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Caleb Newquist: At its peak, Bellum Entertainment had 80 television shows in production true crime, murder, corruption, criminals doing unbelievably stupid things. But behind the scenes, things were getting weird. Paychecks bounced. A cameraman took an expensive camera home as collateral. One producer lent his Christmas tree to a shoot at someone's home, and when the homeowner never got paid, they held the tree hostage. Another filmmaker who was owed money, bought the domain of the CEO's [00:00:30] name and built a website featuring her head on a pig's body. Turns out the strangest true crime story at Bellum Entertainment was the one happening off camera.

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Caleb Newquist: This [00:01:00] is all my fraud. A true crime podcast where the magic of Hollywood always involves a little sleight of hand. I'm Caleb Newquist. How's it going? What's going on? Oh. Oh, here's something I. I had a rare evening alone recently, and on those rare occasions, I do like to watch a movie or a TV series that I know that my wife is not interested in watching. And no, [00:01:30] that's not what I'm talking about. So just get your minds out of the gutter for a goddamn second. So for example, like, uh, you know, if I have some time to myself, I'll knock out some Star Trek viewing. Okay. I, I, I am currently watching Strange New Worlds and my God, if you are a Trekkie, if you're listening and you're in a Star Trek and you are not watching the show, then what on earth are you doing? What is wrong with you? Okay, but this isn't the point. The point is, I watched a movie the other night alone and it was trap, starring Josh Hartnett. [00:02:00] Alison Pill shows up later, but it's an M Night Shyamalan movie and sorry I didn't like it. Didn't do it for me. The performances are fine, you know, Hartnett, Alison Pill, even, uh, uh, Shyamalan's daughter Saleka, I think is her name. Uh, she plays the pop star in the movie. And, I mean, she's kind of a, she's not a pop star in real life. She is a musician, singer, composer. She wrote all the music.

Caleb Newquist: She performed all the music. So that's kind of cool. She got [00:02:30] lots of hyphens, this person. Anyway, the performances were fine, and even the general premise of the movie was pretty good. But you know, the story just didn't unfold in a way that made sense to me. That's all. I'm not going to spoil anything. I mean, the movie is a couple years old, but you know, we're not talking like The Sixth Sense here, which, by the way, Bruce. Bruce Willis is dead. Not in real life, although I know he's not doing well. I mean, the character in The Sixth Sense. That guy's dead. I'm not spoiling anything. It's been over 20 years. Catch [00:03:00] up anyway. Um, trap. I won't spoil anything. Uh, and it legitimately got mixed reviews, I think. But, you know, it just didn't do it for me. Story didn't work, in my opinion. And whatever themes he was going for, they didn't land. And here, here's here's the thing. I can endure a movie I don't like. I can even endure a book I don't like. Some people I know they can't. They won't. They'll walk out of a movie. They'll stop reading the book. They'll put it down. Now [00:03:30] me though, I can't do either. I'm in it to the end. I submit myself to the whole thing. And I submitted myself to trap. And yeah, it was a mess, but not a big deal. I don't consider it a waste of time, but I am a little curious about where people fall on this debate.

Caleb Newquist: Do they finish movies? Books? Do you finish movies books or do they? You quit. I will say, though, I do quit series. I will finish a season if I start [00:04:00] it, but then I sometimes just stop watching a show. But I think it's different. You know, shows there's just too much commitment. Like one one regret I have is I should have stopped watching Ray Donovan. I watched Ray Donovan to the bitter, bitter end. Even the movie. They made a movie and I watched the movie like, what am I doing? But I watched like the first season of Westworld, and then I didn't watch anymore. And then. But then like books too, I read, uh, Red rising, [00:04:30] the Pierce Brown book, extremely popular sci fi book series. Like, I don't even know how many books are there so many books I read the first one. It's not for me. So I'm done. I'm not. I'm not continuing on. Okay, so I don't know how do we get on this topic? I just brought it up. That's how we got on it. That's enough business time for some fraud. I don't have to tell you [00:05:00] that true crime is a popular genre of content. After all, you are listening to a true crime podcast. But forget about podcasts for a second. I'm, you know, but I'm also slightly embarrassed to say there are many, many true crime podcasts.

