The Private Investigator and the Hollywood Con Queen

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Nicole Kotsianas was a Garden State girl, born and bred. “Jersey through and through,” she told anyone who asked, as if it wasn’t already abundantly clear. In high school, she drove a dirty white 1990 Buick Century her grandfather had given her, with cowskin interiors and the fuzzy dice—the “Buey Beast.” Her hairstyle, complete with bangs, harked back to her days as a teenager holding a lighter aloft for Bruce Springsteen, who had attended her same school. When, as an adult, she finally made it out to Los Angeles, she wandered down to the Venice boardwalk and strolled past head shops and haunted houses and didgeridoo-playing Rastafarians. It reminded her of the Jersey shore, only with more weed.

Nicole’s employer, a corporate security and investigations outfit called K2 Intelligence, didn’t discriminate much when deciding which clients to take on. They’d help an unsavory regime with as much gusto as they mustered for a widow who’d been bilked of her savings. For a time, they’d even asked some pointed questions on behalf of Harvey Weinstein, in the months before he was arrested, which earned them a few cycles of bad press. Around the firm’s offices in Manhattan, K2 investigators sometimes referred to the company as “the CIA for the corporate world,” which could be interpreted as a compliment or a slight, depending on one’s perspective.

Nicole worked on the Investigations and Disputes Team, where there were more women than men. Jules Kroll, K2’s founder, liked it that way; he believed that women were better listeners. Most of Nicole’s work was tied up with the kind of meat-and-potatoes research that comprised the bulk of her team’s caseload: due diligence for companies, asset searches, and investigations for high-net-worth individuals, a specific kind of deep-pocketed client.

Hollywood, and this half-formed slip of a case that had landed on her lap in October 2017, felt so foreign. It had come to her from a lawyer in LA whose client, a well-known Hollywood movie producer, was being impersonated. But when Nicole looked into it in those first few days the whole thing struck her as a bit off and, as far as cases went, even a little bit weak. The lawyer’s client was Amy Pascal, who had produced Molly’s Game and the Ghostbusters reboot. Pascal was a big deal, but the extent of the impersonation didn’t seem to add up to a whole lot.

Someone pretending to be Pascal was making calls around town—Hollywood was a “town,” Nicole now learned, a small and tidy place with its own etiquette and language. In some of the conversations, the fake Pascal flirted with the men on the other end of the line. But the caller was also tentative, like someone toying with an idea whose true shape she hadn’t quite grasped. Nicole thought it sounded a little like the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which had erupted in the press that very month, with the gender dynamic powerfully inverted: an exceptionally influential woman was taking advantage of her position to lure unsuspecting—and, most importantly, unknown and powerless—men into awkward compromises. Yet, compared with the firestorm erupting around Weinstein, this was penny-ante stuff. Probably just a weird lady somewhere pulling a prank, she thought; a few phone calls here and there, none of them were very long, and they didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Now and again, the fake Pascal was said to have probed about people’s availability to work on nonexistent projects. Bizarre, Nicole thought, but no one had been robbed of any money—not even Pascal, a multimillionaire and the obvious financial mark.

The real Amy Pascal had been targeted before. Pascal had built an illustrious career in Hollywood. Beginning as a secretary at a production company, she had risen to become the vice president for production at 20th Century Fox and ultimately the chair of Sony Pictures Entertainment. Along the way she had earned a reputation as a hit-maker, involved in some of the most successful movie rollouts of all time, including the 2012 Skyfall, the first James Bond movie to gross over $1 billion at the box office. After a decade at Sony, her reign came to an abrupt and humiliating end in 2014, when a previously unknown group from North Korea, calling itself the “Guardians of Peace,” hacked into Sony’s computers. The group released a trove of private data, including scores of embarrassing emails between Pascal and famous actors, like Angelina Jolie and Meryl Streep. In an instant, Pascal, whom Forbes had once ranked as the twenty-eighth most powerful woman in the world, was brought down hard, and she had been trying to rebuild her reputation since. Now she was in the crosshairs again, and needed to nip it in the bud quickly.

Nicole had a performative streak. Once she got going, she was not inclined to stop. Her high school classmates voted her “most dramatic,” and she was a runner-up for “Class Chatterbox.” Maybe it was the years of theater—six years in Annie in an off-Broadway production, nine shows a week, when for a while it seemed like she might make a career of it. Then there was the Model United Nations. And in college Speech and Debate, the art and science of linguistic persuasion. She spoke quickly, ideas flowing, connections hopscotching. She could build an argument or hurl an insult with equal measure. She was also practical, a doer with a mind for details and numbers, graphs and flow-charts, and cold logic that binds them.

She had always planned on studying communications at Emerson College after high school, but when the dot-com bubble burst and gutted her father’s investments she settled for Rutgers, the New Jersey state school, where she studied economics. In hindsight, she came to view it as the best decision she’d ever been forced to make. She immersed herself in the bustle of the Daily Targum, the country’s second-oldest collegiate newspaper, whose student journalists had produced award-winning coverage. She became the paper’s opinion editor and sat on the editorial board. An imaginary future spooled out before her in which she might one day become a war correspondent. In the end, the lure of home was too strong—and it seemed like newspapers were dying by the dozens. After graduating, she got a job in Manhattan probing securitizations and derivatives for a subsidiary of the Financial Times that offered a premium service for paying customers, and later for a bond-rating agency doing qualitative research. She fell in love with finance. But as much as she felt the lure of the city, she also knew that one day she would return to the suburbs of New Jersey, and settle there in her very own “oasis.”

