Jack of Diamonds: A colourful conman’s house of cards comes tumbling down

There are only two ways to get in or out of the office building on Toronto’s busy Finch Avenue West, a door at the front and another at the side of what was once a large two-storey house halfway between Yonge and Bathurst streets. Police lined up outside both.

Officers pried open the heavy locks and roared inside shortly after 8 a.m. on March 8, 2018.

Some hustled up a flight of stairs, startling staff, many of them international students, who sat in rows of tiny desks equipped with a telephone. Taped to cubicle walls were scripts for sales calls. One was titled: “CLOSE 1—GO FOR THROAT,” a sure sign of what’s called a boiler room, a high-pressure telephone sales centre.

On the ground floor, officers found much larger and nicer offices, with leather chairs behind large desks scattered with customer files and laptops. Safe crackers came to open vaults that dotted the offices, where diamonds and phoney valuation certificates were stored.

There was only one person in these executive suites, an early riser, tall and smartly dressed, who looked about 60 years old. He peeked out at the clamour and even after seeing 20 cops swarming in, he still looked the calmest guy in the joint.

Decorating his office was a colourful painting of a thoroughbred horse race, and a framed photo of Frank Sinatra with his Rat Pack pals outside the Sands hotel, an iconic Las Vegas casino from a bygone era. Sinatra’s photo was mounted alongside playing cards from a Sands poker deck. The only card face-up in the frame was the Ace of Diamonds. It seems a missed opportunity for it not to be the Jack, because this was the office of a real-life Jack of Diamonds.

Detective-Constable Kevin Williams, an investigator with Toronto Police Service’s financial crimes unit, introduced himself and asked the man for his name.

Jack Kronis, he replied.

On Jack’s busy desk, between his laptop and folders of sales forms, was a sticky note. It read: “Derek James.”

Jack can be forgiven for needing a handy reminder of which fake name he was using this time, a name he needed to rhyme off when on the phone schmoozing, cajoling and lying. He has gone by many names over the years while scamming victims in several countries.

Shortly after catching Jack inside the offices of the lavishly named Paragon International Wealth Management Inc., Williams asked him why he was still pulling cutthroat scams after all these years.

“This is all I really know how to do,” Williams said Jack replied.

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Jack Kronis is a polished swindler, a silver-tongued professional conman. Once a protégé of notorious fraudsters from the golden era of boiler rooms, the now 65-year-old Toronto man has spent nearly all his adult life scheming and scamming and swindling, nursing each racket for years until it sours. Then he pounces to eat his own.

When conmen peer-review colleagues they judge two things: what they take and what they give. Their take is how much money they’ve fleeced from suckers. Their give is how often they’ve been caught and punished. Jack weighs heavy on both scales, but his give is about to get much heavier.

As Jack’s first Old Age Security cheques arrive in Canada, he is preparing for a U.S. prison sentence after his conviction for duping gullible investors — this time for over-valued coloured diamonds based on impossible promises.

He’s not sure he’s ever had an honest job, police say he admitted to investigators. Yet he has lived his life in opulence with a fondness for luxury sedans, expensive watches, tennis and fine clothes; of sunny vacations and private schools for his two children.

Before the new breed of fraudsters, sustained by computer hacks, online tricks and artificial intelligence, Canadian conmen were the world’s gold standard, famed as the slickest telemarketers, salesmen without conscience. They came like locusts, stripping suckers of everything they have using their mouth as their only weapon, leaving thousands broke and broken when they moved on to a new pool of rubes to feed on.

Jack isn’t the worst of the bunch, nor the richest, but he does have a secret weapon that ensures he hardly suffers.

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“I can assure you — I will practically guarantee you — that within the week you will see the stock, one week from today, I would say anywhere from twenty cents to fifty cents higher,” Jack enthused to a client over the phone. “You have no idea how big this thing is. This thing should blow sky-high any time.”

Jack’s energy and unflagging enthusiasm was infectious. His sales call was secretly being recorded by a customer in the summer of 1989, when Jack was the young star salesman at Durham Securities Corp. Ltd.

An engineer named Robert Carducci was recording Jack’s promises, not because he was suspicious, but because Carducci’s wife was. The recordings were meant to ease her nerves. He wanted her to hear Jack’s enthusiasm and feel Jack’s confidence and believe in Jack the way he believed in Jack. Carducci, like hundreds of casual investors, put his trust in Jack. It wasn’t just Jack’s confessional tone and full-blooded confidence. The entire scheme was so cleverly concocted that Jack could prove to customers that what he was saying was true, until it was too late.

Jack was 29 when he started working for Durham in 1988. He had been selling securities for four years by then.

He had been recruited to Durham by its owners, a pair of old conmen more than twice his age: David Foster, known as “Pud”, and Alex Pancer. Foster was the owner of a racehorse named Sunny’s Halo, the Kentucky Derby winner in 1983. That made him royalty with the horsey set. Jack seemed to enjoy horseracing too, probably because people like Foster loved horseracing.

Foster and Pancer were also famous among conmen of the day, according to an old conman.

“I remember them very well. The two were partners. They ran crooked stock deals. They were very good at it,” Marvin Elkind, 89, who once worked alongside many of Toronto’s swindlers and gangsters, told me the week before he died in January. “Pud was a big stock promoter. He put on a good show that he was legit, but he sold phoney stock. Alex Pancer was a good phone man himself. He could sell all kinds of stuff over the phone, just put him on the line.

“If Jack learned from them, then he learned from the best.”

Investment dealers have a joke about what Jack was selling: they are stocks that are sold, not bought. By that they mean nobody comes looking to buy these shares; to sell them, salesmen must push and prod customers and usually lie and trick them.

Durham was almost exclusively selling shares in two resource exploration companies listed on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. These types of shares are speculative high-risk ventures, like buying lottery tickets. For investors who understand the risk they can be an attractive gamble in a portfolio, but when the whole scheme is crooked, like it was at Durham, outside investors stand no chance.

Durham started sucking up shares of Aatra Resources 34 minutes after they were issued. People at Durham were almost the only buyers until they owned 99 per cent of its two million shares. They did the same with Bayridge Development. When Jack started flogging the shares over the phone, he had a trick that turned reluctant customers into true believers and turned Jack and his bosses into crooks.