Caleb Newquist: There's even a lot of white collar true crime podcasts now. So. Anyway, sorry, sorry, not sorry, I don't know, true crime television. On the other hand, is arguably, [00:05:30] you know, that's where it all started, right? Has a long track record. Dateline NBC. For example, Dateline NBC. Technically a news magazine, but it's best known for these murder mysteries. Right? It first aired in 1992. But you know, fast forward to the 21st century. And it's it's fair to say, in fact, it's probably not even fair to say it's accurate to say that the recent tidal wave of true crime was indeed [00:06:00] started by a podcast. And that podcast is serial, the spinoff of This American Life that was started by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder. Their first season followed the story of Adnan Syed, who was convicted in the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. And it is, without a doubt, a crazy story with more twists and turns than we can possibly get into here. And if you've listened to the show, then you know. And if you don't, then [00:06:30] all you really need to know is that it was massively popular. Those episodes in the first season have been downloaded more than 300 million times. It's like the most downloaded podcast ever. And the success of serial resulted in an explosion of content, Mostly for podcasts and television. And it's it is understandable. These are very compelling stories, uh, mysteries in a lot of cases.

Caleb Newquist: And they scared the crap out of us. And we like to [00:07:00] be scared and we can't stop listening to them or watching them, whatever. Now, of course, there's Hollywood, which has never met a good idea. It can't bastardize it started pumping out true crime television series left and right after this. In this era of television, there are so many channels and so many hours of broadcast time to fill. True crime was kind of the perfect thing to fill all that time, because the shows are cheap to produce [00:07:30] and they're easy to sell. Um, because no one really knows which grisly murder story is going to be the next kind of popular, you know, popular culture sensation like The Jinx, Making a Murderer, the keepers. I watched those three and then I kind of stopped. But those three are good, so that's why I mentioned them. Okay. But for every one of those hits, there's just an untold number of true crime shows that fill the airwaves that you've never heard [00:08:00] of. Which brings me to Mary Carol McDonnell, Mary or MC, as many people called her. She was a veteran TV producer in Hollywood. She got her start in local and regional broadcasting in the 1970s, and all the while she was working her way up, and eventually she lands in Los Angeles. In the 90s, and in the early 2000, she started her own production and distribution company called Bellum [00:08:30] Entertainment, and bellum produced the kinds of shows that sound vaguely familiar, but you probably never watched them.

Caleb Newquist: You know, titles like Unsealed Alien Files. Fix It and Finish it. Animal Atlas. Zoo clues. The coolest places on earth. You know, shows like that. Um, but it was it was the explosion of true crime that Mary really locked into in the mid to late 20 tens. Some of their titles were, um, deep undercover [00:09:00] motive to murder, murderous affairs, corrupt crimes. It takes a killer. I married a murderer. So much murder. So, so much murder. And, um, I just love how all these shows both sound familiar and are completely forgettable. Like, I'm sure I've seen these titles somewhere at some point, but I guarantee you, I've never watched a single episode of any of them. And I, I do kind of like how bad the titles are or just kind of how cheesy they are, like corrupt crimes. You [00:09:30] might, you might think that that is a show about, you know, corruption. No, it's just more murder. Just more murder. Can't get enough murder. All right. Eight. Bellum was a small, close knit shop. Mcs twin sons Sean and Mackenzie. They worked for her as well as her nephew Peter. Um. And in a story from this past summer, Business Insider reporter Jason Guerrasio [00:10:00] spoke to Ethan Liqueur, who is a producer that really enjoyed this kind of scrappy style of operation. And so he would do things like shoot B-roll around LA and not get any permits and or use Mary's mansion as a location for interviews.

Caleb Newquist: And Lecuyer told Guerrasio that there was, you know, a wrinkle to the job that did bother him, though, and that was that he never got paid on time. And he kind of just [00:10:30] accepted it as a part of the job, you know, that everybody was in the same boat and, you know, the check quote always cleared eventually, right? True crime was Mary's wheelhouse now, and she was making big promises. At its peak, Bellum Entertainment had 80 shows and 180 episodes in production. The Business Insider story reported that in 2017, Bellum Entertainment was [00:11:00] on the hook to produce 26 episodes of corrupt Crimes about murders. Obviously, in six months. The showrunner for that show told Business Insider that the workload seemed impossible. And so naturally, he hired some extra people to, you know, get things done. The only problem with that is that it cut into Mary's formula of producing these series on the cheap or efficient, [00:11:30] if you prefer. Because, you know, you got more producers, writers, editors, technicians, expert commentators, etc., ET cetera. Et cetera. If you got all these people on the payroll, you know, you got to have some flexibility around liquidity. You know, you got to have some cash. So it was around this time, 2017, when Mary started looking for a lender to help things, you know, continue to run smoothly. But [00:12:00] it, it wasn't the first time she had to do this. In 2015, Mary had borrowed nearly $3 million from Pacific Business Capital Corporation.

