True-Crime Producer Who Posed as a Heiress & Allegedly Stole Millions

Editors’ Note: This story first appeared in an exclusive true-crime issue of Rolling Stone for Apple News published on July 21, 2026.

M

ary Carole McDonnell swept through the glass offices of Banc of California in Los Angeles in 2018 holding two homemade pies in her well-manicured hands.

The 66-year-old was dressed elegantly, though understatedly, in a white-collared button-down shirt and crisp blue jeans. Like always, she wore her signature set of pearls and went heavy on the perfume. In an endearing gesture from a multimillionaire who ran a thriving entertainment production company specializing in true-crime shows, McDonnell was coming to offer a sweet form of thanks to the bank’s sales team. 

She was in a jam only the top one percent would know. As heir to the fortune of the McDonnell family, one half of the St. Louis-based McDonnell Douglas airplane-manufacturing business that netted $14 billion after the company merged with Boeing in 1997, McDonnell was finally set to come into her $81 million trust. But until the funds were distributed the following year, she needed a quick bridge loan to hold herself over. 

The bank saw the opportunity to play the long game. McDonnell was the head of a thriving $125 million company; had a $1 million stockpile of jewelry, antiques, and artwork; and held a number of investment properties, according to her bank loan application. In all, she placed her net worth at $77 million. Under the impression that McDonnell would eventually transition all of her business accounts and incoming $80 million windfall over to it, Banc of California happily fulfilled a $15 million loan. 

The deal was just about to close when McDonnell swung by the offices with her homemade goodies. The moment sticks out to Jami Rice, a former VP relationship manager at the bank, who still remembers the pecan slice she devoured. “I’m not a pie person,” Rice recalls to Rolling Stone. “But I went face down on those.” Looking back, Rice can’t see it as anything other than part of a well-calculated ruse. “She brought us those pies for some nefarious reason,” Rice says. “That was part of her grift, I am thoroughly convinced, because she knew the whole time that she was about to defraud us.”

Within six weeks, McDonnell had ransacked the account, withdrawing nearly the entire loan amount, $14,660,255.09 to be exact. When alarmed bank officials dove into McDonnell’s purported financials, they discovered they had been duped, according to a lawsuit Banc of California filed. The padded accounts McDonnell had claimed to hold at another banking institution — backed by reassurances from her lawyer, a separate banking official, and notarized paperwork — were nonexistent. By the end of the year, McDonnell had hightailed it out of the country with her husband, the majority of the funds disappearing with her. 

It’s almost too fantastical a tale to be true: An older woman who produced television series about criminals being the villain all along? When the FBI slapped McDonnell’s smiling face on its Most Wanted list last December, accusing the now-74-year-old of defrauding numerous financial institutions to the tune of around $30 million, it led to internet memes and jokes. New York magazine’s The Cut asked, “Have You Seen This Diva?” Some hailed McDonnell as an Anna Delvey-type scammer, justifying her brazen ripoff of faceless lenders by scoffing at the idea that society should feel sympathy for giant corporate entities. 

But McDonnell’s financial casualties include her twentysomething sons, who discovered their mother forged their signatures on quick-payday loans that left them on the hook for nearly $3 million; family friends whom McDonnell allegedly milked for hundreds of thousands of dollars; and dozens of employees and freelance workers who claim she stiffed them on paychecks.

The story has all the makings of a viral documentary replete with breathless details, similar to the ones McDonnell’s company produced. Her backstory is littered with half-truths and deceptions, including a lie that her mentally disabled younger sister was murdered after being kidnapped. Questions remain on how she was able to pull off such a brazen heist. And it has sparked an ongoing hunt among the FBI, banking institutions, a true-crime podcaster, and television producers to see who can unravel McDonnell’s tangled history, track her down in a foreign land, recoup the financial losses she caused, and perhaps bring the unbelievable tale to screens.  

