Episode 17 - Ryan Schultz + Gerald Blanchard

Twitter fraud! Grand heists!

This week Bec (they/them) introduces us to Ryan Schultz, just an average twitter user and baseball writer with a dark hobby of harassing women online. But when he makes one too many women feel small, they fight back and expose Ryan's deepest secret yet.

Then Adam (he/him) tells us about a Canadian Danny Ocean. We make way too may Ocean's 11 references and giggle ourselves silly with every single one. Gerald Blanchard started his life as a criminal at a young age, starting with bottles of milk, but his ultimate masterpiece was stealing Empress Sisi's beloved jewels under everyone's noses. 



Bec's Sources:
Twitter thread 

https://deadspin.com/teen-girl-posed-for-8-years-as-married-man-to-write-abo-1820305588

Adam's Sources:
Art of the Steal: On the Trail of the World's Most Ingenious Thief

Make sure to follow us on instagram @unscrupulouspod and send us an email at unscrupulouspod@gmail.com

Transcript

[00:00:30.610] - Bec Rose
Hello, everyone, and welcome to an episode of Unscrupulous, the podcast where we talk dishonest folks whose victims always live to tell the tale. Hello, Adam Lawlor.

[00:00:43.530] - Adam Lawlor
Hello, Beck Rose. How are you?

[00:00:47.230] - Bec Rose
I'm going to be honest with you and the people I'm under the other today. I took a sick day. So I rolled my poor aching belly out of bed only to put pants on and brush my teeth to get back into bed to record fair and good. Yeah. Little low energy, but so excited to tell you the story. So I just had to come to work today.

[00:01:13.910] - Adam Lawlor
I love it.

[00:01:15.100] - Bec Rose
Didn't go to my day job. Coming to the fun job. Don't tell them the.

[00:01:21.670] - Adam Lawlor
Break.

[00:01:22.090] - Bec Rose
I mean, I did sleep all day. I was genuinely sick. How are you feeling?

[00:01:29.530] - Adam Lawlor
I'm feeling good.

[00:01:31.090] - Bec Rose
Excellent. I'm very pumped. I don't know where this is going to fall because in recording time is different than listening time. Our recording schedule got a little thrown off. So there's some weeks where we're not going the proper whose turn it is. So this week I'm going first.

[00:01:52.790] - Adam Lawlor
Don't add us. This is a blanket. Whatever you think you found wrong with our podcast, we already know and it's on purpose, actually.

[00:02:02.090] - Bec Rose
It's called artistic license.

[00:02:04.950] - Adam Lawlor
Aren't you embarrassed?

[00:02:06.340] - Bec Rose
Look it up sometime. Okay. So I'm going first and I'm very excited.

[00:02:12.570] - Adam Lawlor
Okay. I'm so ready.

[00:02:14.120] - Bec Rose
Okay. So one thing I want to talk about before we get into the story is the concept of online friends.

[00:02:22.750] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:02:23.410] - Bec Rose
Because this story has a lot of that and I think for some people they may not understand that you can become very close to people online. Right.

[00:02:33.910] - Adam Lawlor
These are like people you never meet in real life.

[00:02:37.410] - Bec Rose
Yes. And I think that there's perhaps like I don't know what your experience is with online friends. I have very close social media friends who like we've cried together, we've FaceTimed together, we text, we've supported each other and we live in different parts of the world.

[00:02:55.450] - Adam Lawlor
Right.

[00:02:56.360] - Bec Rose
Have you had this experience with online friends?

[00:02:59.450] - Adam Lawlor
I have dabbled in online friendship, but it's never mainly I just talk to people I already know.

[00:03:07.580] - Bec Rose
I'm just too popular in real life, everybody. That's what Adam's trying to tell us. Must be nice.

[00:03:13.150] - Adam Lawlor
No, it's just that people love Beck wherever they go. So you need a running list of friends. Sign up. Please use this platform if you're this level of friend.

[00:03:27.170] - Bec Rose
Absolutely. Yeah. So I think that's kind of like an older thought that you can't be that close with people. So I just feel like it's important to understand that and especially during pandemic times.

[00:03:43.270] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. I feel like that showed a lot of people for all the shortfalls and stuff like that. With online schooling and everything going on, I feel like people really realized how much of like a saving grace online friendships.

[00:03:57.910] - Bec Rose
Yeah. I have very close friendships with people who I have not met in real person. I don't know what they smell like, but I know that they make my heart feel good.

[00:04:10.270] - Adam Lawlor
I like that.

[00:04:11.200] - Bec Rose
So anyways, that's just to say you can get really close with people online. So our story is about Ryan Schultz. He was an online baseball writer. Boring. So boring. A yada yada yada. A lot of the boring bits because I had to look up sports websites for this. Adam.

[00:04:30.930] - Adam Lawlor
Oh, no, that's very bad.

[00:04:34.570] - Bec Rose
Yeah.

[00:04:35.510] - Adam Lawlor
Even if I was, like, three quarters deep into my story, and they were like, you're going to have to check one page on ESPN, and I'd be like, forget looks like you're going in the trash.

[00:04:44.880] - Bec Rose
Couldn't have been that good of a story. I'm saying. I looked through a lot of things for us. So where the sport is dull, I do apologize. So in researching the story, I learned a lot about writing about sorry. I learned a lot about people who write about baseball online.

[00:05:05.170] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:05:07.090] - Bec Rose
Isn't that so very neat?

[00:05:09.130] - Adam Lawlor
Weird reading about baseball. No, thank you. But like you saying, reading about the people who write about baseball, the articles that I would never read. Yeah, I will read all about those.

[00:05:19.510] - Bec Rose
But, I mean, if you thought the sport was dull anyway, it was very common, apparently, for publications to reach out to people who were active on social media, say, like, on a Twitter who had a good following, those publications would very likely reach out and ask you to write for them. Okay. So this is, like, how Ryan was getting work, was having a pretty good Twitter following. So the articles he was writing were probably just free or, like, very little money. Okay. One article I had read mentioned that most people would make around, like, $100 a month. So it's no one's prime income.

[00:06:07.420] - Adam Lawlor
It's very much an asshole.

[00:06:09.180] - Bec Rose
Okay.

[00:06:09.940] - Adam Lawlor
It's just kind of, at this point, almost like a fun thing to say.

[00:06:14.040] - Bec Rose
Exactly. Yeah. He's a little Twitter famous.

[00:06:18.650] - Adam Lawlor
Okay. What year is this, by the way?

[00:06:23.210] - Bec Rose
Early. Two thousand s two thousand and ten ish. Okay.

[00:06:26.090] - Adam Lawlor
Got you.

[00:06:26.650] - Bec Rose
Yeah. So it wasn't Ryan's primary income either. He openly talked about going through pharmacology school.

[00:06:35.630] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:06:36.160] - Bec Rose
I wrote that word and had no problem. I didn't think about saying it. Pharmacology school and wanting to support his wife Blair and their two kids. He's very open about all this.

[00:06:47.510] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:06:48.770] - Bec Rose
So we're going to back it up a little bit. Before the marriage, before he even got work as a writer, he was just a guy on Twitter.

[00:06:57.750] - Adam Lawlor
Right.

[00:06:58.220] - Bec Rose
In 2010, he connects with someone named Alex on the same site. The two, as this article said, quote, date publicly for about a year.

[00:07:09.530] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:07:10.510] - Bec Rose
She describes Ryan as a run of the mill blackhawks fan blah who was a couple of years older than her.

[00:07:20.270] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:07:20.800] - Bec Rose
The two connected deeply on an emotional level. This is what the article says. Alex opened up to Ryan and they were sharing intimate details that she really only shared with the closest people in her life. The two had a sexual relationship, which would have been exclusively over the phone or texting because they never actually met. Gotcha all over Twitter.

[00:07:45.590] - Adam Lawlor
All right.

