By far, the most audacious con I have seen in my career.
Holy cow. Who is this person?
Goldberg: How can you live like a Saudi prince if you weren't born one?
This scam had tentacles that stretched throughout the world.
Goldberg: From mug shot to pretend millionaire
scamming the rich and famous.
It was just the tip of the iceberg.
Mosley: He may have stepped into the skin
of this character permanently.
Spiegel: He took some pretty sophisticated people
for some money.
This must stop.
Goldberg: Tonight, the jet‐setting Saudi prince who isn't.
But then, who is he?
Reporter: Do you honestly believe you are a Saudi Prince?
Well, do you honestly believe you're a reporter?
I'm Whoopi Goldberg, and this is "The Con."
‐‐ Captions by VITAC ‐‐
Let's go back to the beginning.
Not to the deserts of Saudi Arabia,
but to the sands of southern Florida,
the playground of the very rich
and, as you'll see, the very gullible.
Miami has always attracted a lot of people with serious wealth.
It believes in the bling, as they say.
♪♪
In Miami, money talks. Okay?
And everybody's listening.
A city like that breeds a culture of grandstanding.
Everyone is peacocking.
Goldberg: And the newest peacock in town
is a flashy royal from Saudi Arabia ‐‐
Prince Khalid bin Al‐Saud.
But this new prince has a secret.
He's making his money by running an elaborate long con.
Mosley: The prince is spending real cash, living large,
doing it for the 'Gram.
Every day, posts spending money,
showing money, flashing money ‐‐ all on social media,
creating the image and facade of this Saudi prince.
Prince Khalid almost seemed
literally like a figure out of a movie.
You know, he's got this Chihuahua named Foxy.
He has pictures of himself feeding Foxy
with angel hair pasta, you know.
Instagram posts, private flights.
Al‐Saud: Getting ready to board.
Posts out on yachts. Posts at fancy restaurants.
Al‐Saud: It's real fresh.
Goldberg: The prince is living the high life, the life of a ‐‐
well, a prince.
But he's about to up his game big‐time,
setting his sights on one of the most daring cons
the Florida Gold Coast has ever seen.
♪♪
Spiegel: One day at Cheeca Lodge,
one of my employees came to me
telling me that there was a prince in the restaurant
who wanted to buy the hotel.
He looked like a Formula 1 race car,
with branded goodies all over him ‐‐
huge rings and jewelry and watches and what have you.
He obviously had a need to convince the world
that he was a very rich guy.
We made a lunch date.
At the lunch, he enjoyed a sumptuous seafood platter.
It was quite expensive.
He ate everything that was in sight.
And he explained to me that he really was interested
in buying the hotel for $200 million.
♪♪
And I said, "$200 million? That's interesting,
because we just traded the hotel for $110 million
a couple of years ago."
Goldberg: Almost double the last price.
But this prince doesn't blink.
And Herbert ‐‐ he's not quite buying it.
♪♪
I spent my life in the luxury hotel business
dealing with lots of real Arabic princes.
First thing, you will see the entourage.
♪♪
This guy is by himself.
♪♪
When you see them checking in ‐‐ fantastic luggage,
as opposed to our friend.
No one who comes from significant means,
particularly if it's passed down over generations,
travels with new Louis Vuitton.
It may be a mixture and a blend of Louis Vuittons
of old and new, but his looked like
it just came out of Neiman Marcus somewhere.
♪♪
Most people who really are genuine
in wanting to buy the hotel
will go through their own financial people to do so.
I said, "Look, I need some references on you."
And he said, "Take me as a reference."
I said, "Well, that's nice, and I appreciate that,
but I need a third‐party reference ‐‐
from an investment broker, a foreign investment banker ‐‐
because this approach is very unorthodox."
He couldn't pony up credible references.
It became pretty apparent that it just wasn't real.
♪♪
Goldberg: A setback for sure,
but all part of this con man's continuing education.
The prince realizes he needs credibility and money ‐‐
enough to convince people he is who he says he is.
So he forms a company called Marden Williamson
and lures an unsuspecting broker
looking for investment opportunities.
Collado‐Hudak: When my client traveled to meet the prince for the first time,
the first night was filled with parties on his yacht.
She sees all of these prominent celebrities, VIPs.
There is expensive champagne flowing,
the most high‐end appetizers and food.
And she is impressed, which reassured my client
that this was a great opportunity for her.