“My hope is really to get some sort of justice,” says Andrew Nock, who worked as an executive producer on two of McDonnell’s shows. “The motivation behind pitch[ing] a documentary is to hire as many people on the show that got ripped off. If the credits at the end have a list of people’s names and how much money [is owed] to each one, that’d be pretty funny.”

The Heiress

Apart from a “Wanted” poster, there are virtually no photos of McDonnell. She has no public social media accounts, though a Facebook page created by disgruntled former staffers placed her grinning smile on the head of a pig. 

Many who knew McDonnell, who often went by her nickname “MC,” recall how her dyed blond hair was always perfectly coiffed and that she had an expensive, quiet-luxury-type wardrobe. “She was incredibly private,” says Stephanie Manos, who worked as an office manager at McDonnell’s production company, Bellum Entertainment. “Some women you have no trouble talking to [and] they spill everything. She wasn’t [that] kind of woman.” (Multiple attempts to reach McDonnell for this article were unsuccessful.) 

McDonnell’s demeanor could come across as cold, but she cultivated the aesthetic of a successful businesswoman. She drove a Porsche, a loud signal to her male colleagues that she spoke their language, while the Hermes Birkin handbag she carried had the same effect for women. “She knew how to project an image of what she imagined a major television executive should be,” says Ted Eccles, a television producer and production-company owner who worked with McDonnell. She regularly took her lunches at the popular steakhouse Morton’s in Burbank, California, perfectly sandwiched between the studios for NBC and Warner Bros. 

She did possess a softer side and was known as a pleasant boss. Celebrity chef Paula Deen was her idol, and she was a decent baker. After a divorce from her second husband, McDonnell saw herself as a devoted single mother to well-mannered twin sons, whom she put through private school and then Pepperdine University. 

McDonnell did, however, like to flash her wealth. She lived in a $3.8 million house on an idyllic street called Sugar Loaf Drive, flew first class, and owned a boat that cost roughly $200,000. She had an over-the-top wedding in Newport Beach, California, to her third husband, Dr. Jeffrey Nilles, an ophthalmologist, in the 2010s, and even footed the bill for her closest guests to stay the weekend at the five-star property where the event was held.

And McDonnell wasn’t shy about her heiress status. It was a source of office gossip, though she’d willingly volunteer the information. Eccles recalls McDonnell casually disclosing the source of her wealth when she offered to buy him out of his production company. “I asked her, ‘How are you going to finance this?’ She told me flat out, ‘Well, my last name is McDonnell and there’s an enormous trust fund that I am the beneficiary of in St. Louis, where my family’s from, and I have lots of financial resources.”  

That’s Showbiz

It isn’t quite clear why McDonnell pursued a career in television. After ditching secretarial school, she learned the ropes at a branch of Texas stations in the 1980s. After briefly leaving the industry to run a clothing-alteration shop in St. Louis, she returned to become the director of programming for a local Denver station. 

In 1999, the now-defunct national broadcaster Raycom poached McDonnell to its base in Montgomery, Alabama, and installed her as vice president of programming. At its height, the company operated 65 television stations and two radio stations across 20 states, with a revenue of $2.6 billion. In her position, McDonnell oversaw Raycom’s entire slate of programming, including acquisitions, scheduling, and budgeting. Her time in the South didn’t last long: In 2000, she negotiated a move to Hollywood that came with even wider authority.

Still juggling her duties at Raycom, McDonnell began producing her own low-budget TV programs in 2003. “The idea of it was brilliant because it was before streaming really hit,” Manos explains. “Have someone write the product, film the shows ourselves, and then we would also do the post-production, so it was a linear vehicle. Nobody else was doing that [and] you could do it under one roof. It was fast and cheap.” 