[00:07:47.510] - Bec Rose
But as the honeymoon period started to wear off, ryan started to show his true colors. Shocker. Ryan's a douche. He was becoming possessive and aggressive with Alex. One weird anecdote was that Alex, she got this friend request from someone named Becca Schultz. So she asked Ryan about it because they have the same last name, and he's like, oh, yeah, that's my cousin. Alex is like, cool, I'm not going to accept as I've never met them in real life. And Ryan gets pissed at this weird. Yeah. What are your suspicions?

[00:08:30.690] - Adam Lawlor
That. That's just Ryan.

[00:08:32.730] - Bec Rose
Yeah.

[00:08:33.750] - Adam Lawlor
And he wants to spy. He's pissed because he can't do the most obvious scheme.

[00:08:42.950] - Bec Rose
You think that he made the Becca account to further creep?

[00:08:47.430] - Adam Lawlor
Basically, yeah. Pass information on, like, influence, maybe, but.

[00:08:54.330] - Bec Rose
Really just yeah, be like, hey, girlfriend, exactly.

[00:09:00.670] - Adam Lawlor
That kind of thing. And even because it's always the case with people like this too, especially in any of their relationships, if the thing that they are accusing their partner of is not happening, and again and again and again, it's just not happening, they'll start setting up the situation, basically giving themselves the pass. So when it does happen, because you've crafted an entire day to get you to give this guy a peck on the cheek or something, then you can flip out and you're totally justified. And everything you've always been saying has always been the case.

[00:09:40.480] - Bec Rose
You've come to a lot of conclusions from this Becca Schultz account.

[00:09:43.870] - Adam Lawlor
I'm sorry. Yeah, it's true.

[00:09:45.280] - Bec Rose
It's true.

[00:09:46.220] - Adam Lawlor
I'm sorry.

[00:09:47.120] - Bec Rose
This is a runaway train. I just need to stop. We'll see where this goes with rye guy.

[00:09:53.330] - Adam Lawlor
Becca Schultz, if you're listening right now, I'm so sorry.

[00:09:56.160] - Bec Rose
Maybe hold on to that as, um, yeah. He gets really upset, and Alex describes Ryan, making her feel stupid and, like, talking down to her. After his third flake out on meeting in person, alex decides she's out. But the two stay friendly online friendly. Ryan shares with Alex that he starts seeing someone new named Blair. Eventually, Ryan proposes he and Blair get married and in time have kids. Boring, boring, boring, boring. Sorry. And Alex is very supportive of this the whole time. So they're like, good friends.

[00:10:43.230] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:10:45.070] - Bec Rose
So although he's getting married and having his boring little heteronormative life, this doesn't stop Ryan from harassing women on the.

[00:10:58.450] - Adam Lawlor
Am. Yeah, that's great. I've heard of I just I couldn't see where it would come in. Just, like, paratroopered in from the going.

[00:11:10.390] - Bec Rose
From harassing girlfriends to harassing just anyone.

[00:11:14.390] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. It's so strange.

[00:11:16.290] - Bec Rose
So many women eventually come forward, all saying that he had, like, a similar Mo. He would approach them as a married man in his 20s within the first messages, he's like, mentioning his family. Then the two would talk more, and he would slowly become more aggressive with them. One victim had said that he would get drunk and become, quote, aggressively horny. And on more than one occasion, ryan made a woman feel that she had no choice but to send him a nude.

[00:11:50.780] - Adam Lawlor
Whoa. Okay.

[00:11:53.140] - Bec Rose
The word coerced was used quite often in the article gotcha. He met one woman who wanted to remain anonymous, but the article calls her Sarah, so that's what we'll call her.

[00:12:06.060] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:12:06.460] - Bec Rose
She said that the two had met on Twitter. Ryan and she interacted a few times before. He slides into her DMs. Same thing. He mentions his wife, his children, but again, this drunken, aggressive flirting that makes it sound, like, uncomfortably sexual. Sarah's like, dude, I'm on Twitter to talk about sports. Like, please stop.

[00:12:33.250] - Adam Lawlor
Right.

[00:12:34.230] - Bec Rose
Within a few months, Ryan told Sarah that he loved whoa.

[00:12:39.980] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:12:41.810] - Bec Rose
Yep. Sarah is not letting this weird Twitter creep get her down, though. She starts dating someone in real life, and Ryan gets possessive. He's sending her messages like, I want to make you feel pain.

[00:13:00.010] - Adam Lawlor
Whoa.

[00:13:00.820] - Bec Rose
Yeah. She would block him, and he would find ways to talk to her, like creating new Twitter accounts or oh, okay. So while he's harassing away in private, ryan starts getting jobs writing for baseball publications. They name some, and I just really could not be fucked to write them down. Sportsball magazine.

[00:13:25.010] - Adam Lawlor
Baseball time. The big bats.

[00:13:31.490] - Bec Rose
Dugout dig.

[00:13:38.870] - Adam Lawlor
It's the consonants. It's the alliteration. You just got to have it there.

[00:13:42.730] - Bec Rose
It doesn't have to make sense.

[00:13:44.630] - Adam Lawlor
No, not at all.

[00:13:45.840] - Bec Rose
Not at all. There's no crying in baseball.

[00:13:50.170] - Adam Lawlor
Baseball bugles.

[00:13:51.570] - Bec Rose
I'm sure none of them have seen A League of Their Own, the movie, or the show. So Ryan's gaining a reputation. Like I said, these gigs are often they often start off as free. But Ryan is moving up, and he's being featured, and he starts getting paid for articles.

[00:14:11.550] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:14:12.270] - Bec Rose
He's being asked to write more and more pieces, some multi parters, and that same year, he appeared on a podcast about baseball. Sounds fascinating. So although this is a side hustle, it is a passion project, and he is somewhat successful at it.

[00:14:29.350] - Adam Lawlor
Interesting. Okay. And these articles are just out there.

[00:14:34.860] - Bec Rose
Yeah. They do exist. Is that what you mean?

[00:14:37.960] - Adam Lawlor
Okay. Yeah. I just had a flash of, like, is he just, like, saying no?

[00:14:44.250] - Bec Rose
No. So those things are easy to follow up.

[00:14:47.420] - Adam Lawlor
Right.

[00:14:47.900] - Bec Rose
He did genuinely have this Twitter account that he was writing. He did genuinely get picked up. He did write more and more.

[00:14:56.190] - Adam Lawlor
All this stuff got you. So he was like, maybe not a major name, but he's like, a minor name in the exact world, I think, specifically baseball. Right.

[00:15:09.090] - Bec Rose
So November 2017, a tweet is released that blows up everything. I'm just going to read the tweet for you verbatim, please. And I have a link to it because it's juicy. Quote I'm sure by now, if you followed quote I'm sure by now if you followed and interacted with Ryan Schultz, you may have noticed he deactivated his account. You may have also heard that multiple women have come forward telling stories of emotional abuse and harassment, leading him to be fired from the publications he was writing for. I was one of those women. It was a hard thing for me to do, because for a while, I considered Ryan to be a good friend. Last night, with the help of some other Twitter friends, I discovered that Ryan Schultz was a catfish. The persona was developed by a now 21 year old about eight years ago, meaning they were 13 whoa. In hopes that she could become a baseball writer. As you can all tell, it spiraled out of control. There were a lot of holes in Ryan's story, and it didn't take long for my friends and I to realize that so many of the stories had been told.

[00:16:29.620] - Bec Rose
The wife, the kids, pharmacy school, they were all made up. Unfortunately, the only thing that was left that was real was the emotional manipulation and the harassment. The Ryan account has been deactivated, and the catfish has been confronted. Publications have been notified. The catfish promises that this is over, but myself oh, sorry. By myself and aloof catfish promises this is over by myself and aloof of people. Maybe it meant a lot.

[00:16:59.990] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, I think so. Right.

[00:17:01.670] - Bec Rose
That the account interacted with have a long wait to go, because this isn't over for us. Signed, Aaron.

[00:17:10.090] - Adam Lawlor
Wow.

[00:17:12.810] - Bec Rose
So Ryan didn't exist because he was, in fact, Schultz oh. That supposed cousin that had tried to add Alex. So your instincts were somewhat correct, but it wasn't Ryan who created the Becca account.