With Durham having cornered the market on the companies’ stock, their share price on the exchange reflected only buys and not sales, which Durham did under the table so that Foster and Pancer could make the price dance whenever they wanted. Jack would tell potential clients to watch the stock price, it was about to jump — and it did, just like he said — and they believed in him and in his magic, so much so they gave him money, more money, and sometimes all their money. Investors later found that, with Jack, stocks were easy to buy but nearly impossible to sell. The only time Jack made selling easy is when he told clients to sell Aatra to buy Bayridge or sell Bayridge to buy Aatra. He made money both ways.

When Jack was on the phone, it seemed a client saying “maybe” meant yes, “no” meant maybe, and nothing ever really meant no. Not even a hang up.

Jack made $470,782 in commissions at Durham in 1988, twice the average price for a house in Toronto that year, and $444,104 the next year. Jack would likely have beat that in 1990 if regulators hadn’t halted trading in the stocks in March. Jack had already made $198,902 by then.

Durham, like all boiler rooms, had a hierarchy. There were 10 “qualifiers” making cold calls from phone lists. When someone showed interest, the qualifiers passed them to an “opener”, one of 12 junior salesmen. The openers eased customers into small sales, but once a live sucker was on the line they were passed to one of two senior salesmen called “loaders,” because they slowly load a customer up with bigger sales, as much as they could until clients start yelping. Jack was the star loader at Durham. It became a $10.9-million fraud.

Scams can’t go on forever. Eventually they collapse under the weight of angry customers. Durham crashed after complaints to the Ontario Securities Commission. Foster and Pancer refused to talk to commissioners, but Jack talked. He cooperated and even testified at hearings. He pinned it on his bosses.

“They ran the show,” Jack told the commission. “I didn’t get involved at all in the mechanics of the stock.” He was, he admitted, exuberant on the phone. Jack’s cooperation bought him grace. While one commissioner wanted to permanently ban him from selling securities, two others agreed to give him another chance. They believed in Jack like his clients had. On the phone or on the stand, Jack was a gifted salesman.

The RCMP charged Jack and his bosses with fraud in 1993. Jack cooperated and pleaded guilty to four counts of stock fraud. Court heard from angry and damaged victims.

“He made me a deal that was too good to be true. I couldn’t refuse,” said realtor Frank DeSantis. To conmen, those words are pure advertising. Jack had no trouble finding new work.

Durham’s bosses also swooned over Jack’s ability to twist arms with his tongue, court heard. Jack had a “natural ability on the phone,” his lawyer, Eddie Greenspan, told the judge. Greenspan asked for leniency because Jack was supposedly broke and had suffered from the charges; he was depressed, Greenspan said, and had split from his wife.

Jack was sentenced to six months in jail and ordered to pay restitution to 180 victims. Newspaper stories described Jack as being well dressed in a dark suit, kissing family before being led away in handcuffs. They weren’t apart for long. He was released soon after to serve his sentence at home.

Greenspan had told the judge that Jack was drawn to easy money because he was desperate to maintain his family’s fine lifestyle that crumbled after his parents lost their long-time business.

“He was obsessed with economic success,” Greenspan said.

That part was true.

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Jack Kronis was born in Toronto on March 2, 1959, and grew up in the shadow of an abatement wall for Highway 401 in a pleasant bungalow on McGillivray Avenue, off Bathurst Street. From kindergarten through high school, he attended a nearby private Jewish school.

“Jackie was a ball of kindness,” an old school friend of Jack’s recalled. “He was just a nice, sweet guy. He was overweight and he was a jovial, round guy. I adored him.”

The Kronis family lived a life torn from 1970s lifestyle magazines, with his father, Davey, smoking Du Maurier on the patio as he dropped steaks on the Hibachi. Inside, Jack’s mother, Pearl, had coffee bubbling in a percolator with the large Zenith colour TV on.

It’s a curious thing about Jack. He has hard-working family roots. Where Jack is a taker, his grandfather was a giver.

Naftali Kronis, known as Nathan, was born in Ukraine and emigrated to Canada in 1911. He trained as a cabinetmaker, got a job in a piano factory, and settled in the Junction before it became part of Toronto. There he helped build a local synagogue, as well as his reputation as a charitable patriarch of the Jewish community. He lived in the same humble house near the Knesseth Israel synagogue for 60 years, until the day he died in 1972 at the age of 90. Nathan and one of his brothers married two sisters, one each, from the United States. Nathan and his wife, Sima, had five sons. The youngest were twins, named Max and David. David, known as Davey, went on to marry Pearl Kornbloom, and the couple had two sons of their own.

They named their youngest Jack.

Jack’s family’s money came from his mother’s side. Pearl Kornblum’s clan had a small bed and mattress store on Beverley Street in downtown Toronto. Over decades, Beverley Bedding & Upholstery Co. grew into a thriving bed frame and mattress maker. It became a grand enough brand to be splashed in newspaper ads for big furniture chains. Beverley Bedding then passed to the next generation of Kornblums, including Pearl, who was named executive secretary while her brothers took the higher corporate titles. Pearl’s husband, Davey, eventually became a vice-president. It made them rich.

Young Jack loved the business. He was so proud of the company and the money it brought in that he took his school class for a tour of its manufacturing plant. Whatever Jack felt when showing off his family’s wealth — girls noticing him, boys sidling up to him — it seemed to reach deep inside him, grab hold of something, and never let go.

Although the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto was a 10-minute amble from his home, as soon as Jack had his driver’s license he started driving his dad’s Cadillac convertible to school.

“When he rolled that top down and drove the girls from school to the McDonald’s on Avenue Road he was in heaven,” said an old classmate of Jack’s. “That was the end of Jack as I knew him. Once girls and money came into focus, he appreciated what money was and what it could give him.”

Jack lost weight and began dressing elegantly. Still only a teenager, he shopped at high-end boutiques in Yorkville. He started playing tennis. He seemed to love the fashion of it as much as the sport. His family took regular winter vacations with Jack returning tanned, and he spent summers at lakeshore camps.

When Jack hit six-feet tall, with his hair wavy and thick and dressed in designer outfits, he looked like a million bucks. Which wasn’t nearly enough.

In the 1970s, after rapid expansion, the family’s bed company started failing, and in 1976, when Jack was 17, Davey Kronis and three Kornblum brothers-in-law jointly announced bankruptcy proceedings. Schoolmates who knew what the company meant to Jack consoled him in hushed tones, like there had been a death in the family.

Jack had a beautiful girlfriend from a rich family. Her parents ignited in him an interest in the stock market and Jack started talking about stocks with baffled classmates. His relationship with the girl crashed when, according to a friend of the family’s, Jack was blamed for missing bottles of top-shelf liquor from the girl’s house. Jack lost the dream girl but held onto dreams of stock market millions.