McDonnell began with the children’s show Animal Atlas, which had nearly a 300-episode run on Animal Planet Kids and Discovery Kids. By 2014, she quit Raycom and ramped up Bellum’s production slate, securing national distributors in Fox, Sinclair, and Sony. The company churned out cooking and travel programs, an alien franchise, and, eventually, niche true-crime series with titles like Bizarre Murders and I Married a Murderer. 

McDonnell seemed to prize family connections over real-world experience, hiring her nephews to serve as directors and executive producers on various series. After graduating from college, her sons, Sean and Mackenzie, divvied up post-production and sales and distribution responsibilities. And McDonnell’s stepson, fresh out of Georgetown Law, served as legal counsel.

Bellum would grow to a team of more than 50 with markets in the U.S., Europe, and the United Kingdom, and seemed to be a thriving, healthy business. At one point, her teams were creating 200 episodes of numerous different series at the same time. It was a one-stop shop, and the returns, especially with syndication, were lucrative. 

But the balance sheets didn’t always correlate. By 2016, some employees claimed they weren’t receiving paychecks. McDonnell’s close friend, Boots Walker, a fellow television executive who McDonnell had persuaded to come work at Bellum in 2011 and who temporarily lived with her, noticed that McDonnell’s Porsche was leased and she was behind on payments; and the same went for the mortgage bill on her house. 

The Podcaster

Even before McDonnell was accused of swindling Banc of California, she intrigued Rice, the bank employee, with her work making true-crime shows. Rice was a true-crime fanatic herself, and had mulled the idea of interviewing McDonnell for her podcast series, Murderish, that she started the year before. 

Rice wasn’t involved in the bank’s deal with McDonnell, but had been following developments through co-workers as the bank began raising red flags. There were immediate concerns over some cash-flow issues arising out of Bellum and talk of the state’s labor board poking around, but McDonnell reassured them it was a pesky misunderstanding that was being handled. As a precaution, Banc of California put in place what it believed was a fail-safe insurance policy: McDonnell agreed to put up a $28.6 million investment account that she was holding at another bank, Northern Trust, as collateral on the deal, according to court documents. After the bank caught wind that Bellum was having some payroll issues, it was agreed in writing that McDonnell couldn’t use the funds in any connection to Bellum. Satisfied it had covered its bases, Banc of California moved forward. That decision would quickly backfire. 

When the failed McDonnell loan caused a panic at the bank, the bulk of the sales team who executed the deal were put on administrative leave. In Rice’s eyes, this was an institutional failure and her friends in sales were the fall guys. “I was miserable,” she says. “Plus, I was getting really angry about how the bank was handling the situation. Mary Carole actually changed the trajectory of my life. I never would have left banking if she hadn’t come in and blown everything up.” Rice quit and went full-time into podcasting, eventually signing with the podcast network Cloud10 and monetizing Murderish, covering developments in the Gilgo Beach serial-killer case and recapping the Domino’s Pizza Murders of the Eighties.

Still, Rice couldn’t shake what had transpired at the bank. An unassuming woman waltzed through their offices and allegedly robbed the institution of $15 million, armed not with a weapon, but flimsy paperwork and a basket of pies. It was a bewildering true-crime saga that had landed in her lap. Rice approached Cloud10 with a pitch to develop a deep-dive investigation on McDonnell and received an enthusiastic green light.  

Hiring a researcher, Rice began investigating, speaking with people from McDonnell’s past and combing through archival records. She retraced McDonnell’s childhood and young-adult life, digging up high school yearbook photos of a teenage McDonnell smiling with members of the Christmas-decoration committee and a divorce filing from her first husband in 1983. She discovered that McDonnell employed a string of half-truths, inexplicable exaggerations, and flat-out lies throughout her life. (Even the “homemade” pies that Rice and the Banc of California team had devoured were reportedly bought from a bakery.)

