All language subtitles for Generation.Hustle.S01E06

♪♪

Hello. I am William Baekeland.

I am Simon Baekeland. I am David Russell.

I am Nikolas Odermatt. I am Jesse Gordon.

I am a billionaire. I am an aristocrat.

I am a world traveler. Am I real or imaginary?

I am a game hunter. I am a helicopter pilot.

I am a concert pianist.

Am I an impostor?

I speak five languages. I'm an entrepreneur.

Am I a conman? Or just a kid who went too far?

How was that, alright? Yeah? [ Chuckles ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Mitsidis: I'm Harry Mitsidis.

I am the founder of "Nomad Mania,"

which is a website for travellers

who like keeping a score of where they're going.

For me, travel implies being happy to go

way beyond your comfort zone and experience something

that you would normally never do

and finding parts of yourself within it.

I ended up deciding to travel to every country in the world,

and I finished every country at the age of 36.

And I've got 11 countries left now

in order to visit them all a second time.

The extreme travel community is quite a tight-knit group,

probably about 800-900 members

who really like to explore the world

in all it's glory and its extreme corners.

What I like about the group

is that there are so many different characters.

Spori: I am Kolja Spori. I'm German, based in Monaco.

I'm known as the "Gentleman Adventurer"

because I travel to difficult and dangerous places,

but always in style.

It's never wrong to be a gentleman

and also to look like a gentleman.

This is a classical clean business look

that is acceptable all over the world.

I have founded a club that is called "ETIC,"

the Extreme Traveler International Congress,

which is an annual meeting

of the most traveled people in the world.

I started to develop a special taste for danger zones,

places like Chechnya, Libya, Syria,

a lot of shady places in Africa.

Now we're getting to the more serious stuff.

This is just a T-shirt as it looks,

but it's actually bulletproof in the front.

[ Knocking ]

I have a bit of a talent to meet warlords in those places.

For example, I have met Prince Johnson in Liberia.

He's famous for cutting his opponents' ears off

many years ago.

I've met an American warlord, uh,

by the name of Donald Rumsfeld in the elevator.

I think he was a bit scared of me.

[ Elevator dings ] So this is the kind of experience

that I-I am looking for.

Laurent: I am Dominique Laurent.

Up to now, I have done about 300 travels all over the world.

I like to go to remote places where people do not go,

like Antarctica, like Siberia. I've been to North Korea twice.

Every penny I get goes into traveling.

If it's a remote place, it could be quite expensive.

In the range of 10,000, sometimes 15,000 Euro

for one trip.

I decided to create a list of 1,221 regions

where one should go,

and they became what is today, "Nomad Mania."

And in order to make the site grow,

I decided to have an internship program.

I advertised and got a number of applications.

At exactly the same time,

I got a message from Simon Baekeland.

Baekeland: Dear Harry,

I recently came across your website.

I'm pleased I found it,

as I never knew such a community existed before.

And it very quickly became obvious to me

that this is a really big traveler.

He claimed to have already traveled to 80 countries

and he's only 20 years old.

And obviously, I was flabbergasted.

Baekeland: Currently, I am working on arranging

a trip to Hawaii and then visiting the Palmyra Atoll

and Christmas Island, Kiribati...

Mitsidis: I asked him as a technicality

to send me his CV and a motivational letter.

And to be very honest, I didn't even look at those

because I was already so taken by his profile.

It was like, "Oh, look at him! He's like a younger me."

Baekeland: Yes, it is true, I'm 20 years old.

I am currently working towards

completing the U.N. list of all 193 countries.

It is my intention to become the youngest person in the world

to have visited every country in the United Nations.

Do you have any pointers or suggestions?

Mitsidis: Two months into him being an intern,

we heard that there would be a trip to Bouvet.

Spori: Bouvet Island is considered the Holy Grail

in our extreme travel community, because it is so remote.

Bouvet is a small sub-Antarctic island

and it is the remotest island in the world.

