Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

With today being the NFL Draft, it’s fair to say that football is gonna be back sooner than we realize. Just think – in less than three months from now, training camps will be opening, and the world will hopefully be (mostly) back to normal. I know I’ll be damn thankful to not have to have a mask on everywhere I go soon enough… although for this week’s Hall of Fame Scammer, I’m fairly confident in saying that he won’t want to give up his face coverings anytime soon. Lend me your ears, valued customers… uh… students!

GILBERT CHIKLI: THE MASKED MARAUDER

BORN: 1965

The French have always had a talent for violence – the Revolution, Napoleon I and III, and a modern culture of worker solidarity are some well-known examples. Financial crimes? Not as well known. That’s more in the business of the United States and the United Kingdom. That said, wherever one finds wealth, one can still find those determined to get a piece of it at all costs. Our Hall of Fame scammer is apparently quite determined to break the mould.

Gilbert Chikli is a French-Israeli con artist who was born in Paris in 1965. While I haven’t been able to track down a ton of relevant info about his early life, I do know that he attended boarding school in the southeastern region of Drôme, and later attended theatre school, but dropped out at the age of 13 in order to pursue his own interests in business and entrepreneurship, apparently. I guess French children are allowed to do that?

Things were pretty quiet with Chikli through the 1980s and ’90s, but he resurfaced into the public eye thanks to the first of two schemes that have since made him famous in France. Around 2005 and 2006, Chikli made dozens of phone calls pretending to be the CEO of several major international corporations, including Disneyland Paris, the Yellow Pages, and La Poste, the government company responsible for delivering mail, banking, insurance, telecommunications, and much more. In these phone calls, Chikli demanded millions of euros for “top-secret government operations”, typically with the messaging that the cash would be used to fight the war on terrorism in various ways. With the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (the French Secret Service) hot on his tail, Chikli escaped to Israel in 2009, along with his ex-wife and two sons. Thanks to Israel not extraditing their own citizens, he remained there for years, remarrying an Israeli woman and having four more daughters with her. He also apparently kept automatic weapons at his heavily fortified house in Ashdod, just outside of Tel Aviv. Pretty gangster shit, I guess?

Gilbert Chikli was completely unapologetic for this scam. “I picked up my telephone and contacted bank directors and spun them a story. They believed it, wired me money, and voilà,” he said in a French radio interview. “When you think a film is very good, it’s because the actor was great and played his part well. It’s the same here. To do what I did you have to have the gift of the gab, be self-assured, a good actor and above all a great liar. It so happens that I have all these qualities and it works.”

While the French government couldn’t touch Chikli while in Israel, he was tried in absentia for his crimes – in 2015, he received a seven-year prison sentence and a million-euro fine for his frauds; in all, he scammed 33 banks and companies, with almost 8 million euros vanishing into various shell accounts and another 52 million blocked or seized by French investigators. It’s quite possible the total was way higher – nobody is quite sure, even today.

Chikli was front-page news in France through 2014 and 2015 while he continued living free as a bird in Israel. Chikli’s scam even had a movie dramatize his story; check out Pascal Elbé’s Je compte pour vous (“I’m Counting On You”). He was everywhere. And yet this was only his warmup act.

Following his 2015 trial, Gilbert Chikli embarked on his most famous scam yet: impersonating France’s longtime Minister of Defence Jean-Yves Le Drian. Like his previous scam, the goal was to con vast sums of money out of wealthy people, often using phone calls, but this time, Chikli and his co-conspirator, Anthony Lasarevitsch, upped the stakes even further – some calls were made via Skype – with Chikli wearing a silicone mask of Le Drian’s face.

What’s hilarious about this is that the mask looked like shit. The whole thing appeared to be hilariously low-budget… the video quality was terrible, the office space haphazard, and the production completely slapdash. The con artists made over 150 attempts to scam wealthy people… and got only three bites in all. Some failed attempts included trying to “sell” Airbus helicopters to the Tunisian government, getting money from Sidaction, the biggest AIDS charity in France, trying to get the archbishop of Paris to finance a war on Islamic terror, and also trying to con the president of Gabon into wiring some money for “top-secret operations”. While there were only three successful cons in all… boy, were they ever massive.

Chikli, Lasarevitsch, and their co-conspirators duped the Aga Khan, leader of Ismaili Muslims across the world, out of 20 million euros, of which eight million have still not been recovered. Later, Turkish businessman İnan Kıraç lost 42 million euros, as the fake minister convinced him that his cash would help free two Turkish journalists imprisoned in Syria. Finally, Corinne Mentzelopoulous, the owner of Châteux Margaux, a highly prestigious winery, lost over 6 million euros. Thanks to some fake email addresses and forged stationary, there was just enough legitimacy on board the operation to give it a veneer of respectability, while fundamentally staying exceptionally weird.

Chikli was finally tracked down and arrested in Ukraine in 2017 and deported back to France to stand trial. In March 2020, the court found Chikli, Lasarevitsch, and four other men guilty – and this time, Chikli received an eleven-year prison sentence and 2 million euro fine. Anthony Lasarevitsch, his main co-conspirator, got seven years and a one million euro fine.

While his fun was finally at an end, Chikli still refused to go away quietly. According to Gilbert, the trial was “a scandal” that specifically targeted him as a political prisoner – apparently he was only on trial because Jean-Yves Le Drian wanted revenge, I guess? It’d be a fascinating look to psychoanalyze this later on, I suppose. In an angry outburst upon the verdict, Chikli shouted “It’s a scandal! You should be ashamed, prosecutor of the rich”.

When Chikli was arrested in Ukraine, he had pictures of a different silicone mask in his possession – this one of Prince Albert II of Monaco, the tiny European tax haven, gambling and F1 racing hub. Hard to say if he’ll be able to pull a similar scam by the time he gets out of French prison, but either the technology will have surpassed him, or he’ll be able to catch up to new deepfake stuff in short order. All I know is that if you wanted my bet, I’d bet on the latter situation.

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If you don’t want your masks anymore, that’s fine. I’ll take all you have! I have some… uh… plans for them. In fact, for every hundred masks you send, take five dollars* off your monthly subscription to my exclusive audiotape sessions. Don’t wait! Be sure to call 1-900-FAST-BUX now for more premium content, delivered right to your door!**

*Monopoly dollars. Also, negative 5 is a multiple of 5.

**By “delivered right to your door”, I mean that a hungover private delivery contractor in a rusted-out ’97 Ford Contour will throw the cassettes in the general vicinity of your front yard bushes. Or your neighbor’s. Not his fault your houses look so similar.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.