Also known as Tuesdays, in Brussels.
From The Atavist Magazine, no. 148:
A good scammer sees opportunity everywhere,
including their own downfall. In 2006, the police showed up at Gustav
Daphne’s house in Beverly Hills. They had come once before, when a
neighbor complained about his trash. Daphne happened to be swimming in
his pool at the time, and because he is French, he came to the front
door in a tiny little bathing suit. The police were appalled; they gave
him a reprimand about storing his garbage more tidily and scurried away.
This time was different. The cops came straight into the house. There
were a dozen of them, wearing bulletproof vests. They took him outside
in handcuffs and put him in a car. Maybe he was paranoid, having built a
multimillion-dollar empire on fraud and deceit, nurturing connections
with international criminal rings, but at first he thought that he was
being kidnapped. When he saw the jail, he was relieved.
The feeling was short-lived. The jail was cleaner than those in
Europe where he’d been held, but after a couple of hours he demanded a
cigarette and was informed that smoking was prohibited. OK, he thought.
There must be a way. There’s always a way. He would find the right
people, negotiate the right conditions. He had to smoke! He loved to
smoke. He loved it more than anything, except for women. He loved women!
And smoking, and art, and shopping.
He found someone in the prison whom everyone called El Gordo, a
Mexican guy who could hook people up with anything. Daphne asked for
cigarettes and was given an address on the outside where he would need
to have $300 delivered. This was not a problem. He didn’t crave money,
but it was useful, so he accrued it. His mansion had once belonged to a
silent film star; he sometimes commuted by helicopter. There wasn’t much
Daphne couldn’t afford.
After Daphne’s cousin drove a Bentley to a shady neighborhood and
made the cash drop on his behalf, Daphne went back to El Gordo to
collect his cigarettes. El Gordo looked at him, then gave him a nicotine
patch. “No smoking in prison,” El Gordo said.
By the time Daphne was extradited to Europe to face money laundering
charges, which was the reason he’d been arrested in the first place, he
had kicked his cigarette habit. He felt great. He was buoyant with
health. He boarded a plane to Switzerland in handcuffs, was whisked to a
prison near the Alps, and was put in a cell. Waiting for him there was a
pouch of tobacco. He resisted for a few hours. Then he smoked the whole
thing.
Eventually, Daphne was sent to a prison in France, where he could get
anything he wanted: magazines, special meals, the Israeli cigarettes he
preferred. His lawyer could also bring him things. So when he saw a
segment on TV about climate change policy, he asked his lawyer to bring
him more information about France’s plans to reduce emissions. Daphne
had a preternatural ability to sniff out criminal prospects, and he’d
caught a familiar whiff.
When Daphne read the materials his lawyer provided him, he learned
about Europe’s carbon-emissions trading system, the first of its kind in
the world. It had grown out of the Kyoto Protocol, the landmark
international agreement to reduce global emissions. Sure enough, Daphne
told me, he saw the blueprint for what would become his next illicit
enterprise. As soon as he’d finished his time in prison, he began gaming
the new emissions-trading system.
The scam would help Daphne accrue even more money, and it would make him famous. In the media he cut a dashing figure,
partying with celebrities and oligarchs. He maintained his slim
physique by avoiding carbohydrates like they were venom and dressed in
blazers cut from blue velvet or embroidered with shimmering brocade
flowers. He liked to wear a diamond-encrusted Chopard sun pendant on his
partially bared chest and was rarely photographed without one of his
hundreds of pairs of Tom Ford sunglasses, all aviator-style with
gradient lenses. Always, it seemed, he had a cigarette hanging out of
the side of his mouth.
Reporters dubbed Daphne the “prince of carbon,” but it wasn’t just
his flamboyant charisma that elevated him to criminal royalty. So did
the nature of his new fraud. Daphne was scamming the fight against
climate change by exploiting a policy flaw that left billions for the
taking.
No one was ever sure who was working with whom, who might be
screwing someone else over, or who had started the whole thing.
I should say here that Gustav Daphne is a
pseudonym. He remains a wanted man in France, so when I traveled to meet
with him at his gated villa in Tel Aviv, he agreed to speak on the
condition that I not use his name—any of his names. (He has a few
aliases.) He kept saying what a bad idea it was to talk to me. He had
turned over a new leaf, he insisted, and like a freshly avowed ascetic,
he nurtured a few simple pleasures: taking his impeccably trained
Belgian Malinois on sunset walks along the beach; going horseback riding
with his daughters. He tried to steer clear of trouble, though it
occasionally sought him out. A few weeks before we met, some masked guys
on a motorcycle drove by firing guns at his home; when I visited, the
front door was being replaced.
Still, his name is all over the French media. I warned him that, at
least in some circles, a pseudonym would be a pretty weak shield for his
identity. That was OK with him. He said that he wanted to put the past
behind him and focus on his new ventures, like crypto investing. So, no
name.
During my visit, Daphne took calls from his lawyers and asked favors
of his wife and flirted with acquaintances over WhatsApp. He wore his
Tom Ford sunglasses indoors and out. He showed me his art: a large
Kandinsky painting in the foyer, a few Chagalls downstairs. The villa
had some burly guys on staff and a cleaner from Sri Lanka who picked up
after two fluffy indoor dogs that liked to avail themselves of the plush
white carpets.
All this is part of Daphne’s downsized lifestyle. He used to have a
bigger mansion, with a swimming pool and a tennis court, a gym and a
movie theater. He once parked his yacht in the glittering harbors of the
Côte d’Azur. But he has fashioned a new life for himself in Israel,
which has yet to grant France’s request for his extradition.
Daphne wanted me to know that to him the carbon scam was a negligible
chapter in a long and successful criminal career. It wasn’t his most
lucrative scheme; it wasn’t even the first opportunity he’d pursued in
the lumpish market of environmental interventions conceived by a
civilization in ecological peril. Plus, he was just one of many people
who ripped off the emissions-trading system.
Daphne and other scammers’ pillaging of Europe’s carbon market constitutes what the media have called “the fraud of the century”—billions
of euros were stolen in a matter of months. The shadowy scheme
attracted established crime rings and amateur hucksters alike, many of
whom knew each other. But the scam lent itself to duplicity: No one was
ever sure who was working with whom, who might be screwing someone else
over, or who had started the whole thing. Its web reached the boxing
rings of Las Vegas, the offices of Germany’s biggest bank, the caves
along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was
hiding, and the gilded restaurants of Paris, where it also left blood
spattered on the streets. It pulled in a playboy demi-celebrity, an
Afghan refugee, a flashy street hustler who couldn’t accumulate enough
bling, an immaculate businessman who hobnobbed with the queen of
England, the doyenne of Marseille’s underground, and a man some people
called the Brain.....