https://thewalrus.ca/the-greatest-scam-ever-written/

A photo illustration of a flat lay image consisting of a Polaroid picture of Patrice Runner, another Polaroid picture of Maria Duval, an image of an astrological birth chart, and stack of mail and handwritten notes.

The Walrus / Paul Kim / US Department of Justice / iStock

was sixteen years old, in Montreal in the 1980s, when he came across a series of advertisements in magazines and newspapers that enchanted him. It was the language of the ads, the spare use of words and the emotionality of simple phrases, that drew him in. Some ads offered new products and gadgets, like microscopes and wristwatches; some offered services or guides on weight loss, memory improvement, and speed reading. Others advertised something less tangible and more alluring—the promise of great riches or a future foretold.

“The wisest man I ever knew,” one particularly memorable ad read, “told me something I never forgot: ‘Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money.’” The ad, which began appearing in newspapers across North America in 1973, was written by self-help author Joe Karbo, who vowed to share his secret—no education, capital, luck, talent, youth, or experience required—to fabulous wealth. All he asked was for people to mail in $10 and they’d receive his book and his secret. “What does it require? Belief.” The ad was titled “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches,” and it helped sell nearly 3 million copies of Karbo’s book.

This power of provocative copywriting enthralled Runner, who, in time, turned an adolescent fascination into a career and a multi-million-dollar business. Now fifty-seven, Runner spent most of his life at the helm of several prolific mail-order businesses primarily based out of Montreal. Through ads in print media and unsolicited direct mail, he sold self-help guides, weight-loss schemes, and, most infamously, the services of a world-famous psychic named Maria Duval. “If you’ve got a special bottle of bubbly that you’ve been saving for celebrating great news, then now’s the time to open it,” read one nine-page letter that his business mailed to thousands of people. Under a headshot of Duval, it noted she had “more than 40 years of accurate and verifiable predictions.” The letter promised “sweeping changes and improvements in your life” in “exactly 27 days.” The recipients were urged to reply and enclose a cheque or money order for $50 to receive a “mysterious talisman with the power to attract LUCK and MONEY” as well as a “Guide to My New Life” that included winning lottery numbers.

More than a million people in Canada and the United States were captivated enough to mail money in exchange for various psychic services. Some people, though, eventually began to question whether they were truly corresponding with a legendary psychic and felt they had been cheated. In 2020, after being pursued by law enforcement for years, Runner was arrested in Spain and extradited to the US on eighteen counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, for orchestrating one of the biggest mail-order scams in North American history.

In early 2022, I wrote a letter to Runner in prison, asking if he would consider being interviewed. While the so-called Maria Duval letter scheme had attracted extensive media coverage, Runner had never spoken to a reporter. “I got your letter yesterday evening. First I was surprised and then moved by it,” Runner said to me over the phone from a detention centre in Brooklyn, New York. “I was intrigued by the fact that it was handwritten. Was it done on purpose to intrigue me? Because it’s unusual today to receive, especially from a professional, a letter that’s handwritten with no letterhead. . . . You’re a good copywriter.” Over the following year, I interviewed Runner dozens of times—in person at the prison, via email, and over the phone—in the lead-up to his trial.

Runner told me that while he always tested the limits of business, he never crossed a legal line. “Maybe it’s not moral, maybe it’s bullshit,” he once said. “But it doesn’t mean it’s fraud.”

One day in 1977, in Saint-Tropez, a town on the French Riviera, the wife of a local dentist drove off and disappeared. Search parties, police, and helicopters scoured the coast but to no avail. Maria Duval, then an amateur psychic, read about the case in newspaper articles and offered to help. She asked for the missing woman’s birthdate, a recent photo of her, and a map of the area. She placed the photo on top of the map and let a pendulum swing back and forth until it hovered over one area. When that area was searched, the missing woman was found in the exact spot Duval had predicted. The story helped catapult her reputation across Europe and beyond. Lore has it that she helped locate up to nineteen missing persons, predicted election results, and helped people achieve wealth through her stock-market predictions. From Italy to Brazil, tabloids touted her clairvoyant abilities, with one Swedish outlet claiming that “politicians and businessmen stand in her queue to know more about their future.” She also allegedly tracked down a lost dog belonging to French actress Brigitte Bardot.