[00:17:33.890] - Adam Lawlor
Right.

[00:17:34.480] - Bec Rose
Becca, that created the Ryan account.

[00:17:37.010] - Adam Lawlor
Wow. Okay.

[00:17:38.420] - Bec Rose
So Becca wrote oh, sorry. So the person who wrote this article, becca spoke with them. They only spoke over gchat because Becca claims she had lost her voice the evening. So this is a lot of this is her words in the article. So she admits to what she's done. She says that she wanted to become a sports writer, but because she was so young at 13, she didn't think she could break in. So she decided to create this character and behave, as Becca says, quote, the stereotypical guy.

[00:18:24.850] - Adam Lawlor
I mean, yeah. Did she kind of nail it?

[00:18:29.320] - Bec Rose
She kind of got the memo, understood the assignment, so she chose a name similar to her own, and she, quote, went with know when you know, go with catfishing. She says that she thinks it would have stopped after a year or two if she hadn't met Alex.

[00:18:51.930] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:18:52.520] - Bec Rose
She says this is Becca. Quote, I was young and had no idea what to do, so I just acted like I thought a man would do. That slowly led me down a path to some things that I was very uncomfortable doing, but I didn't even realize where is happening at the time. I still probably had the valid excuse that I was young, but things started to get serious, and I had no clue how to dig myself out of the hole I was in. Becca claims that despite wanting to get out, she felt that she had enough Twitter followers that she couldn't just, quote, disappear.

[00:19:30.390] - Adam Lawlor
That's I mean, wow. So why did the Alex thing even happen?

[00:19:42.890] - Bec Rose
Let me keep talking. We'll get into okay.

[00:19:45.280] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:19:45.790] - Bec Rose
So she says that she tried a few times to just slowly back away, but she says she always comes back, as if that's we're supposed to congratulate her for that. I did stop, but I always came back. Like, great, you kept coming back.

[00:20:01.600] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. So what you're telling us is that you took several had a I had.

[00:20:07.110] - Bec Rose
An hour and I came back. She says, quote, those couple times I came back are the biggest regrets of my life because they were probably the best and only way I had out until now. By the time Becca graduated from high school, she had been performing as Ryan for five years. Meaning she did this through all of high school.

[00:20:30.490] - Adam Lawlor
Right. This is absurd.

[00:20:35.150] - Bec Rose
Yeah.

[00:20:35.640] - Adam Lawlor
The amount of work alone go with just the mental exhaustion. You would be all the time to be a kid in high school and leading a double online relationship.

[00:20:52.990] - Bec Rose
Side hustle that you are making some money on. So she says that she didn't know she got in so far that she didn't know where her thoughts ended and where Ryan's began, that kind of thing, especially online.

[00:21:06.710] - Adam Lawlor
So she's a method like Jared Leto.

[00:21:10.050] - Bec Rose
She's a Jared leto. This is second episode in a row of recording that he's come up.

[00:21:16.360] - Adam Lawlor
That's true. So I'll just I'll put out Daniel Day Lewis just so we can spice it up a little.

[00:21:21.960] - Bec Rose
Also, I think this is like the fifth time we've talked about Jared Leto in all the episodes.

[00:21:28.510] - Adam Lawlor
He's on our Fit.

[00:21:33.790] - Bec Rose
When he came with, like, the purse of his own head. Oh, my God, so many thoughts. So Becca's anxiety and her depression are mounting. There's a lot of poor me lines that I just personally don't have time for. You can sneak them out if you want to read them. She has talked about them. One woman, though, that Ryan had harassed online was named Melissa. And she said that for over the last four months before Ryan was oh, my God, I'm so sorry. She had been talking to, um, the last four months right before he'd been exposed. They were quite good friends, Melissa and Ryan. And she talks about how Ryan was consistently saying how depressed he was, like, over and over and how unhappy he was. Melissa says that they met on Twitter about nine months ago, and that when she received her first DM from Ryan, she didn't feel threatened or weirded out because he away mentioned his wife and children in this initial, and, like, after a while, it wasn't so.

[00:22:48.690] - Adam Lawlor
Mm hmm.

[00:22:50.470] - Bec Rose
About four months ago, he began to text me quite often, Melissa said, under the guise of having issues with anxiety and depression and quite frankly, at times sounded borderline suicidal, which worried me and kept me engaged out of concern when I wouldn't answer his text, he oftentimes took to liking my tweets or jumping in my mentions. I noticed a few times that he'd started conversations with people that I talked to as if he was sort of inserting himself into my life even when I wasn't talking to him. I don't know if real Ryan struggles with these issues or if this was just like a ploy for attention that they knew they could get from pretending, but it felt very manipulative to me.

[00:23:37.990] - Adam Lawlor
Whoa. Yeah, I was going to say it also felt like that's her quote, sorry.

[00:23:44.660] - Bec Rose
To say it felt very manipulative to me, was Melissa's quote.

[00:23:48.260] - Adam Lawlor
Yes. I was going to say as she was recounting, that it felt almost like there's that third branch of maybe this can be my way out and seeding a depression, near suicidal story thinking. Like, then I'll just post that. He died, he killed himself, and then somebody on there will be like, you know, he did he was struggling with his mental health lately. I've got the messages to prove it, but I don't know. That's where it almost felt like it was like a last ditch could have been a last ditch effort to be like, this might work.

[00:24:25.640] - Bec Rose
That's really interesting because I took it as like, this is Becca in the only way that she can reach out to someone, say, I feel really shit and I'm not feeling great, but I like that you think that it's manipulative.

[00:24:47.610] - Adam Lawlor
I just have this flash of, like, oh, maybe this is, like, the setup.

[00:24:50.980] - Bec Rose
I think that what you're saying is more likely because yeah, I don't think it makes a ton of sense for her to cross those lines. But whatever. I mean, obviously this woman is not well.

[00:25:03.000] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, right. And it could just be a case where she was finding that was the new, more effective strategy of hooking people kind of thing. Like, the same way that Yushi always went in with talking about the wife and the kids and then moved on and maybe used the methods that she knew worked over and over again. She was doing it for so long. Of course those attitudes would shift. Right. Like, you'd be changing your tactics.

[00:25:34.610] - Bec Rose
Yeah. It's just so bizarre. Erin, whose tweet about Ryan blew up that one night, had told the author of this article that she had had this close, platonic relationship with Ryan that had begun in January and around the end of March is when she first starts dating someone new in real life. So this is another girl completely.

[00:26:03.330] - Adam Lawlor
Right.

[00:26:03.920] - Bec Rose
And that's when she started to see Ryan become super possessive and upset, and when he, like, he would get so pissed that this woman just wasn't around for his beck and call at any time. And so Erin starts reaching out to people, and she starts learning more and more about these past interactions, that this is something that is known, that Ryan does. And she said Erin had said, this is a direct quote from the article. Even without knowing anything was shady about Ryan. I had set up really strong boundaries in the beginning because to me, I was talking to a married man. So I was like, I'm not attracted to you. I'm not going to flirt with you, and if you ever flirt with me, I'm going to track down your wife and tell her everything. So Erin begins to distance herself from Ryan, and he begins periodically sending her money unsolicited.

[00:26:57.430] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:27:00.230] - Bec Rose
So it appears that the person that Becca had taken the photos from was an old classmate, and the pictures of the kids were the classmates, niece, and nephew. And during the eight years that Becca pretended to be Ryan, she had sent a ton of photos and videos of those three people.

[00:27:23.550] - Adam Lawlor
Whoa.

[00:27:24.680] - Bec Rose
Yeah.

[00:27:26.510] - Adam Lawlor
How did they never I think that.

[00:27:29.710] - Bec Rose
Happens a lot, though. I mean, in the many years that I've been watching Catfish on MTV, they will talk to people. Just as the quickest aside, in the original Catfish documentary, the woman whose images were being used, even when that movie came out, she didn't really know that this was going on, and they met up with her and explained it, I guess.

