Snowball - Episode 3: The Coconut Wireless

Pushkin.

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This episode contains occasional course language.

The first thing about Leslie Minuchian that caught my brother's attention was her American accent. The second thing my American file brother was attracted to was Leslie's wild story about why she left Hawaii.

Some bad people in Hawaii were trying to attack her, you know, because that frauded her and we're trying to do bad stuff to her, and her mom and dad sent her to Europe to escape them.

According to Leslie, she had been run off the island by murderous locals. A lot of people heard different versions of the story.

I remember her saying something about she had to crawl up in a dark bathroom.

Was something about some cash. She was like hiding under a table and these guys looking somewhere and she was trying to call her dad and she got on the wrong side of the local mafia.

She witnessed.

She might have got beaten up, murder or she got home invaded at a house or something like that.

They're going to kill me tonight, dad.

Criminals got on this chartered airplane.

Parents had a paper and private jet to come get her before the mafia killed her.

So this story about Hawaii, after everything that happened to my brother Greg, he started to think about how it might be a fat yarn. He wanted to know what really happened, So we figured he had write to the Hawaiian police and ask if they knew anything. Greg might have been watching a bit too much Hawaii five Oh or Magnum Pi when he wrote this letter, because he's dialed up the drama.

I find myself in a murky world of con artists and swindlers. We are battling them and I will find out the truth. Any information, advice, maybe a point in the right direction, would be invaluable.

Normally cops don't go giving out details to letter writing busybodies like you can't just write a letter to the police asking them to hand over documents because you're curious about someone's past. But maybe whoever got that letter was moved by Greg's quest for justice, because whoever read Gregg's letter sent back a thick Manila envelope. What Greg found in that envelope was relief.

Finally I had something that was real and genuine and could cast light on her, her character and what she was really about.

Inside the envelope were copies of police reports, including detectives notes, and witness statements. The reports suggested that Greg wasn't alone. He wasn't the only person who had been burnt by Leslie Minuchian. I'm Ollie Ward's and this is snowball. Does the name Leslie Minuchian mean anything to you?

Oh, you've bet never forget her.

She's a sociopath.

She wanted me to come to Hawaii with her and help her open this fucking bar.

That's the cool spot because it was one of the biggest venues here on Mollie.

It just started getting shittier and shittier.

He was brock. She took every fucking thing out.

I just kept tiding about if screw you, this is your karma, and I just kept grabbing every bit of money.

He's a manipulative con artist. He loves what she's doing.

She just loved it. By writing to the Hawaiian State Police, Greg was able to get back this fat Manila folder that I've got in my hand. It contained these couple of reports that I'm looking at now, which show there was at least two people pissed off enough to file police complaints against Leslie, and there's detective notes, witness accounts.

Please okay you I mean please.

Hello Georges. Yes, yes, my name is Ollie Ward's and I'm just wondering, are you the same Georges that used to live in Hawaii in about two thousand and four. You used to go there a lot, so I've had trouble getting I'm just wondering if you if the name Leslie Minouchian means anything to you.

Oh, the scammer.

I'm kind of glad to hear him say that, the scammer. I'm onto something, Georges says him Leslie in Oceanside, California.

Leslie was a very charming like she you know, I had a way too, Can I get into your good side? Like seeing nice things about me, like what a good looking man I was. And she had the hearts for me and this and that and the other, and she kind of started dating and that was the whole thing that she wanted me to come to Hawaii with her and help her open this fucking bar.

George's story already sounds familiar. It starts out with Leslie hooking up with a guy and next thing, he's involved in the grand opening of a hospitality business. George's wasn't the only person Leslie recruited for her Hawaiian plan. Leslie was working at a restaurant in California and became friends with some of the others who worked there.

She and I became friends, so she would invite me over to her house in San Diego and Oceanside, and she had a beautiful home. She had a lot of toys with the doom buggies and you know, beautiful yard with a pond, and you know, she was my manager at the restaurant that I was working at.

Trinity found that her ambitions matched up with Lislie's.

