Another Victim in a Land of Grifters

“It’s pathetic, isn’t it? A woman of my intelligence. The humiliation.”

The woman shakes her head. She’s blond, with that blunt-cut bob so popular with middle-aged working moms in your beachier Southern California suburbs. She laughs, then stops. Then looks out the picture window. It’s afternoon and the room is golden. You can hear gulls, see the waves breaking, smell the Pacific. This is the house she got in the divorce.

It was all she got, of course. Other than this view and the children, he pretty much cleaned her out. She came home one day and found it stripped empty. Now, she lives in the million-dollar property with curtains made out of pillowcases she got on sale at Ikea. This is how it was when they asked her to join their “empowerment” club.

“Want to see their spiel?” She reaches into a desk and pulls out a file folder. The come-on is written in the form of a little script: Thank you for coming to our all-women empowering network. You have been invited by someone who has given much thought to bringing you into a financial opportunity that is very exciting and rewarding, and that has been making great changes in the lives of many women. . . .

“When I joined, they were calling it the Dinner Party.” She laughs.

“I was brought in by a photographer I’d met at a wedding. I was told it was an investment opportunity, only you couldn’t say ‘investment.’ It was ‘gifting.’ ” The ante was cash-only, five grand. There were women from as far south as San Diego, as far north as the San Fernando Valley; the organizer was supposedly the wife of a developer who’d followed the tech money down from Seattle, but the setup was very Orange County, with that whiff of cutesy Newport Beach kitsch to it. The levels of progression were named for parts of a menu: appetizer, soup and salad, entree, dessert.

You had to bring new people in to move up the food chain. Nobody got to know anybody’s last name. When eight newcomers had been gathered, the pot went to the woman at the top rung, who then started a new group. They called it a “Birthday Party.” The concept is simple, the script said. Each women [sic] gives a gift of $5,000 and receives $40,000 in return.

*

It is one of Southern California’s abiding mysteries that people keep forgetting its mother lode of crookedness. That they forget the particular brand of covetousness that has forever stoked its engines; forget how many dupes and grifters--from the aqueducts to the Information Highway--have fueled its empowerment. “Oh, God,” she sighs. “I’m a business consultant. I knew it was a pyramid scheme, but they convinced me it wasn’t, because the person at the top didn’t stay there. Once you were the Birthday Girl, you went back on the board as an appetizer again.” She shuts her eyes, realizing how she sounds, a woman in her 40s talking about birthday girls and food groups.

She tries again: “You really don’t expect it from other women. People like me want to believe in the sisterhood.” But that’s not it, either. Not here, in the land that served up bride, groom and gimmick for that homage to post-feminist empowerment, “Who Wants To Marry A Multimillionaire?” It is suggested that maybe she just wanted the money.

“I wanted to do something for my friends and family,” she replies. Then: “I wanted to pay the property taxes and credit card bills.”

*

She’d invested $5,000 plus another $2,500 for a friend, and was within one rung of the jackpot when the bust came last week. Someone was “birthday-ing” and the group had convened at the Newport Beach Crab Cooker. Investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department came in and quietly tapped them on the shoulders, asking if the ladies would step outside please.

There’d been an undercover officer among them the whole time. “I’m pretty sure it was Michelle from San Diego,” the woman says now. “She’d been brought in by Shirley the real estate agent, right after [the organizer] kicked Shirley out.” Only the organizer, a 35-year-old Laguna Niguel woman, was arrested. The rest--hairdressers, boutique clerks, housewives--just sat there, numb. Some, authorities said, were out tens of thousands of dollars. Some had raided their retirement funds.

Days later, the woman said, she still hadn’t mustered the nerve to tell her children what she’d done. On TV, the Thousand Oaks nurse who married the multimillionaire was confessing, “I don’t think I was thinking clearly.” At least she got to keep the diamond wedding ring and the Isuzu Trooper. Down the freeway, there were no such consolation prizes from this, the land of the golden con.

Shawn Hubler’s column runs Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.