Spori: And just every couple of years,

there's a dedicated expedition ship going there --

quite expensive and usually you only have

some crazy travelers on board

who want to hold the Holy Grail in their hands.

I had always had a dream, you know, is to go there.

Mitsidis: I found out about this trip

and I conveyed that to Simon

and he said he's gonna do everything to be able to go

because this is what excites him the most.

And a few days later,

we got an e-mail from one of our members named Mike

who told us that Simon Baekeland is a fraud.

He's not who he says he is.

Obviously, this was very strange

because I had never heard of Mike

and, although I had never met Simon in person,

he's been doing work for us for two months.

So the first thing I did is I went back to the CV.

The CV was extremely unusual.

It said that his current position

is as a student at the University of Aberystwyth.

His previous studies, however, were at the Harrodian school,

which is one of the most well-known schools in the UK.

And then I look further down

and he claimed he had had an internship of a month

in North Korea at Pyongyang University.

Getting into North Korea in the first place is unlikely.

Having an internship at the university there?

Come on.

So I Googled "Simon Baekeland" and I got nothing.

So I decided that I'd call the educational institutions

to see if they really know of a Simon Baekeland.

And they said, "Sorry, no."

When I heard that,

I decided I'm gonna write a nice e-mail to Simon

and I'll tell him, "Look, your CV doesn't check out.

I would rather that you did not continue

your internship with us. I'm sorry."

And we'll leave it at that.

For this unique Bouvet trip,

we boarded the ship called the Ortelius

at the port in Oshuaia in the South of Argentina.

Laurent: All the people who were there

were in their 60s or 70s because it was expensive.

So, uh, of course this is probably not

the kind of trip you can do when you are 20.

Mitsidis: Many of the people on this ship

were extremely experienced travelers.

Some of them were incredibly wealthy.

So we sailed off from Oshuaia,

and I remember being up on deck as we left the port.

And there, completely unexpectedly,

who do I see?

But, Simon. Simon Baekeland was on deck.

And I was stunned.

This is the first time I saw him live

and I remember thinking, "Oh, Lord, I'm such a moron.

How could I have possibly thought that he was a liar?

He had said he'll be here, and here he is in front of me."

I really didn't know where to hide,

and I immediately decided that at the first opportunity,

I'm going to offer an apology.

And over those days,

I befriended a really nice German man called Helmut.

And he told me, "Well, you know, have you heard about

the youngest passenger on board?"

And I said, "Well, yes. What about him?"

And he told me, "Well, you know,

he's also the richest one on board."

And I'm like, "Well, who is he?"

He's like, "You don't know the Baekeland family?!"

And I had heard nothing about this name before.

But yes, it turned out

that his great grandfather Leo Baekeland

was the one who invented Bakelite.

And from Bakelite, then plastic was made.

Announcer: Out of the discoveries

of Doctor L.H. Baekeland

has grown a world-circling empire of plastic.

And he's like, "They are loaded. They've got all this money.

He's a billionaire, and here he is.

And he has a cabin all to himself."

This was a relatively expensive crossing for an average person,

so all of us essentially were sharing cabins.

And we knew that if he could pay for single occupancy,

it meant he really was very wealthy.

♪♪

Laurent: People began to talk about him between themselves.

He was a very well clad guy.

Sometimes during the trip,

he went to dinner with a bow tie.

So like a dan-- what we call in French, a "dandy."

Mitsidis: He looked extremely distinguished

and he sounded like an upper-class Englishman.

Baekeland: I've travelled a fair bit with family

in Eastern and Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand,

and North America.

Laurent:We talked about trips he did.

He was describing places very accurately.

So he had a very good knowledge of geography.

Baekeland: I went to school in Switzerland.

I guess I know a few people

and some connections have definitely helped

in my world travels.

Mitsidis: He told some people

that he visits art galleries and collects art.

He plays all sorts of musical instruments.

He can speak all these languages allegedly.

And he was writing a book about Norwegian territories,

which is what Bouvet is.