After high school, in 1978, Jack enrolled at York University and started taking stock market courses. He met his future first wife on campus, a woman a year behind him.

The same year that Jack graduated with a BA from York, in 1982, he started selling stock as a junior salesman, and when he joined Durham Securities a few years later, he was back enjoying the visible signs of the high life: Cuban cigars, designer clothes and a jet-black Mercedes-Benz sedan with a personalized plate.

Once back on top, Jack announced his engagement to his long-time sweetheart, Monique, in newspaper ads in 1988. Always a marketer, Jack topped his ads with a headline: “AT LAST!”

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Throughout the summer of 1994, Toronto property manager Terry Parnell had tried just about everything to get a tenant to pay his rent for a business suite inside the Madison Centre, 24 towering floors of dark glass and silver on Yonge Street, north of Sheppard. He had sent demands and final demands, and even stuck a lease default notice on the door.

In September, Parnell went in to change the locks.

It was a shame because the tenant had even named their business after the tower, First Madison International. While Parnell was securing the suite, he noticed investment materials for a different company and stacks of paper filled with names and phone numbers. It looked dubious to him, so he phoned police. Answering Parnell’s call was Toronto Police Detective Tony Slot. Slot listened to what Parnell told him and it seemed suspicious to him as well. Together they went in for a peek.

Inside, Slot saw evidence of a company called Eurocan Metals being used for fraudulent telemarketing. Slot left, applied for a search warrant, and returned to the Madison Centre with more cops who seized sales data, customer cards and telephone scripts flogging things he had never heard of, called indium and germanium.

As Slot’s fraud investigation progressed, his list of suspects ran into the dozens. It wasn’t long before he added the name Jack Kronis to his list. Jack had been hitting the phones hard at Eurocan since early 1990, within a few months of his last stock sales at Durham.

Jack was so far ahead of authorities that by the time he was charged for his Durham fraud in 1993, he was already three years into pulling the Eurocan scam. The mechanics of the two cons are similar but instead of flogging stocks of little value, this boiler room sold obscure industrial metals of little value.

To hear Jack on the phone, though, it sounded like indium and germanium secretly made the world go round. Jack pressed customers to buy the metals at grossly inflated prices — as if they were gold or silver — based on lies of hush-hush technological breakthroughs and a government drive to stockpile them. He made these metals seem scarce and in high demand. Even a rube knows that makes something valuable.

While the metals were worth as little as $7 an ounce, the unfortunate folks answering a call from Jack paid up to $85 an ounce. This was, of course, before customers could just Google commodity prices.

Once Jack and his pals snagged a victim, they tried everything to keep them in their grinder, always upselling and pushing them to swap their indium for germanium or their germanium for indium, for additional fees, all to boost a promised payoff that would never come.

Jack set up a company to discreetly move his money. He called it Monikron, a portmanteau of his first wife’s married name: Monique Kronis. Maybe she was flattered, for a spell at least.

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By the time the lease lapsed on the swindlers’ Toronto office, the Eurocan scam was already winding down. At least one lawsuit, by a couple in Los Angeles County, had been filed against Jack, claiming investment fraud.

The summer before, Eurocan clients received a letter saying new managers had taken over and were finally ready to pay out investments. When clients frantically called the new team, they were transferred to a company in Nassau, Bahamas, called The Sandstone Group. Sandstone told clients their cash was ready to disburse, they just needed to pre-pay shipping, duty and legal fees.

It turned out not to be a lifeline for desperate customers but a last chance by fraudsters to mop up any remaining capital. They weren’t new managers at all; Sandstone was run by Jack and a few others, including a Canadian conman named Walter Fantin.

Jack and Fantin then scampered away.

If they had cleared out their offices or kept up on the rent, they might have got away clean. As it was, Toronto police had gathered a mountain of incriminating paperwork and were talking about it with the FBI. Jack and his crew had hired a mail forwarding service with a Wall Street address in New York City to make their metals company look like a swank American firm. They also used a warehouse in Buffalo to store and send out samples of indium and germanium as part of their hustle. Add in the long list of American victims and the scam became an attractive target for the U.S. Department of Justice.

The FBI figured the Eurocan fraudsters had bilked more than $10 million from U.S. investors, and Canadian authorities happily handed over the evidence from Slot’s search of Eurocan’s office. The FBI quietly grabbed low hanging fruit in the fraud, including Amran Cohen, whose name was on the office lease, and Jack’s pal, Irv Bielas, and Jack himself. Each proved to be a weak link in the criminal fraternity. All of them rolled over.

Cohen was the first to quietly appear in Buffalo court. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud in October 1996. Bielas was next. He avoided prison for the same crime by paying $100,000 in restitution. He gave the government $50,000 on the spot and $10,000 each year for the five years of his probation.

Then it was Jack’s turn. Everything was arranged before he walked into the Buffalo courtroom on Sept. 30, 1997. A plea agreement was presented to the judge, and Jack immediately pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud. He was released three days later, free to return to Toronto pending his sentencing.

Nobody said a word about any of this until Jan. 13, 1998, when a large indictment was unsealed in the United States, accusing 24 other men of a fraud conspiracy.

As with Durham Securities, Jack wasn’t the mastermind. He was pegged as a senior salesman. Authorities named Walter Fantin, another of Jack’s mentors, as a kingpin, making Fantin the case’s marquee name.

Walter Fantin had been running boiler rooms in Europe for decades, and had worked with David Winchell, a white-collar crook who made scandalous headlines in the 1980s, and Guy LaMarche, a crooked stock promoter who was shot dead in 1987 in the lobby of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel during a mining convention.

Police had uncovered a network of European boiler rooms believed to be Fantin’s after an Englishman was arrested in Sweden with a suitcase stuffed with US$250,000. Fantin walked into a Swiss boiler room in the summer of 1988 to find police searching it. He chatted with officers for a bit and then excused himself, saying he would be right back. He went straight to the airport.

Fantin returned to Canada to cook up the metals scam with Jack and the others and later — just as the U.S. indictment for their Eurocan fraud was unsealed — Fantin flew back to Europe. He was finally arrested in Spain in 1998 and unsuccessfully fought extradition to the United States. By the time Fantin was in custody in Buffalo, the deck was stacked against him.

