Stranger than pulp fiction: meet Bob Nygaard, America's psychic-crime fighter

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/12/bob-nygaard-private-investigator-psychic-fraud

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It wasn’t something she would normally have done.

Then again, nothing in Megan’s life was normal that year. There had been a bad breakup that triggered a deep depression. Her doctor had prescribed pills, her mother had prescribed time away from New York, and she had tried both. Now, several months later, she was back on the Upper East Side, walking down Second Avenue to meet a friend for dinner. She wasn’t exactly cured, but she was getting there. And then she stepped off the curb, crossed over to 77th Street and walked straight into a woman named Velvet.

Harbingers of disaster are supposed to look ominous, but the most ghoulish thing about Velvet was her bad dye job; other than that she looked utterly unremarkable.

“There’s something wrong with you,” said Velvet, extending a hand, stopping Megan in her tracks. “I see darkness surrounding you.” She repeated variants of this as she tried to usher Megan into a psychic’s office nearby. “A dark aura” ... “Something wrong” ... “We can help.” Megan made excuses but accepted a flyer from Velvet, and told her she might be back.

Megan had never seen a psychic before. She was a thirtysomething professional with a master’s degree. She didn’t believe in that kind of stuff! But all through dinner the flyer sat ticking at the bottom of her bag like a bomb about to go off. “How could she tell there was a problem?” Megan thought, picking at pasta. The question niggled at the back of her mind and wouldn’t go away.

A few days later, curiosity got the better of her. Megan fished the flyer out of her handbag and went to the address specified. There, Velvet ushered her in to meet the head honcho of the establishment: Betty Vlado.

And so began a series of unfortunate and very expensive events that turned into private investigator Bob Nygaard’s sixth supernatural scam case: the Incident of the Fraudulent Meteorite.

Bob Nygaard, hardboiled hero

You could say that it was fate or an auspicious alignment of the stars that propelled Nygaard, a bulky and somewhat bashful ex-cop, into the unusual role of psychic-crime-fighting private investigator. But, really, it was Bacardi and Coke. It all started, as a great many things do, after a couple of drinks.

It was late 2008, and Bob was at a neighbourhood bar for a Wednesday afternoon happy hour. He had retired early from the New York police force and moved to Florida. After decades spent busting prostitute rings and “fighting the war on crack”, he wanted to sit out the rest of his days on the beach, lounging around tiki bars. To occupy himself in between beach time and bar time, he got a PI’s license and did some run-of-the-mill investigative work: tracking down unclaimed funds, catching cheating spouses, that sort of thing.

Bob wasn’t married; an adult life spent chasing “bad guys” hadn’t been conducive to dating. But his circumstances were different now and, that evening, he got chatting to a couple of attractive women at the bar, regaling them with war stories about his time as a street cop and his interest in “bunco” investigations. These are crimes of persuasion, scams usually perpetrated on elderly and vulnerable people. Fascinating stuff, but perhaps a bit of a downer if you’re trying to chat someone up. Eventually, he gave both women a business card and they went their separate ways.

Or so he thought. Shortly after he left the bar he got a call from one of the women, a doctor, asking if they could meet at the nearby Mobil station. It seemed a strange place for a romantic assignation, but he drove up to the gas station anyway. The doctor proceeded to unburden herself of an embarrassing secret: a psychic had defrauded her out of over $12,000 and she didn’t know what to do. And so began Bob’s first major foray into the world of spiritual scamming.

It turned out the doctor hadn’t been defrauded by just any fortuneteller, but by a celebrity of sorts. Gina Marie Marks was a notorious southern Florida psychic who had co-authored a memoir under the name Regina Milbourne – Miami Psychic: Confessions of a Confidante.

The doctor didn’t seek out Marks for her literary skills, however. A friend had recommended her, thinking it might help the doctor with her anxiety. Although the doctor initially thought the source of her stress might be the opaque workings of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and her immigration status, Marks disagreed. She said a jealous co-worker had put a curse on her by burying a piece of meat, and the rotting meat was causing the doctor’s life to disintegrate. If she didn’t get rid of this curse through cleansing rituals, she could be deported.

Distressed, the doctor agreed to the cleansing rituals. She rubbed an egg and chanted. She wrapped up thousands of dollars in a handkerchief and gave it to Marks to get blessed at a sacred altar in Hollywood, Florida. She handed over her credit card details for the purchase of special candles. And so on, until she finally realized she was being scammed. At that point she was too embarrassed to go to the police and had no idea what to do next. Bob, however, seemed like he might be able to help.

