Michael Mastro was a Seattle property magnate worth $350m. Then the market crashed. In a tale described as Cocoon meets Catch Me If You Can, he and his wife filled their Range Rover with jewels, packed up the Shih Tzus and ran for the French Alps. Simon Goodley tracks them down
It is 24 October 2012 and Michael Mastro, an 87-year-old former multi-millionaire Seattle property developer, is relaxing with his wife Linda at home in the French Alps. It is a magnificent setting in a tiny town called Marceau on the shores of Lake Annecy – surrounded by snow-topped mountains, it is a scene that once inspired the paintings of Paul Cézanne. The ageing couple enjoy watching local paragliders take off as they sit on their large balcony, but this utopian picture of a quiet retirement is about to be shattered.
Mastro answers an aggressive knock on the door and is greeted by a team of French policemen who march in and announce that they are arresting him and his wife. In the chaos, Linda throws pills into her mouth, which the police forcefully remove, while other officers start searching the property. The pair are then told to prepare for their immediate extradition to the United States, handcuffed and dumped in separate police cells.
"It was like the Gestapo coming in," says Linda. "I did not take anything that was suicidal – I took my migraine pills. The toilet [in the police cell] was a hole in the ground. There were lunatics in there – I don't know if they were drug-induced, but they screamed and yelled and slammed against the bars all night long… It was so ludicrous. Here we are, two senior citizens, and [the police] are so ecstatic that they'd caught us."
The idea of the Mastros – now 88 and 63 years old, but looking much younger as they sit shoulder to shoulder on a large sofa – being hauled from their home seems utterly ridiculous. But the French police really had captured a pair of international fugitives who had been on the run from US authorities for 16 months after ignoring a bankruptcy judge's order to return two massive diamond rings. Theirs is a story of a husband and wife, supposedly in their dotage, being pursued by the FBI as they fled America for Canada and then Europe – a dash that was completed with their three Shih Tzu dogs, the family Range Rover and suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars' worth of jewellery.
It is also a story of an old couple leaving their "friends and family investors" $100m out of pocket only to spend seven weeks in French jails and, after release, being electronically tagged for six months. Yet as creditors continue to circle Mastro's bankrupt empire, the French courts have resisted US efforts to bring the couple home. Comparing the tale to a pair of Hollywood movies, one observer sums up the saga thus: "It's like Catch Me If You Can meets Cocoon."
MICHAEL and Linda Mastro were once influential figures in Seattle – he as a highly successful property developer and she, as she puts it, as a member of the city's "high society". They had met in 1974 at the Peoples Bank, where Linda worked. They talk of their "perfect life" and having to "pinch themselves" at what a fortunate position they found themselves in. They lived in a $15m "waterfront residence" located in Medina, Washington state, which was stocked with cellars housing $23,000 worth of wine, a $20,000 Steinway grand piano and a $24,000 collection of works by the American glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. The couple drove a Bentley, a Rolls-Royce Phantom and the Range Rover. These were the trappings of a $350m fortune, which is what they had amassed just before Mastro joined the queue of casualties created by the financial crisis.
As the financial world began to implode in 2008, Mastro attempted to alleviate the concerns of his investors, who loaned his business money on the promise of high rates of interest. He wrote: "Our organisation is strong and healthy, in no small part because of the relationship we value so greatly with lenders including you, our friends and family. I hope this report has eased any concerns you may have."
That letter was sent at the end of September, but around two weeks later Mastro moved his most significant assets into a Belize-based "offshore asset protection trust"– of which he and his wife were the primary beneficiaries. "My lawyer in 2008 had been after me for a long time to set up diversionary accounts for estates purposes, the theory being that you don't have all your eggs in one basket," he recalls now. "We put the house in it, the cars in it, the jewellery in it… [It was done] in case you fall on hard times, then creditors can't grab everything."
Mastro describes such arrangements as commonplace, but for a routine move it proved uncannily prescient. He actually did fall on hard times as the value of his properties crashed during the financial crisis, meaning his investments were suddenly worth less than his loans. He was forced into bankruptcy in 2009 with debts of around $600m, and his creditors soon took a different view of the Belize arrangements to Mastro's lawyers. In December 2010 the courts overrode the scheme and a fire sale of the Mastros' Medina home – which they had bought for $15m – raised $8m.