Over drinks at the annual Christmas party one year, she started chatting with the K2 investigators, whose firm shared a bathroom on the same floor. This “journalism” job wasn’t really journalism and she was growing tired of it. K2 wasn’t journalism, either, but she was intrigued by what they were doing, and whether it might be an opportunity to put her investigative talents to good use for better pay. K2 hired her in 2015. Most of her work was focused on white-collar crime. Fraud. Identity theft. Even impersonation. By 2017, she and her husband, Anthony, a Manhattan litigator, had one small child and another was on the way. At thirty-three, she was providing for her family. This was her perfect life.

*

One of the most influential women in Hollywood, Amy Pascal existed on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, yet here she was entrusting the fate of her public persona, and perhaps her private one as well, to an unknown investigator on the other side of the country. Maybe that was by design; the “town” was small. As she began her investigation, Nicole heard variations on the same basic story: “Amy Pascal” was calling industry professionals inquiring about their availability for work. The conversations had turned awkward and, in some cases, oddly flirtatious. She got her hands on a few short voice mail recordings but they added very little. Nicole needed something more to go on.

And then, one day in October 2017, Nicole’s office phone rang. A distraught father was on the other end. He told the investigator about his twenty-six-year-old son, Will, who was right now stranded in Jakarta, caught up in something gone horribly wrong involving Amy Pascal. “He thinks he’s working on this project,” the father, Fred Strathmann, said. “Something doesn’t seem right.”

While Will Strathmann had been running around on his Indonesian goose chase, Fred and Francy Strathmann had made their own inquiries. Fred took a closer look at the websites and emails of his son’s supposed benefactor, Amy Pascal. He had found a number for Pascal’s office in LA and placed a call. He explained to an assistant that Will was working with Ms. Pascal on a project in Indonesia for which he hadn’t yet been paid. Almost immediately he was patched through to one of Pascal’s assistants, who delivered a series of revelations: Amy Pascal was not involved in any projects in Indonesia. And Fred Strathmann wasn’t the first person to call—though he was the first to identify the connection to Indonesia. Pascal’s identity had been compromised by some unknown criminal enterprise and the Los Angeles County district attorney had already opened a preliminary investigation. Pascal had hired a private investigator in New York. The assistant was sympathetic and said she would put Fred in touch with all of them.

It was 2 p.m. in Pennsylvania, where Will had grown up and where his parents still lived, when Fred began frantically calling and texting his son.

Will’s initial reaction to the revelation that he had been conned was denial: he accused his father of inventing a story of fraud and deception, in order to lure him home for some as-yet-unknown purpose. It simply made no sense, he pointed out. What on earth would compel someone to invent such a complex and elaborate scheme? The hours and hours of telephone conversations? The hotels in Indonesia that, in some cases, had been prepaid for him? The pages and pages of nondisclosure agreements, logistics packets, itineraries, and emails outlining every aspect of his three trips, down to the dour temperament of a shabbily clad Indonesian driver with horrible English. There was simply no way it could not be real. Suspended between fear and rage, alternating in those first few minutes from shock to incomprehension, he tried to explain these complexities to his father, who was unmoved. But as dawn approached, the strength of his father’s love and concern proved overpowering, and a crack appeared in the artifice. And as it did, fear settled in.

Will’s phone rang just minutes after he hung up with his father. The LA district attorney told him he needed to make his way to the U.S. embassy. Moments later his phone rang a third time. The woman on the other end of the line said her name was Nicole Kotsianas and she was an investigator from K2 Intelligence, a corporate security firm in New York City.

On the other side of the world, Will sat alone on the hotel bed, his phone to his ear, wondering if he was being watched. He turned his ire on this supposed investigator, Nicole. He asked her: How could he be sure that she, in fact, wasn’t part of . . . whatever this was? Then his anger gave way to a wave of cascading fears. He wondered whether he would even be able to make it out of Jakarta safely. Nicole urged him to skip the visit to the U.S. embassy and get to the airport as quickly as he could. He took an Uber, leaving his hotel room just after two in the morning, and used his phone to buy a ticket home. He spoke to Nicole again as the now-familiar scenery passed by, and she tried to reassure him again that she was on his side.

At the airport he waited for three hours in a large outdoor amphitheater, hemmed in by wire fencing and guards, watching the milling crowd until, at 6:30 a.m., half an hour after he had been scheduled to meet Mr. Rusdi at the hotel, he finally boarded an Ariana Afghan Airlines flight. Fake Amy had already called him three times, and sent several messages and a voice mail. “WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU? YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.” More messages poured in as he listened to the airline attendants run through routine security protocols. The reminder to fasten his seat belt felt oddly comforting. He spent the flight to Japan staring out the window, running through worst-case scenarios; even after landing he worried that she, his Amy, would find a way to cancel the final leg of his journey home. If Amy was capable of creating a completely fabricated world for him in Jakarta, he wondered, what wasn’t she capable of?

Will didn’t sleep for four days after arriving home. He had never felt so vulnerable in his life. The criminals knew virtually everything about him: his parents’ names, his address and bank account information, his work history and his contacts. And those long hours of conversations with “Amy” had at times veered into deeply personal, revealing territory.

On the fifth day, his phone rang. It was Amy. He stared at the screen and let it ring. She didn’t leave a message.

***

Excerpted from The Con Queen of Hollywood: The Hunt for an Evil Genius, bhy Scott J. Johnson. Published by Harper. Copyright 2023. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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