Rumours swirled that she might be a fabrication, a caricature used to con people into believing.

Over time, two European businessmen recognized the commercial potential of Duval’s superstar reputation. By the early 1990s, Jacques Mailland and Jean-Claude Reuille had become renowned in the mail-order industry in Europe and beyond. Reuille reportedly ran a Swiss company called Infogest, which controlled the worldwide distribution of direct-mail letters that used Duval’s image and fame to sell personalized psychic-services and trinkets with purported magical properties. Mailland was a French copywriter and businessman who allegedly wrote the ad copy of most of the letters, making it appear as if Duval had written it herself. He was also an adviser to Duval and helped propel her to stardom, with some news reports later referring to him as her “personal secretary.” (Mailland reportedly died in a motorcycle accident in 2015; Reuille did not respond to requests for comment but has previously denied having any business relationship with Duval.)

It was in the early 1990s that Runner says he first heard the names Mailland and Reuille—and the name Maria Duval. A few years before, Runner had dropped out of the University of Ottawa to teach himself copywriting and had launched his own mail-order business, based out of Montreal, that sold items including sunglasses and cameras. In June 1994, Runner, who also holds French citizenship, travelled to Europe with his then girlfriend in the hope of meeting Duval and acquiring a licensing contract for North America. He says he found her number in the white pages of a phone booth. Duval, to his delight, invited the couple to her villa in the small village of Callas. Runner’s then girlfriend recalls that Duval conducted a psychic reading on them and knew details about their lives that the woman couldn’t possibly have known, including that she had lost her father at age six. “I was quite skeptical at that time,” Runner’s ex-girlfriend told me. “She really convinced me that she had a sixth sense.”

By the end of that year, Runner says, he inked an agreement with Duval that allowed him to use her likeness for direct-mailing operations in North America. (Runner has never been able to produce that agreement.) Under a company that became Infogest Direct Marketing, he placed print ads across Canada and the US for her psychic services. He says he paid Duval royalties worth about 5 percent of revenues, amounting to several hundred thousand dollars per year. Money began flowing in as he found success writing the letter copy himself. “With writing,” Runner told me, “you can get the attention of someone, and at the end, after a few minutes, the person sends a cheque, to get a product, to an address or company they’ve never heard of.”

A photo illustration of a stack of three Polaroid pictures. Two photos are visible: A photo of a collage of newspaper headlines, and a photo of Maria Duval.

The Walrus / Paul Kim / US Department of Justice / iStockHe was capitalizing on the surge in the popularity and mass commodification of psychic services in 1990s North America. The Psychic Friends Network, a phone service that used infomercials hosted by singer Dionne Warwick, connected callers to a network of “psychics” working in shifts from home. At its peak, Psychic Friends reportedly made more than $125 million (US) a year. Self-proclaimed psychic Sylvia Browne often appeared on The Montel Williams Show and Larry King Live and was a fixture on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and tarot card reader Miss Cleo became a TV star and a cultural phenomenon. The Maria Duval letters, though, were an influential progenitor of what ballooned, especially in the US, into a more than $2 billion (US) industry of psychic services.

Runner’s venture exploded. In addition to ads, Infogest Direct Marketing began sending letters to people’s mailboxes that combined copy written by Runner and adaptations of content produced by his European counterparts. They had a common format: typed letters or photocopies of handwritten ones presented as written by Maria Duval herself, requesting payment for astrological readings, fortune telling, or lottery numbers. Some correspondence directed recipients to purchase supposedly supernatural objects, while others urged them to use provided green envelopes to mail personal items—family photographs, palm prints, locks of hair—against a promise that the psychic would use them to conduct personalized rituals. “Once this envelope has been sealed, it may be opened ONLY by me,” read one letter that included Duval’s photocopied signature.