talking to the masses who adored her. She had that kind of energy. She was brash and bold and charismatic and funny and irreverent. She told dirty jokes and everybody loved her.”
The story is so outlandish and bizarre that Johnathan never questions it. “Why would someone make that up? I, never, not even for a second, suspect that it’s a scam.”The story continues. Mair tells Johnathan that she works at a luxury travel agency in LA called Pacific Island. She’s the number one seller there. The company is owned by her cousin’s best friend – who actually helped to get her the job back when they were on good terms. Mair doesn’tto work though, she makes that very clear.
“Fast forward, literally a couple of weeks later and I get a call from jail. She’s been arrested, and she’s crying on the phone, telling me I was right. Her family set her up to make it look like she stole $200,000.”She planted the seed and Johnathan took the bait, so again, he believed everything she told him. “I walked right into it. She used my good nature against me. We’re almost a year and a half into our friendship at this point. I love her like a sister.
“You’d think I was worried, but I wasn’t at all because I believed she was going to get her inheritance, and she was showing me emails and text messages from her barristers saying that the case is going to be resolved, everything’s looking good, she’s happy.”“Then one day, she tells me, all she needs is $50,000 for legal fees and court costs to make the case go away and get her inheritance. Now, you know, people are like, ‘How can you be so stupid?’.
“You were well cut out for this,” I note in response. “Oh, my god. Those words are so profound,” he replies, “because yeah, I was cut out for everything.” After a year of investigating, Mair is finally put on trial for grand theft. She’s still scamming people in the meantime though – pretending to be mentally ill and trying to coerce another mentally ill man into marrying her.
The trial lasted four days, and Mair was sentenced to five years in prison – she got out early due to Covid. “In California, they were releasing a lot of non-violent criminals – tens of thousands of them, and she was one of them. Once she’s out, she goes straight to Maine, her home state which is about 3,000 miles away from California. Literally the furthest point she could get from me,” Johnathan tells me of her current whereabouts. But she’s still up to her old tricks.