Julia was already suspicious of her mother’s new boyfriend, Nelson Roth, a high-flying businessman. Then he asked Julia for money. Who was this guy? “Nelson Roth,” she said, “is the fakest fucking name I’ve ever heard.”
In the summer of 2018, my friend Julia learned that her mother had a new boyfriend. Julia’s mom, whom I’ll call Rachelle, was a septuagenarian nearing retirement who had been amicably divorced from Julia’s father for nearly three decades. She had signed up for a dating site called Our Time, which catered to an older clientele. I’d known Julia for more than twenty years—we met during our freshman year of high school—and for that entire time her mom had been single.
Nelson set up a meeting with a high-end New York City broker. Rachelle wondered why they would meet with someone in the city to explore Connecticut real estate, but Nelson insisted that this broker had all the right connections. He also wanted Rachelle to go alone to the meeting. He told her not to mention him, and to make it seem as if she were looking for real estate for herself. She was puzzled, but she followed his instructions.One evening, Rachelle found Nelson distraught.
“Let’s go to Campagnola,” Kristie suggested, referring to a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant frequented by the occasional B-list celebrity. As the women ordered drinks at the bar, Kristie met eyes with a handsome man across the room. He wore a brown suit and had a copious head of hair, and he was sipping on a Scotch. “He was sexy and mysterious-looking,” she recalled.
At the end of the summer, Nelson gave Kristie an engagement ring. It was much too big for her finger and flopped around as she walked. “I’m engaged,” she told her friends. “Not that I really believed it,” she reflected later. “I was just—I needed a fantasy.” Months later, Kristie opened her credenza drawer and noticed that a diamond ring she’d owned for years was missing. She filed this in the mental dossier of suspicions about Nelson that she didn’t like to dwell on. But, one day, Kristie got a phone call from a woman named Elaine. Kristie and Elaine pieced together that they’d both been dating Nelson, and that he’d taken them both for money. Elaine, who died recently, was out tens of thousands of dollars and a cherished diamond necklace.
In the fall of 2001, about a year after she started dating him, Kristie broke things off with Nelson. “I never want to see you again,” she told him. He still hadn’t repaid any of her money. Please, he asked, would she just meet him at the spot he liked on Seventy-second and York? It was a quiet, often empty place with benches that overlooked the water. “I thought, Yeah, right, so you can flip me into the East River?” she told me. “I wasn’t going to meet him there.
Julia, a lawyer, was beginning to panic, and she contacted a number of people she trusted, asking for advice on what to do. One of them was my dad, a fellow-attorney specializing in criminal defense, who, I later learned, put her in touch with a New York-based private investigator he’d worked with through the years. The P.I. told Julia that Nelson Roth’s real name was Nelson Counne.
It’s impossible to say how many people Nelson Counne scammed, and for how much money, but various indictments allege he stole some $184, 210 in cash and jewelry from five people who decided to prosecute. Though significant for his victims, this amount, in the course of several years, is no large sum for a person who is trying to live the New York high life.
Whenever Ethel questioned Nelson, he insisted that an opportunity for more money was right around the corner—a big deal, a payout. The relationship went on for so long, and she’d invested so much time and money, that, in retrospect, Ethel isn’t sure if she was complicit in his scams or if she had believed that they might be true.
Rachelle said that, despite everything, she felt sorry for Nelson, whose lies were aspirational. When describing his childhood, he claimed that he’d grown up poor. Although some of the finer points were likely exaggerated, the broader strokes of the narrative felt true. Nelson told Rachelle, for instance, that he used to watch as wealthy people stepped in and out of fancy cars with well-dressed drivers, and that he’d wanted that kind of ease and luxury his whole life.
According to Maurer’s taxonomy, con men are “the aristocrats of crime.” Petty thieves, meanwhile, are the lowest of the low. In this way, even Nelson’s grift was aspirational. When it came down to it, he was neither an aristocrat nor an aristocrat among criminals.
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