She and I had the same ideas of entrepreneurship, of wanting to fulfill opening up a restaurant, bar night lifestyle. And it was kind of like friendship instantaneously because she kind of had that aura where she's a very smooth speaking person, where she can make everything seem perfect.

Trinity looks like someone who would be at home at the beach some died here, straight talking vibe. She had spent lots of time in Hawaii and had always wanted to go back there, so she had an idea for Leslie.

She wanted to do it within Oceanside, and I kept telling her, no, there's you know, there's too many restaurants here. You're going to be such a small fish in this big pond, you know. And so I kept telling her that I have lived in Maui prior to and that I had a lot of connections here in Hawaii. And one day she said, Okay, let's go, let's do it, and so I said, okay, let's do it. Let's go.

Trinity wasn't the only person ready to follow Leslie out to the islands.

We were like her little ducklings.

Following behind her, Georgia and a couple of others jumped on the bandwagon.

And all the stories that she had, you know, put into our heads as to what we were going to be doing.

They headed to Maui, the second biggest of the Hawaiian islands. They ended up in a place called Lehina. There's heaps of tourists. If you've been to Maui, you probably went to Lehina with its still blue water protected by a reef. The main street is called Front Street, with restaurants, bars, and souvenir shops. Amongst those was an old bar that had been closed. It looked like the perfect spot to open a new business.

It's like a ten thousand square foot venue, and I have a lot of connections, so I started making phone calls, got in there, we got the lease on the building. Being a bartender for nineteen years, I had a wonderful connection with the liquor Commission, so I was able to get the liquor license and stated as well, I was creating network of people for her to be welcomed here in Maui.

More and more people were drawn into Leslie's Hawaiian vision. One of them was a British backpacker called Will. He was in his early thirties and looking to set himself up in the island life. He's a Northerner with long hair and a laid back attitude.

When I met Leslie, she had all these fantastic ideas of what was going to happen, and it seemed to fall so into line with the things that I wanted to do as well. I've really fallen on my feet. I mean everyone almost saying the same thing. It all hinged on Leslie's word of things, and it was all sun together by dreams.

Really, it sounds like Leslie has always been someone that can work out what people want and talk to that a dream reflector. Leslie rented a house in a nice neighborhood for some of the people working for her to live in. There were lots of bedrooms and a separate cottage out back.

There was no furniture in there. It had been explained to me that Leslie was waiting for a shipping container or something to arrive. That I had all the furniture for the house. The girls were all really nice, and they were all raring to go with the club idea.

We'll be right.

Back on promises of getting paid. Once the bar took off, Leslie's squad got to work. They had a lot to do.

It had been closed up for a long time. I think russ had been the only thing in and out of the place. It needed a hell of lots of work doing to it. They had sort of grassroof type of foods that were just black with dust many years. It was a filthy mess.

Lesley's Brazilian boyfriend, Georgia, was redoing the bars Interia.

We had to pull out a lot of trash out of there, repaint everything, and basically start from scratch. And she had a whole bunch of people working for her, painters, people that would do like you know, would work or whatever just to get the place ready to go.

Another of Lesley's recruits was Leahina local Layane.

She told us that, you know, she had all this funding and then that she needed our help. What I remember is busting my butt for hours, day after day for her. Nurse would pay me like one hundred two hundred dollars every now and again.

And Leslie was almost like a little celebrity in Lahina, so everyone was sort of bowing at her feet. Kind of thing, and we were enjoying it. Everyone was very helpful.

With some elbow grease from all sorts of people. Lislie's bar started looking pretty good. She named it the Breakwater. It almost looked like the dream was coming true.

Oh, that's pretty awesome. There was a front and bar with tables, and then also an outdoor seating area, and then as you walked towards at the back, you have more of a nightclub where you can actually close off the doors from the front side so that you can have the full nightclub aspect.

The club opened and we're doing really well. There was a lot of interest from the locals, people queuing around the block a couple of times to get in. On the opening night, it was really really busy. There were local bands playing, It was packed, and it was a really good atmosphere.