Bob took the job pro bono and started building a case against Marks. A process involving no mystical rituals – just routine, rather dull detective work. While some of his work involves stakeouts and covert surveillance, much of being a PI is simply piles of paperwork: collecting testimony from witnesses and victims, establishing evidence of financial transactions and creating detailed timelines of events. Bob’s investigations soon uncovered four more victims, all of whom frequented the same nail salon. Marks had extracted small fortunes from these women by telling them they were cursed, then performing elaborate, expensive rituals to get rid of these curses. This dynamic of “invent a problem only your product can solve” is the standard backbone of the psychic scam. In that sense, it operates much like modern marketing.

Fortune-telling: illegal but rarely punished

Unless you are a particularly empathetic person, you might be struggling to understand how anyone but a dimwit could hand over money to a psychic and expect something of value in return. On the surface, the idea of fortunetelling fraud sounds like a tautology, or a punchline. But this is precisely why it is often overlooked and its perpetrators left unpunished, free to exploit more vulnerable people.

Bob gets very emotional about this, and his face gets noticeably red as he describes the way in which police departments and district attorney offices tend to shrug off psychic crime and dismiss it as a “civil problem”. Although he gets paid for his work, usually around $5,000 a case and sometimes a 20% cut of recovered funds, Bob seems to treat what he does as a sort of mission. Some people want to save the whales; he wants to get the American justice system to take fraudulent psychics seriously. According to his calculations, he has recovered over $3m for 21 victims across 12 cases.

There are a few ways a psychic can be charged with breaking the law. In New York state, an archaic fortune-telling law makes professing to tell the future a class B misdemeanor. While rarely enforced, this means that pretty much any sidewalk psychic you pass in New York City could automatically be charged with up to three months in jail and a $500 fine. The more serious charge is grand theft or grand larceny, which carries up to 25 years in state prison.

In order for these charges to be pressed, the district attorney needs to be convinced that there is a case worth pursuing. Bob managed to do just that in Gina Marks’s case, leading to $65,000 worth of grand theft charges against the celebrity clairvoyant. These charges led to more of Marks’s victims stepping forward, and she was eventually found guilty of swindling people out of more than $500,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Bob would have celebrated this first victory, but the day after Marks’s arrest he woke up with his left eye so severely swollen that he couldn’t see. The swelling lasted a couple of days, and his friends joked that he had probably been cursed. Bob is about as unflappable a guy as you can find, dismissive of the sort of danger you can’t shoot with a gun; but for a couple of days he was, he admits, rattled.

But if Marks had put a curse on him, it certainly hadn’t affected his business. Her arrest drew press attention and Bob suddenly found himself inundated with calls from other people who had been defrauded by psychics.

One of those calls was from Megan, who had found Bob through a Google search: “Psychic + Scam + Help”, or something like that. It was 2013, almost two years after her run-in with Velvet on the Upper East Side, and in that time she had lost her entire life’s savings – more than $50,000 – to Vlado.

It started, as it always does, with a diagnosis of the curse that was causing Megan’s depression. There followed a series of purification baths and the purchase of two Rolexes, which were submerged in a mystical lake in Pennsylvania so as to “turn back time” and undo Megan’s curse. According to Vlado, only a Rolex was able to handle the complex mechanics of reversing time, as “cheap materials would lead to cheap results”.

The Rolex was small fry compared to the next purchase, however: a meteorite that had supposedly been smuggled from outer space by one of Vlado’s friends, an “insider” at Nasa. It would cost $14,500 but it would be worth it; Betty assured her that Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump used “meteorites” to be successful. Megan bought the meteorite but started to lose faith in Vlado’s abilities and, seeing no change in her circumstances, took it to be valued. It turned out to be a lump of quartz worth at most $350.

‘They take advantage of your deepest insecurities’

Today the meteorite sits in Nygaard’s living room and Vlado sits in jail, although she is due to be released this month after serving less than a year behind bars. Meanwhile, Megan is in a much better place.

Bob put me in touch with her, and as we chatted it was hard for me to reconcile this assertive New Yorker, someone who “argued with a checkout guy if he overcharged me 50 cents”, with the Megan who had paid $14,500 for a fake meteorite. “They terrify you,” said Megan. “That’s what these ‘psychics’ do. They take advantage of your deepest insecurities and then they tell you you’re cursed. Nobody who goes in one of those places is ever told they’re doing well.”

I decided to test this out for myself, and went to a fairly upmarket clairvoyant in Greenwich Village for a crystal ball reading. I won’t name the place, but Bob told me he had his eye on it for a while. Lo and behold, the woman I saw followed the psychic scam playbook to the letter.

As it turns out, my actions in a previous life have resulted in “bad karma”, meaning I will never find true love with a man. Which perhaps has more to do with being gay than “bad karma” – but hey, how was she to know? The psychic went on to tell me that I didn’t have to suffer in this life. If I performed all the rituals suggested and paid her $500, she could 95% guarantee results.

I told her I would think about it.