With the house gone and their reputation in Seattle shredded, the couple relocated to California. But by 2011, when Mastro says he was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from property consultancy and even harbouring thoughts of paying creditors back "a little at a time", two further setbacks occurred.
Having won a court judgement stating that two rings – which housed huge diamonds, one of 27.8 carats and one of 15.93 carats – were the sole property of Linda, the courts overturned that decision in June 2011 and ordered the jewels to be handed back. That move came shortly after a devastating blow in February.
"My husband was in the garage and fell off the step-stool and literally died," recalls Linda. "They resuscitated him and then he had a cranial. He was a vegetable for several months. He had to learn to walk again. Then everything disintegrated."
"I had a nervous breakdown," she continues. "I just wanted to get away. It wasn't that I didn't respect the court – I just couldn't take any more. The initial plan was to go to Seattle, which we did. We stayed with [Mastro's sister] a couple of nights and then I said: 'Let's just go.' I don't know what came over me."
PRIVATE jets tend not to allow Shih Tzu dogs as passengers – which was proving an irritation after a few weeks travelling across Canada and staying in "little crappy motels". The Mastros had arrived in Toronto, a city they loved and didn't want to leave, but they say their lawyers encouraged them to keep moving. "All three sets of attorneys we had, their favourite saying was 'Get out of Dodge'," Mastro says. "It didn't take much prodding to get us out of there because the press coverage was so unfavourable."
Headlines such as the Wall Street Journal's "Living Large in Bankruptcy" and the Seattle Times's "Suit alleges 'sham' transfers of IOUs to shield assets" may have irked, but there was an added urgency to disappear as well. They had fled over the US-Canadian border while still in possession of the diamond rings they could not bear to surrender, meaning they were being tailed by a US marshal intent on bringing them home to face civil contempt of court charges. "We had a friend in Seattle who had a plane, so we called his pilot and they started looking around for a plane for us," continues Linda. "We found a puddle-jumper – but it was fine, we didn't care – that would take the dogs. We went through this private firm and I thought the shortest distance would be to Portugal."
The flight on that small private plane, which stopped in Greenland, proved a devastating blow for the couple's North American pursuers, with the Mastros and the diamonds vanishing from the radar. With dry understatement Jim Rigby, the accountant hired by the US Department of Justice to recover assets for creditors, says: "If I could have afforded the emotion, I'd have been profoundly frustrated."
He would remain so until the knock on the Mastros' door in the autumn of 2012.
EVEN the Mastros' fiercest critics find it difficult to argue that they were making massive efforts to hide, having finally decided to settle by Lake Annecy on the advice of a Seattle priest and friend. They lived under their own name and appear to have become convinced that the US authorities would not follow them to Europe on a civil matter.
But unbeknown to them – and Rigby says to himself, too – a federal grand jury had finalised an indictment accusing the couple of 43 counts of bankruptcy fraud. As well as citing the timely transfer of assets to the Belize trust, the document also alleges the "fraudulent concealment" by the couple of a JP Morgan Chase bank account used to fund personal expenses and from which they withdrew almost $600,000. "I did not disclose that in the paperwork I submitted," Mastro admits now. "I'm responsible for that. My attorney said it was not necessary. Anyway, they nailed me on that."
The grand jury's charges, coupled with the couple making two extraordinary mistakes, meant their arrest was almost inevitable. First Mastro, who has needed frequent surgery since his "eardrums were blown out in World War Two", had a small hearing operation in France. Behind his wife's back, and against her pleading, he claimed the cost of the treatment on his US insurance policy.
Linda is still fuming at her husband's "sly" move, but she had left a trail, too, after following local rules and registering their Range Rover in France once they'd shipped it to Lisbon. As she explains that move – without a hint of irony relating to her fugitive status – "I have to do things right. I never even jaywalked." Whatever the reasons, the outcome was clear. US authorities now had everything they needed to ask their European colleagues to bring the suspects in.
Following that first night spent in the police station, the Mastros were transported 90 miles to a prison in Lyon, which Linda found particularly gruesome. There was a plastic mattress and a piece of "crappy muslin" as a cover, all of which contributed to Linda's openly depressed demeanour; she was put on suicide watch.