The Jack of Diamonds was the government’s trump card. Just as Jack had betrayed Foster and Pancer at Durham, the protégé repaid a mentor by ratting him out. With Jack prepared to testify against Fantin and others, lawyers fought to suppress evidence from snitches at their trial. After they lost, Fantin pleaded guilty in 2001 to defrauding U.S. investors and was sentenced to five years, the longest sentence in the case.

Even by then, Jack hadn’t been sentenced. He kept pushing it back while living free in Toronto.

It wasn’t until Aug. 11, 2003, that a secret document was handed to a federal judge in Buffalo and Jack was finally sentenced for the metals scam. Almost a decade after the property manager’s tip to police, Jack was sent to prison for about 10 months, with a restitution order against him, jointly with co-conspirators, of $3,966,177.

Jack had a new alias: Inmate 09167-055.

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An unusual demand from a 23-year-old Dutch woman to withdraw more than half a million Dutch guilders caused a stir inside a bank in Brussels, Belgium’s capital, on Dec. 5, 1994. A bank manager looked at the account’s records and saw the money, worth about $400,000, had recently arrived in Canadian currency through many deposits from several countries. Rather than turn the cash over to Michèle Van Aerde, the manager apologized to her for the wait and called police.

Investigators found she had already withdrawn more than 10 million guilders from other banks in Belgium.

Van Aerde was the secretary of a company called Grimaldi Hofmann & Co., an investment firm that feigned royal pedigree by using the maternal family name of Prince Rainier III, the glamorous ruler of Monaco. When buttering up potential clients, its salesmen falsely claimed the celebrity prince was chairman of their board. What Van Aerde told investigators about Grimaldi Hofmann concerned them enough to freeze the company’s accounts and alert financial regulators and police in other countries.

Belgium’s federal police had uncovered a thumping international telemarketing fraud. Registered in Bahamas two years earlier with a business address in Spain, Grimaldi Hofmann’s nerve centre was on Rotterdam’s Westewagenstraat, one of the oldest streets in the Netherlands’ second largest city. Everything about it was designed to give fraudsters a respectable veneer while they ransacked clients by convincing them to send money for shares in a couple of dormant Canadian companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

Clients who invested with Grimaldi Hofmann were told to send their money in Canadian currency; that made it look like they really were buying shares through a Canadian stock exchange, but it was a charade because shares were rarely bought with the money. Instead, cash was transferred to accounts in other countries or withdrawn to pay Grimaldi Hofmann’s salesmen, which was what Van Aerde was doing when she was pinched.

“A lot of guys from Canada went over to work in Holland because they didn’t have a stock market commission for a long time,” Elkind told me. “They could pretty much do what they wanted there.”

One of those salesmen was Jack.

It was a hectic time for him. His schemes and scams in three countries were overlapping. The same month in the summer of 1993 that Jack sent letters to his victims for one last kick at the Eurocan, he was charged for his Durham fraud, and before the year ended Jack had flown to Holland to join Grimaldi Hofmann for a piece of the world’s hottest telemarketing swindle.

In Holland, Jack drew on all the tongue twisting he learned from his mentors at Durham and Eurocan. No longer a qualifier, or an opener, or even a loader, here he was management.

He introduced himself to unfortunate customers as Jack Lewis, Grimaldi Hofmann’s vice-president of international trade.

Grimaldi Hofmann’s racket was like the Durham fraud but jacked up in sophistication. It didn’t target rubes who hadn’t invested before. It positioned itself as upmarket and targeted investors who had some knowledge and a lot more money.

The come-on usually started with a phone call and a newsletter. The Grimaldi Hofmann Papers passed itself off as a legit investing tip sheet mailed to people who answered the phone or responded to ads in magazines and newspapers. Somehow, the swindlers got themselves a glowing plug in the Times, a major daily newspaper in Britain. “Grimaldi Hofmann is rapidly becoming recognized as one of Europe’s emerging investment banks with a reputation for prudent conservative investments,” an article said in 1994. That sort of mainstream imprimatur is one of the greatest gifts for a conman. It wouldn’t be the last time one of Jack’s swindles got a big plug from mainstream media.

Jack was amassing a fortune in Europe, with a brief interruption. While he worked the phones, in March 1994, his father died from his family’s curse: cancer. Cancer would later also claim his mother, and his brother, Kenneth.

After Van Aerde was stopped at the bank, Dutch police raided Grimaldi Hofmann’s offices in Rotterdam and Amsterdam at the request of Belgian authorities. Arrests were made in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and Peru. Investigators said that over two years the conmen snagged $250 million from at least 1,227 victims. Jack was blamed for duping at least 160 victims. One entrusted him with $3 million.

Jack almost escaped the dragnet. He was caught at Schiphol, Netherlands’ main airport. Once again, Jack conceded quickly and started blabbing. He returned to Canada pending trial on $35,000 bail with the condition he return when investigators needed him. He flew back to Belgium for about 40 hours of interviews, including a full confession.

“We found Jack has been co-operative with us in our investigation,” Marc Holsteyn, an inspector with Belgian federal police, told the Toronto Star at the time. “He played the game, knew he lost, and took responsibility.”

After Jack was convicted in the Belgium fraud case in late 2000, along with a dozen Grimaldi Hofmann workers, including Van Aerde and its mastermind, Sheridan Cox, he was given a shock seven-year sentence, but that didn’t hold. While Jack was free in Canada, an appeal cut his sentence to two years, in 2003. It’s uncertain if he returned to Belgium for jail.

Jack told Belgian prosecutors he couldn’t pay restitution because he lost his money gambling, but authorities caught some cash moving from accounts in Luxembourg to a bank in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where $540,000 was discovered. The account was frozen while Belgian authorities tried to seize it.

Fraudsters — if they’re caught — often get light sentences because their crimes are seen as nonviolent, but the damage they cause is significant. One Grimaldi Hofmann investor in Britain, Michael Mayer-Diamond, told reporters, “If someone had given me a gun at that time, I would have blown my brains out.”

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On May 3, 2017, Erickson Donis, an engineer with a large oil company, answered his phone in a suburb of Houston, Texas. On the other end was a friendly sounding man introducing himself as a trader with Paragon International Wealth Management Inc.

It was a dangerous call to answer.

Donis listened as the salesman told him of Paragon’s special access to pink diamonds from the Argyle mine in Australia, once the world’s largest diamond producer. The mine was almost depleted and when its closure is announced the value of pink diamonds will go “through the roof,” Donis said he was told that day.