Laurent: Everybody was impressed.

An extreme traveller at the age of 22

who has been in 150 countries?

It's a dream impossible for us. [ Chuckles ]

Mitsidis: It then became apparent

that his name was not Simon after all.

His name was William and Simon was his second name.

And that's where I realized I had made my mistake.

When I had phoned those schools,

I had asked for a Simon Baekeland.

Now, William Baekeland quickly explained

that occasionally, for privacy reasons,

he used his middle name instead of his first name.

♪♪

Drury: My name's Jack Drury.

I grew up in a suburb of Birmingham

alongside William Baekeland, and we were at school together.

William was a good friend.

He was, uh, interesting and engaging to talk to.

He was very interested in the world.

He knew something interesting

about almost every country that I can think of.

He had a fascination for remote travel

from a very young age.

He must have been 17 or so

when he produced two itineraries that I really remember.

One of them was a tour around India from London,

exclusively by train.

He had found all of these timetables,

translated them where necessary,

thought about what he could see and where.

He planned it meticulously. And he did the same for China.

He believed that he was the sort of person

that should be able to do this sort of trip.

But of course, he wasn't.

It was just a curiosity, a hobby, a thought experiment.

And I never expected him to turn idea into reality.

Mitsidis: William was planning all sorts of great trips,

but I was never approached about them.

And I almost felt left out,

which I accepted as my punishment

for my previously bad behavior.

Laurent: He was planning a very expensive trip

to Palmyra Atoll in the Pacific.

Palmyra is difficult to reach.

It's forbidden to go there. It's protected environmentally.

So people were competing each other on this kind of trip.

So if William were going to propose something,

we would grab the thing, not leave to the others.

Drury: In really his first and second year of university,

William set up a company called "Uncharted World Travel".

And he had an idea that he could somehow monetize

the trips that he'd been planning from his teenage years.

I think it wasn't successful because he realized

that the people that would part with money to go on these trips

were not willing to pay a company.

And instead, individuals helped individuals out.

You can't market to a group of people

that operate as a community.

As an unknown 22-year-old, you've got no track record.

You've got no background.

None of these people know who you are.

And that is why he constructed an exotic backstory

sufficient to garner interest and trust.

Laurent: He said, "In order to get

the permission to go there, I said to The Conservancy

that I was going to make a donation,

and everybody should give me 10,000 euros

on top of the price of the trip."

Baekeland: My family are donors to the Nature Conservancy.

We are working on some projects

which now specifically include Palmyra,

so I have the permission to fly there.

Laurent: After the trip,

one of the guys wrote to The Conservancy

just to say, "You have received $10,000 euros from me.

I would like to know what you are going to do with it."

The Conservancy answered to him,

"We have not received any money from William Baekeland.

Nothing at all."

Drury: I can only imagine his ecstasy

when the first five figure number hit his bank account.

That moment for William would have been everything.

It would have been a-a vindication

of his years of research and effort.

And for him, that would have been

the opening of the door to the possible.

Money facilitates a certain lifestyle

that William had always been ambitious for.

He moves into a country club

where he's going to be looked after.

So the clock was ticking from that moment.

He was gonna cream off enough to fund his own travel.

He was going to spend a little bit on his lifestyle,

but he's too greedy to sustain that for the long term.

This guy who discovered that he did not give the money

did not share the information.

If we had known at that time that there was this problem,

it would have helped us a lot for the next things to come.

Spori: I met William Baekeland once in my life in Mogadishu.

I had hosted our annual extreme traveler conference

and we were about a dozen people from all over the world.

I had booked for our group,

the best hotel in Mogadishu, the Jazeera Palace.

And best means most safe

because every hotel in Mogadishu has been blown up.

I said to the agent who booked it for us,

"Make sure I get the best room.

I want to be as high as possible

and as far away as possible from the street side

so I have more chance of surviving if there's a bomb."

When I check in, I get the room key 200-something.