[00:28:00.380] - Adam Lawlor
The Internet is unfathomably large.

[00:28:02.780] - Bec Rose
Yeah. You can't track it, too.

[00:28:06.650] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. And again, it's such a niche, micro celebrity corner of the Internet. That's wild, though.

[00:28:20.450] - Bec Rose
Just to end it, this is just the last line of it. Becca reactivated the Ryan Schultz account and tweeted an explanation to the account's followers that I could not find. I kept looking for it, but you cannot find their explanation. And then they deactivated the account again, and nothing much has really been like said since.

[00:28:46.650] - Adam Lawlor
Wow.

[00:28:47.440] - Bec Rose
Yeah. So I realized I didn't really answer your question about the Alex thing. I don't know why the Alex thing started. I think that Becca started this. And obviously there's a lot we don't know about Becca and their struggles, but I think that they started this as the baseball thing, and they did succeed. That's all going on on the side, and then it found out that this has been going on underneath. I don't know why the Alex thing started, but I think it would have started no matter what. If it wasn't Alex, it would have been someone interesting.

[00:29:28.870] - Adam Lawlor
Okay. And she never tried to get any money or anything from any of them?

[00:29:39.960] - Bec Rose
Not from them, no. She did make some money from some of the articles, but there's a little bit of confusion around that as well, because she would have had to give her own Social Security number. Right. They could have just written a check if it was just, like, an online thing, but she hasn't really explained that either, how that would have happened. But the fact that it was going on for so long, things would have had to be perfected. Like, just wild.

[00:30:16.310] - Adam Lawlor
That is yeah. The conclusion all happened in 2017.

[00:30:26.090] - Bec Rose
Yeah. And it happened fast. Like, the article that I took a lot of this from that I just basically read to you, it came out, like, a couple days after this whole thing was exposed. And so it was just, like, right back to back. Kind of like they were exposed. A bunch of the publications that they wrote for Tweeted saying, you're no longer affiliated with Ryan Schultz. The Ryan Schultz account goes down. The article's written, the account goes back up. There's a quick explanation.

[00:31:03.330] - Adam Lawlor
That is and.

[00:31:04.800] - Bec Rose
I really couldn't find much of what's going on. I'm going to do the currently. Yeah. It was hard to find. If I looked her up, it was all about what had happened, not really what's going on now. I couldn't even find a picture of what she looks like.

[00:31:21.450] - Adam Lawlor
Whoa. Okay.

[00:31:23.770] - Bec Rose
Yeah. And all the articles are from 2017 that I found. There's not much since.

[00:31:36.910] - Adam Lawlor
Such a bizarre like, there's so many layers going on.

[00:31:40.370] - Bec Rose
There is. And I think it's always disappointing when there is woman on woman crime. Like, the fact that Becca made those women feel a way that they then believed that she was a man. Like, this is something that many women have experienced. And why would you then make someone else feel that? Yeah, just, like, to make them feel small and to belittle them and bully them and to coerce nudes out of them. For what? Like, what's your damage?

[00:32:24.350] - Adam Lawlor
Step off, Becca.

[00:32:28.030] - Bec Rose
Not me. Also, don't call me Becca.

[00:32:31.970] - Adam Lawlor
But they like yeah, just like the heartbreaking realization, too, that she started this when she was 13 and already was very aware of stereotypical abusive behavior.

[00:32:53.930] - Bec Rose
Yeah.

[00:32:55.050] - Adam Lawlor
So you are following that pattern to the point where I didn't think that the guy was fake.

[00:33:01.110] - Bec Rose
Exactly.

[00:33:01.500] - Adam Lawlor
Because I was like, yeah, guys do this all the time. Of course he is. This guy. That's wild to me, at such a young age, have to have such a clear idea of the way that men behave online.

[00:33:18.190] - Bec Rose
But that's horrible. Emulate it it's basically like letting your intrusive thoughts win.

[00:33:25.490] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, that's true.

[00:33:26.880] - Bec Rose
The amount of times I think I don't know how your intrusive thoughts manifest mine are usually like, I could yell something really horrible right now in this space and have everyone stare at me.

[00:33:38.870] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah.

[00:33:39.850] - Bec Rose
I just don't understand. I could say a horrible thing to this woman to make her show me her boobies, and then she did it.

[00:33:55.130] - Adam Lawlor
That is so devious fascinating and devious. Yeah, it definitely feels like you knew how you were making these women feel.

[00:34:09.920] - Bec Rose
Yeah. And it's in such a vacuum as, like, she could just go log on to her Twitter account, seek it out. Sometimes when she's Ryan, she's just writing about baseball and apparently is good at it. And then other times. And what's interesting is I did see this little bit about a lot of writers will have pseudonyms, especially because this is like a side hustle. It's not OD for people to not write under their own name. So for her to say, like, I was a 13 year old kid and wanted to write about baseball, so I thought I should pretend to be a man. That is somewhat believable and that in itself would be a very interesting story. But actually, I just used my power for evil.

[00:34:58.670] - Adam Lawlor
Right. It's such a long, con set up to get to what you clearly actually liked doing.

[00:35:09.080] - Bec Rose
But she did choose a hot woman's name for the wife. Blair.

[00:35:14.470] - Adam Lawlor
Blair. That's true.

[00:35:16.550] - Bec Rose
I'm into it.

[00:35:19.270] - Adam Lawlor
You like the Blair?

[00:35:20.670] - Bec Rose
Well, it makes me think of Blair from Gossip Girl because I read all those books. Not the show, not the cool popular thing. The inside by myself thing.

[00:35:36.490] - Adam Lawlor
Gotcha.

[00:35:37.120] - Bec Rose
Gotcha.

[00:35:37.600] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah.

[00:35:38.060] - Bec Rose
And wasn't his name Blair in that Kevin Spotci show?

[00:35:48.830] - Adam Lawlor
Kevin Spotchy.

[00:35:50.120] - Bec Rose
Kevin Spacey.

[00:35:53.410] - Adam Lawlor
Oh.

[00:35:56.050] - Bec Rose
We talked about this.

[00:35:57.970] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. I can't remember his name.

[00:36:02.820] - Bec Rose
Deep Southern accent. And I feel like his name was Blair. Anyways, I like the name Blair and the Blair Witch Project. VA information. I have to tell you, I hope that that made sense because as I was saying the story, I kept being like, I am ill because my brain was so foggy.

[00:36:23.130] - Adam Lawlor
No, it was good. That was like, I hope it made.

[00:36:27.450] - Bec Rose
Sense to the listener.

[00:36:28.750] - Adam Lawlor
No, I think it totally would have made sense. Nothing to worry about. Thank you so much for that story. That is wild and something I probably never would have heard of otherwise. So this week, my story is recommended by a listener.

[00:37:00.350] - Bec Rose
Oh, my God. We have listeners.

[00:37:02.540] - Adam Lawlor
We have listeners. This story was recommended by my very good friend Jordan.

[00:37:09.430] - Bec Rose
Oh, Jordan. Is it pronounced Jordan?

[00:37:14.240] - Adam Lawlor
Jordan, yes. Jordan, who also helped me out with some pronunciation.

[00:37:20.330] - Bec Rose
Oh, thank you.

[00:37:21.920] - Adam Lawlor
Yes. Which was very nice. Thank you, Jordan.

[00:37:25.380] - Bec Rose
Unless they set you up for failure.

[00:37:26.970] - Adam Lawlor
In which case that's true. You just sweared for, like, 15 minutes.

[00:37:33.910] - Bec Rose
Sweared.

[00:37:35.460] - Adam Lawlor
Swear. Yeah, sweared.

[00:37:38.970] - Bec Rose
Swore. Past tense. I probably said something cool like a swear Bob's Burger.

[00:37:49.080] - Adam Lawlor
So this story was recommended as one aspect of it. And then I looked into, like I just fell down an article with all the aspects from this guy's life, and it was so wild from start to finish that I was like, this story is amazing. So this is the story of Gerald Daniel Blanchard.