It was a cool spot because it was one of the biggest venues here on Melli. It was the newest thing happening, and it was great. A lot of the time, when you have nothing and somebody has something and they make it seem like such this beautiful painted picture, you try to believe in.

That the story about Hawaii. It makes me think about the Dragonfly CAFA in New Zealand and everyone who helped Lislie open it, Greg Simon, my parents. It's like the same story, just on a different island. Because just as the dreamy picture Lislie paints starts to become a reality, things begin to fall apart.

There was a chef that she chosen to take over the kitchen work, and it was a really nice guy who was putting everything into it. It made some really nice hamburgers as samples that have been given out at the bar, and he got good ideas. But the fridges were filled with these hamburgers, but they were never able to be sold because of the grease trap, never get and emptied.

I don't know what a grease trappers, but it sounds gross and it needed empty in Apparently it needed an expensive reef. It too to get a liquor license, Leslie told the liquorboard the grease trap had been upgraded, but will rickins that was never done.

That was the health code violation that stopped the kitchen from ever opening up.

So after a pretty good start at the bar, the breakwater became a shambles. Will sees their electricity got cut off.

There were anti moskitail candles on the tables instead of any light in. People were starting to wonder what was going.

On without air conditioning. The bar was baking hot too.

We were buying bags of vice from the local shop, filling cool box is full of beers, but Leslie was still trying to sell her little dreams.

I'm starting to recognize pieces of the story. Leslie once told me that electricity got cut off at the breakwater because she got on the wrong side of the bouncer who had a cousin in the power company. So the power did get cut off, but Will in Trinity think it was for a more obvious reason.

At this point, she hadn't paid her electric bill, so from my understanding, she was running her electricity off of a generator.

Literally. Around this time, Leslie and her workers were all evicted from the house they lived in. Will suspected that Leslie wasn't paying the rent.

We got evicted on New Year's Eve and I had to move into the club. So I was in the offices at the bike I put a bed in there and a fridge and wavya while Leslie was in a pool house she's rented at the side of her big house.

People had been working on the project in return for free rent, little bits of cash, and promises that they'd be sordid when the breakwater took off, But now they started to realize they might never see the money they were owed. Words spread quickly that things were broken at the breakwater.

This town is very small. We caught the cook and it wireless, so everyone talks to everyone about everything, so it's very easy to find out what people are doing when you're not even within the same area as them.

Slowly but surely, people were dropping. Things started getting really shady at one point because every time we tried to ask her for money and she didn't have it. And I still have bills to pay, I have children defeed.

Eventually, Leane did manage to get some of their wages out of Lesley, which was more than most.

I was never paid a dollar. I was able to live. I guess you can say rent free for a month, but if that is restitution for everything that I did to get her to have this ten thousand square foot venue, to get the chef in line, for her to get the music in line, for her to get the sign person involved, for her I liquor license. I did it all, but no, I was never paid one penny, not one.

And people weren't just saying they didn't get paid. There were also allegations of stolen chicks and credit cards. Leslie's Surphy boyfriend, Georgia's, had been living with her. Then he went home to Brazil on holiday, and.

Shortly after I realized that she had already picked up my check book and went to town on it. You know, literally, she had like fake checks sent out to the whole fucking city under my name. I couldn't believe. It was actually pretty much sucked into that whole thing. It's like a movie.

Georgia went to the police and told them that Leslie had ridden out nine checks totaling over thirteen thousand dollars from his account.

And she was just like, oh, I'm gonna pay that. My father's gonna pay you. It's like, I don't believe one single word you say to me anymore, you know, after what you've done. And apparently she just kept on on a roll.

From this other police report I've got from Hawaii, it does look like Leslie might have been on a roll. This second report is filed by a guy called Scott. Scott's police report says that Leslie needed a place to crash, and so he offered her a room at his. The report also says quote they were intimate, but only a few days later Scott noticed some strange charges on his credit card. Scott's a sort of wily looking entrepreneur guy.

Yeah?

Oh that's great. Okay, Scott, Look, this might be a little bit of a strange call, so please just hang in there for a moment. But I'm just wondering if you used to live in Hawaii in around two thousand and four.

