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At Leidos, a brilliant mind is smart, but a brilliant team is smarter. A ship that finds enemy subs is smart, but an autonomous fleet, that's smarter. Defending against cyber attacks? Smart. Stopping attacks before they start? Smarter. And using AI tools is smart, but integrating trusted mission AI into your technology is smarter. We're not just making technology solutions and national security and health. We're making smart, smarter. Leidos.
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Sharks are constantly moving through the ocean, looking for food, looking for food, looking for food. They don't care if it's a seal or a human. Even though they don't eat humans, they'll bite to see if it's something they want. Con artists are always looking for food.
When Jonathan Walton hosted a wine and cheese night in his Los Angeles apartment in 2013, he couldn't have known that the event would invite a shark into his inner circle. Flyers he hung up around the building gave off the scent of a helper, a do-gooder, a warrior against injustice. It was like blood in the water. Jonathan Walton's story unfolds thousands of miles away from New England,
But the woman he knew as Mayor Smith began her long career of conning and scamming in her home state of Maine. 98% of victims of con artists never tell a soul. And that silence gives the con artist power to scam everyone in the circle because no one's talking about it. Not one to be silenced. Jonathan Walton is talking about it.
online, in the press, and with his podcast, Queen of the Con. Now he's on Dark Down East to share his story. Because the con artist he's been fighting so hard to expose, she's back in the wild, right here in Maine. I'm Kylie Lowe, and with Jonathan Walton, this is part one of his story, The Con, on Dark Down East.
I live on the coast of Maine, within rock-skipping distance to Casco Bay. My grandfather was a lobster fisherman, and so I've long had a love and appreciation for the sea. When I think of Maine's salt waters, I picture colorful lobster buoys dotting the deep blue-green expanse, the foamy white waters crashing on rocky ledge, seals bobbing their heads just below the surface as boats motor by.
Until recently, I never really thought of Maine as a place where sharks swam freely. I assumed our waters were too cold and this just wasn't their habitat. Porpoise, whales, some monster tuna, sure, but not sharks, right? Of course, my assumption was wrong. There have been shark sightings just this summer. Trackers notify of great whites offshore right near Casco Bay.
And tragically, even a fatal shark attack in Maine waters within the last few years. Maine is absolutely a habitat for sharks of all kinds. In 2013, a Maine-born shark swam into the life of Jonathan Walton, but there was no dorsal fin to warn him. Her name was Mare Smith, at least that was the name she was using at the time.
Jonathan is a reality television producer. He's been living in Los Angeles since 2007, working in the industry on some big-name shows: American Ninja Warrior and Shark Tank, to name a few. Ironically fitting for this metaphor. Mayer lived in the same apartment complex as Jonathan and showed up for a wine and cheese night he organized to bring together his fellow residents.
They needed to address and solve a particularly frustrating tenant issue. The pool that was such a draw to living there needed repair, but due to a dispute involving the two buildings that shared the amenity, the pool was out of commission. Jonathan hoped that by galvanizing his community, they could find a way to get the pool back.
From that first moment when Mare entered Jonathan's apartment, responding to the details on the flyers he hung up all over, she commanded his attention and the attention of others.
She kind of took control of the evening. She quickly set herself apart as the mover and shaker in our building. She claimed to be dating this Los Angeles politician who's a partner in a big law firm. You know, she said she was from Ireland. She had a weird accent. It wasn't
American, but it was something. So I just attributed that to, oh, that's what Irish people sound like who've been living here for years. You know, they kind of mix. And she was funny and, you know, she was likable. Everyone liked her immediately. I liked her immediately, too. It wasn't just a social hour at Jonathan's apartment that night. They needed a solution. And Mayor Smith presented the most impressive one.
Her boyfriend, that Los Angeles politician who was a partner at a big law firm? Yeah, he'd get the job done. Mare was gregarious and fun. She was outgoing and outspoken, willing to help, willing to go out on a limb for her neighbors she'd only just met. Mare made herself easy to be friends with, and soon she developed a deep bond with Jonathan.
There were no obvious red flags to me. She was a nice, lovely woman. She was so kind. She wined and dined, my husband and me, at fancy restaurants. We became best friends. As soon as I told her that my family disowned me because I was gay and I haven't been home for years, she said, with tears, like literal tears filling her eyes, my family disowned me too because they're trying to get me disinherited.
Mare's Irish roots were actually quite impressive, Jonathan came to believe based on the evidence Mare presented. She had a copy of the Irish Constitution hanging in her living room. Her great-uncle's signature was at the bottom, she told him. So Mare came from money, a lot of it. And with the patriarch of her family having passed away back in Ireland, Mare said she was due a significant portion of that money.