Goldberg: With an unwitting broker bringing in wealthy investors,
more money starts to roll in,
and the prince takes to social media
to show off his new wealth.
Al‐Saud: South Beach, Miami, Florida.
Convincing people that he is royalty.
Masterpiece.
And his posts help to solidify his princely persona.
♪♪
So, where was all this money coming from?
Well, I can't tell you yet. The show isn't over.
But he adds an entourage complete with bodyguards
and some swanky new digs to call home.
So, as this member of the Saudi Royal Family,
he rents an expensive condominium on Fisher Island.
People of real serious wealth own property there.
Goldberg: With his new neighbors, billionaires and millionaires,
the prince feels right at home,
and he is soon welcomed into their elite circle.
♪♪
Now the prince can put his big con in motion.
His target ‐‐ just one of the richest men in all of Miami,
Jeffrey Soffer, billionaire owner
of the exclusive and legendary Fontainebleau Hotel.
Mosley: It's beautiful. It's glamorous. It's expensive.
It is the most iconic hotel in Miami.
Goldberg: This is the place where Frank Sinatra welcomed
Elvis Presley home from the Army.
We're great, and I'm glad to see the Army hasn't changed you.
It has been the crown jewel of Miami's social scene
for decades.
♪♪
Weaver: Back during the real estate boom of 2008,
Soffer redeveloped the Fontainebleau,
and it cost him a billion dollars.
Prince Khalid very shrewdly saw this as an opportunity
simply because in the aftermath of the recession,
Soffer was in desperate need of an infusion of capital.
And here you have this international investment company
backed by the Saudi prince.
So he was more than happy to meet with him.
The prince wanted to put in $440 million
and buy about a 30% equity stake in the hotel.
Things were going pretty well,
and then it got to the point where there was some questions
about Prince Khalid's background.
The prince felt like his integrity was challenged
by Soffer's group, and he took offense to it.
Mosley: The prince took it so personally.
He threw a fit.
And then it was communicated to Jeffrey
that if he wanted to get on his good side again,
he was gonna have to give him a gift.
Well, he asked him for a $50,000 Cartier bracelet.
Can you imagine if someone tells you that,
"You need to present me with a $50,000 bracelet,
or I will not buy your business"?
♪♪
Weaver: Soffer was taking his team out to Aspen
and invited Prince Khalid to come along
to further discuss the Fontainebleau investment deal.
Goldberg: And the prince doesn't miss the chance
to post the whole trip on Instagram ‐‐
an opportunity to advertise that he's doing business
with one of Miami's top investors.
♪♪
Weaver: After everybody settles in at the St. Regis,
the most fancy hotel in Aspen, they decide to go out to dinner.
At dinnertime, they were discussing the terms,
and everything is going fine, until Prince Khalid
ordered something that took everybody aback.
♪♪
Goldberg: The prince is in Aspen, Colorado,
meeting with Jeffrey Soffer
to discuss buying a share of Soffer's hotel.
But then he does something that makes everybody drop their fork.
He ordered prosciutto for the table,
and then he ate some.
Goldberg: Most people know pork is a no‐go for most Muslims.
Privately, Jeffrey Soffer and his associates there
were wondering, "Well, wait a minute. He's a Saudi prince.
He's Muslim."
And if you're familiar with being a Muslim,
you don't eat pork!
So this is a fatal misstep for the prince.
Weaver: Soffer and his team didn't let on at that point.
They kept things to themselves.
But the suspicions lingered.
♪♪
Upon the return to Miami, Jeffrey Soffer decided,
"You know what? I'm gonna look into this guy."
Goldberg: So he hires a private investigator to do just that.
♪♪
Page: I'll never forget ‐‐ it was a Friday evening,
and they started to tell me this story
about a potential investor.
Our job was to see if he was who he said he was.
Was he a prince?
Goldberg: So, identifying one particular prince
is like finding a needle in a haystack,
because there are over 15,000 members
of the Saudi Royal Family.
Many of the Saudi Royal Family
are not that public in their profile.
You have to somewhat understand where to go
and then how to identify them.
We started looking at the prince's name,
and there is a Prince Khalid Al‐Saud.
We located a picture.
It certainly wasn't the supposed prince
that we had here in Miami.
♪♪
Who is this person?
And why would he want to buy a hotel?
♪♪
He doesn't look like he's Arab.