[00:38:11.680] - Bec Rose
Which word did you need help pronouncing?

[00:38:14.800] - Adam Lawlor
None of those. Can you help me speak? Good. So. I'm just going to call him Gerald. It's the name I'll stick with mostly, even though it does not suit Jerry. The actions of this carrot. Oh, Jerry. Jerry might work, but he was born in 1972 in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

[00:38:38.750] - Bec Rose
Wolf.

[00:38:39.960] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. His first brush with a merry. Heist was when he was six years old.

[00:38:47.660] - Bec Rose
Mary like M-E-R-R-Y or M-A-R-Y-M-E-R-Y.

[00:38:51.930] - Adam Lawlor
Okay.

[00:38:52.270] - Bec Rose
Like a joyful host. Got it.

[00:38:54.700] - Adam Lawlor
A joyful. Heist it's a host. He's being raised by a single mother. There were times when it was pretty rough for the family, and at times they couldn't afford milk. And Gerald remembers that when he was six years old, he noticed some bottles of milk in front of a neighbor's house. So he slumped on over there and stole that sweet cow juice. And according to him, the thrill of doing that was what hooked him.

[00:39:24.440] - Bec Rose
No, it was just drinking calcium and feeling like strength in your bones. My bones? This is what bowel is. No, that's what protein in your body is.

[00:39:39.980] - Adam Lawlor
Your skeleton isn't so feeble anymore.

[00:39:42.870] - Bec Rose
My bones aren't as brittle. I said protein, but I don't think that milk is a protein. I don't know. I just want to cover my bases.

[00:39:52.180] - Adam Lawlor
That was a joke. He and his mother eventually move to Nebraska. And yeah, from one cold ass to another, right. And he plays a nerdy, quiet kid, but he got into enough trouble that he ended up in reform school. Teacher of his, Randy Flanagan, which is a great name. It just, like, bounces all over the place. Took him under his watchful eye and met. They actually met when Gerald stole Randy's classroom VCR. He recognized Gerald's inherent intelligence, but desperately wants him to be on a good track. But instead of sticking to his after school grocery job, gerald was all about that fencing life. So, like, getting stolen products and then.

[00:40:53.140] - Bec Rose
Reselling them like you're the sort of fencing.

[00:40:57.140] - Adam Lawlor
Yes, just that kind of fencing.

[00:41:02.360] - Bec Rose
Not swords or putting up fences.

[00:41:06.280] - Adam Lawlor
Or putting up fences, both emotionally and physically. Yeah.

[00:41:11.760] - Bec Rose
This joke has so many layers.

[00:41:14.860] - Adam Lawlor
Oh, my God. Um he is so good at fencing stolen department store products that he's making tens of thousands of dollars.

[00:41:30.480] - Bec Rose
In what year? We're like, early 80s now.

[00:41:35.280] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, this will be in the 80s.

[00:41:37.130] - Bec Rose
Jesus.

[00:41:39.140] - Adam Lawlor
He did this by using his natural charm to befriend department store employees and get the goods. Like, he just said, I would just immediately know who would work with me so I'd be friends with them and get this. Like, it was just such a like, the people skills this guy has combined with everything else. All the while, Gerald is also learning so much from the teacher, Randy Flanagan. He's learning construction.

[00:42:07.420] - Bec Rose
Are the department store people knowingly giving him product or he's stealing under their watch?

[00:42:13.180] - Adam Lawlor
No, they're knowingly giving him the product. Yeah. So all the while, this is going on. Gerald is learning so much from Randy Flanagan, his teacher. He's learning construction, woodworking, model building, and automotive mechanics because this teacher just recognizes that he's a genius with his hands. Then Gerald takes a deep dive into mechanical devices and electronics. After becoming obsessed with surveillance tech on one Easter Sunday, he straight up just steals all his gear from his local Radio Shack. When he is 16 years old, he hires a lawyer to handle money and sign a deal on a house oh, my God. For $100,000 in cash.

[00:43:05.130] - Bec Rose
I know. In the 70s, Gerald is not a boomer, but that's boomer energy. Right.

[00:43:11.280] - Adam Lawlor
So Gerald just straight up tells his mom that the house was his friends.

[00:43:15.470] - Bec Rose
Oh, my God.

[00:43:17.280] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. But he still thinks that she had her suspicions and kind of looked the other way, but he never wanted to involve her in anything. But that's wild. I think she had to know he was just like, no, that's just Bob's mom.

[00:43:31.290] - Bec Rose
I'm in escrow. Also, my mask.

[00:43:37.000] - Adam Lawlor
It's wild. So, in 1993, Blanchard gets picked up by the cops, this time for potential car arson. Carson he is yeah.

[00:43:51.550] - Bec Rose
Carson couldn't resist.

[00:43:59.600] - Adam Lawlor
He is interrogated past midnight. Then he manages to slip out of his interrogation room somehow. Yeah. When the cops notice he's gone, the station empties and goes on the hunt. 2 hours later, Gerald Blanchard re emerges in the now near empty police station. Yeah. Because it turns out he didn't run. He just went into an adjacent room, climbed up into the ceiling, and put the ceiling tiles back into place and waited.

[00:44:33.740] - Bec Rose
Wow.

[00:44:34.530] - Adam Lawlor
On the way out, he helps himself to a police coat, a badge, a hat, a radio, and a revolver.

[00:44:42.080] - Bec Rose
A doughnut.

[00:44:44.000] - Adam Lawlor
Oh, that would be so good. He finds the desk of the police officer who interrogated him and leaves a single bullet on the desk. As like, that's creepy.

[00:44:56.880] - Bec Rose
Like, that's why I don't like that one as much.

[00:45:00.900] - Adam Lawlor
Then he walks calmly out of the station and hitchhikes home with a friendly neighborhood motorcyclist. And the motorcyclist is like, why are you dressed like a cop? And he's just like, I went to a costume party, and it was lots of fun. Yeah. As amazing.

[00:45:19.420] - Bec Rose
Let me hop on the back of your hog. Okay, officer.

[00:45:26.860] - Adam Lawlor
So, as cinematic as that is, he is immediately found. Like, they just go to his mom's house and they send in a SWAT team. The SWAT team has to pull him out of his mom's attic.

[00:45:41.820] - Bec Rose
Wow.

[00:45:42.960] - Adam Lawlor
They put him in the back of their squad car and leave him for a bit. It's unclear exactly how long he was alone, but it was long enough for him to fiddle around, get his cuffed hands in front of him, crawl into the driver's seat because there was no barrier in the squad car. And then he takes off again. Just steals the police car. After a brief chase and a bit of an on foot pursuit. The cops catch Gerald, and he spends four years in jail.

[00:46:12.280] - Bec Rose
You're saying when he's released so adorable and delightful. I'm horrified.

[00:46:17.260] - Adam Lawlor
It's just wild. When he's released, he is also deported back to Canada. He's not allowed back in the US for five years.

[00:46:29.360] - Bec Rose
Over the next little, like, five years, you think it'd be forever, but, like, five years and then we forgive you.

[00:46:38.340] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, that's what the US thinks of itself. It's like they can only go for five years, and they'll come crawling back. Over the next little while, Gerald takes a little bit of a European tour. Flanagan, his old teacher, says that he would check in with him once and twice a year. He'd send him postcards and letters talking, and he'd send pictures of him gallivant him around Europe. Gerald told his old teacher that he was in the security business, that Flanagan was hopeful, but also not an idiot. So he's pretty sure that crimes are still happening. As this is going on, in 2001, Gerald finds himself back in Canada and notices a brand new branch of the Alberta Treasury being built in Edmonton. So he decides to start really getting to know the building's layout super casually. He would do this in the middle of the night, but sometimes he just posed as a construction worker and snuck onto the site during the day.

[00:47:51.390] - Bec Rose
Wow.

[00:47:52.620] - Adam Lawlor
He found the type of loves an outfit. He does love an outfit.

[00:47:57.410] - Bec Rose
Like Dean Pelton. Like, let me go to my costume closet.