Caleb Newquist: It's a commercial lender. Uh, but things went south very quickly. And Pacific sued her in 2017. And this was all kind of odd because Mary had been able to secure the loan in the first place, because she had claimed to have [00:12:30] access to a family trust, with her share being worth $80 million. Now, you might be saying, wait a minute. Mary had money. I mean, yeah, she was the head of a moderately successful production company, but an eight figure trust fund. How does that happen? And the answer is how wealth in most families happens, which is a wildly successful business that is [00:13:00] passed from one generation to the next. And in this case, the wildly successful business was McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, founded in 1939 by James Smith McDonnell. Headquartered in Saint Louis, Missouri, McDonnell later merged with Douglas Aircraft Corporation that formed McDonnell Douglas, and it merged again later with Boeing in 1997. So, yeah, you've got an aerospace manufacturer going through a couple mergers, and, you [00:13:30] know, that will result in a big pile of money just kind of sitting around. And Mary had a piece of that. At least that's what she told people, including Pacific Business Capital Corporation. To be fair, Mary MacDonald did come from Saint Louis Kirkwood, to be precise, and her family did have a successful business. But it was a corner grocery store in Kirkwood that operated for 75 years. But she did not have an $80 million [00:14:00] trust.

Caleb Newquist: Mary McDonnell was not, in fact, one of those McDonald's. But she did not let a small detail like that get in the way of her borrowing. $2.7 million from Pacific Business Capital Corporation and then 2.5 million in March 2017 from Reliable Fast Cash, another lender, and then 14.6 million from Bank of California in December 2017. And for what [00:14:30] it's worth, Bank of California, I'm sure you've noticed. If you know it, it's a bank with a C. So if you pronounce that bank, I don't know, it seems weird. It's just a bank, right? I don't know, it's such a bizarre thing. Anyway, how could Mary lie about something like this and get away with it? In the case of Pacific, at least, a lawyer representing Mary wrote a letter to them saying that she was the beneficiary [00:15:00] of an irrevocable trust established by her parents that is worth well in excess of $400 million. And Mary's share was 80 million. Now, there was a catch, however, and that was that. The letter stated that the trustees were forbidden from disclosing any information or documentation relating to the trust pursuant to a court order issued after the kidnap and murder of Mary's sister, Marilyn Holly McDonnell, at [00:15:30] age 11. This was at the request of Mary's father with the objective of protecting his other children. And there is some truth to this, but not quite all of it. Mary did have a younger sister named Holly who died when she was 11 years old, but according to a 1966 Saint Louis Post-Dispatch story that was dug up by Business Insider, Holly wasn't kidnaped.

Caleb Newquist: She was stabbed [00:16:00] to death while playing in the yard of her family's home by a 14 year old boy that she knew. Which is horrific. And you don't really need to embellish that story. You do not have to embellish that story at all. The murder of your 11 year old sister. But according to people who knew Mary, adding a kidnaping and ransom implied that there was a family fortune worth extorting in the first place. [00:16:30] It was kind of a way to signal money without ever having to prove it. Jamie Rice, who spent a season of her podcast Dirty Money Moves digging into Mary's history. She told rolling Stone that Mary had been striving to look like she came from wealth since she was young, and according to the letter that Mary provided in connection with this loan, it was that kidnaping and murder that supposedly resulted in the court order preventing anyone from disclosing [00:17:00] information about the family trust. So the dead sister was real. The kidnaping was not, and neither was the $80 million. Now, as far as bellum entertainment goes and its operations, you know. Delays and paying people and whatnot. None of [00:17:30] that is terribly unusual. Plenty of small production companies, hell, plenty of small businesses, period. Are these scrappy outfits that sometimes struggle to make payroll.

