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To listen to her talk was to hear the sound of coins clinking and dollars shuffling. She’d discuss her dealings with Greek shipping magnates, Middle Eastern oil dealers and European royalty. She could drop names with the best of them and was a financial wheeler-dealer a cut above the rest. As the executor of a large trust fund, Australian Investments, based in the British West Indies, she arranged low-interest loans to back hotel projects, resort construction, golf courses, whatever. Nothing was too large to consider; she had at her disposal, after all, trillions of dollars.
It was easy to believe. The posh 15th-floor office suite on Pennsylvania Avenue, a stone’s throw from the Capitol, exuded an aura of high finance. The suite was furnished with antiques, expensive art works and bottles of Dom Perignon. The chauffeur-driven limousine would pick the client up at the airport and deliver him to the ritzy office building. Next, the mahogany conference table was a fine place to sit with each client and discuss his monetary needs.
Of course, she said, it would take some advance fees to research the viability of each project. And the amount of the fee depended upon who was listening: the fees were on a sliding scale dictated by ability to pay.
She changed her name often, using different identities to deal with different clients. One day she was Evangeline Miller, the next she was Lee George, Evangeline Couston or Lynn Madison. The US Attorney indicated that correspondence between Miller and 25 of her clients added up to a staggering $13.5 billion in promised loans.
But Miller never had any trust and there was no account hiding trillions of loanable dollars. In fact, her lavish lifestyle was supported solely through the up-front fees that she received from potential clients.
As Miller sits in a DC jail, awaiting her transfer to a federal prison where she will serve a five-year sentence, she has plenty of time to reflect on her past deeds. She might have faced much more jail time, but she agreed to plea bargain and accept a single count of wire fraud. In return, prosecutors dropped nine other charges. Of course there’s the small matter of restitution to be handled when she is eventually released. She owes her most recent victims $1.5 million; however because she has no job, the judge was lenient with the terms of the payback. Miller may make payments of $200 per month – for 600 years.
Miller’s history is colorful, in a criminal sort of way. Her first husband filed for divorce when she began racking up bills way beyond the couple’s income. Miller contested the action and insisted that she’d just given birth to triplets. The judge, not seeing any babies to back up the story, granted the divorce but no child-support.
The baby story played a prominent part with Miller over the years. When a client would begin pressing her for money, or at least solid answers, she would seek sympathy by telling the story of her infant twins in Texas, one of whom had a serious heart malfunction, or her quadruplets or triplets living with far-away relatives. The stories bought her a little more time, but nobody ever saw any of the alleged children.- Norfolk police were familiar with Miller. Arriving in the mid-1980s, she pulled a mini-version of the more recent Washington DC scam. She’d entertain clients in her waterfront condominium and then she’d write bad checks and obtain credit to support the lifestyle she craved. After she was caught, she served a year in prison.
With her gift of gab, she could go into a new area and almost immediately convince people to give her money. A priest handed over $10,000 in Waterbury, Connecticut, and a Chicago taxi-driver gave her $5,000. In each case, she soon left the area – and so did her victims’ money.
Her last address before Washington DC was Nashville, where once again she pulled a mini-scam. After convincing clients that she could arrange the financing for a huge hotel project, Miller lived on up-front fees until the clients got wise and stopped paying.
With her income halted, she was off to set up shop on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Appearance was everything. The chauffeur-driven limo helped. The ritzy office helped. The fancy entertainment, complete with fine foods and liquor, helped. It all combined to support the wild tales told by the large woman in the black dresses. By 1994, Miller and her company had fallen almost $58,000 behind in the rent. She also owed almost everybody else in town: a dentist, a cabinet maker, a jeweler, a camera shop, a courier service, a florist – and $25,185 to The Forgotten Woman, a store specializing in clothes for large women.
An FBI investigation began in 1993 after a tip was phoned in by one of Miller’s employees. Not only did investigators discover a checkered past, but they found that the only funds in the offshore account were the front fees that clients paid. The arrest came in February 1995, and the guilty plea followed soon thereafter.
Unless she changes her stripes, the year 2000, when she is released, may prove interesting for those who encounter the very interesting Evangeline Miller.
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