00:01:40] She was not the typical occupant of the courtroom.
[00:01:44] She spoke in a soft, European accent.
[00:01:47] She had well-kept long brown hair, and large glasses. Several times during the month-long trial, she had even come in wearing designer clothing, not the prison-issued orange jumpsuit.
[00:02:03] And, like the occupant of the dock, the charges were unusual.
[00:02:09] Not petty theft, not stealing or assault.
[00:02:14] She was accused of multiple cases of what’s called “grand larceny”, in other words, stealing large amounts of money.
[00:02:25] It would later be revealed that she stole up to $275,000 from a mixture of hotels, restaurants, shops, and individuals.
[00:02:36] The jury deliberated for two days, but the verdict was clear. Guilty. She was led away to prison, and would spend three and a half years behind bars for her crimes.
[00:02:52] Now, to understand how she got to this point, we must go back six years, to 2013.
[00:03:00] It was New York fashion week, a time where the who’s who of the fashion world comes together. People from all over the world fly to the city for fancy dinners, champagne, and the opportunity to meet and network.
[00:03:17] One such person was a young lady called Anna. She told people that she was a wealthy German heiress, that her father was a wealthy entrepreneur, and that she would inherit a large trust fund when she turned 25.
[00:03:34] She wore expensive clothes, stylish but not over the top. She was clearly someone who knew and understood fashion. She seemed like she came from a wealthy background, and was very accustomed to there being large amounts of money flying around.
[00:03:52] She talked about the most fashionable bars and restaurants, she knew the places to go. This wasn’t someone who had just read up on some Buzzfeed list of “The most expensive places to eat in New York City”; she really knew. She had taste.
[00:04:09] She had been working as an intern at a French fashion magazine called Purple. The pay wasn’t good, in fact, she was only paid €400 a month–a pittance for Paris–but the connections she made were priceless.
[00:04:25] She knew people, she had taste, and the assumption of people who met her was that there was something else she had: money, and bucketloads of it.
[00:04:38] Over the following year or so, she would be seen at the most exclusive parties and social events in New York City. She seemed to know everyone, and would introduce people as “her dear friend X or Y”, despite only having met them a few times.
[00:04:55] The impression was that this girl was connected, and that she had money coming out of her ears.
[00:05:04] Even back in the early days, though, there were strange signs that something was off, something wasn’t quite right.
[00:05:13] In 2015 she met a Chinese socialite and art collector called Michael Xufu Huang, and asked him if they could go together to the Venice Biennale, a cultural festival in Venice, in Italy.
[00:05:27] Sure, Huang said, it would be fun. Anna asked him to book the plane tickets and hotel, which was a bit weird because she clearly had a lot of money, but he did so anyway. They went to the Biennale, had a lot of fun, Anna paid for everything in cash, and tipped generously, as she always did.
[00:05:49] But when they returned to New York City, Anna seemed to just forget about paying him back. It wasn’t a huge amount, by Huang’s standards, two or three thousand dollars, but it was a sign of things to come.
[00:06:05] So, what was this Anna actually doing in New York?
[00:06:10] She was no longer working for Purple, she was working on her own project. She had a vision for a private members and arts club called The Anna Delvey Foundation.
[00:06:23] Like everything involving Anna Delvey, it would be exclusive, have impeccable taste, and require vast amounts of money.
[00:06:33] To try to make her dream a reality, she started scouting for locations. Now, we aren’t talking about a small house or a disused commercial building, Anna wouldn’t settle for anything less than a super exclusive location, and a giant building. After all, it would be named after her, it had to turn heads, it had to be a prime location.
[00:06:59] The building she settled on was called Church Missions House, which is an amazing historic building in Manhattan with six floors and over 3,000 metres of space. And in the club itself, no expense would be spared. There would be exclusive restaurants, a German bakery, and a luxury hotel.
[00:07:23] But at this stage the idea for the club was only that, it was an idea.
[00:07:30] To turn it into a reality she needed capital, money, and lots of it. The problem was, Anna told her friends and people involved with the project, she would only come into her inheritance when she was 25, so she needed a loan to get the project off the ground.
[00:07:51] And it wasn’t a small loan. She needed about $25 million.
[00:07:57] A lot of money, sure, but it seemed like this was a relatively insignificant amount of money for someone like Anna, someone who would spend thousands of dollars a day.
[00:08:08] Everything about Anna screamed wealth and luxury.
[00:08:14] For starters, she was living in a hotel, 11 Howard, in Soho, Manhattan, in a $400 a night room.