Among the more egregious falsehoods was the one McDonnell had told many people about her younger sister, Holly. The 11-year-old girl had been killed in 1966 when a playmate from her special-education school stabbed her in the back with a hunting knife, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. McDonnell would twist the story later, according to Walker and others, claiming her sister had been held for ransom and murdered, ostensibly as a roundabout way to signal evidence of her family’s fortune. “She always was striving, from a young age, to make herself appear as if she comes from wealth,” Rice says. “She wanted to be among the elite.” 

What Rice discovered would lead to a new podcast series titled Dirty Money Moves in August 2022, as she joined forces with Nock and producer Lee Frank, who both worked with McDonnell on Bellum productions. The trio began angling to turn the crazy tale into a documentary. 

“She was the most devious, sinister operator I have ever encountered. An absolute sociopath.”

Ted Eccles

The True-Crime Producers

Brian Testa knows everything about McDonnell and her alleged scamming. When asked by text if he was open to talking about McDonnell, he responded with himself as the Pepe Silvia conspiratorial meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “I love talking about MC,” he added. 

As a field producer and director on four McDonnell shows, Testa had a front-row seat to Bellum’s rapid downward spiral. “There were so many people who weren’t getting paid,” Testa says. “I think she got lost in it all and the greed overtook her. [She had this] ego, she could allegedly walk in and sell shows within the first five minutes. She was that smooth of a talker.”

It began with McDonnell shifting a bulk of the company’s production work to New Orleans in 2016, as she eyed better tax credits for her shows down South. Manos was tapped to lead the operation, moving to Louisiana along with 50 other people. Bellum’s financial troubles soon became obvious. “We had plenty of work, but we didn’t have plenty of money, and we were doing very cheap shows,” Manos says. “We started not being able to pay the extras. A year and a half into it, we were always late on the rent. It was a nightmare to get employees paid.” 

McDonnell came up with a range of excuses over missed paychecks. “She would fly first-class, stay in a five-star hotel in New Orleans, [and] tell [the workers], ‘Oh, my gosh, we are having bank fraud, don’t worry, here’s some pizza.’” With paychecks faltering, contract employees had to rush to cash their checks or they’d bounce by the weekend. “They would write checks from an account, the money would be in there, and then they would move the money out of the account,” Testa says. “It was a mad dash on payday.” 

Nock says he received a warning from a friend that checks sometimes didn’t arrive on time; he later experienced the same thing personally. “It was always this mystery as to where the money was and what was going on,” Nock says. “Then the labor board showed up and started interviewing [people], walking around, handing out business cards to everyone.” 

The company soon began racking up wage claims. Between 2016 and 2019, nearly 100 complaints were lodged against Bellum, according to California’s Department of Industrial Relations, all from workers alleging they were stiffed by McDonnell for anywhere from a few hundred dollars for day players and background actors to tens of thousands for producers. One source estimates McDonnell owes around $4 million total to Bellum employees. 

“I think she treated her business like a candy store,” says director and producer Phil Paul Call, who worked on Bellum shows. “She could have paid her bills, but she just had to be an elitist.”

By the fall of 2017, workers and freelancers were picketing outside Bellum’s main Burbank office, with the protests earning coverage from Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter. “It was pretty much a riot scene,” Eccles says. “She would regularly announce to the people that she owed money, me being one, that she had arranged new financing, and everything was fine now, and everybody was going to get paid. That’s when she started a combination of hitting on everyone she could find to invest in her fund, and also getting lines of credit from banks, based on this fantastic story that she had this huge trust fund from the McDonnell family.” 

McDonnell’s personal circle was also hounding her for repayment. She was running an underground investment fund for women in the entertainment business — and later her wider network — that turned out to be “the ultimate Ponzi scheme,” Eccles says. Walker says she was pitched a similar opportunity, promising a 20 to 25 percent return on her investment in the company. “She always said, ‘When I leave, you can have your money.’” Walker handed over $800,000. 