Yeah, uh huh.

Does the name Leslie Minukian mean anything to you?

Oh?

You bet.

Never forget her. It's not good that Leslie might have scammed more people, but I'm glad I'm on the right trail. I'm kind of relieved to find someone else. And even though this all happened like fifteen years ago, Scott remembers everything straight away.

She took my credit cards, went and charged all that money on him. And then I got called by the credit card company on a charge and I says, no, I didn't make that charge. You know, I knew it was her because it was all restaurant related supplies and different things to open that restaurant. But I mean, she was stealing. But when I contacted the police, she was so slick.

Leslie said Scott gave her permission to use his credit card and to buy things for the breakwater. She says Scott wanted a relationship, but when she turned him down, he started making accusations. Scott says, that's all lies.

The police. They told me that I was full of it, and she convinced them that I was lying. I couldn't believe it, and so a few more days passed by, somebody else called the police and told them that she had done something to them similar, So then they believed me.

The cops had actually done a criminal history check on Leslie, and this background check must have fired the cops up because it showed that Leslie had form. They found out Leslie had been arrested for stuff like writing bad checks in San Diego, California, only seven months earlier. Leslie had ended up pleading guilty to burglary related to check fraud. She was even on a three year suspended sentence from that when all this went down in Hawaii. And that

Mountains, the Leslie Leslie thing.

It turns out the sky Mike Templin is the guy with the June Buggies and the nice place where Leslie was living before she went to Hawaii. And like a lot of people who have hooked up with Lislie, he's got a story. Is now all right time?

Yeah, it's okay, okay, I just don't like to relive it. Yeah, sorry to drag as you can imagine.

Yeah, Mike's a tour guide and he's walking around an amusement park while we talk.

We did live together, a notion side. That's when she was hiding my mail, you know, like my credit card statements and saying that she was paying for them while meanwhile she was just racking up everything she could on my credit cards after I found some receipts with my credit card numbers on them, you know, with her signature, you know, bottles of champagne, you know, two hundred dollars dinners.

Zero sounds like a lot of cash on nail salons. Must have been some sweet, many pities. Mike says. Hawaii was Leslie's escape plan.

Yeah, she literally packed up and wamp, I'll pay you back. Don't worry. I'll start this restaurant and send you back money. Oh like, oh my god. So yeah, she was gone.

I've got copies of the documents from Mike's court case against Leslie. They show while Leslie was in Hawaii, she kept promising to pay Mike back. In his statement to the court, Mike says he believed she'd pay him back because he loved her. Leslie kept sending him checks that bounced, all from a closed account. Then she sent Mike a receipt showing she had transferred him thirty one grand Lizlie added a handwritten note to the transfer receipt, Mike.

Marry Axnez, I've thrown in an extra six thousand dollars by yourself, some nice. This is from my trust fund and could take up to eight working days.

Bit cheeky by yourself, something nice. But the money never arrived. That receipt turned out to be fake. It's another one where the numbers trail off on an angle. Maybe they have twink and photocopies in Hawaii too. Leslie didn't show up or respond to the court, and they ruled in favor of Mike. She was ordered to pay him more than sixty five thousand dollars. But even though deck collectors were assigned to the case, Mike says he's never seen a cent.

I would love to see her right And how.

So, by the time Leslie was setting up the breakwater in Hawaii, she was on a suspended sentence and she was about to be sued for racking up tens of thousands of dollars on someone else's credit card. With that kind of stuff goinging on, why didn't the cops just arrest Leslie? At the bottom of the police reports filed in Hawaii. It says referred to the Prosecutor's office for review and prosecution. So it seems like the police were keen to lay charges, but neither of these police reports

My name is Tivoli Famu and I am the chief of Police for the Maui County Police Department. Here in a way, I'm not sure what happened, but now everything is computerized, so it's automatic, but back then it was not computerized. A copy goes to our record section, and then another copy goes to the Prosecutor's office. How what happened to the case? I can't give you an answer to that.