Donis asked for more information and was emailed a proposal. That night, he read Paragon’s web site boasting of 75 years of experience in the field and a remarkable track record, with pink diamonds increasing by 1,000 per cent over 12 years. When Paragon called the next day, Donis was ready to buy. He started small, a tiny pink diamond for US$795. Four days later a sparkling chip of pink arrived at his home with an authenticity certificate, a glossy brochure and a letter from Michael King, Paragon’s director of trading.

Once Donis was pulled into the water, Paragon’s swindlers were like circling sharks, each taking ever bigger bites out of him. Donis would later sue Paragon, detailing allegations of his many transactions.

A month after his first purchase, a different man from Paragon called, introducing himself as John Carson, Donis said in his claim. He told Donis his tiny gem was now worth US$1,926 — imagine what he could make if he owned more. Donis bought another four, including a one-carat stone. That one alone cost him US$21,400, he said.

Another call came a few months later from a man introducing himself as Derek James, Paragon’s inventory and auction coordinator, Donis said. Derek James was the fake name Jack Kronis used at Paragon.

Donis was told the value of pink diamonds was about to jump and was offered a chance to squeeze another carat into his portfolio before that happened. Donis bought another full carat stone for US$27,500, he said. For a year, Donis flopped from exhilaration to frustration as he was told his diamonds were surging in value, but finding it impossible to receive any of the purported gains.

Whenever Donis raised the idea of selling, an opportunity arose that made buying more diamonds seem the smarter option: There was a wealthy buyer in Asia snapping up coloured diamonds at premium prices; the price was about to jump; there was a major diamond auction on the horizon. But each time he was told he needed to buy more or bigger diamonds to qualify, he said.

After hearing the supposed sale to the Asian collector fell through, Donis said he wanted to cash out on all his gems. According to Donis, Jack told him to send back the few stones Donis had been sent, and Paragon would sell them all. Donis shipped them to Toronto by FedEx. Paragon now had all his diamonds as well as the US$99,169 Donis spent to buy them.

Jack then called again. He told Donis he had a way for him to “cash out quicker,” Donis said. Jack would swap all his lesser diamonds for a nice set of green diamonds that Paragon would set in jewelry for an auction in December 2017. Donis agreed and was soon told his new jewelry was valued at $1,071,450.

The ruse delayed Donis’ push to cash out and by the time he found out his jewelry again hadn’t been sold, Paragon’s offices were closed for Christmas. In January 2018, Donis demanded that Paragon send all his diamonds to his home in Texas. He said he received a cunning reply: The jewelry didn’t have authentication certificates, making them hard for Donis to sell; he should hold on for the next auction. After that, Donis could no longer reach Jack.

Donis received an email from Paragon in March 2018 saying the company had suffered a “complete IT meltdown.”

What really happened was Toronto police raided Paragon’s boiler room shutting the company down.

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Behind an automatically locking door on the third floor of the sprawling Toronto Police Service’s headquarters is a large space for what was once called the fraud squad. It is now named the not-as-fun-to-say Financial Crimes-Mass Marketing Section.

Clusters of police investigators dot the office, some beside wallboards covered with photos and documents mapping swindles they’re trying to untangle.

Detective-Constable Kevin Williams has a desk with a view here, looking down Bay Street to the Financial District. His desk is bunkered on one side by stacks of stuffed banker’s boxes that mirror the lines of the bank towers behind him.

Shortly after Williams was deployed to the fraud squad in 2014, one of the first cases he was assigned was a diamond investment swindle. Complaints were coming in of gems sold over the phone by a company called Royal Fine Jewels. One customer said he lost a million dollars. In 2017, Williams made three arrests in that case, and two men pleaded guilty to fraud. One of them was a Richmond Hill man named Edward Rosenberg.

“We put a press release out in relation to that and we started getting calls — not about Royal Fine Jewels, but a similar company called Paragon International,” Williams told me. “Our complainants were telling us, look, these guys are doing the same thing that Royal Fine Jewels was doing. We started taking a hard look at them.”

Paragon had a façade of legitimacy. They issued press releases through publicity services that sometimes made their way onto online news sites. Many of the releases were about international jewel auctions and gem sales that a careful reading reveals had nothing to do with Paragon. Its salesmen told clients their office was in a tower at 5000 Yonge Street, just one block north of where Jack’s office had been when pulling the metals scam, but Williams learned it was merely a virtual address. He traced their real workspace to Finch Avenue West.

“We realized they were operating a boiler room out of that address,” Williams said. Meanwhile, victims kept telling him sad stories.

“The majority of the victims were seniors, and a majority were investing large portions of their retirement. It was heartbreaking to hear some of their stories. (The salesmen) always had a story to keep these people on the Ferris wheel, But there were no auctions being held. A lot of the diamonds they were purporting to have and sell to people were extremely overinflated — and in some cases they never existed at all.”

Although Williams started chasing Paragon in 2017, the company was started four years earlier by two Toronto men, James Gagliardini and Michael Shumak.

A large, fancy sign was erected outside a Finch Avenue office, featuring Paragon’s grandiose red logo of a lion’s head overtop an arrow soaring upwards. They took the sign down soon after they started selling. They didn’t really want people knowing where they were.

Before Paragon opened its doors, some of its salesmen had been pulling the same gem score under different company names. In 2012, Jack was selling gems for one of the most notorious crooked investment peddlers, Irving Dobrutsky. If Jack had anything left to learn about ripping people off, Dobrutsky was one of the few still alive to teach him.

“He was the Godfather of these types of schemes,” Toronto lawyer Trung Nguyen said of Dobrutsky. Nguyen represented clients who lost almost everything to Dobrutsky. “He was a master of pitching a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire a rare and valuable item for a fraction of its real value. Of course, the item had little to no real value.” Jewel sales became a family affair. Dobrutsky’s clan was so enamoured by the trade one of them named their child after a gemstone and announced their birthweight in carats and points, the way diamonds are appraised.

When I confronted Dobrutsky in 2008 about his many victims, he showed no sympathy: “Are these people idiots? They keep sending money,” he told me with an exaggerated look of bewilderment.

Jack met Gagliardini through Dobrutsky when they worked at one of Dobrutsky’s companies, called Devonshire Diamonds. Gagliardini, 20 years Jack’s junior, was learning the ropes while helping his wife’s mother, Cheryle Bidner, who was the last of Dobrutsky’s six wives before he died in 2012. Bidner wasn’t charged for her role in the business.