I think, "Well, two, that's the second floor,

sounds strange."

I walk up the stairs and I have the worst of all rooms.

I walked back to the reception

and I'm crossing William Baekeland

who is also just finishing his check in,

and his key is 600 and something.

Floor six is the VIP floor with extra security,

two guards with Kalashnikov.

But I wasn't there, although I was the organizer,

but young Mr. Baekeland

obviously managed to have the best room in the hotel.

So that sort of impressed me.

And this is typical for people

who are in the business of signaling social status.

And in Britain, that's where this is played to the max.

Class is entirely unique to Britain.

And everybody who's British has an idea of where they stand.

And William was middle class.

Class is about taste. It's about dress, how you speak.

And to a degree, it can be learned.

There are books on this.

One of them is called, "Debrett's."

William had a copy.

It describes stirring your tea,

not in a clockwise or anti-clockwise motion,

but in, uh -- in -- in back and forth motions

'cause that's less likely to strike the edge of the cup

and make a noise.

And as soon as William learned that,

that was the only way that one could stir sugar into --

into one's tea.

That care for image was, I think, one of the things

that the travelers found different about him,

which, counterintuitively perhaps,

makes them more willing to trust him.

He did not give me any hint of there being something wrong.

William Baekeland told me in Somalia

that he's planning to circumnavigate Antarctica,

and he was gonna do that trip with his mother.

Mitsidis: He claimed that his mother

was Lady Violette Baekeland.

She was an older woman in her 60s

and very well traveled.

Baekeland: Dear Harry, I wanted to let you know

that after ETIC and Bolsaso, I shall be flying to Socotra.

My mother and I are doing this together.

She has always travelled a lot,

for the most part, in an era when travel was

a lot less simple than it can be today.

Lady Violette seemed to have friends in all the right places.

And one of her friends was allegedly the wife

of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

and that is how William claimed

he managed to go to Syria on a long trip

without any problems.

William also had two sisters, Muguette and Ariadne,

and he never mentioned his father's name.

Just before Christmas in 2016, I got an e-mail from William.

Baekeland: Where to begin?

2016 has been an indescribably bad and difficult year

for both myself and my family.

Mitsidis: First, it was his eldest sister Muguette

who got sick.

And then after a few months,

she lost the battle and she passed away.

Baekeland: A simple closed-casket service

was held in Manhattan for a small audience,

limited to immediate family and close, personal staff.

Mitsidis: And apparently they had a teddy bear

flown first class from London to New York

so that the teddy bear could accompany the sister

to the final resting place.

Tragedy number two was when his younger sister Ariadne

actually killed herself.

Baekeland: I lost my second sister, Ariadne,

to weariness of life in October.

It is impossible to describe

the whirlpool of emotion and feelings

following the loss of both of my sisters.

And his father couldn't take it and he also passed away.

Baekeland: I returned from Argentina a few days ago

for the funeral of my father who passed away, 68, of stroke.

All is okay, though for sure, my mother has had a bad year.

To the many of you who know her well,

your continued kindness is very gratefully received.

Mitsidis: I wanted to be discreet.

I didn't ask too much.

But that was really, really difficult for him

and for all of us who tried to support him

through this tragedy.

William has always operated partly on sympathy.

He cares that people don't dare challenge him

because if they do, they might be treading

on something really uncomfortable.

The Baekeland family is one that is sufficiently well known

to be publicly documented

and was embroiled in all sorts of scandal.

With a high profile murder in the family,

that was the perfect backstory

because if you tried to check it out,

you'd go, "Okay, maybe you do want to operate in anonymity."

Mitsidis: Gradually, the status of William

within the travel community became more and more enigmatic.

He became an icon almost

because he was so young and so wealthy.

And because he started having

a much more active social media presence,

he was able to gather more awe-stricken fans

and more people who were really listening to what he had to say.

Gazarian: Hello, William.

Tell me a little bit about yourself today.

Baekeland: Well, I was born in the UK.