"I laid there and cried," she says, welling up as she speaks. "Then I found out that [one of my] dogs had died. That's when I gave up and they watched me. I didn't care if I got out of there. I just wanted to die."
But the Mastros' incarceration was having a revitalising effect on the case for their pursuers. Rigby now knew where they were and was feverishly searching for clues of further funds. The euphoria, however, quickly gave rise to a problem. The Mastros had been picked up in a lovely – but modest – property. If they had fled after squirrelling away millions, why was there no sign of largesse?
DAYS earlier, Rigby had hired some new recruits to assist his effort. Daniel Hall, a former lawyer turned corporate investigator, had just set up his own investigations agency called Focus, where he worked from a small office overlooking the Old Bailey, London's famous criminal court.
The case was made for Hall, whose speciality was tracing hidden assets, and on hearing news of the arrest he turned to his colleague Robert Capper, a former British intelligence officer, and dispatched him to France.
Capper immediately visited the chief of police in Annecy, only to receive an incredibly cool reception. With reason. The small station was already investigating the shooting of the 50-year-old Surrey-based engineer Saad al-Hilli, his dentist wife Iqbal, 47, and her mother, Suhaila al-Allaf, which had horrified the region weeks earlier. What's more, the police were still wrestling with exactly what had been happening in their quiet little town after a surprise drowning in the picturesque Lake Annecy a year earlier dredged up more than they'd bargained for: several bodies.
"The police had had in those past few months: two American fugitives; a massacre of Brits, which creates a media storm, and a guy who falls out of boat," Capper recalls. "And they find his body but then have to ask: who are these other three bodies we have found at the bottom of the lake? This police office has got about eight staff. It's like Midsomer."
The one piece of useful information the overworked police deputy did give Capper was that while the Mastros had been arrested in Marceau, it was not the first address the US authorities had sent French police to. The first call had been made to a property on the lake's eastern shore – the far more glamorous Veyrier-du-Lac.
"One of the things we were thinking is: 'Does this guy have money?'" says Capper. "He fled but was found in an ordinary flat. Then we discover he had been staying at Veyrier-du-Lac for the majority of the stay. That makes more sense. If you were a very wealthy man, you would stay there."
In Veyrier-du-Lac, the café owner recalled the ageing American couple with the Shih Tzu dogs who always popped in for a coffee on their way into town – and before long Capper had painstakingly pieced together a picture of their life, virtually all of which the couple now confirm: it included the magnificent Veyrier-du-Lac house, rented at around €5,000 a month; how the Mastros had been forced to leave that base because the villa had already been let for the summer to other tenants and, intriguingly, how the couple had opened a bank account in the Veyrier-du-Lac branch of Société Générale.
The account was being funded frequently by company cheques ranging in value between €2,000 and €8,000 each time. "Low enough not to set off any red flags," observes Hall conspiratorially. "Suspicious activity reports come in at more than €10,000."
Still, it raised a wider question. The Mastros had funds to finance being on the run – but where was the cash coming from? Back in Seattle, Rigby was hatching plans for a bold move that provided the answer.
A Renault Clio, with a poodle sitting in the back seat, comes to a halt right outside the Mastros' Marceau flat. Out of the car hops a velvet-suited man, looking the very antithesis of his trade. Following a request from Rigby, the French courts had appointed him as the bailiff on the French side of the Mastro case. After entering the three-bedroom property, he reaches a box room at the end of the flat's corridor.
On opening the door he is presented with a room stuffed full of cases overflowing with designer clothes and jewels: Christian Dior suits with Linda Mastro's name stitched into the inside of the seam; carrier bags full of jewellery; freezer bags full of ropes of pearls, others stuffed with earrings. After taking a moment, he finally finds the word to express his mood. "Merde," he gasps before trooping off to call his office to request reinforcements.
Also in the room that day is Capper, in a purely observational capacity, but with an entirely different focus. "The bailiff is saying: 'That's shiny, that's Louis Vuitton, I'm having that,'" he recalls. "But what's really interesting to us is the business cards, scraps of paper, written notes, luggage labels."
Also in and among the treasure are dozens of notepads in which Mastro has fastidiously handwritten every financial transaction, plus, shoved into a drawer, a folded piece of paper with names and numbers of Mastro contacts in Switzerland and a weathered business card.