He doesn't look like he's from the Middle East.
And he has all these Americanisms.
Page: Maybe he's a distant member
that isn't part of that upper echelon.
Maybe he's a bastard child of a member of the Royal Family,
which could convey royalty but not necessarily a status.
♪♪
Goldberg: So, why all the lies?
What is our pseudo Saudi up to?
We did, for a period of time, watch him here in Miami.
He was very difficult to follow 'cause he drove like a maniac.
It was easier for us
to have somebody at a different restaurant
to tell us when he came in, and then we'd go watch him.
But we learned that he had money.
He was spending money,
from Fisher Island to restaurants on South Beach.
Goldberg: They learn that when the prince wines and dines his marks,
he always pays for his own very expensive meals.
Page: I've never seen a case like this.
He was courting wealthy people, and it looked like
he was doing it successfully in some areas.
That was very, very difficult for us,
trying to understand, "What was he up to?"
Goldberg: DC Page decides to run the plates on the prince's Ferrari.
Page: We sent some investigators out, and we found his car.
♪♪
We took a picture of the license plate,
which was a diplomatic plate.
Each diplomatic plate issued in the United States
has lettered designators of the country
that the diplomat is from.
♪♪
So, I was Googling the letter designators
for diplomatic plates, and a pop‐up came on my screen,
and it was his plate.
The exact number, the exact plate
for $79.99 from eBay.
♪♪
Goldberg: They know this fake prince is up to something,
but they need to find out more.
We needed to learn ‐‐ what was the con,
and who is being exposed to it?
Goldberg: After more digging, DC Page uncovers
a criminal case file involving the prince.
DC notices right away
that an additional name is associated with the crime.
Page: It had the prince's name and the name Anthony Gignac.
Anthony Gignac is this small‐time grifter
who lives outside of Detroit, in Michigan.
At that point, I was shocked ‐‐ absolutely floored.
♪♪
Goldberg: Can this supposed Prince Khalid from Saudi Arabia
really be Anthony Gignac from Michigan?
♪♪
Goldberg: The prince's attempt to buy a $440 million share
of Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel has revealed him as a fraud.
Now a criminal file pulled from Michigan court records
has turned up the name Anthony Gignac.
We have to learn everything we can about Anthony Gignac ‐‐
Social Security number, date of birth,
what does he look like, and is he the prince?
And as we're digging and digging,
we find out he has a criminal record.
In fact, he has quite an extensive criminal record ‐‐
credit card fraud, bank fraud, and defrauding hotels.
We're still not 100% sure
that's the person we're looking at here in Miami,
so in order to confirm that,
we wanted to get a picture of Anthony Gignac.
The only photos we could find were arrest booking photos.
♪♪
And there was no doubt in anybody's mind,
even as old as the pictures were,
that Prince Khalid Al‐Saud is Anthony Gignac.
♪♪
Now we have, you know,
a Midwesterner professing to be a Saudi prince.
He's not going to invest in the hotel. That's clear.
Our client wanted to see him behind bars
for any fraud that he may have committed.
He had violated some federal offenses,
and impersonating a diplomat is a violation of federal law.
That's the time that we thought we should bring in
the federal authorities.
So we went to various law enforcement agencies
and we said, "This is what we have.
We're not sure what he's up to."
And some agencies, like the FBI and that,
were not interested in him.
They're very busy.
Their resources are very, very limited.
So that's when we took it to the DSS ‐‐
the investigative side of the State Department.
McSeveney: At the time this investigation began,
I was an acting supervisor in our Miami field office.
We became aware of an individual
claiming to be a prince from Saudi Arabia
who was trying to induce investors
to bankroll his projects.
Weaver: The Diplomatic Security Service,
a lot of people are not familiar with that agency,
but they are highly trained.
They're specialists in passport fraud
and impersonating a foreign diplomat and all of that.
That's the kind of work they can do fairly quickly,
and that's what they did.
McSeveney: We knew that he was misrepresenting himself
as a prince
to purchase a portion of the Fontainebleau Hotel,
but trying to purchase the hotel would not be a crime,
so we needed to determine what is truly taking place here.
Goldberg: As the feds build their case,
the Fontainebleau ownership team buys them some time.
We didn't want to give up
that we knew he wasn't Prince Khalid Al‐Saud.
We continued the charade, and there were still conversations,
text messages, things like that,
while we're still keeping him engaged.