Gagliardini uploaded a photo of a coloured gem to his Facebook page on Nov. 1, 2011, declaring: “I’m in the diamond business now! Coloured diamonds!” By then, Devonshire and some of its salesmen had already been named on the Ripoff Report, a public message board for fraud complaints. When someone posted an anonymous review attacking Devonshire, it was Gagliardini who launched a civil suit in Arizona seeking to unmask its author. One complainant warned that Jack was selling diamonds worth $5,000 for almost $100,000. At least six published complaints said Jack was a crooked salesman there.

Jack’s alias at Devonshire, his thinnest ever, was Jack Kay, complainants said.

Company names didn’t stick around long once victims started complaining, and between Devonshire’s and Paragon’s boiler rooms came a related company, called Capital Coloured Diamonds.

At the end of 2012, Gagliardini hit the mother lode in his campaign to be seen as a diamond investment expert when he appeared as a guest on CBC’s flagship business show, The Lang & O’Leary Exchange.

“The entire studio is sparkling,” said CBC host Danielle Bochove, beaming almost as brightly beside Kevin O’Leary, the famed investor from the Dragons’ Den and Shark Tank television series. Gagliardini, using his real name, was introduced as director of Capital Coloured Diamonds. In a grey suit with purple shirt and tie and a matching pocket square, he sat next to his mother-in-law, who was introduced as Capital’s CEO. Bidner held out her hand adorned with a ring fixed with a large stone. She told the hosts this million-dollar diamond had spiked in value 60 per cent that year.

“The return on coloured diamonds is much higher than any other investment that you can possibly do today — stocks, bonds, real estate,” she said. O’Leary asked Gagliardini about sales fees. “A lot of these jewelry pieces go into auction and a buyer’s premium is added on to the reserve bid. If you’re selling a stone privately to one of our — we have over 3,000 clients — then we would take a four per cent commission against the sale of your stone,” Gagliardini replied.

The more complaints appeared online, the more Capital Coloured Diamonds trumpeted their CBC appearance, issuing press releases about it months after it aired and sharing screenshots from the show.

If customers had a hard time figuring out what Gagliardini was all about, it would be no wonder. His website says he is “a famous investor and businessman” and a “renowned dealer in precious stones,” while another one claims he is “a famous sportsman.” A third promotes Gagliardini’s home renovation services. But then, no customer of Paragon would be searching for information on James Gagliardini, because to them he was John Moore, director of marketing, which became his nom de guerre.

Just as Paragon International Wealth Management sounds like a real and reliable investment firm, its salesmen adopted distinctly Anglo-establishment-sounding names. While Gagliardini was masquerading as John Moore, Michael Shumak was pretending to be Michael King; Antonio Palazzolo called himself John Carson and Edward Rosenberg allegedly went with the shortened Ed Rose.

When Gagliardini and Shumak started Paragon, they didn’t bring Jack with them, but Jack’s luxurious living continued, despite no evidence of up-and-up employment.

Jack and his second wife had two children by then. Their kids share the same birthday, five years apart — one before Jack went to prison in the United States for his metals scam and one afterwards. His second child’s birth announcement was topped with a salesman’s headline: “Two on the exact same day!!!” Both kids went to an expensive private school in Toronto and Jack and Jennifer Kronis were regular donors to the school’s annual fundraising campaigns.

Jack’s resources were running thin, though, and he was looking for new employment in 2014, he later told Williams. Jack asked a diamond wholesaler in Toronto if he knew of anyone needing an experienced salesman. The dealer seemed to know exactly what kind of salesman Jack was and the kind of outfit he was looking for. He sent Jack to Paragon. Jack called up Shumak, he later told Williams, who said their operation was small and didn’t have room for anyone else. Jack became “more and more desperate,” and he called again a few months later. This time, Jack was welcomed in.

He was at Paragon within the week, on the phone doing what he does best.

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The landline at an Idaho home rang in September 2016 and Jack was soon spinning the farmer who answered it with a dizzying offer to make him rich. Keith, who, like some other victims, didn’t want their real name known publicly, was already a Paragon customer. He’d answered his first call seven months earlier when a man introduced himself as John Moore, who was really Gagliardini, and convinced Keith to put US$2,090 on a credit card for a small pink diamond.

A month later Shumak called Keith, masquerading as Michael King. He told Keith lies about a wealthy buyer in Asia, convincing him to upgrade his pink stone to several yellow ones. Keith put another US$5,100 on his credit card and sent US$27,000 by wire transfer.

It was Jack’s turn next.

Jack convinced Keith that diamonds would attract impressive bids at an upcoming auction if they were green and set in dazzling jewelry. Keith sent him US$50,000 by wire transfer and a US$17,080 bank transfer. Fifteen months after first answering the phone, Keith was still sending money to Paragon, chasing an increasingly desperate dream of making some return.

Antonio Ancona, an engineer in Annapolis, Maryland, bought several coloured diamonds from Paragon over two years, starting in 2015. He was so convinced by their promises that whenever Paragon called, he often ate up what they offered. Paragon held onto most of his diamonds for safekeeping until they were ready to be resold, he said he was told. He would later sue Paragon, alleging a roller coaster of transactions.

In 2017, Ancona said he was pitched something far bigger, a gem collection: a Ruby necklace, a 5.21-carat white diamond set in 18-carat white gold, and a white diamond custom pendant and necklace. He was told a wealthy Canadian woman had reneged on a contract to buy the jewelry and, even though it was valued at more than $3 million, Paragon would sell it to him for $578,836.51. He was urged to do whatever it took to close this deal and he did; Ancona sold stock options, emptied a bank account and put the remaining $270,000 on credit cards, he said.

The jewelry arrived at his home in an armoured Brink’s truck, the final bit of theatre convincing him he now owned gems worth millions.

After that, he had trouble getting answers from Paragon about selling his jewels. Growing anxious, he had an independent appraisal of the jewel collection that Brink’s delivered. A gemologists said it was little more than costume jewelry. Ancona claimed Paragon’s sales were fraudulent and complained to Toronto police and to the FBI.

Another victim, Daniel, was passed around Paragon’s conmen for three years as they slowly drained him of US$218,436.

Jack took bites out of Daniel at least twice in 2016, including talking him into upgrading his gems to green diamonds and having them set in jewelry for an auction that never happened. Paragon mailed Daniel an appraisal certificate from a company called Saxon-Krüss saying his imaginary jewelry was worth more than two million dollars.

For a time, Daniel would feel like a king, before realizing the certificate was as trustworthy as a promise from Jack. He too called police.