The number on the business card was for a "cash for gold" shop on the shore of Lake Annecy, where the Mastros had opened an account and were making regular deposits. Over time, it is thought that the total gold they had sold came to €50,000 – all paid out via company cheques. The values, again, were between €2,000 and €8,000 a time. "It was our intention to gradually sell the jewellery [excluding the diamond rings] to meet our living expenses," confirms Mastro. "We thought we had two, three, four million dollars' worth of jewellery."
The modus operandi was becoming clearer and clearer – at least in the minds of Rigby and his investigators. They believe the Range Rover was shipped to Lisbon as a Trojan horse full of jewels which were sold to fund the Mastros' lavish, if low-profile, lifestyle. Apart from the fateful insurance payment, the Mastros never moved money via wire transfers that would have provided clues to their whereabouts. They fastidiously kept their own ledger – so when they noticed their bank balance approaching zero, they would simply sell some more gold.
These were answers, but the information posed further questions: did this ageing couple know that these actions would make their detection harder? Were they getting help?
ON MASTRO'S iPad was a series of photographs, one of which was a piece of paper containing written instructions explaining how a car could be imported to Portugal and not attract attention from customs officials.
Capper also photographed a map found in the Mastros' flat. "They had annotated in many different pens and ink all sorts of places across Europe," he explains. "So there were rings around places such as Monaco and San Sebastián as well as Annecy. A few places where they had crossed out roads. When the FBI came to France for a briefing on what I had discovered, one of the junior Annecy policemen in the room looked at a road that had been crossed out. He said: 'Oh, that's the new tunnel into Italy. There's police everywhere there.' The route into Chambéry was also crossed out. I drove that route. Every car got stopped by customs."
The Mastros ridicule the suggestion that they have acquired some sort of manual for the aspiring international fugitive which explains the secrets of avoiding detection – and insist they don't recognise the descriptions of the note on customs procedures or any map with warnings of potentially troublesome roads.
"[Rigby] got it all wrong," says Linda. "How could anybody be so stupid as to leave a car in a parking lot with jewellery in it and they've got the key? Mike and I were bent over laughing on that one."
There is an edge to her voice as, by her own admission, she is taking Rigby's pursuit personally. "In my opinion he has a vendetta against me," she says, and claims that the search of the couple's property was conducted overzealously.
Rigby dismisses any personal motive – although he acknowledges that the case is likely to be the biggest of his career. And in Rigby's defence, any neutral observer would need to point out that Linda's take on events is not always considered reliable. A 2011 judgement by the US bankruptcy courts found her "to be a witness lacking veracity, as her testimony was often transparently vague, contradictory and self-serving". Meanwhile Mastro himself openly admits to playing games with the whole bankruptcy process. In early 2009, before his empire collapsed, Mastro borrowed against his luxury cars. "I got the money, put it in my business, and I knew if I got in trouble and the trustee grabbed those cars, there would be no value in there," he admits now. "I put large loans on [the cars] to thwart Rigby."
WHO IS currently winning this game of financial chess remains a debating point. The Mastros reckon it is Rigby as, they say, he has reclaimed everything they own and they are now forced to live off a $2,000-a-month US pension plus donations from friends. Rigby suspects, but says he has no proof, that there are millions more in assets stashed away offshore. "He thinks to this day that we have much money buried overseas," Mastro says. "We don't have a cent in that respect."
But whoever is leading, the losers are obvious. Rigby has so far managed to collect $20.5m, of which the unsecured creditors, including "friends and family investors", have received just $2.2m. That compares with $1.6m that has gone on property maintenance and insurance costs, as well as fees paid to banks and Rigby.
Now there is a chance of getting creditors a few million more. At a bail hearing in France, Mastro revealed that the diamond rings were stashed in a safety deposit box in Annecy. After the box was drilled open, the rings were recovered and now, along with the items gleaned from the Marceau flat, the haul is in the hands of the FBI. There are around 300 pieces with an estimated value of $3m – but it is not yet certain in whose hands the collection will end up.
The Mastros look likely to live out their days in France after the country's courts refused America's extradition request on humanitarian grounds earlier this month. Having masterminded that case, their lawyer Thomas Terrier is making their stay as comfortable as possible by getting their jewels back. He is keeping the extraordinary four-year saga running by making a fresh claim to have the jewellery handed back to Linda. "We will now be able to say [to Rigby]: 'Why did you act that way at that time?'" Terrier says. "It was not appropriate to seize everything that way. It's another session which begins." Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.