Goldberg: But the feds just made a discovery
that raises some serious questions.
McSeveney: If you're going to make a pitch to buy a landmark hotel,
at some point, there's going to have to be a wire transfer
in order to do that.
There was never any intention or capital
to actually purchase the hotel.
There was really no way that that transaction
ever would have gone through.
Mosley: If the prince had no intention
of actually purchasing the Fontainebleau,
why is he spending all this money, flashing all this cash?
What is he after?
This is about the connections
that he was making with powerful people.
Jeffrey Soffer is a powerful man.
The prince wanted to get close to them
so he could take people to the Fontainebleau
and say hello to the manager on duty,
or maybe the owner walks through, he could say hello.
And that provided him legitimacy.
♪♪
That enabled him to further his other cons.
Goldberg: Our prince has his sights set
on something much bigger than buying a famous hotel.
Whatever this artificial Arab is up to,
the wheels are already in motion.
And if the feds are gonna stop him,
they'll have to move fast.
We needed to go back
and look at any and all available records.
And like any cases, you're building a house ‐‐
you start with the foundation,
you work up with the framing of the house,
and you put everything together.
And we quickly realized that he had used
upwards of 30 different identities,
various nationalities, from Saudi Arabia
to the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere,
to perpetrate crimes over a 30‐year period.
I have worked on previous imposter cases
for the Diplomatic Security Service,
but none to this magnitude.
But I'll tell you again ‐‐ it was just the tip of the iceberg.
♪♪
Goldberg: The feds now know that the man claiming
to be Prince Khalid from Saudi Arabia
is really Anthony Gignac from Michigan,
but they still don't know what he's after.
Although his adopted mother is deceased,
they hit up some folks who knew Anthony way back when
in Michigan.
♪♪
Lisa: As a child, Anthony seemed to always be focused on money
and other material kinds of things.
In elementary school,
he was very bizarre
in his need to stand out
and appear to be better than and older than his peers.
♪♪
He would often go to school wearing sport coats
and a dress shirt.
He would tell stories to his teachers.
He said that his mother had married Dom DeLuise
and they together owned the Grand Hotel
up in Mackinac Island in Michigan.
Anthony was highly intelligent and highly daring.
I think lots of kids sit around
and wish they had things in their life,
but they stop there.
He actually went ahead and figured out a plan
and made it actually happen.
He would order a limo to come pick him up at school
and drop him off at a local mall or a local hotel
where he had managed to get them to let him have a room,
using the idea that he was someone else's kid
who had great prestige and money.
Goldberg: And as little Anthony Gignac grew up, so did his schemes.
He was forging checks,
paying for things with fraudulent credit cards,
and opening lines of credit with fake names.
And one of those fake names happened to be
Prince Khalid bin Al‐Saud.
♪♪
Goldberg: Lisa Whitehead's daughter, Jessica,
saw firsthand some of Anthony's early exploits as the prince.
People were really drawn to Anthony
because of the way he carried himself.
♪♪
You could not ignore the loud laugh,
the very thick, expensive fur coat,
the way he kind of barked
at people he believed should serve him.
And he would just kind of wave his hand around
with his jewelry on and demanded the respect.
Anthony really did make you feel like
you were on top of the world with him.
When Anthony and I would go shopping,
we would touch every tile of Neiman Marcus.
People would give us water
and offer to hold our bags or our jackets.
We would have to make numerous trips to the car
and filled up the trunk
and then started stacking things
on top of each other in the back seat.
Anthony spent over $20,000.
Anthony would just gesture that he has an account
or he brought out a credit card and everything was paid for.
If there was even a glimmer of any question,
he would get loud
and talk down to the person and say,
"Who do you think you are? I am Khalid bin Al‐Saud,"
and he would shake his head at them,
and he would get very, very frustrated
and make such a huge scene
that honestly, the person would just want it to end
and would give in to what he wanted
because it was such an ordeal.
♪♪
Goldberg: The more Anthony grew into his Saudi prince persona,
the more success he had as a con man.
But eventually, his luck ran out...
and then ran out 10 more times.
♪♪
From 1988 up till when we found him in 2017,
he had been arrested or convicted 11 different times
for Saudi prince‐related scams.
He's been doing this for years.
They started very small‐scale ‐‐
getting a fake Saudi prince account at a Neiman Marcus.