I've lived in seven countries, totally.

And I'm traveling to every country in the world.

My family have always travelled quite a lot.

When I was about 18,

I decided I would start going to more difficult countries,

like the Central African Republic,

and other countries like that

which require more planning and effort.

But I find something to see in every country,

so that's the plan.

Gazarian: What do you think it requires personally,

to be able to do this?

Baekeland: Well I think you need to be, uh,

good or competent with handling logistics

because that's the most challenging part, definitely.

Around this time then, early 2017,

my contact with William is intensified

because we are planning the trip to Central African Republic.

Up to that moment, I had never been on a William trip.

So I told myself, "If he manages to pull this trip off,

then I know for sure that he is legit."

Laurent: We were four -- him, me, a Russian guy, Harry.

And the objective of this trip was, by small chartered plane,

going to different places.

And what did he do?

He pulled it off fantastically.

Everything was seamless.

We went to the hotel.

It was a beautiful hotel -- the best in town.

And then we had our trips by plane.

It was perfect and it was all William's organization.

I had not known that he was also a pilot,

but he discussed technical issues of aviation

with our pilot on this small propeller aircraft,

so I was, once again, flabbergasted.

Like, "Is there anything this man can't do?"

After this trip, I was 110% confident,

and I paid closed-eyes deposits, made three checks.

All together, it's 50,000 euros.

[ Gun clacks ]

Mitsidis: During this period, William is organizing

a huge amount of very diverse trips.

So he has this ability

to organize extremely difficult trips

but also to pitch them to the right traveler.

Baekeland: Dear Paul,

I am attaching for you all of the relevant details

concerning the 2019 crossing...

Dear Dominique, attached is the schedule

for the South Sudan expedition

sailing down the White Nile, flying over Boma National Park.

Dear Harry, there's also a military jet experience

add on if desired.

I'll send it your way to look at,

as I know you are into this sort of thing.

Kind regards, William S. Baekeland.

[ Gunshot ]

There were many more trips I wanted to do

and I felt that he was

the right person to do them with.

I remember those days very fondly.

We traveled to many places

and we had a really good time together.

And of course, what we know happens about a year into

William's hitherto quite successful career

as a travel agent

is a few of the trips start to fall through

for vaguely plausible sounding reasons --

the logistics was difficult, these costs were sunk,

but the trip can't happen. Money has been lost.

And that money has probably been spent

in the bar of -- of William's country club.

While the members of this group

are very happy to share their accomplishments,

the problem is that they're a little less forward

about sharing the trips that fell through or didn't happen.

Mitsidis: William and I very happily planned

a trip to Sudan.

When I arrived in Khartoum,

there were already two travelers there,

including the Russian guy who had been with us

in Central African Republic.

I immediately go to the Lebanese restaurant to meet them.

And in my head, I'm wondering, "Well, where is William?

He's supposed to be coming here, too."

So I get there, and the Russian guy is red.

His face looks like a beetroot and he's really angry

because he is meant to be going to South Sudan with William,

but William has not showed up in Sudan as he said he would.

William hasn't given him any information.

He refuses to answer messages, and my friend is stuck.

And he is like, "William is a thief!

William is a liar.

William isn't answering the messages,

which means he's not respecting me."

So the Russian guy entrusts me with some information

that he has given William 166,000 euros already

for a number of different trips.

And two months before, his trip to the North Pole

via Greenland had been cancelled

also without any reasonable explanation.

I realized that I had also entrusted William

with quite a lot of money.

I had given him a total of 27,000 pounds.

That was for three different trips.

I sense something is deeply wrong,

but I know that he will be in Serbia in a few days

with his mother.

And so, when I see him in Serbia,

I'm gonna go all out

and I will not accept any half-baked answers.

This is where I will face him and he will come clean.

♪♪

Spori: I had organized my next extreme traveler meeting

in an exotic place between Serbia and Croatia

called the Free Republic of Liberland.

So I allocated a room for him, the best room.