It is 24 October 2012 and Michael Mastro, an 87-year-old former multi-millionaire Seattle property developer, is relaxing with his wife Linda at home in the French Alps. It is a magnificent setting in a tiny town called Marceau on the shores of Lake Annecy – surrounded by snow-topped mountains, it is a scene that once inspired the paintings of Paul Cézanne. The ageing couple enjoy watching local paragliders take off as they sit on their large balcony, but this utopian picture of a quiet retirement is about to be shattered.
Mastro answers an aggressive knock on the door and is greeted by a team of French policemen who march in and announce that they are arresting him and his wife. In the chaos, Linda throws pills into her mouth, which the police forcefully remove, while other officers start searching the property. The pair are then told to prepare for their immediate extradition to the United States, handcuffed and dumped in separate police cells.
"It was like the Gestapo coming in," says Linda. "I did not take anything that was suicidal – I took my migraine pills. The toilet [in the police cell] was a hole in the ground. There were lunatics in there – I don't know if they were drug-induced, but they screamed and yelled and slammed against the bars all night long… It was so ludicrous. Here we are, two senior citizens, and [the police] are so ecstatic that they'd caught us."
The idea of the Mastros – now 88 and 63 years old, but looking much younger as they sit shoulder to shoulder on a large sofa – being hauled from their home seems utterly ridiculous. But the French police really had captured a pair of international fugitives who had been on the run from US authorities for 16 months after ignoring a bankruptcy judge's order to return two massive diamond rings. Theirs is a story of a husband and wife, supposedly in their dotage, being pursued by the FBI as they fled America for Canada and then Europe – a dash that was completed with their three Shih Tzu dogs, the family Range Rover and suitcases stuffed with millions of dollars' worth of jewellery.
It is also a story of an old couple leaving their "friends and family investors" $100m out of pocket only to spend seven weeks in French jails and, after release, being electronically tagged for six months. Yet as creditors continue to circle Mastro's bankrupt empire, the French courts have resisted US efforts to bring the couple home. Comparing the tale to a pair of Hollywood movies, one observer sums up the saga thus: "It's like Catch Me If You Can meets Cocoon."
MICHAEL and Linda Mastro were once influential figures in Seattle – he as a highly successful property developer and she, as she puts it, as a member of the city's "high society". They had met in 1974 at the Peoples Bank, where Linda worked. They talk of their "perfect life" and having to "pinch themselves" at what a fortunate position they found themselves in. They lived in a $15m "waterfront residence" located in Medina, Washington state, which was stocked with cellars housing $23,000 worth of wine, a $20,000 Steinway grand piano and a $24,000 collection of works by the American glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. The couple drove a Bentley, a Rolls-Royce Phantom and the Range Rover. These were the trappings of a $350m fortune, which is what they had amassed just before Mastro joined the queue of casualties created by the financial crisis.
As the financial world began to implode in 2008, Mastro attempted to alleviate the concerns of his investors, who loaned his business money on the promise of high rates of interest. He wrote: "Our organisation is strong and healthy, in no small part because of the relationship we value so greatly with lenders including you, our friends and family. I hope this report has eased any concerns you may have."
That letter was sent at the end of September, but around two weeks later Mastro moved his most significant assets into a Belize-based "offshore asset protection trust"– of which he and his wife were the primary beneficiaries. "My lawyer in 2008 had been after me for a long time to set up diversionary accounts for estates purposes, the theory being that you don't have all your eggs in one basket," he recalls now. "We put the house in it, the cars in it, the jewellery in it… [It was done] in case you fall on hard times, then creditors can't grab everything."
Mastro describes such arrangements as commonplace, but for a routine move it proved uncannily prescient. He actually did fall on hard times as the value of his properties crashed during the financial crisis, meaning his investments were suddenly worth less than his loans. He was forced into bankruptcy in 2009 with debts of around $600m, and his creditors soon took a different view of the Belize arrangements to Mastro's lawyers. In December 2010 the courts overrode the scheme and a fire sale of the Mastros' Medina home – which they had bought for $15m – raised $8m.
With the house gone and their reputation in Seattle shredded, the couple relocated to California. But by 2011, when Mastro says he was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from property consultancy and even harbouring thoughts of paying creditors back "a little at a time", two further setbacks occurred.