Then there came an office blowup around 2016. A smattering of employees whipped their heads toward the direction where the shouting was coming from. “You’re a monster!” McDonnell’s son Sean screamed at her repeatedly. He had barged into her office after reportedly learning McDonnell had hit up his wealthy girlfriend’s parents with one of her flimsy investment opportunities. It was one of the final straws in their already-strained relationship.

Sean and McDonell’s other son, Mackenzie, would also claim to be victims of their mother’s “perfidy,” according to court papers, when she allegedly forged their signatures on documents in August 2017 after she missed a payment on a $2.5 million loan from a quick-payday firm. The twins said they discovered the alleged fraud when the payday firm garnished $56,000 from their bank accounts and another $502,700 from the sale of a property when McDonnell defaulted on the repayment agreement. (A document examiner brought into the court case determined “with a reasonable degree of certainty” that the twins’ signatures were not their own.) 

“We had relied on Mary Carole, our mother, all our lives, and at the time we had no idea that the seemingly successful business she had founded and run was no more than a house of cards on the verge of collapse,” Sean wrote in an affidavit, pleading with a judge to let him and his brother off the hook due to the alleged forgery. “It is now abundantly clear that our trust in our mother was sorely misplaced.” (Neither son responded to interview requests for this article.)

Reminiscing from a beach in North Carolina, Walker still can’t fathom how her longtime friend wound up being labeled a “con artist.” “I’m sitting here looking at the ocean, and if she walked up right now, I would hug her,” Walker says, pausing. “But I can’t believe all that she took from people.… My heart wants to say she’s not a bad person, but the other side is, ‘How in the world could you do this?’” 

The Truth

Thomas Carroll was enjoying the comfort of his home in the suburbs of Denver when his phone began pinging with messages and an old, familiar face flashed across his television screen. A news anchor was reporting that the FBI had placed McDonnell, his ex-wife, on its Most Wanted list.

He was halfway surprised. Not by the accusations, but that her habit of lying had seemingly caught up with her. “You really couldn’t trust anything that she said,” Carroll, McDonnell’s second husband, says. “I even joke about if she said, ‘Hey, the sky is blue,’ I need to go outside and check that.”

There were a few truths about McDonnell that Carroll could confirm. She did hail from St. Louis — the same as the McDonnell airplane dynasty  — but far from an aerospace baron, her father, Thomas, ran a local grocery store. But even Carroll had been led to believe McDonnell was heir to a fortune, though she warned him to never talk about it with her family because they didn’t like to discuss the matter. 

Their marital trust wore thin as the couple fought about finances. McDonnell once bought a $6,000 piano on a whim, and Carroll dealt with lenders looking for her. He once went digging in their closet and discovered a stash of plastic bags with unpaid bills amounting to some $50,000. Carroll also claims McDonnell had been investigated over allegations that she might have skimmed money off people’s checks at the alteration shop she ran in the 1980s.

After harboring his suspicions about McDonnell’s finances, Carroll was fed up and went to her father. “‘I understand that you’re connected with the McDonnell Douglas family,’” Carroll told him. “He laughed and said, ‘No … I wish there were, but there’s no connection.’ Well, talk about bursting my bubble.” McDonnell continued to claim even after that that she was a beneficiary, spreading the lie to their sons. 

“You would think that she really believed that lie about the McDonnell Douglas connection, since she was so invested in it,” Carroll says. “Maybe she made herself believe it.”

On the Run

After realizing it had been duped, Banc of California sued McDonnell and anyone it believed had been involved, knowingly or not, in what it called a “Ponzi-type scheme” in July 2018. The bank pointed a finger at a senior Northern Trust representative who had allegedly lied about McDonnell freezing $15 million in one of her accounts as collateral for the Banc of California loan. (The purported account belonged to a person under the name “McDonald,” who closed their account the month McDonnell approached the bank.) A notary was also accused of being a “co-conspirator” after they admitted they never saw the actual documents being signed. And the bank’s lawyers were suspicious of Barry Rothman, McDonnell’s bulldog of an attorney, but the 75-year-old died of a heart attack the day after the bank started asking more questions.