This is what he gets, just, you know,

through social programming.

Mitsidis: The first meeting of the travelers

was taking place in a restaurant by the Danube,

and I was looking out for William and Lady Violette.

I walked in to 30 travelers,

some of whom I knew from previous trips,

but there was one traveler missing.

William was not there.

And then a few days later,

I got an e-mail sent by David Russell,

William's personal secretary.

And I'm like, "What?"

Baekeland: Dear Harry,

I am contacting you on behalf of William Baekeland.

He has been in a rehabilitation clinic

and is now having some major surgery.

He currently does not have access to a mobile phone

and I am handling some of his affairs temporarily

which he is currently incapable of.

Mitsidis: I didn't believe it.

None of us had ever heard the name David Russell,

and none of us had ever had an indication

that William Baekeland had a secretary.

Baekeland: In any case,

it will not likely be a quick recovery

and William will certainly not

be travelling anywhere in November.

Best Wishes, David Russell, personal secretary.

Mitsidis: I felt that David Russell is William

writing under a different name.

So I was certain in my mind that William is not in hospital

and that for his own reasons, he is hiding and avoiding us.

Spori: Harry Mitsidis approached me and asked,

"Kolja, have you had any trouble with William Baekeland?

Have you booked a trip? Have you lost money?" Et cetera.

I said, "Come on. Not at all."

But then on this event,

a lot of his victims met for the first time

and started talking and saying, "William Baekeland is not here

and he didn't show up last time there

and we have money invested in future trips."

There was a momentum building against William Baekeland.

Mitsidis: The only way to reach the truth

would be to contact as many people as possible

who I knew were involved with the case.

Laurent:I received an e-mail from Harry

asking me if I had made payments to William.

At that point, he did not say why he asked the question.

But when he asked the question,

I immediately understood that there was something wrong.

Immediately.

Mitsidis: It was an extremely stressful week.

All I could think of was William and what has happened.

It was becoming clearer

that William owed money to more people,

and we're talking of an amount close to $800,000.

Laurent: Harry made a lot of research

to discover the scam.

On my side, I also did my own research.

I discovered that he was a partner in a travel company

which was just created in July, 2017.

This company, Atlas Expeditions,

proposed trips to extreme places.

Maybe at this point, he was lacking of money.

So I think he was preparing the next step of the scam.

Drury: William was constantly coming up with new trips.

He's meeting more and more people.

He's navigating this network.

And he could pay off some people

for whom he'd failed to organize a trip

by bringing in more trips, meeting more people,

as a result of this network effect.

But the deficit created by funding his lifestyle,

he's judged wrong.

He's -- He's just got the maths wrong.

And as with all pyramid and Ponzi schemes,

the problem is that the world is not infinite.

There are not enough of these people

to constantly be expanding into.

Eventually, you hit up against the same people

that you've bumped into before, they start talking,

and as soon as there is pressure put on William's backstory,

things start to unravel and crumble.

Gazarian: Of the people I've spoken to on this podcast,

I was able to do some research at some level

on all the other individuals.

You must be a very private guy.

I was unable to find any information on you on the web.

So curious, why did you decide to say yes

when I contacted you to be interviewed for this podcast?

Baekeland: Um...I-I decided this would be

an interesting experience.

I don't have a website

or a blog or anything like that.

I don't -- and I don't intend to, either.

It's just, uh, an interesting experience to share it.

Mitsidis: I was confused and upset.

But more than that,

I turned into the one thing I never thought I'd be,

and that was a detective.

I already knew that William and Simon were the same person.

And of course, I never forgot Mike's tip,

that Simon is not who he says he is.

He's a fraud, and his real name is Jesse Gordon.

Back in 2013, Mike claimed he had seen a post

on Simon Baekeland's Twitter

which was exactly the same photograph

as one that Jesse Gordon had had on his Twitter.

So, the only lead I could take was to start trying

to put together who Jesse Gordon had been,

and I was able to find the records of the old company

that he had originally registered.