Having won a court judgement stating that two rings – which housed huge diamonds, one of 27.8 carats and one of 15.93 carats – were the sole property of Linda, the courts overturned that decision in June 2011 and ordered the jewels to be handed back. That move came shortly after a devastating blow in February.
"My husband was in the garage and fell off the step-stool and literally died," recalls Linda. "They resuscitated him and then he had a cranial. He was a vegetable for several months. He had to learn to walk again. Then everything disintegrated."
"I had a nervous breakdown," she continues. "I just wanted to get away. It wasn't that I didn't respect the court – I just couldn't take any more. The initial plan was to go to Seattle, which we did. We stayed with [Mastro's sister] a couple of nights and then I said: 'Let's just go.' I don't know what came over me."
PRIVATE jets tend not to allow Shih Tzu dogs as passengers – which was proving an irritation after a few weeks travelling across Canada and staying in "little crappy motels". The Mastros had arrived in Toronto, a city they loved and didn't want to leave, but they say their lawyers encouraged them to keep moving. "All three sets of attorneys we had, their favourite saying was 'Get out of Dodge'," Mastro says. "It didn't take much prodding to get us out of there because the press coverage was so unfavourable."
Headlines such as the Wall Street Journal's "Living Large in Bankruptcy" and the Seattle Times's "Suit alleges 'sham' transfers of IOUs to shield assets" may have irked, but there was an added urgency to disappear as well. They had fled over the US-Canadian border while still in possession of the diamond rings they could not bear to surrender, meaning they were being tailed by a US marshal intent on bringing them home to face civil contempt of court charges. "We had a friend in Seattle who had a plane, so we called his pilot and they started looking around for a plane for us," continues Linda. "We found a puddle-jumper – but it was fine, we didn't care – that would take the dogs. We went through this private firm and I thought the shortest distance would be to Portugal."
The flight on that small private plane, which stopped in Greenland, proved a devastating blow for the couple's North American pursuers, with the Mastros and the diamonds vanishing from the radar. With dry understatement Jim Rigby, the accountant hired by the US Department of Justice to recover assets for creditors, says: "If I could have afforded the emotion, I'd have been profoundly frustrated."
He would remain so until the knock on the Mastros' door in the autumn of 2012.
EVEN the Mastros' fiercest critics find it difficult to argue that they were making massive efforts to hide, having finally decided to settle by Lake Annecy on the advice of a Seattle priest and friend. They lived under their own name and appear to have become convinced that the US authorities would not follow them to Europe on a civil matter.
But unbeknown to them – and Rigby says to himself, too – a federal grand jury had finalised an indictment accusing the couple of 43 counts of bankruptcy fraud. As well as citing the timely transfer of assets to the Belize trust, the document also alleges the "fraudulent concealment" by the couple of a JP Morgan Chase bank account used to fund personal expenses and from which they withdrew almost $600,000. "I did not disclose that in the paperwork I submitted," Mastro admits now. "I'm responsible for that. My attorney said it was not necessary. Anyway, they nailed me on that."
The grand jury's charges, coupled with the couple making two extraordinary mistakes, meant their arrest was almost inevitable. First Mastro, who has needed frequent surgery since his "eardrums were blown out in World War Two", had a small hearing operation in France. Behind his wife's back, and against her pleading, he claimed the cost of the treatment on his US insurance policy.
Linda is still fuming at her husband's "sly" move, but she had left a trail, too, after following local rules and registering their Range Rover in France once they'd shipped it to Lisbon. As she explains that move – without a hint of irony relating to her fugitive status – "I have to do things right. I never even jaywalked." Whatever the reasons, the outcome was clear. US authorities now had everything they needed to ask their European colleagues to bring the suspects in.
Following that first night spent in the police station, the Mastros were transported 90 miles to a prison in Lyon, which Linda found particularly gruesome. There was a plastic mattress and a piece of "crappy muslin" as a cover, all of which contributed to Linda's openly depressed demeanour; she was put on suicide watch.
"I laid there and cried," she says, welling up as she speaks. "Then I found out that [one of my] dogs had died. That's when I gave up and they watched me. I didn't care if I got out of there. I just wanted to die."