Caleb Newquist: And, you know, bellum was busy. They had the like we said, we had 80 shows in production. So there's plenty of work to go around. And Mary has a track record of selling shows. And she lived like a successful television producer. She had a 4800 square foot mansion in LA Canada. She drove a Porsche. She had a 39 foot boat down [00:18:00] in Newport Beach. She had her makeup and hair done in the office every morning. Very glamorous. Okay. But pretty soon the vendors and people working for her, you know, you kind of get tired of the checks bouncing and having to ask over and over to be paid for the work that they had been doing. And But the fun part is that because this is show business, there are some juicy stories. [00:18:30] We mentioned it at the top, but there was the one producer who lent his Christmas tree for the shoot at the person's home. And when that person didn't get paid, they held the Christmas tree hostage. And then there was the unpaid cameraman who took a very expensive camera home as collateral. And then there was the producer who busted in to Mary's office and confronted her with an accountant in tow. Of course, Mary just yelled at him and threatened to call the police, and apparently that got the point. I don't know that ended that little [00:19:00] standoff. But then there was, of course, the filmmaker who took slightly more drastic measures. Quote, after months of waiting for $2,000, Aaron Cadotte says he was owed for working two and a half days on an episode of Bellamy's Mysteries of the unexplained.

Caleb Newquist: The filmmaker bought the domain name Mary Carroll macdonald.com and designed a disparaging website with a picture of MacDonald's head on a pig's body. I [00:19:30] basically said, look, I want my money. I own the domain name. Mary Carol macdonald.com. This is the website I've designed. If I don't get my money by Friday at 5:00, this website is going to go live. And apparently at 455 on Friday, they wired him the money. But the best part. In another Hollywood twist, he took the site live anyway, uh, to, [00:20:00] you know, stand in solidarity with all the other unpaid people. But despite all this noise, Mary always had an explanation. Going so far as to claim in an email to workers that Belgium had been a victim of bank fraud and that they were having trouble securing a new line of credit. In June 2017, deadline reported on all this communication. Email from Mary read, quote, as you know, we had significant bank fraud which occurred about a week ago, which caused major [00:20:30] issues with our account. End of quote. She went on to say that BLM CFO quote, was working with Comerica to rectify the situation and get our funds back. Once that situation is resolved, we will be distributing the checks for the 20th next week, but do not have the specific date.

Caleb Newquist: I know this is frustrating for all of us, but be assured that BLM is doing well. Except, Mary went on, there was a small problem with closing on a new line of credit due to unspecified delays, but [00:21:00] also stated that closing quote should happen at the end of this month or first week of July, which will provide ample resources to support our productions going forward. So by 2018, Mary was backed into a corner. And this is where the lawyers who are vouching for her fortune become important. Years earlier, Mary had been represented by a tax and estate planning attorney named D Matthew [00:21:30] Richardson, then a partner at Sheppard Mullin. In February 2013, Richardson wrote that Mary's trust assets were quite substantial and that her business holdings should represent many millions of dollars in value. A Los Angeles attorney named Robert Chatham was considering going into business with Mary, and those representations helped convince him that the money was really there. Richardson reaffirmed that letter in May 2014. That [00:22:00] September, he and Chatham discussed Mary having a net worth somewhere between 80 and $100 million. And in December, Richardson put it in writing again. As he understood it, Mary was the beneficiary of the trust, worth well over $400 million and her share exceeding 80 million. So by the time Mary started borrowing serious money, she just wasn't walking into rooms saying, trust me, I'm rich. She had all this correspondence from [00:22:30] a prominent attorney backing up her story. Now, there's no ruling or evidence of any kind that Richardson knowingly participated in Mary's fraud.