Whatever happened, the Hawaiian police didn't arrest Leslie and they didn't prosecute her. So at least those police reports have told me a lot about what happened, And after reading them heaps of times on their own, I realized that putting them together like jigsaw pieces, reveals a picture of how Leslie briefly kept afloat in Hawaii. It looks like this is how things worked. It's like a rob Peter to pay Paul's situation, or make that Robed Scott to

We'll be right back.

As it all went down, Scott actually went into investigator mode himself, and he had another interesting thing to tell me. Scott had tracked down Leslie's parents, Betty and Andrew, and told them what he thought was going on.

I don't know what the hell their deal is because I got ahold of them and told them what their daughter was doing, and they would I don't believe you.

Throughout this whole thing, I've been wondering how much of Leslie's antics Betty and Andrew really know. So it seems that they knew about some of these allegations from Hawaii, but maybe Leslie was lying to them too. In any case, Scott is angry at Betty and Andrew as well.

They know exactly what she's doing. They know all of it, you know. I don't know how much a part they are of it, but they know exactly what this girl's doing.

Hearing about Leslie's parents reminded me that I should give my own mom and dad an update. They've always wondered whether other people have had similar experiences with Leslie. So I called them and told them about all the stories I've been hearing, and I asked Dad what he thought about Leslie's parents potentially being aware of this stuff.

I just feel the same basically that Leslie's been, if you like, nurtured into continuing by her parents. They're obviously not necessarily agree with what she does, but they sort of do by not condemning it.

I asked Mum how she felt knowing that there were other victims out.

There, sickened, but also a bit vindicated that we're not as dumb as we thought we were because other people have said, oh no, we would have known when I meet her. I knew she was no good. I knew it when I meet her. This we were wanting to tell us I knew, I knew, and it makes you feel really dumb and angry. Makes me feel vindicated that we're not dumb, that we were so powerfully used. The power that she has is amazing.

It turns out there was one more report from the Hawaiian police. Leslie went to them to file a report of her own. The police wrote down her account of a break in at her house. This report says, upon her return to her residence at about twenty one hundred hours, she observed everything in her room thrown about. The door was open and removed from her jewelry box a two point five carrot diamond ring valued at twenty thousand dollars, white guest watch valued at about two hundred dollars, and

She's definitely made a lot of enemies that wanted the money that they were promised, but especially like where I'm from, and it is a community, and I'll say, you know, Honora, She's burned so many people that even people that weren't directly affected monetarily by her. I was to the point where I probably, you know, wanted to punch her in the face. Unfortunately I ever had a chance.

Lane isn't the only person who felt that way. Trinity, the beachy, sporty looking Hawaiian who helped Leslie set up the breakwater, well, she definitely did. I mean, this.

Island, you know, we're all very Aloha made people here. I'd seen ninety percent of us, and you do wantto others as you want done to yourself. So if someone's working there butt off and they have bills to pay and you're not paying them, what are they going to do? They're going to do something to you.

The story she told me next kind of shocked me. It starts late one night in Lehina. Trinity says she was having a night out. Her and her uncle and her boyfriend went to see a punk band play. Leahina is a small place, so they weren't that far from the breakwater. After the band finished, Trinity and her crew climbed into a cab to leave, But just as she was getting into the cab, she saw Lazie coming out of the breakwater.

I looked over at the bar and I seen her coming out, and I said, oh, hang on a minute, mister, And he said what the cab driver said, you need to stop the cab. So I looked at my uncle and I said, hey, man, she's out there. I'm gonna go get her. And he said what I said, Are you ready? And he said okay. So I jumped out of the cab. I ran directly towards her and I just punched her directly into her face. She had grabbed all of the cover charge money from the front door,

The brul got bigger as Trinity's uncle started fighting with someone in Laizley's crowd.

One of the cops pulled up, and he's one of our local cops, and he said, Trinity, what have you done? And I said, I know, you've heard about all of the things she's been doing. At this point, he looked at me and he said, oh, I know. He said, do yourself a favor, get out of here right now. I said, okay, So I jumped in the cab and we took off. Next morning, I showed up at her door,

And for Leanne, that local from Lehina, she reckons Leslie probably wouldn't care about who she hurt. Anyway.