And the registration address was in Birmingham.

And then I got the record for this house

and I found his parents' names.

And I was also able to trace the sisters of Jesse Gordon

and their names were not Muguette or Ariadne.

One of them was called Jasmine.

I went to Facebook and I found a Jasmine Gordon

and I started looking at her profile.

And finally, one photo came up.

Jasmine Gordon had tagged the photo with,

"My crazy family,"

and there were five people in that photo.

It was Jasmine and her sister, her father, her mother,

and her brother.

And her brother was William.

Only that he wasn't William. It was Jesse Gordon.

[ Dramatic music plays ]

♪♪

Laurent: Everybody received an e-mail from Harry

named, "Apocalypse Now."

I was really, very upset.

I felt ashamed, also, that somebody of my background

would be a victim of this kind of scam.

Spori: I've met conmen in my career.

I've been working for one

and heavyweight boxing for example.

I have met some famous conmen,

and I didn't see through William Baekeland.

I wouldn't have thought so.

I was as surprised as the others.

Laurent: "Dear Travellers,

today is our day of the apocalypse.

I am afraid that after reading this message,

nobody will quite be the same again."

Mitsidis: When the travel community found this out,

people were in absolute disbelief.

The idol of the travel community,

this young billionaire, doesn't exist.

Drury: William, who I knew to be Jesse Gordon,

did not play ice hockey.

He did not study in Pyongyang.

He did not have a mother

who flew a teddy bear in first class.

He did not have sisters who are dead.

He does not have a dead father.

Until the age of at least 20,

he had not traveled the remote corners of this earth.

There's no helicopter to fly. There's no helicopter lessons.

I'm not even sure he could drive.

All of it is fiction.

Jesse was an ordinary kid in an ordinary city

with an ordinary life.

But he has a genuinely extraordinary sense of self,

a massive self-belief

and a belief that extends his own reality

to whatever he wants it to be.

Mitsidis: One of the recipients of the e-mail was William,

and I requested that he contact me

so that we can see how we will go forward.

And if he didn't,

then I would go to the police with this.

♪♪

Walton: My name is Dylan Walton,

and William Baekeland was known to me as Jesse Gordon.

He was the brother of my then girlfriend Jasmine.

She asked me to move in with her and her parents.

And yeah, we shared a room in her parents' house

for roughly two years.

Jesse definitely liked to distance himself

from the working-class side of his family.

His dad was a train engineer, his mother didn't work.

He'd look upon people with, like, lesser jobs

as lower class.

He could be quite insulting about lower-class people.

"They're all idiots. They're all stupid."

Which is the kind of class I fell into,

so it would be offensive to me and my family.

Maybe he just lacks the empathy.

Maybe he just lacks the feeling

that people normally would have when you hurt people.

Drury: When he was still at university,

my friend and I were in vague contact with him.

He was telling us that he was traveling all over Europe

and a bit of Africa.

He'd have met super high-profile people,

gone to super high-profile things,

none of which we -- we really believed.

And out of the blue, we received a message on Facebook

from a profile with the name of Nikolas Odermatt

that had clearly been created quite recently

explaining that Jesse has taken ill

and nobody's got any idea what will happen.

And at this point, we call bullshit.

We wrote to him and said that we were terminating our friendship,

such that there was left.

And we realized a couple of months later

that all public record of -- of him was gone --

the Facebook profile was gone,

pictures that he was tagged in were gone.

He just didn't exist anymore, and we got on with our lives.

And I believe in that year, he invented his own identity

and he was able to construct whatever the hell he wanted to.

Walton: So when he left university,

he told his family he had an internship with the government

to do with international trades, weapons trades.

Well after that, he told us

he was a stockbroker working out of London.

[ Phone dings ]

It was around this time when he was away a lot.

Um, letters would arrive addressed to William Baekeland.

And I think they found a passport with

a full William Baekeland identity

and letters to do with fraud,

but never really questioned him about it.