Northern Trust denied having any knowledge of McDonnell’s alleged fraud and misrepresentations, according to court documents. The senior banking official also denied in court papers having any “involvement in McDonnell’s scheme,” saying he was in the hospital during the relevant period. (Representatives for Northern Trust, Rothman’s estate, the banking official, and the notary did not reply to Rolling Stone‘s requests for comment.) 

Lawyers quickly discovered this wasn’t the first time McDonnell had pulled this kind of stunt. Another banking institution, The Credit Junction Holdings (TCJ), was also in the process of taking McDonnell to court over the exact same scheme. McDonnell had saddled up to Banc of California and funneled a portion of her new $15 million loan to keep the other bank at bay. By the time an $8.6 million payment on the defaulted TCJ loan was due, Banc of California had cut off McDonnell. “This was essentially a Ponzi scheme borrowing from one party to pay off the prior party that you defrauded,” an attorney for Banc of California would later tell a judge. “There was also a lot of highfalutin lifestyle to some extent.” 

The bank also called in the federal government, with FBI agents dispersing to Bellum’s Burbank high-rise and the bank’s offices. In December 2018, federal prosecutors unveiled a seven-count grand-jury indictment against McDonnell on charges of bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, and alerted the judge that McDonnell had fled the country. It didn’t stop McDonnell, though, from trying to broker deals and promising her creditors that payment was imminent. 

“You couldn’t trust anything that she said. If she said, ‘Hey, the sky is blue,’ I need to go outside and check that.”

Thomas Carroll

In emails to one couple who sued McDonnell over nonpayment of a $2.5 million loan, McDonnell was snippy as she blamed a time-zone difference on why her bank wires were stalled. “Lynda, your sarcasm is unhelpful,” McDonnell wrote in September 2019 as a frustrated representative for the couple made a wry joke, calling bullshit on the steady stream of obvious excuses McDonnell gave as to why no transactions were completed. 

Eccles says he received “several emails from her wanting to know if I would still either share ideas or pilot material that I had shot with her,” even though McDonnell was considered a fugitive. “She wanted to produce a show with her doctor husband, Jeff, something to do with medical tips, kind of like a Dr. Oz. By now she had multiple email addresses and was no longer going by the name Mary Carole. I just cut all ties with her and didn’t respond.”

New Beginnings?

There had been little update on McDonnell after she took off in 2018. The emails from McDonnell promising incoming bank wires and new revenue streams subsided. Lawsuits were forced into a standstill as McDonnell refused to engage. A string of judgments were made against her, but there was no way to enforce them. (Though Walker says that after taking legal action against McDonnell, she was able to recoup a majority of her $800,000 investment.) McDonnell was presumed to have kicked up her feet in paradise, living quietly off her stolen millions. Then a notice in Dubai’s court system surfaced in 2024. According to the public posting, McDonnell’s husband, Jeffrey Nilles, had lost a civil lawsuit there. 

Thilani Kumari Brady met McDonnell and Nilles through a close friend. The new-expat couple had been living out of a five-star hotel-apartment space at a Radisson hotel in Dubai. As Brady got to know McDonnell, she thought she seemed lonely. “She used to cry a lot, saying that her sons don’t speak to her and that they don’t even call her on her birthday,” Brady recalls. “When it comes to Christmas, she gets very soppy. She would lock herself in the room and didn’t want to go out.” 

Brady didn’t pry into the situation, believing it was a typical family fallout. To her, the pair seemed wealthy and were in the process of setting up some form of business in the United Arab Emirates. Brady, a real-estate business owner and entrepreneur, says the couple leaned on her as they were looking to buy an apartment. “I used to treat them like my mom and dad,” Brady says. “They wanted to see all these properties because [McDonnell] said she’s expecting something like $15 million to be transferred to her.” 