[00:08:23] And among the hotel staff she was known for being an incredibly generous tipper, she would slip a $100 bill as a tip for anyone who did anything for her - brought her shopping to her room, carried her suitcase, or made a restaurant reservation for her.
[00:08:41] Understandably, this made her very popular.
[00:08:45] And she actually grew close with one hotel employee in particular, the concierge, a lady called Neff.
[00:08:53] In fact, a lot about what we know about Anna’s time at 11 Howard comes directly from interviews with Neff, and the long article in a magazine called The Cut that would reveal what Anna was really up to.
[00:09:07] Anyway, Neff and Anna grew close.
[00:09:11] Anna would take her shopping, she would go out to dinner with her, she even offered to finance a film that Neff was hoping to save up enough money to make.
[00:09:20] It was clearly a strange relationship. Transactional, on one level, with Anna giving Neff hundred dollar bills every time she did something for her. But there was clearly something deeper there.
[00:09:35] It turned out, Neff grew to realise that Anna was actually quite lonely. She knew everyone, she would constantly be going out for lunches and dinners at New York’s most expensive restaurants, she would introduce people as her great friend.
[00:09:52] But it was the concierge, Neff realised, that Anna would confide in the most.
[00:09:58] She would spend hours at the desk talking to Neff about her hopes and dreams, taking her on shopping trips, and going out for dinner.
[00:10:07] Anna would always pay for Neff. But one evening, something strange happened. They were out at a restaurant, the bill came, but Anna’s credit card was declined, it was rejected. Anna had a list of other credit card numbers that she asked the waiter to use, but they all came back as rejected.
[00:10:30] It must have been some issue with the card network, Anna said, and she asked Neff to pick up the check. It was a lot of money, by Neff’s standards at least, but the pair were friends, and friends do this sort of thing for each other, right?
[00:10:46] In fact, this was only one of an increasing number of signs that Anna’s financial situation wasn’t quite as she suggested, and that Anna Delvey might not be who she said she was.
[00:11:00] The first sign was relating to the financing of her grand eponymous members-club.
[00:11:07] She had, it appears, managed to convince an investment company to give her a multi-million dollar loan to pay for the start-up costs of The Anna Delvey Foundation.
[00:11:18] There had been multiple negotiations, Anna had put the investment company in touch with a man named Peter Hennecke, who had provided bank statements from her trust fund.
[00:11:30] Peter Hennecke was, according to Anna, her “family advisor”, the man entrusted to look after the family fortune. Essentially, it was Peter who controlled the purse strings.
[00:11:43] There were some peculiarities about this man though. He used an AOL email address, he promised to send financial statements but they were either late or incomplete, and there was no evidence of him anywhere online.
[00:12:00] It was strange, but lots about Anna was a little strange. Eccentric perhaps, but lots of very wealthy people are a little odd.
[00:12:11] In any case, the investment company agreed to finance the loan, they were going to give Anna the money. As part of the due diligence process, and a condition of the loan, representatives of the investment company would go to Switzerland, where her fortune was reportedly being held, to speak with her private bankers.
[00:12:33] When Anna got wind of this, when she heard it, she baulked, she got cold feet and told them she no longer wanted them to provide a loan, she didn't want their money.
[00:12:44] Not exactly the behaviour of someone who is being totally honest…
[00:12:50] Fast forward to March of 2017, things were really starting to go wrong for Anna Delvey.
[00:12:57] It turned out that she had never actually paid her hotel bill at 11 Howard, the $400 a night boutique hotel where she had met Neff. She had been allowed to check into the hotel without having a credit card on file because of who she was - a supposed multimillionaire German heiress who knew the richest people in New York City.
[00:13:20] And it wasn’t only the cost of the room, the $400 a night. There was room service, champagne, and meals at the hotel's Michelin Star restaurant, all billed to her room.
[00:13:33] After a month and a half of living the high life, this bill had reached $30,000.
[00:13:40] Anna had said it would be settled, it would be paid, by her team, but no payment came.
[00:13:47] Clearly, it was somewhat of a delicate situation for the hotel.
[00:13:52] On the one hand, there was this valued and highly profitable guest, a young girl who was spending tens of thousands of dollars at the hotel and who was very generous with her tips.
[00:14:03] On the other hand, she was only valued and profitable on paper, as no money had actually been received.
[00:14:11] Neff, the concierge and the person closest to Anna, was asked to have this delicate conversation. Anna promised that the bill would be settled. Days went past, but no funds appeared.