And that's when she started laying down this inheritance story, that she had this 25 million euro inheritance that she was supposed to get a big part of, but her family is fighting over it. And she would show me texts and emails from her cousin Fintan telling her, "You'll never get a bloody cent, a bloody farthing." Fintan was among the several cousins and other family members that would incessantly text Mare, hassling her about the inheritance she was due.
Jonathan saw all the texts with his own eyes. He got to know pieces of Mare's life, each of her anecdotes falling into place to support the web she was weaving around him.
As the story starts unfolding that she's fighting for her inheritance, she tells me she's working. So she doesn't have to work, she tells me. She's like independently wealthy, but her cousin is best friends with the owner of Pacific Islands Travel, which is like this luxury travel agency, and got her a job there because she was going crazy with nothing to do. Because she told me there's only so much shopping you can do all day and then you get sick of it.
In the time she had to spare while waiting for her inheritance to be settled, Mare worked as a travel agent. Mare told Jonathan that she grew up vacationing in the Pacific Islands and had beautiful childhood memories there. As an adult, she returned to those islands as a friend of the Prime Minister of French Polynesia. She would stay at and inspect all of the luxurious five-star hotels.
Selling vacations to these high-end tropical locales where she spent so much time was easy and even fun, she explained to Jonathan. Mare sold the story, the vision of these Pacific Islands vacations, and people bought it. She became one of the top sellers in the country. Meanwhile, Jonathan and Mare's relationship grew even closer. They were like siblings. But that was all part of her plan.
Con artists don't outsmart you. They're not smarter than you. Con artists outfeel you. They use your emotions to get you. Because once you care about someone, once you love someone, you'll do anything to help them, and it'll blind you. Love blinds people. And it doesn't even have to be romantic love. It wasn't that in this case. I loved her like a sister. I cared about her, and that blinded me. At Leidos, a brilliant mind is smart, but a brilliant team is smarter.
A ship that finds enemy subs is smart, but an autonomous fleet, that's smarter. Defending against cyber attacks, smart. Stopping attacks before they start, smarter. And using AI tools is smart, but integrating trusted mission AI into your technology is smarter. We're not just making technology solutions and national security and health. We're making smart, smarter. Leidos.
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Right to the driver's seat. Discover every just right feature in the all new QX80 at infinityusa.com. 2025 QX80 is not yet available for purchase. Expected availability summer 2024. Individual audio cannot buffer all interior sounds. A little over a year after she and Jonathan met, and as the inheritance battle waged on, Mayer got an email. She shows me an email from her barrister saying, if any heir is ever convicted of a felony, they get disinherited.
First, Jonathan googled what a barrister was. It's the Irish terminology for lawyer. And then he connected the dots. With his years working in news, Jonathan had seen the stories of the extremes people would go to for the chance at money. He had a warning for Mare.
And I told her, "You better be careful because your cousin is friends with the owner of the company you work for. He might try to set you up and get you convicted of a felony so you get disinherited. We're talking millions and millions and millions of dollars here." I warned her. I'm like, "You better be careful." And she laughed it off. And she said, "Don't be silly, Jonathan. No one's going to set me up. That's preposterous. Ah, don't be silly." A couple of weeks later, I get a collect call from jail.
The automated voice instructed him to dial 1 to accept. So I press 1 and she's crying. She's like, you were right. I was arrested today. My family set me up. They're trying to make it look like I stole $200,000 from Pacific Islands, the travel agency. Jonathan called it. He just didn't know he was calling the con that would end up costing him tens of thousands of dollars. I bail her out of jail. I pay $4,200 and she pays me back the next day.
Because that's what you do for family, right? Mare was like a sister to Jonathan, and he had confidence she was good for the money. Confidence. The word con artist is short for confidence artist, because they gain your confidence and rob you blind. Mare's arrest was the start to her legal battles. Now that she was accused of a felony, that clause from the inheritance could impact her ability to claim the millions she said she was due.
It seemed like her estranged family would stop at nothing to make Mare's life miserable in the process. When her evil family, working with a dirty district attorney in Los Angeles, froze her bank accounts, she needed money to live on. So I started lending her money. I loaned her like $20,000 over the course of a couple months in cash. And I had no doubt. I wasn't worried at all because in my mind, well, she's a woman of her word. She paid me back the first $4,200 she borrowed. Like, I was completely confident
In order to dismiss the case against her, Mayer said she needed to pay $50,000 in legal fees to the district attorney. She turned to Jonathan, who again opened his wallet and swiped his credit card to the tune of 50 grand. It was a lot of money, a lot of debt, but in comparison to her multi-million dollar inheritance, which she would receive once she paid this fee and wrapped up the legal battle, it was nothing.