I haven't been on a lot of holidays.

My family would have to save up for a long time

to have a holiday.

And if they did and had the money stolen,

you know, I'd be devastated.

I just really didn't like him.

He was such a horrible character.

I really think someone needs to

beat some sense into him, to be honest.

It's -- Someone really needs to, and I really wanted to.

Mitsidis: The moment I saw the photograph

was a moment of relief.

I think the second feeling I felt was stupidity

because I hadn't really seen Mike's initial warning through

the way I should have.

Spori: I want to make clear

I am not a victim of William Baekeland.

Among the 19 victims, I know about half.

A couple of them are my good friends,

and then there's a couple who are outright idiots

who almost deserved what happened.

I wonder how they could wire $200,000 to a 22-year-old kid.

You better feel very comfortable

about spending that amount of money

or you don't cry afterwards.

It was not the money itself.

It's that to have been betrayed.

I reported to the police in UK.

At this point today,

I am very, very upset by the fact that,

as there is nearly no British victims except Harry,

the British police did not care and did not do nothing at all.

Drury: It had actually been years

since I had seen Jesse.

And one day, I was just chatting to -- to a friend of mine.

We were just discussing where people that we knew at school

had ended up, and we thought, "Let's Google Jesse Gordon."

And what we find is an article titled,

"Turmoil in the Travel Community."

We were like, "Holy shit."

He's been up to some funny business

in the last couple of years.

And we then spent several hours reading

the various interviews that he'd given,

going around these travel websites.

I've got to admit, part of me was a little bit "Bravo Jesse."

You know, "Fuck me, you've sort of pulled it off."

The key moment for me, I think, was hearing his voice.

He -- He had given an interview about a year prior.

Baekeland: My family have always traveled quite a lot

all over the world.

My mother had travelled a lot, even in childhood.

I had a music teacher who was living in Prague,

and I've been to Prague maybe 100 times.

Gazarian: What instrument were you playing?

Baekeland: That was harpsichord.

Gazarian: Harpsichord.

Drury: It's all nonsense,

but it's the same confident drawl

that he always had.

My friend and I then decided to approach Harry.

We sent him a message to kind of make sure these people

and Harry, especially, were in full possession of the facts.

Mitsidis: This story changed the way I felt about the world.

I had a lot of sleepless nights.

And now, I understand that William Baekeland

has changed his name again.

So he could be Donald Duck or Donald Trump, for that matter,

and we wouldn't know.

Am I a conman or just a kid who went too far?

This can only be decided by the courts.

Maybe William Baekeland was trying to organize

all those trips honestly, and it just grew over his head.

And he can't be blamed in a criminal way.

He is just a regular thief, just a regular thief.

So I want that his life, more or less, is ruined by this.

Drury: We're not talking about the kind of con artist

that is able to construct fantastically elaborate

international financial schemes.

What he does is do it to the right audience,

with the right level of confidence.

And so he finds his niche. [ Gunshot ]

And so a con artist with

the perfect set of people to be conned

is probably the perfect con artist.

Don't we all just want to be someone else sometimes?

Mitsidis: Although his performance was brilliant,

I think it was brilliant not because it was a performance,

but because he believed he was William Baekeland.

But I think behind the brilliance

lies a lot of discomfort

with the social class in which he was born.

Spori: With the grandeur that he has inside him

and this longing to flee his mediocre upbringing,

he almost had to take a shortcut,

which allowed him to enter the game of extreme travel

at a very high level

where he would not have gotten into ever

if he would have gone through rank and file.

Mitsidis: For those two years, more or less,

I think a part of him lived the dream.

I must admit, I quite like Harry.

I did admire him.

And even now when I look at William's old photographs,

sometimes I find myself smiling.

It's rather hard to say...

But I kind of miss him. ...but I kind of miss him.

Or rather, I miss the person I thought he was.

The one that doesn't exist.

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How was that, alright? Yeah? [ Chuckles ]

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