Caleb Newquist: But what matters for our purposes is what those letters did do. And again, they provided credibility. You know, when somebody needed to believe the fortune was real before loaning Mary money, this attorney's letter is what got them to that [00:23:00] point. And so when she went looking for a really big loan, another attorney entered the picture, Barry Rothman. Rothman was himself a client of Bank of California. He's the one who introduced Mary to the bank. Court records say that both Mary and Rothman represented that she was the heir to a large fortune whose trust assets were temporarily frozen. Okay, so Bank [00:23:30] of California did its homework on Mary, but the homework was very bad. The bank learned that Mary had a credit score of 545, that she had committed check fraud in 2016, that there was already a judgment against her for about $2 million, that the LA Superior Court had issued an injunction against Belgium over an unpaid loan, and that there were news stories about the company not paying its employees and vendors. Bank [00:24:00] of California's own Bank Secrecy Act department investigated her and recommended against the loan. So did the bank's chief risk officer, who later testified the deal sounded fraudulent to him, and the CEO of the bank emailed his own executives about her in January 2018. Bank fraud did not pay her people short of funds. If it is too good to be true, it probably is.

Caleb Newquist: Really dig in on this one, please. And [00:24:30] Bank of California still loaned her $15 million. Why? Why? I don't know. Because everyone agreed that if they did it at all, it had to be secured by cash. And so Mary produced documents showing more than $28 million sitting in a trust account at Northern Trust. Because the loan was supposed to be cash secured, Mary's problematic credit history became [00:25:00] largely irrelevant, and the loan earned Bank of California's lowest internal risk rating man. Lowest risk rating A 545 Credit score fraud history an injunction. Newspaper coverage of her stiffing her own people. And yet, this application is one of the safest things that the bank is doing. Not because any of that stuff went away. Because a piece of paper showed up. Except [00:25:30] there was a problem. Nobody at Bank of California could get Northern Trust to verify the account. Mary had also told the bank that nobody from Bank of California was allowed to call Northern Trust without her or Barry Rothman on the line. Which is, yes, weird. The Bank of California chief credit officer, apparently not aware of this rule, called anyway [00:26:00] and left a voicemail. He didn't get a call back. What he got were two letters on Northern Trust letterhead. The first confirmed the money. The second instructed the bank that there was to be no further verbal communication with Northern Trust. The day before that first letter arrived. Mary had emailed the bank the exact language that appeared in it, and the second letter, the one telling them to stop calling, contained language.

Caleb Newquist: Mary had emailed [00:26:30] them earlier that same day. The supposed independent verification was coming back, in Mary's own words. There was also a control agreement signed by Mary and purportedly by an executive at Northern Trust. Both signatures notarized. The Northern Trust signature is now believed to have been forged, and Bank of California later accused the notary of being a coconspirator after the notary admitted they hadn't actually watched the documents get signed. [00:27:00] The loan was funded on February 1st. On February 2nd, Mary transferred $5 million to herself, and by March 5th, Bank of California had dispersed the entire loan. Four days later, a fraud examiner from Northern Trust called Mary had no interest in the account. It belonged to someone else, a person named MacDonald, and it had been closed since [00:27:30] December 2017, which is the month Mary walked into the bank. Also fun fact Jamie Rice, the podcaster we briefly mentioned earlier, she actually worked at Banc of California when Mary was dealing with the bank and but she wasn't involved with Mary's loan. But she later spent months investigating her. And that investigation became the first season of Dirty Money Moves. So if you're not able to follow all this, you have a producer of [00:28:00] true crime television shows actually committing a true crime, and a person who was adjacent to that crime is now the producer and creator of another true crime podcast.