♪♪
Goldberg: In 2003, Anthony was finally busted
for his department store shopping scheme.
♪♪
Anthony had legally changed his name to Khalid bin Al‐Saud,
making his fraud cases harder to prosecute.
♪♪
During the time that Khalid ‐‐
I'm sorry ‐‐ Anthony was around us,
there was a lot of smoke and mirror
and not real honesty.
So I don't really honestly feel like I ever got to know
who Anthony really was,
because he was kind of like a chameleon,
and he blended in when he needed to,
and then when he needed to change his colors,
he certainly did.
[ Arabic accent ] They will not let me contact the embassy.
Goldberg: Anthony continued to build his persona.
In another arrest, he even added an accent.
Current legal name is Khalid bin Al‐Saud.
And he had an answer for everything,
even when he was asked, "Who is Anthony Gignac?"
That is a friend of mine that I had used his name 7 years ago.
Reporter: Do you honestly believe you are a Saudi prince?
Well, do you honestly believe you're a reporter?
They have not charged me with any kinds of fraud.
They have charged me only
with grand theft of my own credit card.
I'm done speaking to you.
Goldberg: But commitment to character only goes so far.
Soon after, he was busted trying to rip off a $3.9 million trust
using the name of a real Saudi prince
and did 6 years on the charge.
But for Anthony, going to prison was like enrolling in Con Man U.
Mosley: He was learning from other inmates and con men
how to become a better criminal.
He had a lot of time to read books, newspaper articles
on how to perpetrate these types of scams.
He took the time and effort to educate himself
what he could do and what he could get away with.
♪♪
Mosley: He even went as far to reach out to his family
to have them send him magazines
so that he could study the culture of Saudi princes ‐‐
how they look and how they dress and how they live.
He was only allowed to keep a certain amount of materials
in his jail cell,
so he would send these materials home after he'd peruse them.
He would often have articles specifically torn out
or marked on.
Mosley: Anthony really spent his time studying ‐‐
celebrities, powerful people.
Where do they go? How do they meet?
How could he target these people?
Goldberg: When he finally got sprung from the big house,
Anthony was ready for the big time.
And in 2017, he turns back up in Miami.
♪♪
McSeveney: He grew better at scams,
and they grew in sophistication and complexity over the years.
Goldberg: That was, of course, until the prosciutto incident.
Now the feds know Anthony's real identity
and his colorful history,
but to stop him, they need to find out much more.
We need to look at every financial transaction.
We need to look at every potential coconspirator,
every investor
and truly determine what is taking place here.
♪♪
I told myself early on that this must stop.
I did not want to see this turn into
another 6‐ or 8‐year sentence
where he would just serve a few years,
get out, and do it again.
We know he's acting like a fake prince,
with the fake plates and the fake badges,
but we don't know why.
What's the con? What's the job?
[ Camera shutter clicking ]
McSeveney: It became very clear to me
there was a much larger scam afoot.
[ Camera shutter clicking ]
♪♪
McSeveney: Anthony is a prolific con man
with a 30‐year track record of defrauding people
and stealing from individuals of all different walks of life.
Goldberg: If Anthony knows he's being pursued,
he doesn't act like it.
Al‐Saud: You know what it is. We're taking off.
Goldberg: He's taking a trip overseas,
and that gives the feds the break they need,
because once again, Anthony just can't help himself
from documenting his travels on social media.
We knew Anthony was traveling abroad
and that in doing so,
he was committing a crime because he was traveling
on another individual's passport and identity.
♪♪
We met with the assistant United States attorney
on the case and his superiors.
They said unequivocally,
"Yes, we will accept this case for prosecution."
We need to get him into custody and keep getting evidence
so we can figure out what he's up to.
We know it's got to be more than
just acting like a diplomat for no reason
or using a passport for no reason.
But this is sort of the first step
in getting to the bottom of what he's doing.
Now we had to find him.
Goldberg: Which Anthony is making easy
by posting his every destination on social media.
His posts were instrumental in us determining his location.
[ Telephone rings ]
Shadley: We received a notification
that he's booked on a flight from Miami to Chicago
and then from Chicago to Hong Kong.
From Hong Kong, he went to Dubai, then to Paris.
From there, the United Kingdom to London.
McSeveney: My "aha" moment when I saw where he was traveling to,
I knew right then and there
he is trying to lure investors.
Goldberg: But lure investors for what?
