In hindsight, of course it was a set-up.
The messages that fell fairy dust-like into the inboxes of cinematographers and actors, makeup artists and security workers, came from the email addresses of top female Hollywood executives, women who probably communicated through layers of assistants when they weren’t being impersonated. The notes detailed work opportunities that were perfectly calibrated for the interests and CVs of the recipients, virtually all of whom were young, male and struggling to get a foothold in the industry.
The Skype calls that followed, with a mogul who insisted on using the camera off setting “for security reasons”, sealed the deal. After a round of intimate chats with Amy Pascal, or Wendi Murdoch, or Megan Ellison, or any of the A-list women who the con queen of Hollywood impersonated, the marks booked a flight to Indonesia, where they were instructed to scout locations, find inspiration, and pay their translator and driver in cash. They would be reimbursed for their expenses via wire transfer, was the line.
Working off a tip that came his way in 2018, former Hollywood Reporter features writer Scott C Johnson broke the story of the Con Queen of Hollywood and her elaborate web of deception. In his riveting new book The Con Queen of Hollywood: The Hunt for an Evil Genius, Johnson plunges deeper into the story of a “studious and determined criminal”, interviewing victims, an ace investigator and, ultimately, the con queen herself – or himself, as it happened.
The voices were the invention of Hargobind “Harvey” Tahilramani, a man who was born in Indonesia, educated in the US, and lived in England, where he maintained a foodfluencer Instagram account (50k followers, many of them bots) while pursuing victims for his Hollywood dream scheme.
The Con Queen was alternately warm and a control freak, prone to name dropping and cultivating relationships with the parents of her marks. The productions she was staffing were for places like Netflix or HBO. One mark was told of a film starring Tom Cruise, financed by Elon Musk and filmed in outer space.
A bit hard to swallow, but as anyone who has followed the writers’ strike knows, Hollywood is fertile ground for dreamers and disconnects. “The whole industry is built around the illusion that anybody can come [to Los Angeles] and with the right amount of grit and determination and luck, it’s a place where the most improbable things can happen,” Johnson said over a video call. “But then for every improbable success, I imagine there’s other bad people selling false goods to people looking to make their dreams come true.”
His book’s hero is Nicole Kotsianas, the New Jersey private investigator who had learned of enough fruitless trips to Indonesia to know there was something bigger at play. She spent years gathering anecdotes and studying digital fingerprints and myriad finsta accounts. Miraculously, she managed to pin the prime suspect’s identity on an Indonesian man who’d cycled through numerous identities and had worked hard to leave no online trace of his own. He worked hard at his grift; one day he spoke with 436 people and received emails from contacts on six continents.
The overall financial damages are estimated to be $1.5m, a relatively small figure considering that the number of people Harvey catfished is in the hundreds. “You can find any number of scams where the totals run up into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars,” Johnson said. “In this case it was clear from the beginning that it wasn’t really about the money. And so the question then became: what is it about?”
Harvey, as Johnson calls him, had a rich background in bad behavior. He had spent time in prison for calling in a bomb threat to the US Embassy in Indonesia; he had pretended to be an irate Cate Blanchett calling on his behalf when he’d been kicked off his college debate team for plagiarism. As a food blogger he was known to be a menace; Yotam Ottolenghi banned him from all his eating establishments.
Johnson also struck up a relationship with Harvey’s estranged sister, who calls her brother a “monster” and detailed a long history of abuse, cruelty and deception. Persuading Harvey’s sister to open up to him was a feat for an investigative journalist, but nothing like tracking down Harvey himself. At the height of Covid, after Harvey had already dismantled his foodie Instagram account Purebytes, Johnson noticed a woman on Instagram tease that she was going to be conducting an Instagram Live with the man behind it. Johnson tuned in and, working with an English friend, managed to trace his background to an apartment tower in Manchester (not London, where the guest claimed to be), identifying Harvey’s location to the exact floor.
He flew out to find him, and offered him a chance to tell his side of the story. Soon, Harvey was calling him nonstop. He was a garrulous and talented storyteller, and having him on the other end of the line was thrilling at first. Here was the final act of the book he was working on, and a chance to find the answers to the more spiritual questions that had been dogging him. “It’s kind of like peering into the void,” Johnson said. “There’s this sense of: am I capable of that? Or are people around me capable of that?” Talking to Harvey, whom many believe to be a psychopath, became exhausting. “Imagine a room in which a television broadcasts a Miramax movie, conservative AM talk radio blares, a YouTube influencer scrolls through TikTok videos, and an actor performs a never-ending series of monologues at the same time,” Johnson writes. Sometimes he “would feel this great pang of empathy”, and the jaw-dropping revelations kept presenting themselves, but “it was this never-ending labyrinth of lies”.
The calls came to an abrupt end. Harvey was arrested in the UK, where he is fighting extradition to the US, where he faces eight charges. Johnson, now living outside of Marseille, France, with his wife and young children, said he is looking forward to turning the page.
The Con Queen of Hollywood: The Hunt for an Evil Genius is out on 6 June