[00:48:01.660] - Adam Lawlor
Yes. He finds the type of lock used on the ATMs, orders them online, and obsessively reverse engineers them at his home.

[00:48:13.070] - Bec Rose
Okay? This is a Mark Wahlberg movie.

[00:48:16.080] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. When he sprung his plan into action, he easily made away with $60,000, which is, like, not that much money, but it wasn't even the purpose for him at that time. Like, he wasn't going for $100 million. He was kind of, like, testing himself to see if he could do it. And it rekindled the thrill of the game.

[00:48:39.830] - Bec Rose
The hunt is afoot. Tried to get out of the game.

[00:48:44.710] - Adam Lawlor
But dragging me back in.

[00:48:48.040] - Bec Rose
Becca Schultz knows what that's like. He's trying to get away from the baseball Twitter abyss, but my followers needy.

[00:49:00.240] - Adam Lawlor
And this kicks off a string of bank heists. He also does his level best to sound like a fun side character in an Oceans Eleven franchise because he just amasses this. He's got night vision, surveillance, tech scramblers, D scramblers. Name the tech. He's got the tech.

[00:49:24.830] - Bec Rose
It's really does he have any friends, or is he doing this all on his own?

[00:49:29.160] - Adam Lawlor
His main scams are done alone for.

[00:49:31.760] - Bec Rose
The most part of the Danny Ocean.

[00:49:37.580] - Adam Lawlor
But he does meet another side partner who comes up later, and they met and then immediately they must have super trusted each other because they're immediately partners in crime. And she apparently is like, they never had a sexual relationship, was just criminal.

[00:49:58.010] - Bec Rose
They didn't even have it wasn't even platonic. It was simply criminal.

[00:50:02.010] - Adam Lawlor
It wasn't even professional criminal. They didn't even nothing.

[00:50:05.510] - Bec Rose
You're like carnal. That's all you need to know.

[00:50:07.700] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, but according to everyone, she is just this stunning like, it's like a Carmen Sandiego episode. It's wild. Like, there's it's just like she would literally like, she'd be on watch out. Or she would be the and, like, walk just it's so wild.

[00:50:28.510] - Bec Rose
I know what that's like.

[00:50:33.600] - Adam Lawlor
Ham it. During one of the bank jobs, he literally installs a metal panel in an air conditioning duct that he could hide behind should anything go wrong. Yeah. With this level of planning, nothing is going wrong with any of these. Heists he is casing place. This is the kind of stuff you see in movies where they're like, if you go two steps that way, the security camera doesn't know you're there, kind of thing. He knows the exact layout of these things. At this point, a huge part of the whole situation was figuring out how to baffle people the most. He knew a particular lock used on ATMs so well that years later, when he's being interrogated, the police give him this hugely complex lock and it's broken into pieces. Like, it just has dozens of pieces. And Gerald puts it back together in under a minute. He used this skill to rob a Winnipeg branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. He has. Oh, my God. It is the CIDC. That was ridiculous. I read that so many times.

[00:52:18.800] - Bec Rose
The first time you said it to you, I was like, what the fuck is that?

[00:52:22.720] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, that's what I thought. Yes. I was like, I've never heard of that one.

[00:52:26.970] - Bec Rose
Well, I think I knew it because I think I've had to write it up before because that's my bank.

[00:52:36.580] - Adam Lawlor
That's wild.

[00:52:37.880] - Bec Rose
Should I not say that? Should I not say what bank? It's one of the banks. I went, I have multiple.

[00:52:44.680] - Adam Lawlor
You'll never catch me. You can't pin me down. Oh, man. Oh, my God. Okay, so it's during this time in his career that he has his accomplice, the equally slick Angela James.

[00:53:07.290] - Bec Rose
Okay, that is not her real name, right?

[00:53:10.990] - Adam Lawlor
Like, it can't be. She needs her own story one day, but this is Gerald's for now.

[00:53:18.070] - Bec Rose
God damn it.

[00:53:20.100] - Adam Lawlor
I was like, finally, it's our time to shine. Bale on a Saturday night, Gerald enters the building while Angela keeps watch. And he knew the building is set to open on Monday. The ATMs, however, had been filled on Friday, which is something he was well aware of. Once in, he actually found that the ATM room door was unlocked.

[00:53:52.870] - Bec Rose
Oh, God.

[00:53:53.730] - Adam Lawlor
Which is just like luck after luck in this guy's life. So within 90 seconds, he is in and out. Some of the articles that talk about him say he would have these spaces. Like, there was a space he rented in an acquaintance's basement, and he actually had his own little oceans. Eleven side floor plan in the basement, like measurements. All true to real life. He knew it's just so many details.

[00:54:28.360] - Bec Rose
And he would have to for every job, right?

[00:54:31.600] - Adam Lawlor
Exactly. Yeah. There's not a single job he's going into where he's not doing this. So he's in and out in 90 seconds. No apparent damage to the ATMs. He even locks the ATM door on his way out.

[00:54:48.000] - Bec Rose
Someone comes in and they're like, I left this unlocked.

[00:54:53.840] - Adam Lawlor
When the police get there eight minutes later because the alarm got tripped, they find the locked door and assume the alarm went off by accident and leave. By Monday, the confusion is rife. Six of the seven ATMs were empty. The 7th was seemingly untouched. It baffled the investigators who just could not fathom what had happened. Luckily, due to all the surveillance that Gerald had installed himself in the room, he monitored the entire goings on in that room as he was being investigated. So he knew about the confusion. He knew their leads. He knew their names.

[00:55:37.040] - Bec Rose
Wait, he has surveillance in the bank?

[00:55:40.570] - Adam Lawlor
You mean in the bank?

[00:55:42.180] - Bec Rose
Got it. So when they're discussing it in the bank okay. Yes.

[00:55:48.180] - Adam Lawlor
And he knows that his little trick of leaving the 7th ATM untouched just to sow chaos worked like an absolute.

[00:55:57.610] - Bec Rose
Absolutely. That would be so confusing.

[00:55:59.470] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah.

[00:55:59.790] - Bec Rose
That's amazing. Right?

[00:56:03.320] - Adam Lawlor
And now I mentioned that Blanchard also has multiple fake identities because, of course he does.

[00:56:09.290] - Bec Rose
Yeah. I thought that was a given.

[00:56:11.660] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, 32 in all.

[00:56:14.210] - Bec Rose
Wowza.

[00:56:15.980] - Adam Lawlor
Passports, driver's licenses. He would even sign up for college courses under assumed names. An array of uniforms and disguises. You got to love a man with a deep closet.

[00:56:27.610] - Bec Rose
He loves a costume change.

[00:56:29.810] - Adam Lawlor
He loves it. He even pretended to be a reporter sometimes, seemingly just to see if it would work and so that he could hang out with celebrities. This is how he met the Prince of Monaco.

[00:56:46.040] - Bec Rose
That's the celebrity you choose.

[00:56:48.500] - Adam Lawlor
At one point, he interviewed Christina Aguilera after one of her concerts.

[00:56:54.580] - Bec Rose
Do you say there's footage of this?

[00:56:57.400] - Adam Lawlor
I believe there is, but I have not been able to find it. The photos, for some reason, are like.

[00:57:01.640] - Bec Rose
So college courses, just to kind of create, like, a deeper human.

[00:57:07.370] - Adam Lawlor
I think he just liked learning. He would go to the courses. Yeah. He would actually go. That makes sense to me.

[00:57:14.480] - Bec Rose
Then.

[00:57:17.440] - Adam Lawlor
Even this guy's luck runs out, though. It turns out that at the CIBC, literally, I had to catch myself.

[00:57:32.660] - Bec Rose
The Canadian people outside of Canada will not laugh as hard as we.

[00:57:44.360] - Adam Lawlor
No. That night, a Walmart employee working nearby was vindictively scanning for overnight. Parkers in the parking lot, they weren't.

[00:57:55.990] - Bec Rose
Even just like, they were walking home and noticed they had a hook in their craw and they wanted to bring someone down.