[00:14:26] The hotel told Anna, in no uncertain terms, that if the bill wasn’t paid they would lock her room, she would be kicked out.
[00:14:36] Finally, as if by magic, the money did appear, all $30,000 of it.
[00:14:43] Anna had some breathing room, she was ok, but she was told by the hotel that she did need to have a valid credit card on file if she wanted to continue to stay there. But no credit card was added, and the bills piled up.
[00:14:58] Eventually, after continued non-payment, the hotel removed all of her stuff from her room and locked her out.
[00:15:08] To detox, to supposedly reset her American visa, and also because she had nowhere else to go, she decided to jet off on a trip to Morocco with a group of close acquaintances. The venue was Marrakech, and Anna had rented the same luxury villa that Khloé Kardashian had stayed in. It would cost $7,000 a night, but it would be worth every penny.
[00:15:34] This trip, it would transpire, would be a total disaster. There were numerous problems with Anna’s credit card, unpaid bills, and the friends only just managed to return to New York without being arrested.
[00:15:48] The net was well and truly closing in around Anna Delvey.
[00:15:53] She couldn’t move back into 11 Howard, and instead moved into another luxury hotel. It didn’t take this hotel long to realise that Anna had no intention of paying, and she racked up an $11,500 bill before being kicked out.
[00:16:11] Things were going from bad to worse for Anna, and even her friends had realised that she wasn’t who she said she was. Worse still, these friends had had to pay for things on Anna’s behalf, and she owed them tens of thousands of dollars.
[00:16:28] All the while, she had been depositing fake checks at banks, and withdrawing the money or transferring it to a different bank before the cheque had time to bounce, to be discovered as fraudulent.
[00:16:40] This, by the way, was where she got all the cash from. It was fraud, pure and simple.
[00:16:47] And clearly, this is a serious crime. By now it was far more than a simple case of some angry hotel owners, the police were after her.
[00:16:58] It wouldn’t be until October of that year that she was arrested, in the fitting location of a luxury addiction facility in California.
[00:17:08] And this brings us back to the start of the episode, her trial and subsequent imprisonment.
[00:17:15] It turned out that Anna Delvey was indeed not who she said she was.
[00:17:21] She wasn’t German; she was Russian, but had moved to Germany when she was 16.
[00:17:27] She wasn’t an heiress; her father was a truck driver who then opened a small energy company, and was far from the multi-millionaire she said he was.
[00:17:37] Her name wasn’t even Anna Delvey; it was Anna Sorokin.
[00:17:42] It was all one giant lie.
[00:17:45] And the amazing thing about this story is that she almost got away with it. It seems like she did work very hard, she did have this big vision for what she wanted to achieve, everyone who met her said that she was smart and determined, and if she had been able to get the investment, she might have been able to pull it off, who knows?
[00:18:09] It was the ultimate fake-it-till-you-make-it con, and she almost did make it.
[00:18:16] Indeed, at her trial, she was asked whether she was sorry for the damage she had caused. Normally, defendants say yes, of course, I’m so sorry for everyone I hurt, as either they have learned their lesson or they want to pretend that they’ve learned their lesson so their sentence is reduced.
[00:18:35] Anna Delvey, or Anna Sorokin I should say, had an unusual response.
[00:18:42] She said, and I’m quoting directly, “The thing is, I’m not sorry. I’d be lying to you and to everyone else and to myself if I said I was sorry for anything.”
[00:18:54] As you heard at the start, she was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison, and she served three and a half.
[00:19:02] She is now out, a free woman, and has given several interviews about her future.
[00:19:09] Clearly, she is a clever and talented young woman, with big plans, grand ambitions, significant hopes and dreams.
[00:19:18] One only has to hope that her methods of realising these dreams will be a little less fraudulent.
[00:19:26] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Anna Delvey, the fake German heiress, and with it comes the end of this mini-series on The Great American Con Artist.
[00:19:38] I know, you might say, Anna Delvey wasn’t American, but I think her con was even better than the Americans in this mini-series, and it took place in America, so I think it deserves its place.
[00:19:51] As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode, and of this mini-series in general.
[00:19:57] Of the three con artists we learned about - Billy McFarland, Liver King and Anna Delvey, whose crimes do you think are the worst?
[00:20:05] Are they all as bad as each other?
[00:20:07] And what do you think the future holds for them?
[00:20:10] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:20:13] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:21] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:26] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