But the Mastros' incarceration was having a revitalising effect on the case for their pursuers. Rigby now knew where they were and was feverishly searching for clues of further funds. The euphoria, however, quickly gave rise to a problem. The Mastros had been picked up in a lovely – but modest – property. If they had fled after squirrelling away millions, why was there no sign of largesse?
DAYS earlier, Rigby had hired some new recruits to assist his effort. Daniel Hall, a former lawyer turned corporate investigator, had just set up his own investigations agency called Focus, where he worked from a small office overlooking the Old Bailey, London's famous criminal court.
The case was made for Hall, whose speciality was tracing hidden assets, and on hearing news of the arrest he turned to his colleague Robert Capper, a former British intelligence officer, and dispatched him to France.
Capper immediately visited the chief of police in Annecy, only to receive an incredibly cool reception. With reason. The small station was already investigating the shooting of the 50-year-old Surrey-based engineer Saad al-Hilli, his dentist wife Iqbal, 47, and her mother, Suhaila al-Allaf, which had horrified the region weeks earlier. What's more, the police were still wrestling with exactly what had been happening in their quiet little town after a surprise drowning in the picturesque Lake Annecy a year earlier dredged up more than they'd bargained for: several bodies.
"The police had had in those past few months: two American fugitives; a massacre of Brits, which creates a media storm, and a guy who falls out of boat," Capper recalls. "And they find his body but then have to ask: who are these other three bodies we have found at the bottom of the lake? This police office has got about eight staff. It's like Midsomer."
The one piece of useful information the overworked police deputy did give Capper was that while the Mastros had been arrested in Marceau, it was not the first address the US authorities had sent French police to. The first call had been made to a property on the lake's eastern shore – the far more glamorous Veyrier-du-Lac.
"One of the things we were thinking is: 'Does this guy have money?'" says Capper. "He fled but was found in an ordinary flat. Then we discover he had been staying at Veyrier-du-Lac for the majority of the stay. That makes more sense. If you were a very wealthy man, you would stay there."
In Veyrier-du-Lac, the café owner recalled the ageing American couple with the Shih Tzu dogs who always popped in for a coffee on their way into town – and before long Capper had painstakingly pieced together a picture of their life, virtually all of which the couple now confirm: it included the magnificent Veyrier-du-Lac house, rented at around €5,000 a month; how the Mastros had been forced to leave that base because the villa had already been let for the summer to other tenants and, intriguingly, how the couple had opened a bank account in the Veyrier-du-Lac branch of Société Générale.
The account was being funded frequently by company cheques ranging in value between €2,000 and €8,000 each time. "Low enough not to set off any red flags," observes Hall conspiratorially. "Suspicious activity reports come in at more than €10,000."
Still, it raised a wider question. The Mastros had funds to finance being on the run – but where was the cash coming from? Back in Seattle, Rigby was hatching plans for a bold move that provided the answer.
A Renault Clio, with a poodle sitting in the back seat, comes to a halt right outside the Mastros' Marceau flat. Out of the car hops a velvet-suited man, looking the very antithesis of his trade. Following a request from Rigby, the French courts had appointed him as the bailiff on the French side of the Mastro case. After entering the three-bedroom property, he reaches a box room at the end of the flat's corridor.
On opening the door he is presented with a room stuffed full of cases overflowing with designer clothes and jewels: Christian Dior suits with Linda Mastro's name stitched into the inside of the seam; carrier bags full of jewellery; freezer bags full of ropes of pearls, others stuffed with earrings. After taking a moment, he finally finds the word to express his mood. "Merde," he gasps before trooping off to call his office to request reinforcements.
Also in the room that day is Capper, in a purely observational capacity, but with an entirely different focus. "The bailiff is saying: 'That's shiny, that's Louis Vuitton, I'm having that,'" he recalls. "But what's really interesting to us is the business cards, scraps of paper, written notes, luggage labels."
Also in and among the treasure are dozens of notepads in which Mastro has fastidiously handwritten every financial transaction, plus, shoved into a drawer, a folded piece of paper with names and numbers of Mastro contacts in Switzerland and a weathered business card.