[00:58:05.840] - Adam Lawlor
It's time for David versus Goliath.

[00:58:10.320] - Bec Rose
Parker.

[00:58:12.000] - Adam Lawlor
Walmart.

[00:58:15.540] - Bec Rose
You don't understand what this corporation puts up with who's parking here overnight. Is that a robbery at the Canadian Imperial?

[00:58:30.660] - Adam Lawlor
Oh, God. So he's scanning for overnight. Parkers and he notices that there's a blue car parked outside the bank that night. And he calls in. He gives the authorities the make, model, and license plate. Bitches.

[00:58:51.990] - Bec Rose
Immediately. Kenneth, again, I just wanted to let you know that I have found another vehicle, license number Echo Charlie.

[00:59:32.200] - Adam Lawlor
So he gives them the license plate to a car rented by one Gerald Daniel Blanchard. So authorities start monitoring Gerald hardcore. They know, like, they've tried to bug every single random phone that he has. At some point, they are watching him everywhere. At one point, a man known only as The Boss this is a movie. So the boss calls Gerald.

[00:59:58.420] - Bec Rose
It's a sting. No, I was going to say because there is a sting called, like, The Boss or something. That is not illegal in the States. That's legal here.

[01:00:08.760] - Adam Lawlor
Oh, interesting. Okay. He calls Gerald and asks how soon he can get a cruise. And it's not Springsteen. I know what you're thinking.

[01:00:22.570] - Bec Rose
It's a Canadian.

[01:00:23.760] - Adam Lawlor
The Boss. The Boss asks Gerald how soon he can get a crew together in Cairo. The Eavesdropping authorities are astonished listening in on this. Gerald and his crew are organized and in the air to Egypt a few hours later.

[01:00:47.990] - Bec Rose
Holy cow. How can you have a life that you could just go to Egypt at the drop of a hat?

[01:00:53.780] - Adam Lawlor
It's bomb.

[01:00:55.290] - Bec Rose
How do we go to Egypt? I want to go to Egypt.

[01:00:58.440] - Adam Lawlor
Just like up and go. Working now for The Boss and I shit you not, his Kurdish henchman. Gerald takes part in a massive skimming scam. Which I didn't know what skimming meant. Are you aware of skimming?

[01:01:18.260] - Bec Rose
No, but multiple things come to mind, I'm assuming. Just taking a little bit off the top or cleaning pools, one or the other.

[01:01:26.880] - Adam Lawlor
You're right. He went to Egypt and cleaned pools for a while. He really found himself.

[01:01:33.680] - Bec Rose
I don't know.

[01:01:34.530] - Adam Lawlor
How soon can you get to Cairo? I've got so many dirty pools.

[01:01:39.840] - Bec Rose
They'll never know what hit up confirmation code Bravo.

[01:01:48.520] - Adam Lawlor
It. Oh, my God. Okay. Essentially, their tech gathers the numbers off of active debit and credit machines from, like, local networks. So then they create fake cards, complete with magnetic stripes and authentic numbers that they've stolen. Then you use the card to withdraw amounts until the fraud is noticed. Got it. Basically, you just go and draw out the daily limit. And then if it works, the next day it works. You go until it's noticed and the account is frozen. Then you switch cards.

[01:02:29.930] - Bec Rose
Got it.

[01:02:30.740] - Adam Lawlor
But you're doing this with multiple cards at a time. They have success in Cairo, and Gerald and one of the crew members then move to Kenya, where the ATM limits are actually higher. In a week, they made over $2 million. But when his crew member disappeared and it was clear to everyone, including the boss, that he had gone AWOL. The stress of this situation and smoothing things over with the boss meant that Gerald was a bit, like, sloppy than usual. He lands in Vancouver on December 3, 2006, and he is caught talking about Cairo, talking about the next job and theories about where his crew member may have disappeared to.

[01:03:18.100] - Bec Rose
So the police just like, let it happen, essentially.

[01:03:24.340] - Adam Lawlor
So then on January 23, 2007, there's a massive bust and he is arrested again by SWAT. And it takes out several other contacts, including Angela from earlier.

[01:03:39.230] - Bec Rose
Angela not hot. Angela not hot.

[01:03:42.460] - Adam Lawlor
Angela. Gerald refuses to talk about any of his accomplices, but eventually he decides to cooperate on his part. Staring down a maximum sentence of 164 years, gerald sees an opportunity and he convinces the police to accompany him to his grandmother's house in Winnipeg.

[01:04:08.400] - Bec Rose
So this is all through courts, right?

[01:04:11.140] - Adam Lawlor
Yes, yes. Once he's at the house, gerald and an investigator, Larry Levasser, go into the crawl space. And after some digging around, gerald hands him a styrofoam box. Larry opens it and inside is the Cece star, a prized jewel that had been missing for over a decade. You see, back when he was doing his European gallivant, gerald found himself in Austria in 1998. Specifically, he's in Vienna, just in time to take a tour of the Shundbren Palace, which is world famous. If people have never heard of it, you're an idiot. I was going to say it's like, think Versailles, but in Vienna.

[01:05:05.290] - Bec Rose
Okay. I've never heard gotcha.

[01:05:08.270] - Adam Lawlor
It's just like a very ornate, gorgeous, gorgeous palace. And it's in the middle of the city. It's great. It's so beautiful. Not the middle of the city, but yeah. He is delighted to see that in their collection on current display, they had the last remaining Cece Star, a famous bejeweled hairpiece worn by Empress Cece. Empress Cece, as a brief aside, is a massively, fascinating subject. She ruled as Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary from 1854 until she was assassinated in 1898. She was, as many royals at the time, a huge trendsetter. And in one famous portrait, it was painted with her ankle length hair done up elaborately and adorned with many of these bejeweled stars instead of a crown or a tiara. And it became like a huge thing. All the stars had since been lost to history, but there was one left, and it was loaned to the palace by a collector for the palace's exhibition. Gerald sees this star and then immediately figures out a plan. He hangs back from the tour group. He films the security under the guise of taking in the sights. After discreetly loosening some of the screws in the star's display case, gerald heads to the gift shop and then starts about organizing his after hours entry, which will be from the sky.

[01:06:49.410] - Bec Rose
I mean, of course, Tom Cruise ain't got nothing on.

[01:06:55.160] - Adam Lawlor
No, he has made a German pilot friend in his time in Europe who agrees to fly Gerald in his plane. On the night of the heist, gerald skydives at night, landing on the palace roof. He repels down a wall to a window that he had cracked open for himself earlier that day. Yeah. Once in the palace, he avoids the night security guards and walks slowly enough that none of the sensors register anything untoward. He finds the star, which sits on a spring loaded trigger. Not one to be surprised, gerald reaches in and pulls out his gift shop. Souvenir a cheap recreation of the CC star. He makes the swap, leaves via window, repels down the rest of the palace wall. He dumps his rope and parachute in a nearby trash can. And nobody even realized the star was stolen for two weeks.

[01:07:54.650] - Bec Rose
Whoa.

[01:07:56.380] - Adam Lawlor
And now here the CC star is sitting in an incredulous Larry's hands in a basement in.

[01:08:04.700] - Bec Rose
Like did you happen in your research to find out how they figured it out?

[01:08:10.880] - Adam Lawlor
I believe because it was on loan for the exhibition. When the owner got it back, he was like, this is not even like, there was a weird media thing around it, too, where they didn't announce that it had been stolen or the news came out, and then they just said, oh, we found it, or something like that.

[01:08:34.650] - Bec Rose
Or they said it really quietly.

[01:08:37.320] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. And they were just, like, saving face. And then there was no heat on Gerald for this at see, he put it in scuba gear in, like, a scuba tank. When he shipped it across, it was.

[01:08:52.080] - Bec Rose
Just and he just had it because.

[01:08:53.920] - Adam Lawlor
He knew literally this. Heist was like, for the thrill, he's like, I can't sell this it's immediately. I think they said it would be about $2 million at the time.