Then McDonnell and Nilles asked Brady for a favor. They had been dealing with a complicated banking situation. Moving funds around internationally could be a headache, and there was an additional workaround with their foreign visas. Could Brady withdraw the funds on their behalf if McDonnell wired her $80,000? Brady agreed, and documented each transactional withdrawal. A year later, Brady says, Nilles filed a lawsuit claiming that Brady had stolen $100,000 from them. 

The situation was baffling, and the couple seemed unremorseful, Brady says. McDonnell refused to acknowledge her afterward. Brady ultimately beat the case and was in touch with the FBI, confirming McDonnell’s whereabouts and the alleged scam. (Rolling Stone’s attempts to reach Nilles were unsuccessful.) 

“I’m 100 percent sure [she] is the one behind all of this,” Brady says. “Jeffrey is just a puppet, and [she] is the one with mind games.”  

What’s Next?

When Rice’s Dirty Money Moves podcast came out in August 2022, she received an influx of messages from Bellum freelancers and McDonnell’s old circle of friends and acquaintances, all waiting for answers on how McDonnell was able to pull off her alleged scams and if they’d ever see their money again. 

“What happens when people decide to do this? There’s no punishment,” Call says. “There’s people that lost their apartments and [this] changed their lives.”

With no immediate takers on a documentary pitch her team put together, Rice has mulled booking a one-way ticket to Dubai and showing up at the last hotel McDonnell was known to be living at to close the loop on the story herself. “I’ve been sitting on this for years and shouting it from the mountaintops, so I would really hope that it’s us that gets it done,” Rice says. “We broke this story before it was sexy.” Other directors and producers, like Call and Testa, have been toying with the idea of starting their own McDonnell projects, now with the added pressure of inquisitive reporters and other producers circling the story. 

But there’s been no obvious movement in the case in nearly a decade. When the FBI placed McDonnell on its Most Wanted list in December 2025, there was no reason provided as to why the agency renewed its search. (The FBI declined to be interviewed for this article.) 

Retired FBI agent R.W. Simpson, a financial-crime specialist who worked for the agency for 26 years, says while there is no formalized extradition treaty between the U.S. and the UAE, there is cooperation on a case-by-case basis — like the recent apprehension of former NFL star Antonio Brown, who was wanted on suspicion of attempted murder and had fled to Dubai. “They could be shaking the trees a bit with the publicity, seeing what falls out,” Simpson says of the Wanted notice. But, he adds, “my gut tells me there’s something in the works, and [they] are going to have her extradited.” (Brown has pleaded not guilty.)

There’s talk that McDonnell might have already slipped out of Dubai. She and Nilles are rumored to have fled to Switzerland or the Czech Republic, where they allegedly held investment accounts, according to sources. A second source floats that she could be in Eastern Europe. Wherever she may be, Walker is convinced McDonnell won’t ever return to the United States. “She’s not coming back and going to prison at 75 years old,” Walker says. “The only thing I thought would bring her back was the grandbabies.” 

Many are doubtful they’ll ever be made whole by McDonnell even if she faced the courts. “We are so far down on the totem pole of people that are gonna get anything,” Testa says of the Bellum workers. “It’s the banks first.” 

Manos, who left behind her apartment in Los Angeles to move to New Orleans to run the Bellum outpost, remains in Louisiana. When the company began to show signs of folding, she stayed firm and held out. After it went under, she blew through $60,000 worth of her savings when she was unable to find work in New Orleans. 

“Her selfishness was on a scale that I rarely, thank God, ever see from one person,” Manos says. “She had the control to make this go either way and she didn’t care. She could have stopped it sooner. I don’t think she’s a sociopath, but she’s close.” 

Eccles, the director and producer, goes even further: “I’ve known her for 15 years — she scammed so many people that I know and care about in the entertainment business,” he says. “She was the most devious, sinister operator I have ever encountered. She is an absolute sociopath.”