She is as fake as they come, and she has no heart for anyone or no concern for anyone, And honestly, her level of care is zero for anyone else outside of herself.

You get what you give care, whether you're in Hawaii, you're in California, you're in New Zealand, and wherever, you get what you give. And this place will welcome you, but it will also throw you and drowned you as fast as you make yourself apparent to be who you are. And that's what she did, and she's lucky she left.

So there were parts of Leslie's story about Hawaii that were kind of true. It's easier to tell a lie when it's built on a truth. I'm learning that as I'm starting to understand Leslie's world. But that doesn't make Leslie's lies any less damaging, especially as I'm hearing from the people who have been hurt by those lies along the way, people that remind me of my brother Greg. If there's a Greg in this story, it's a local

So she hooked up with David pretty much as a con artist.

David was a friend of Scott's.

She went ahead and found all of his dreams and strengths and weaknesses and talked him into quitting his job and investing all of his money with her to open up this bar.

David quit his job managing another restaurant for the promise of bigger things at the Breakwater. He invested twenty five thousand dollars in Leslie's business. David got to work immediately alongside the others, including Will.

Everyone liked him. He was a very junteel guy, very humble guy, very honest guy. And I think that's one of the main things that Leslie was able to trade on is Dave's reputation as being an honest, trustworthy fellow.

As things started to go bad at the Breakwater, David Will tried to keep each other's spirits up.

As time was going on, it became more and more apparent that Leslie was just lying to everybody, just behind had been the whole time. Myself and Dave used to lay down the beach in the Daytimes, talking everything through and laughing in a way at how much bullshit we would pull with.

But Wills's that laughter was a sad kind of laughter.

For Dave, it was devastating. It was his life savings and his reputation that was being plundered.

He was broke. She took every fucking thing he had. Okay, he was flat broke, But more than anything, he was so humiliated. We all told him that he was going to get screwed.

You know, I really wanted to talk to David. I've been asking everyone what happened to him. People have told me David was totally cut up and his reputation was ruined. So he left Hawaii. He went to live with his mum. Then one day Scott called me back with some news he had found.

Out Dave did pass away. The people that I talked to don't know what it was. My friend that knew him that hasn't seen him for quite some time said that it was a sudden thing or something that he didn't know what the situation was, just the bottom line that he was gone.

So I'm just looking at this statement that David made for the police. Now that I know he's no longer alive. It seems like this is the only thing I'll ever hear from him. It's a statement he made as part of Scott's case. He was a witness, and it's recorded in here that he stated he is non Minuchian for only a few months and regrets ever going into business with her. And I've read this witness statement from David so many times, but it's really this last line that

She loves sucking a person in, like your brother or me or David, and just destroying that person. Those things never leave you, you know, they never leave you. She's a manipulative con artist that is like a serial killer. She loves what she's doing. She just loves it.

Maybe she does love it. I really just don't know at this point. Maybe it's all just sport for her. But on the other hand, maybe she's just deluded. Maybe she believes that these crazy schemes are going to work out and everyone's going to get paid back and everything's going to be okay. I just feel like I have no idea what's going on inside of her head. I'm not sure where Leslie went next, but a year later she turns up traveling happily around Europe doing the tourist thing.

May three, New York. Eric met George Cloudey Julia Roberts private jet from Das.

Sounds like old mate. Eric t Weiss esquire the lawyer who Leslie said represented her. And this was written well before any of us had met Leslie, So this Eric character has been around for a while. She was just writing random, strange stuff about him in her own diary as she traveled. Why would Leslie have made a note to herself about Eric if he didn't exist, I don't know.

I am starting to make threats also.

And it's time for me to go to the United States. I'm going to go and find Answers. All right, touchdown, USA, I'm going to go and find Leslie.

What are we getting ourselves into?

But we've got a muscle curve. It looks like a sting ray on Willards. That's next time on snowboard. I have to say you've made a pretty unusual choice of snacks, But I mean, like, who gets banana chips and beef jerky?

And I wanted to

Stay away from sugar