[01:09:05.990] - Bec Rose
Wow.

[01:09:06.710] - Adam Lawlor
And he was like, I can't sell it. But he just wanted to prove to himself that he could, basically. And he did so at his sentencing, the judge on the case tells Gerald, quote, I think you have a great future ahead of you if you wish to pursue an honest style of life, although I'm not prepared to sign a letter of reference.

[01:09:31.900] - Bec Rose
So did he bring them to the jeweled in an effort to get less time? Yes.

[01:09:39.420] - Adam Lawlor
Instead of 164 years, gerald is sentenced to eight, he serves less than two, and he now works in security consultation. That's amazing. It's like if the story from Catch Me If You Can was somehow more cinematic and actually true, I have looked.

[01:10:04.410] - Bec Rose
Into that story to tell it here, and then it's like, how much of that is actually true? And I'm like, oh, that makes sense.

[01:10:09.950] - Adam Lawlor
Actually, it makes sense that the Catchy.

[01:10:12.660] - Bec Rose
Cat story is probably not that.

[01:10:15.720] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. But and that is the story of Gerald and what was suggested to me originally by Jordan, which was the heist of Cece Starr.

[01:10:31.240] - Bec Rose
Oh, my God. And how do you spell cece?

[01:10:34.220] - Adam Lawlor
S-I-S-I. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really fascinating figure. And this is the topic that made us switch them up, the episodes, because this is the week of CC's 185th birthday on Christmas Eve.

[01:10:53.950] - Bec Rose
Christmas Eve. Yeah. Happy b day, sissy. Sorry about your stolen shit.

[01:11:01.320] - Adam Lawlor
Sorry about all that.

[01:11:02.950] - Bec Rose
But it sounds like you were cool.

[01:11:07.320] - Adam Lawlor
She was interesting. Let's say that she was a complex figure.

[01:11:11.330] - Bec Rose
Complicated.

[01:11:14.460] - Adam Lawlor
Sounds like you contain multitude. Cece don't understand.

[01:11:17.900] - Bec Rose
That was awesome. That guy's life is crazy. I love there's something so satisfying knowing that these like, maybe this is not the right take, but that the secret. Heist worlds that we watch in movies that are so exciting are going on. I think about The Italian Job and of course, Oceans Eleven, and there was a documentary about the real Pink Panthers. And it's a group of people who do these crazy diamond heists and stuff. There's something so satisfying knowing that that world actually exists below our society, that.

[01:12:06.320] - Adam Lawlor
We I totally agree. And it's the wild. You always think that, oh, the perfect crime. Nobody knows that the perfect crime exists. That's the whole point of the perfect crime. And then you read some of these plans and you're like, legitimately, even if, say he in one of those bank heists, he leaves the 7th ATM untouched and then doesn't clear all the money out from the ATMs. So that there's like because I assume when the cops got there on the day they left because they thought the alarm went accidentally off because he had locked the door behind him. And would they just not realize it's? Just how many times has that kind of thing happened where people have not realized in any way for those two weeks after he that's what I think is pretty funny about the theft of the CC star, because he does seem like a genuinely very pretty private person. He wasn't sloppy in trying to look for fame or spread the secret around.

[01:13:15.630] - Bec Rose
Almost like one could argue, somewhat victimless, that he did these things at night. Like he didn't traumatize innocent people. Those kind of things. One could argue.

[01:13:34.760] - Adam Lawlor
Yes, I agree.

[01:13:38.840] - Bec Rose
Suave about it. And the fact that he wasn't just good at the technical stuff, but the people stuff. To be that well rounded.

[01:13:51.100] - Adam Lawlor
You can read people, you can cold read people, no problem. And you just know what's going to work in certain situations. But yeah, I say you'll hear a side character on Oceans Eleven, but Gerald is basically six of them in one.

[01:14:10.580] - Bec Rose
Well, he's like, have you seen we recently rewatched Oceans Twelve?

[01:14:14.500] - Adam Lawlor
Oh, no.

[01:14:16.020] - Bec Rose
Well, okay, here's the line. So we just binged what we do in the shadows. And there was a character in what we do in the shadows who is obsessed with Oceans Twelve. And so we watched Oceans Eleven one night as a laugh. And we were like, that kind of held up. And then we were like, we should do 1212 was not good. And then I realized I've never seen 13.

[01:14:42.380] - Adam Lawlor
But 13 was better than twelve.

[01:14:44.800] - Bec Rose
I don't think. I have. Not by energy in me for it. But I could watch Brad Pitt eat forever. Which is weird because I don't really like men like Brad Pitt or people eating. But I'm fine with that one for some weird reason. Any hoozers the person in Oceans Twelve. That was the point of this. Who challenges danny kind of reminds me of this guy that he worked alone and stuff. Except about the break dancing through the laser field. That part was a little rough in the movie. Break dancing. Break dancing for like ten minutes. That scene was way too long.

[01:15:30.700] - Adam Lawlor
Forgot it existed. Me too.

[01:15:32.930] - Bec Rose
There were so many parts of this movie that I was like, wait, that's not good. Oh, yeah, I remember this.

[01:15:40.880] - Adam Lawlor
You remembered the exact decision in your brain where you were like, I'm going to toss this right out.

[01:15:45.670] - Bec Rose
Yeah, but like, poor Vincent Castle. I love him and he looks amazing.

[01:15:51.860] - Adam Lawlor
Of course he does.

[01:15:53.270] - Bec Rose
Anyway, I love this world of espionage. Is that the right yeah, I love spy shit, too. Just people who can, I don't know, live in their own world within our yeah, yeah.

[01:16:14.030] - Adam Lawlor
It's very and like, just to get into people's heads and then he's a fucking Winnipeg.

[01:16:24.000] - Bec Rose
Yeah.

[01:16:25.920] - Adam Lawlor
Just there his grandma's just unknowingly sitting on top of the CC star for a decade.

[01:16:32.160] - Bec Rose
Kevin at the Walmart is what got him.

[01:16:37.540] - Adam Lawlor
Still scanning cars to this day. Absolutely.

[01:16:41.300] - Bec Rose
Thank you so much for that. That was amazing.

[01:16:45.220] - Adam Lawlor
You're welcome. I was so excited.

[01:16:47.340] - Bec Rose
I got a text last night saying I'm very excited. Which I assumed was in part to also remind me that we switched our recording date this week.

[01:16:57.960] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah, it was a truthful.

[01:16:59.970] - Bec Rose
There was a little subtext there, but I remembered. Thank you everyone, so much for joining this week. Happy birthday to Queen Cece.

[01:17:13.100] - Adam Lawlor
Thank you to Empress.

[01:17:14.340] - Bec Rose
We did change our entire schedule for your birthday.

[01:17:18.070] - Adam Lawlor
Yeah. Friend of the pod. Emperor. The ghost of Emperor CC. Friend of the pod.

[01:17:26.650] - Bec Rose
The first one if you haven't done so already. We are still trying to reach our goal of 20 reviews on itunes. Not difficult to do. Even if you don't really use itunes, you could still log on. You can still make a review if you were so inclined. It would help us out so much.

[01:17:48.920] - Adam Lawlor
Yes, please.

[01:17:49.710] - Bec Rose
Yes, please. And make sure to join us next week when we talk more dastardly deed.

[01:17:56.940] - Adam Lawlor
Sounds good to me.

[01:17:58.130] - Bec Rose
Thanks for putting up with my sick, mushy brain today.

[01:18:02.540] - Adam Lawlor
It was an absolute pleasure.

[01:18:05.360] - Bec Rose
Bye bye.

[01:18:05.940] - Adam Lawlor
Bye.

[01:18:06.100] - Bec Rose
Bye bye. Thank you so much for listening to Unscrupulous podcast. If you want to hear more from us, you can check us out on Instagram at unscrupulouspod. You could always send us an email with any of. Your case suggestions or just your admiration for us at Unscrupulouspod@gmail.com. Make sure to check out our show notes where you can find information on where we got our resources today. And we will check you out next time.