Caleb Newquist: And then this true crime podcast is doing a story about a true crime that's already been happening. I mean, my God, I can't even do it. It's too much. My brain's in knots. The point is, the [00:28:30] cycle just keeps going. It's the cycle of true crime. Is that what it is? I don't know. It's not the cycle of life. Circle of life. Cycle of life. Circle of life. Anyway. Bank of California wasn't the only lender dealing with this trust thing. The credit junction was already pursuing Mary over essentially the same scheme. And according to court filings, she used some of the French Bank of California money to keep that lender at bay. Bank of California's own complaint described the arrangement as a Ponzi [00:29:00] type scheme. I don't know what a Ponzi type scheme is versus a Ponzi scheme. I don't know. Somebody tell me the difference. I don't know anyway. But eventually Bank of California, their lawyers started asking some very uncomfortable questions about Barry Rothman's role in the deal. And according to rolling Stone, the day after that happened, Rothman died of a heart attack. And he was he was 75, [00:29:30] which is sad, but also. Yeah. Must have been he must have been stressed out. Sorry. Anyway, there there was no finding that Rothman knowingly participated in Mary's fraud. And by this time, of course, Mary had defaulted on all the loans that she had taken out. And finally, on December 12th, 2018, facing plenty of civil charges, Mary was criminally indicted for bank [00:30:00] fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Caleb Newquist: But there was another problem. Mary was nowhere to be found. In December 2025, the FBI put out a bulletin announcing a new face on its most wanted list Mary McDonnell's face. Now, granted, she didn't wind up on the ten Most [00:30:30] Wanted list. Ruja Ignatova from episode 114. She's on there though. Ten Most Wanted Life goals, right? Anyway, to her credit, Mary is on the FBI's Most Wanted Fugitives page, which I don't understand if it's most wanted and a fugitive. I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't understand the if they're most wanted, isn't a fugitive the like isn't that implied? Maybe there's a, maybe [00:31:00] there's a, there's nuance there that I'm missing anyway. But if you filter for white collar crime, she's on there. Mary's is on there, you know, wanted dead or alive. Just kidding. They don't they don't they don't want people dead. They want him alive. They don't I don't even think what yeah, wanted posters are kind of fun, but they just don't say that anymore. Anyway, it was at this time, the time of Mary ending up on this most wanted list that the broader media picked up on the story, with [00:31:30] the added wrinkle being that the FBI stated that they believed Mary was hiding out in Dubai. Now, Dubai was likely a deliberate choice for Mary to land because, as it happens, the United States does not have an extradition treaty with the United Arab Emirates, and I did not before this doing the research for this episode.

Caleb Newquist: I did not know that also. Apparently English [00:32:00] is widely spoken there, so you wouldn't have to cram Arabic. So, you know, tuck that away for later should, you know, things get a little weird around here. Anyway, that Business Insider profile of Mary that we've mentioned a few times, uh, had a little interesting aside about a woman named Tilly Brady who became friends with Mary in Dubai back in 2019 and [00:32:30] described, quote, her bond with Mary and her husband as parental. Mary opened up to Tilly, including telling her about her former life, saying things like, quote, I had a Porsche back in the US, but also really strange things like, quote, she introduced herself as an heiress and always brought it up. Now, I have to admit, I don't know a lot of rich people. Um, you know, the kind of people who are actually heirs, I guess. But when I have had kind of a rare chance to encounter [00:33:00] a person who has either inherited a lot of wealth or will inherit it someday, uh, you know, they never mention it. They don't mention it. You know, I don't know, maybe times have changed or maybe it's just my experience, but, you know, if you've got an eight figure trust fund and you're going out of your way to kind of tell people about it, that just seems like a great way to end up like Frank Sinatra Jr.

Caleb Newquist: Meanwhile, back in the US, Mary [00:33:30] still a fugitive. Belgium officially became inactive in 2020. Close to 50 former employees filed wage claims with the California Labor Commissioner's Office, and several former Belgium workers still say they're owed tens of thousands of dollars. Now back to our Dubai besties. Tilly Brady said that eventually, Mary invited her to invest in a $7.5 million deal to develop three TV shows. [00:34:00] The email that Mary sent to Tilley said that, quote, I have done these deals through banks before, but this one requires private investment because of the immediate product demand, which, you know, knowing what we know, hindsight makes this hilarious for her to say, given that her most recent experience with banks was arguably not great and mostly involved her not paying them back. Long [00:34:30] story short, Tilley ran the deal past a lawyer and she passed on it. But then things got weirder because Mary and her husband tried to get $80,000 from Tilley and then sued her when she refused to pay them. It's not clear what this what this had to do with anything, Why? She would all of a sudden owe them $80,000. And it was weird that they would sue her. But, you know, nothing like bitter litigation to end a friendship, [00:35:00] right? When Tillie looked into Mary further, you know, did the little internet stalking, uh, she came across a Facebook group of former bellum employees, and she shared her story with a member of that group.