The feds are still trying to figure out
what exactly Anthony is up to.
The agents see their chance to strike
when Anthony posts that he is on a flight
back to the United States.
We knew that he was going to be landing in New York
on a specific flight at a specific time.
And we said, "Alright, let's move on this.
Let's arrest him."
♪♪
Shadley: DSS agents from Miami had flown up to New York
to arrest him when he comes into JFK.
[ Police radio chatter ]
♪♪
He is relentless.
Up until they handcuff him,
he is vehemently declaring that he is the real prince
and that Anthony Gignac was impersonating him.
[ Siren wailing ]
At the same time, a team of agents
was executing a search warrant
at his condominium on Fisher Island.
McSeveney: It was a beautiful apartment.
It had an ocean view,
decorated with artwork
that later on turned out to be fraudulent.
♪♪
He also had a very nice alcohol collection.
Come across a bottle of a very high‐end whiskey
filled with iced tea.
It was not real.
I had everything inventoried and appraised.
For every one piece of real jewelry
or real artifact or painting,
there were a hundred frauds.
Goldberg: The feds find plenty of incriminating items,
but they aren't finding many clues about Anthony's big scam.
But then their big break
literally walks through the front door.
[ Elevator bell dings ]
♪♪
McSeveney: While we were doing the search, we encountered this individual
returning to the residence after doing some shopping.
Goldberg: Anthony's bodyguard has picked this exact moment
to restock his boss's fridge.
McSeveney: And he decided to cooperate with law enforcement,
and he led us to storage units on Miami Beach.
[ Rattling ]
Goldberg: The feds have no idea what might be in those storage units,
but what they find blows the case wide open.
McSeveney: There was cash,
fake diplomatic license plates, fake badges,
a treasure trove of falsified documents
on letterhead bearing the title Marden Williamson International.
Goldberg: As they dig through the documents,
they find out exactly what Anthony's big con is ‐‐
a con so big, so outrageous,
they have never seen anything like it before.
This scam had tentacles that stretch throughout the world.
♪♪
Goldberg: The feds have finally arrested
master con artist Anthony Gignac,
and the raid of his secret storage units
has given them the big break they need.
Now they know the full scope of Anthony's grand plan,
and it's a doozy.
He is pitching these multimillion‐,
multibillion‐dollar deals ‐‐
very complex, high‐level investment opportunities.
There were deals for
a pharmaceutical company in Ireland,
a casino hotel in Canada, jet fuel trading platforms,
and then, ultimately, a project
called the Alaska‐Jersey Project,
which goes from being "What's this prince up to?"
to "Holy cow."
Goldberg: So, what was the big scam?
Well, get this ‐‐
Anthony was selling fake shares in Saudi Aramco,
the state‐owned Saudi oil company worth $2 trillion.
Shadley: He said, "Listen, I've got 10% stake in Saudi Aramco.
It's not public yet, but if you invest with me,
you could have some of my 10% stake."
Goldberg: But pulling off a scam of this magnitude
took more than just Anthony's usual con man charm.
For this one, he had to get creative.
Shadley: He had a fake letter from the Bank of Saudi Arabia.
We went back through his computer
and his Internet search history
and saw him writing in Google Translate
from English to Arabic these paragraph‐long phrases
where he would have the head of the Bank of Saudi Arabia
or prominent lawyers in Saudi Arabia
"write these letters" saying
"Prince Khalid bin Al‐Saud owns 10% of Saudi Aramco."
And he found online Arabic letter stamps
that he put on the letter,
and he forged signatures of high‐ranking bank officials
to make it seem legit.
And he could sell that, and he did sell that in spades.
♪♪
Weaver: He used Marden Williamson International
as a cover for luring in
a lot of different investors.
Some 20, 25 of them
eventually ended up investing in this company.
They came from various industries ‐‐
a lot of investment bankers, some government employees,
some connections, some acquaintances.
Goldberg: The documents also explain why Anthony faked interest
in luxury hotels like the Fontainebleau.
It was all part of the Saudi Aramco con.
They would be chomping at the bit
to have such a wealthy investor involved in their project,
and he would sort of string them along
and string them along and string them along
and ultimately pull out of the deal.
Later on, he'd come back and say,
"How about this investment?"
The con was to lure investors into thinking
that they were going to be partners
with the Saudi Royal Family
and get discounted rates on Saudi Aramco shares.