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Jack was his showy self on March 8, 2018, when he backed his bone white Bentley Flying Spur sedan into a reserved parking spot at Paragon’s office. That’s a regal ride anywhere but especially on a grey day in north Toronto that was promising a late-winter flurry.

It wasn’t yet 8 a.m. and Jack was the first of Paragon’s bigwigs to arrive that Thursday, but the upstairs boiler room was already buzzing with cold callers who had arrived by city bus and were checking time zone maps taped up in their cubicles before dialing.

Jack settled into his office on the ground floor.

Downtown, at police headquarters, the fraud squad office was empty. The entire section had discreetly joined Williams near the Paragon office. A surveillance team was watching Paragon from cars parked down the road, waiting for signs someone from management was on site before launching their raid. Nothing says management quite like a Bentley in the premier parking space.

Officers then moved in and forced their way into Paragon.

Strung up on an off-white wall on the ground floor was a row of colourful novelty letters spelling Happy Birthday. Taped on the office door next to the sign was a Mickey Mouse balloon with more birthday wishes.

Through this door is where Williams first met Jack.

“He was in his office and didn’t look overly worried,” Williams said. “He was cool as a cucumber.” After introductions, Williams recalls he asked Jack if this was his office and Jack said yes. A black telephone was in comfortable reach on the left of his desk, a paper shredder on the floor behind. On the right, beside hand lotion and relaxation aroma therapies, was paperwork tucked into a dozen file folders, one filled with sales orders labelled “FRESH BLOW OFF”. Jack once bragged to a client that he kept “meticulous notes” to help him remember details of his calls.

Williams then noticed the “Derek James” sticker on the desk, and he asked Jack why it was for a different name. Jack didn’t answer, Williams said. Below the name tag, which was stuck on the top of a desk calendar, there was a big red star drawn on March 2, which was Jack’s birthday. He had turned 59 the week before.

“I told him to get a lawyer, I’ll give you an opportunity to give your side of the story,” Williams said. Jack watched for a bit and then left.

Gagliardini and Shumak had the biggest offices. Gagliardini’s had Metallica and Blue Jays memorabilia. A sign on the desk said: “Keep Calm, Wolf On.” Shumak’s office was chaotic. Several guitars hung on a wall, a sign of his past playing with a band in Los Angeles. Police had a shock when they found what looked like two handguns. They turned out to be BB guns. Paper targets tattered with holes say Shumak often shot them around the office.

In the administration offices and storerooms were heavy duty vaults, office supplies and boxes of business cards with fake names, Derek James cards among them. Address labels had recently been printed, presumably for customers, destined for Texas, California, Colorado, New Brunswick, Utah, Illinois, Minnesota, Florida, Arizona, Ohio.

Gagliardini arrived at Paragon an hour or so into the search. He stayed, pacing and watching, until all the cops left. Williams was amazed to find that one of the alleged Paragon salesmen was Edward Rosenberg, the man he had arrested in the Royal Fine Jewels case that first sent police chasing Paragon.

Not long after, Williams answered a call from a lawyer. Jack wanted to talk.

“He wanted immunity here in Canada and also wanted immunity in the United States, but obviously we can’t provide that part,” Williams said.

Jack sure can sell. And when the product is his freedom, he can spin a good yarn. Jack and his lawyer sat across from Williams and his partner, Detective-Constable Valerie Dahan, at police headquarters for lengthy interviews. “He’s a professional conman, right, so he’s got the gift of the gab and good at swindling out of situations,” said Williams. “I attest his longevity to that, because when I sat down and spoke with him, there were times where he was very convincing and if I didn’t know what I knew from the investigation and the whole background about it, there is a chance that you could get hooked on some of the things that he says.

“He basically said (the old conmen) taught him how to schmooze and how to talk to people, and if you were good enough, you could essentially get as much money as you wanted out of people and not really have to sell them anything. I’m convinced he’d be able to sell snow to a snowman. He said diamonds are just one product — ‘You can give me anything and I can pitch it as an investment to somebody’ is what he told me. ‘If you’re convincing enough, you can get people to invest in anything.’”

They hammered out a deal. Jack would tell police all about the Paragon operation and be the star witness at a trial in Ontario in return for Jack only being a witness there, not a defendant.

“It was to save his own skin. I can tell you this, there was no loyalty, he was willing to sell them all out at the drop of a dime.”

At the end of May 2018, Toronto police contacted five men from Paragon and told them to get a lawyer and turn themselves in to be charged with eight counts of fraud over $5,000. Jack was not one of them. Police named the accused as James Gagliardini, who was 40 at the time, Michael Shumak, 48, Antonio Palazzolo, 60, who is also known as Anthony, Edward Rosenberg, 53, and a 72-year-old man against whom charges were dropped.

Williams prepared for a trial and was urging Crown prosecutors to play a clip from the movie The Wolf of Wall Street to the jury. It’s a memorable scene: Matthew McConaughey’s character, a crooked Wall Street broker, mentors a young stock salesman played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the science of unchecked avarice.

“Fuck the clients. Your only responsibility is to put meat on the table,” McConaughey’s character schools DiCaprio’s character. “Name of the game, move the money from your client’s pocket into your pocket.

“If you got a client who bought stock at eight and it now sits at 16, he’s all fuckin’ happy, he wants to cash in, liquidate, take his fuckin’ money and run home. You don’t let him do that because that would make it real. What do you do? You get another brilliant idea. A special idea. Another situation. Another stock to reinvest his earnings — and then some. And he will, every single time, because they’re fuckin’ addicted. And you just keep doing this, again and again and again.”

Williams said that scene describes what the pack of Paragon peddlers were doing but it was never played for a judge or jury.

As the case crawled through Ontario courts, with the accused all free on bail, victims of Paragon kept calling, including American victims complaining to the FBI. When the FBI contacted Toronto police about Paragon, it turned out there were far more victims in the United States than in Canada and the value of their losses was much higher, so the case was handed to the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Americans didn’t need Jack as a witness. They didn’t need anything at all from Jack. Federal charges in the United States overwhelmingly end in guilty pleas without even going to trial, about 90 per cent of them. Four years after the Toronto police raid on Paragon’s office, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio in Cleveland indicted Gagliardini, Shumak, Palazzolo, and Jack for wire fraud.

The deal that Jack closed with Toronto police stank. Instead of facing charges and a trial in Canada, one by one, in July 2022, the accused men made their way across the border and surrendered.

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Four Paragon men agreed to plead guilty, Jack included. Rosenberg was named in indictments as Paragon salesman Ed Rose, but he was not charged in the United States. The plea hearings for the others, for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, rolled out in Cleveland in September 2022. Palazzolo was first in line.