Caleb Newquist: And then the FBI got in touch with her, and she they interviewed her. But then a little while later, she ran into Mary and her husband in a parking lot. And I, you know, which is very odd. I mean, Dubai [00:35:30] has millions of people. But I guess as a small town, like, are you just running into former friends in parking lots? I've got people in Denver. I've fell out with that I haven't seen in over 15 years. Denver's not as big as Dubai. Also, 92% of Dubai's population are expats. That's a lot. Weird, right? Okay. Needless to say, Mary and her husband were not happy to see their former friend telling her that she had, quote, insulted [00:36:00] MC. And then Tilly returned with, quote, Karma's a bitch. This is gonna come back to you. As of this recording in September 2026, Mary Carole McDonnell is still at large. Okay. Did we learn anything? Sure. Lenders don't mess around. If you don't pay them back, they're gonna come after you. That's. [00:36:30] You know, banks have all the money, right? And so if you go through the trouble of borrowing from them, I mean, hopefully you have a plan to pay them back. I mean, that's kind of the loan application process, right? Otherwise, I don't know why. Why just go for armed robbery. You know, that's not legal advice or anything. But if you if you go through the trouble of applying for a loan and then like with.

Caleb Newquist: But in the back of your mind, there's no way am I gonna, you know, pay this money back. Like why? I [00:37:00] don't know, it's weird, but I mean, in Mary's case, to be fair, Mary's case, she needed a lot of money. She had millions of dollars. You know, this is show business, baby. She's producing these shows. She had to hire people to do the things. You know, she's not A Mary's not a key grip. You know, she can't do any of that stuff. And she made up a good enough story that people didn't look too close. But then, you know, things didn't work out. And she didn't pay them, ostensibly because she wanted a glam [00:37:30] squad to come to her office every day, drive a nice car, have a big house. It's very weird. Anyway, an heiress wouldn't do that. They don't have to do that. Yeah, I mean, that sounds just like greed. But, you know, if you go back to one of our earlier episodes, episode 21 of our very early episodes, uh, there was, we, we did a story about a much, much bigger Hollywood fraud. And, um, you know, in that story, similar to this one, the perception [00:38:00] of success in certain industries, in show business being an obvious one, but, you know, high finance, high end real estate, elite law firms, money management, even professional sports, the image of a person is kind of like a form of currency.

Caleb Newquist: In other words, how you're seen and perceived by the outside world can have a meaningful impact on your ability to do business. You know, nothing succeeds like success. [00:38:30] And Mary, at least to the outside world, seemed like a success. A production company with dozens of shows and development and a proven track record for getting stuff done. But in the end it was all just a facade. And finally, I don't know if it's greed or just, you know, people not doing their jobs. Incompetence. [00:39:00] Like, you know, I don't know what it is, but like Bank of California, you know, Mary, Mary, Mary goes to them and she wants nearly $15 million. Okay. And Bank of California's a big bank. Like they're not they don't hire idiots. They don't they don't have like one little office with, you know, filled with, you know, you know, hillbillies. They have sophisticated professionals working there, you know, and she has a credit score of 545. They [00:39:30] found that she bounced checks. She had an injunction against her and involved in litigation with other lenders. Like all this stuff. The CEO looks at all this and he literally the CEO literally says to people working at the bank, look into this deeply, or whatever it was. And they still loaned her the money. Like all that stuff is just staring them in the face. They still gave her the money just because there was a letter from a lawyer that said, yeah, my client [00:40:00] has this trust and they couldn't they couldn't they couldn't verify it.

Caleb Newquist: I don't know, it's just it's so bizarre to me that you would have all those things in place and that you would get all of that evidence to the contrary. The CEO said it. It's like it's too good to be true. What she's telling us can't be true. And they even had evidence to back it up. Still under the money, I don't know. Still [00:40:30] under the money. All right. That's it for this episode. And remember, never underestimate working people who are used to organizing. If you screw them over, they will come back to you. Hold your equipment hostage, storm your office with their accountant, make a website describing how shitty of a boss you are, and stick your face on a pig's body. And I'm not talking about Miss Piggy's body either. It's gonna be a third place sale from the county fair. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for stories, drop us a line at omnifrog@cpe.com. [00:41:00] This episode of Omnifrog was written by Zack Frank and me, Caleb Newquist. All My fraud is created, produced and hosted by me. Caleb Newquist. Zack Frank is my co-producer, audio engineer, music supervisor. Laura Hobbs designed the logo. Rate, review and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you listen on earmark, that's where you earn CPE. Cool. Join us next time for more address swindlers and scams from stories that will make you say oh my fraud!