The number on the business card was for a "cash for gold" shop on the shore of Lake Annecy, where the Mastros had opened an account and were making regular deposits. Over time, it is thought that the total gold they had sold came to €50,000 – all paid out via company cheques. The values, again, were between €2,000 and €8,000 a time. "It was our intention to gradually sell the jewellery [excluding the diamond rings] to meet our living expenses," confirms Mastro. "We thought we had two, three, four million dollars' worth of jewellery."
The modus operandi was becoming clearer and clearer – at least in the minds of Rigby and his investigators. They believe the Range Rover was shipped to Lisbon as a Trojan horse full of jewels which were sold to fund the Mastros' lavish, if low-profile, lifestyle. Apart from the fateful insurance payment, the Mastros never moved money via wire transfers that would have provided clues to their whereabouts. They fastidiously kept their own ledger – so when they noticed their bank balance approaching zero, they would simply sell some more gold.
These were answers, but the information posed further questions: did this ageing couple know that these actions would make their detection harder? Were they getting help?
ON MASTRO'S iPad was a series of photographs, one of which was a piece of paper containing written instructions explaining how a car could be imported to Portugal and not attract attention from customs officials.
Capper also photographed a map found in the Mastros' flat. "They had annotated in many different pens and ink all sorts of places across Europe," he explains. "So there were rings around places such as Monaco and San Sebastián as well as Annecy. A few places where they had crossed out roads. When the FBI came to France for a briefing on what I had discovered, one of the junior Annecy policemen in the room looked at a road that had been crossed out. He said: 'Oh, that's the new tunnel into Italy. There's police everywhere there.' The route into Chambéry was also crossed out. I drove that route. Every car got stopped by customs."
The Mastros ridicule the suggestion that they have acquired some sort of manual for the aspiring international fugitive which explains the secrets of avoiding detection – and insist they don't recognise the descriptions of the note on customs procedures or any map with warnings of potentially troublesome roads.
"[Rigby] got it all wrong," says Linda. "How could anybody be so stupid as to leave a car in a parking lot with jewellery in it and they've got the key? Mike and I were bent over laughing on that one."
There is an edge to her voice as, by her own admission, she is taking Rigby's pursuit personally. "In my opinion he has a vendetta against me," she says, and claims that the search of the couple's property was conducted overzealously.
Rigby dismisses any personal motive – although he acknowledges that the case is likely to be the biggest of his career. And in Rigby's defence, any neutral observer would need to point out that Linda's take on events is not always considered reliable. A 2011 judgement by the US bankruptcy courts found her "to be a witness lacking veracity, as her testimony was often transparently vague, contradictory and self-serving". Meanwhile Mastro himself openly admits to playing games with the whole bankruptcy process. In early 2009, before his empire collapsed, Mastro borrowed against his luxury cars. "I got the money, put it in my business, and I knew if I got in trouble and the trustee grabbed those cars, there would be no value in there," he admits now. "I put large loans on [the cars] to thwart Rigby."
WHO IS currently winning this game of financial chess remains a debating point. The Mastros reckon it is Rigby as, they say, he has reclaimed everything they own and they are now forced to live off a $2,000-a-month US pension plus donations from friends. Rigby suspects, but says he has no proof, that there are millions more in assets stashed away offshore. "He thinks to this day that we have much money buried overseas," Mastro says. "We don't have a cent in that respect."
But whoever is leading, the losers are obvious. Rigby has so far managed to collect $20.5m, of which the unsecured creditors, including "friends and family investors", have received just $2.2m. That compares with $1.6m that has gone on property maintenance and insurance costs, as well as fees paid to banks and Rigby.
Now there is a chance of getting creditors a few million more. At a bail hearing in France, Mastro revealed that the diamond rings were stashed in a safety deposit box in Annecy. After the box was drilled open, the rings were recovered and now, along with the items gleaned from the Marceau flat, the haul is in the hands of the FBI. There are around 300 pieces with an estimated value of $3m – but it is not yet certain in whose hands the collection will end up.
The Mastros look likely to live out their days in France after the country's courts refused America's extradition request on humanitarian grounds earlier this month. Having masterminded that case, their lawyer Thomas Terrier is making their stay as comfortable as possible by getting their jewels back. He is keeping the extraordinary four-year saga running by making a fresh claim to have the jewellery handed back to Linda. "We will now be able to say [to Rigby]: 'Why did you act that way at that time?'" Terrier says. "It was not appropriate to seize everything that way. It's another session which begins." Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 hours ago.