Goldberg: Anthony never did land his biggest fish, Jeffrey Soffer,
but he still raked in some serious cash
from his other marks.
McSeveney: At the end, he stole approximately $8.1 million.
♪♪
I think if he had been a bit more discreet,
he may have gotten away with this for a little while longer.
Goldberg: Unfortunately for Anthony,
discretion isn't exactly his strong suit,
and neither is knowing when to quit.
He was an extremely difficult defendant.
He was difficult for his defense lawyers.
He went through 4 of them.
McSeveney: It was very interesting to see him boss around
and belittle his Miami defense attorney,
who was not an individual
who was probably used to being talked to like that.
Weaver: He entered a plea deal
for something that was fairly reasonable,
that would have sent him to prison for 5 to 7 years,
and then he withdrew from his guilty plea.
He clearly wanted to just play the system a little longer.
But the feds regrouped, put together another indictment,
and slammed him.
He ultimately pled guilty
to 4 counts conspiracy to commit wire fraud,
wire fraud, impersonating a diplomat or foreign official,
and aggravated identity theft.
He was sentenced to a little more than 18 years in prison.
♪♪
[ Gavel bangs ]
♪♪
McSeveney: He would claim once he was incarcerated
that his very expensive sunglasses were prescription
and had asked us to return them to him 'cause he couldn't read.
When I actually looked at the glasses,
they were, in fact, sunglasses.
They were not reading glasses.
He wanted his glasses because it's a status symbol.
Even when he was handcuffed and shackled
and wearing an orange jumpsuit,
whatever little bit he could get,
whatever he could manipulate to get something
gave him a very good sense of satisfaction.
Goldberg: It's finally the end of the road
for the kid who has been slinging scams
since his grade school days back in Michigan.
But it is not the end of this story.
In fact, Anthony's true roots reveal a twist
that may surprise you.
Anthony did not grow up in Saudi Arabia.
He was born in Bogotá, Colombia.
Goldberg: You heard the lady ‐‐
Anthony from Michigan is actually Anthony from Colombia.
Lisa: He was living in an orphanage.
He had been picked up off the streets,
where he was estimated
to have been living for a couple of years.
Goldberg: Anthony was adopted when he was 6,
and he spent the rest of his childhood
in a nice middle‐class home in Michigan.
So, what drove him to reinvent himself as a lavish prince?
Lisa: To me, it makes perfect sense
when coming from such a deprived environment at an early age
where you learn that if you have money, you have power.
Weaver: It's preposterous, but he spent a lifetime
pretending to be somebody else, somebody other than who he is,
who he was, when he was born,
and just wanted to forget it,
even if it was all in his head.
That's what I think he was chasing.
That's the dream I think he was chasing.
When you don't have a lot of attachment to your identity,
you make one up,
and that's what Anthony has done his entire life.
And he was successful at it,
so I get why it's so hard to stop.
It's not just about the con. It's a lifestyle.
Spiegel: I don't feel bad for him at all. He's a crook.
He's taken a lot of people to the cleaners.
I'm sure he cost a lot of people their jobs.
I think he has had his day in justice,
and he's serving it right now, and justifiably so.
Lisa: I feel a lot of sadness for his mother's pain.
There was nothing anyone was gonna be able to do
to get him to change his ways
and stop living the way he had been living.
♪♪
Shadley: He was a very sophisticated fraudster.
He was very effective at what he did,
had a very strong, outgoing personality,
and was adept at controlling people and putting on a facade.
And he used that to the best of his ability.
Unfortunately, it was illegal,
and he used it to commit crimes and to ruin people's lives.
The 26 victims, many have had very difficult issues
psychologically, emotionally, and financially
as a result of this crime,
and we did our best to make sure that this does not happen again.
♪♪
Lisa: I don't think the con is over for Anthony.
I have heard that he is running the floor
in the penitentiary that he's in now.
He's got everybody running for him.
He's got everybody sending him stuff.
He has people working for him, and all because they believe
that he's somebody he's cooked up for them to think he is.
Goldberg: Anthony Gignac's journey has taken him from rags to riches
and then back to rags again ‐‐
or, at least, an orange jumpsuit.
Jessica: Anthony would absolutely be proud of what he's accomplished.
He was this young orphan from Colombia,
and he just got so wrapped up
in all of the things that he could have
and just took it too far.