Pretending to be a wealthy German heiress to the New York jet set made Anna Delvey part of the club.
She stayed in accommodation for 500 euros a night, distributed dizzying tips right and left and came to owe 60,000 euros to the most exclusive hotel in Marrakech.
The story of this white-collar thief, born in reality as Anna Sorokin, now inspires the series by Shonda Rhimes (
Grey's Anatomy
) that has just premiered on Netflix.
A fiction that, as its title anticipates,
Who is Anna?
, tries to answer the enigma behind the woman who managed to fool the cream of the New York elite: from Macaulay Culkin to the magnate Aby Rosen passing through the architect Gabriel Calatrava, son of the famous Santiago Calatrava.
Sorokin, who was born into a family of humble origins and who is currently serving a four-year sentence in an American prison accused of stealing millions of dollars, took the mantra “Fake it until you make it” to the last consequences. until you get it”).
Based on transfers that never arrived, fake checks, luxurious clothes and an undeniable gift for people, she managed to create a character of a rich girl who ended up fleecing those who truly were.
But she's not the only scammer to have pulled it off with similar tricks.
Another of the most mediatic of recent times, Billy McFarland, also has a cameo in the series, recreating the meeting that two criminals had back in 2013. Only five years later, the businessman would be convicted of multiple charges of fraud at most responsible for the disastrous Fyre Festival.
What was supposed to be the most exclusive musical event ever organized —the most luxurious packages cost 200,000 euros—, with concerts by top-level artists, five-star accommodation on a paradisiacal island in the Bahamas and international models such as Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner as ambassadors, ended up proving to be a fraud in the absence of concerts, artists, influencers, decent accommodation or more food than a couple of slices of bread and a slice of cheese.
Images of Anna Delvey, on the left, and Billy McFarland, on the right
McFarland, who was barely 25 years old when the events took place, earned the nickname "Madoff of the millennials", in reference to the biggest and perhaps the most famous con man in the history of Manhattan.
From the 1990s until 2008, the financier defrauded more than 54,000 million euros by promising copious profits to investors whom he later ignored or to whom he paid the contributions of new clients.
Its tens of thousands of victims range from companies and financial entities to well-known faces such as Pedro Almodóvar, Steven Spielberg, Alicia Koplowitz or the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.
"It was a bad day," he admitted to
The Guardian .
another of those affected, actor Kevin Bacon.
"But quickly I was able to value all the things I had compared to what we lost, the biggest clichés: children, health, love and a nice house."
Madoff, who died in prison last April at the age of 82, also saw his story dramatized by Hollywood.
Robert De Niro was in charge of bringing him to life in
The Wizard of Lies
, a film released directly on television by HBO and which shows the creative source and vein of audience that
streaming
and podcast platforms have found in the genre known as
true crime .
(actual crime).
But even De Niro himself fell into the nets of another of the most well-known swindlers among the Big Apple's high society.
Gallerist Lawrence Salander, one of the most famous art dealers, was arrested in 2009 for more than a hundred crimes, including larceny, forgery, accounting fraud and perjury.
Salander spent more than a decade lying to his investors and selling the same painting to various collectors, including tennis player John McEnroe and the Oscar winner himself.
One of the artists with whom the gallery owner used to market was the actor's father, Robert De Niro Sr., a painter who did not find fame in life, but whose works were revalued after his death in 1993. Salander sold a dozen over the years of pictures of De Niro Sr. without informing or remunerating his heir.
More information
The twentysomething who turned the VIP paradise of the 'millennials' into a nightmare
The Rockefeller surname, a key dynasty of the global elite, has also been supplanted on a couple of occasions.
One of the most famous was Christophe Rocancourt, arrested in 2001 after discovering the scams he had committed posing as a French Rockefeller.
A few years later, in 2008, another fake Rockefeller was also imprisoned after alarm bells went off when he was accused of kidnapping his daughter.
Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, as he was actually called, had lived two decades as Clark Rockefeller and had a long history of impersonating aristocratic personalities.
After his arrest he was also accused of the crime of a couple in the eighties.
"I think one of the most satisfying elements for the viewer in these stories is that when someone plays with the system, you see that there is a system," journalist Jessica Pressler reflects in a recent interview.
Her pen has served as a compass to adapt these tales of thugs that expose the cracks in society, from
Who is Anna?
a
Wall Street Swindlers
.
On April 20, the trend will continue with
The Dropout
, a Disney+ series about another quintessential millennial swindler, Elizabeth Holmes.
Amanda Seyfried will play the young woman who deceived all of Silicon Valley with a technology that promised to revolutionize the field of blood tests, appearing at just 32 years old on Forbes magazine's list of the richest.
A house of cards that will also soon be brought to the big screen by the creative duo behind the hit Don't Look Up, director Adam McKay and actress Jennifer Lawrence.
Our film industry seems to be still one step behind the Hollywood industry when it comes to deciding to dramatize this type of episode.
And it won't be for lack of muse.
Although in 2019 the development of a docuseries on the life of Little Nicolás, the young man arrested for having posed as an emissary of the Royal House and advisor to former Vice President Soraya Saénz de Santamaría —among many other crimes— was announced with great fanfare. , the project led by Zebra Producciones (
El Cid
) has been canceled due to the refusal of operators and platforms to acquire the rights to the documentary.