“I’m here trying to make amends for what happened, and I’m trying to cooperate in every possible way that I can,” Palazzolo told the judge. He knows of Jack’s cooperation with Toronto police and seems to resent him for it. “I make no comments on Jack Kronis anymore,” he blurted in court without even being asked. All those indicted in Cleveland admitted to their aliases and their Paragon conduct in their plea agreements.

At Gagliardini’s plea, he admitted Paragon’s diamond scheme was a fraud and that he was in on it, but denied he was a leader or organizer of it. That issue was set aside to argue at his sentencing.

At 10 a.m. on Sept. 15, 2022, a plea hearing for Jack was called to order and it ended less than an hour later. It was clinical. Everyone knew what was going to happen and everyone, from Jack to the judge, let the script unfold. It was fortuitous for Jack his case came during COVID. He had been allowed to remain free in Canada on a $20,000 bond and didn’t even have to travel back to Cleveland for court. He appeared by video from his home in Toronto, with several of his victims listening in by phone.

Calm and polite, Jack told United States Magistrate Judge Amanda Knapp he has been unemployed since March 2018, the date of the Toronto police raid.

“I’m just looking for the kind of work, what kind of profession you had,” Knapp said.

“It was sales. Telephone sales,” Jack answered.

“Can you please tell me, in your own words, what you believe the purpose of this proceeding is?” the judge asked Jack.

“Pleading guilty to my involvement in a crime.”

Prosecutor Brad Beeson told court Jack’s conviction for conspiracy to commit wire fraud had a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison with a maximum fine of $250,000, on top of any restitution the judge might order.

“The object of the conspiracy that the defendant was involved in was to enrich themselves by persuading customers to invest in coloured diamonds and jewelry through the use of false and misleading information,” Beeson said. The loss by victims to Jack was said to be between US$1.53 million and US$3.5 million. Beeson then detailed some of Jack’s pitches and transactions.

“Has Mr. Beeson accurately described what took place,” the judge eventually asked Jack.

“Yes, Your Honor,” he answered.

“How do you plead?”

“Guilty, Your Honor.”

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The telephone has made Jack millions over more than 40 years, but he didn’t sound comfortable on the other end when I called him recently.

“How did you get my phone number?” he asked. Still, he remained cordial, although cool, when I asked him to talk about his time at Paragon and life as a conman.

“I’m very uncomfortable discussing it, to be honest with you,” he said.

“You’ve been through this before,” I said.

“Unfortunately, I have. I’d rather not have that rehashed, to be honest with you,” he said. “I will give it some thought and perhaps I’ll check with some legal people to see what their viewpoint is.”

I’ve not heard back.

As a serial swindler, Jack Kronis bought himself the life he craved since childhood, adorning himself and his family with unmissable markers of earthly success. That he is as ruthless towards colleagues as he was with his victims became clear. Jack is a serial snitch as well.

From his first known legal beef at Durham Securities in the 1980s, through his Eurocan and Grimaldi Hofmann frauds in the 1990s, to his diamond duplicity in the 2000s, Jack played the same hand: When authorities start sniffing, quickly surrender. Talk, tattle, sell a deal.

As a strategy, it’s served him well. It insulated him from more serious repercussions, and often kept his name out of the public’s eye, muting the spurn and strictures that the source of his cruel booty might bring. Unlucky for Jack’s colleagues, investment frauds require several people to be in on the plot, and salesmen with Jack’s talent and temperament can be hard to find. Lucky for Jack, those he finked on are generally like him: confidence men not muscle men. Still, it seems odd that his fellow swindlers didn’t pick up on Jack’s poisonous nature. He is a great salesman, yes, but he is also a treacherous man to have around. Jack used the same closer on workmates as he did in his sales: Go for the throat.

The outcome for him this time, however, is not yet known.

Despite their quick guilty pleas, Jack and the others have not been sentenced for their diamond frauds. Their sentencing hearing has been delayed several times while they remain free in Canada. The latest delay was no fault of Jack’s. It was Gagliardini who asked for extra time for a family matter.

It is not a secret among his Paragon colleagues that Jack spilled the beans in Toronto, making things difficult for them.

“When they’ve got that kind of evidence and that kind of potential sentencing exposure you usually have to strike the best deal you can get,” Palazzolo’s lawyer, Michael Goldberg, told me after his client’s plea hearing. “Anthony was a small cog in this wheel. He is actually a very decent, sweet guy and got caught up in what this company was doing. The people at the top of this pyramid are going to face the toughest sentence.”

Lawyers for Gagliardini and Shumak declined to talk about the case or their client prior to their sentencing. Rosenberg, who is not facing charges, could not be reached for comment.

There seems no rush by anyone to wrap things up. Maybe everyone needed a breather.

Fraud investigators like Williams are under a deluge of complaints. Fraud is a growth industry. So far this year there have been more than 6,394 frauds reported to Toronto police, with a loss of about $147 million. It’s like that across Canada. Last year was a historically high year for reports to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, a federal agency, even though fraud is under-reported because many victims are embarrased and feel recovery is futile. Investment-style scams like Jack’s are the top complaint.

The way conmen do business is changing. Sweet-talking cold calls have been eclipsed by online scammers and hackers, but for most high-value investment frauds there is usually someone like Jack talking or texting with victims, pushing them to send money and then more money.

After the Toronto police investigation wrapped up, Williams said he received another complaint regarding Paragon. This one came with a twist.

Someone was calling Paragon’s victims declaring good news. The callers claimed to represent lawyers and said a class-action lawsuit against Paragon was underway and victims could get their money back. There was, of course, a catch. They had to pay for legal fees up front. It was another scam by someone who had Paragon’s client list, Williams said. In the fraud trade, a list of past victims is derisively called “a suckers list.” The source of the phone calls is not known.

“They’re constantly revictimizing these people,” Williams said of fraudsters. “Unfortunately, we’ll never be able to make all of these victims whole again, but they’ve pled guilty, so it was a good result. And it shines a light on these types of investment frauds.”

The sentencing for Jack and the others is scheduled for October. A prison sentence of some sort is expected for most, if not all. It was also an October when Jack was last sent to a U.S. penitentiary, 21 years ago. Jack might not need a sticky note to remind him of a new pseudonym this time. He will be dusting off an old one. Jack will be re-assigned his former U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate number.

The Jack of Diamonds will again become Inmate 09167-055.

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