Mayer would pay him back and all would be well. So I loan her close to $75,000 over that year, you know, in this legal fight to claim her inheritance. And, you know, she shows me emails that the case against her is deteriorating because there is no case because it's a setup and that's coming out and I'm excited and she's going to get her inheritance and she's happy. We're moving on and she's going to get her inheritance. And then came another plot twist.
Then one day, I go to her place and she's doubled over crying. And she says that the judge in her case, because I let her charge my credit cards to pay legal court costs, that he considers that money laundering. If you've never seen Ozark or Breaking Bad, let's chat through money laundering real quick.
Money laundering is most commonly thought of as making large sums of money through criminal conduct, like Walter White cooking and selling methamphetamine with his partner Jesse Pinkman, and then funneling it through some other avenue to make it look like the money came from a legitimate source, like Mr. White's car wash business. I did some research into credit card money laundering based on the vague description of it that Mayer used.
My internet search history may be flagged by the FBI now, but I didn't really uncover any version of money laundering that had to do with paying legal fees through someone else's credit card. But either way, Jonathan had no reason to doubt Mare. He wasn't doing Google searches of his own.
With his lack of experience in the court system himself, save for a traffic ticket once upon a time, he had no cause to question the money laundering charge as anything but legitimate. The judge is going to punish her with 30 days in jail as a slap on the wrist. It's not a felony. She's going to get her inheritance as soon as she gets out. And again, I was so far down the path that this was just another hiccup, and I believed it. She goes to jail for 30 days, L.A. County Jail.
And she calls me collect every day. On like the seventh day, I tell her, I'm coming to visit you. And she's like, no, no, no, no, you can't come to visit me. I don't want you to see me like this. It's horrible. I'm ashamed, blah, blah. But this is like a sister to me at this point. So of course, I'm going to visit her. I've never visited anyone in jail before. In order to visit someone at the Los Angeles County Jail, Jonathan had to complete a registration, providing his personal information and identification via an online portal.
And then he had to select the inmate that he planned to visit. He typed in her name and clicked submit. What popped up caught him completely off guard. Mayer wasn't in jail for supposed money laundering, for charging her legal fees to his credit card. The charge instead? Felony grand theft. And like a heat washed over me and I couldn't breathe. I'm like...
This has to be a mistake.
I literally drop what I'm doing, I'm at work, and I run out, I get in my car, I drive down to the courthouse, and I go to the criminal clerk. I pay, God, 30, 40 bucks. I wanted every court record on this case that I'm looking at that she's in jail for. What is this felony ground up? And I get the court records, it took hours, and I sit down in the corner and I'm sifting through the court records, and I'm just, I'm shaking because I realize everything she told me about this case was a lie.
She really did steal $200,000. She pled guilty to stealing $200,000 from Pacific Islands. She pled guilty and she used $40,000 of the money she scammed from me to pay a plea agreement. And that's the reason she only got 30 days. Had she not come up with that $40,000 for the plea agreement, she would have got a five-year sentence. I went home and I collapsed in my husband's arms crying. I couldn't believe it because I realized she scammed me.
Her bank accounts were not frozen. She was not getting a slap on the wrist. He learned that Mare had been collecting payment from her travel agency customers direct to her own PayPal account. Mare was decidedly not a wealthy Irish heiress. Jonathan's money, the nearly $100,000 he expected to get back when her inheritance came through, it was gone. Imagine that feeling for a moment.
Imagine your closest friend, someone that feels like family, that you care for and support like a sibling. Now, imagine everything you believe to be true about that person evaporating into a puff of smoke all in one instant. Top that with a crippling financial impact. Jonathan was inconsolable, raw with pain, until he wasn't.
At his very core, Jonathan is someone who takes action. So he decided to do something. Leidos Radio. L-I-D-O-0-0-0-3-0-0-0. What's making smarter smarter? 15 seconds. At Leidos, a brilliant mind is smart, but a brilliant team is smarter. That's why we collaborate to create even smarter technology solutions in national security and health.
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Mayor had asked Jonathan to pick her up when she was released from her 30 days in jail. Thinking ahead, before Mayor got into his car that day, he popped open the voice memo app on his phone and started recording.
At that point, she didn't know Jonathan was aware of her actual conviction or that he could see straight through her schemes. Jonathan confronted Mare at the end of that drive, calling her out for all the money she scammed out of him. It's all captured in the recording, and you can hear it if you tune into his podcast, Queen of the Con. And I said, you know, you've been lying to us about everything, and I have the court records in my hand.
And I told her the last part of the conversation, I said, the next time I'll see you will be in criminal court. And I walked away. The whole time, Mare is crying, quivering lip and all, assuring him that he's wrong. He's got it all wrong. The fake but sometimes convincing crying act was all part of her craft. But Jonathan was immune to it now. Jonathan later texted Mare. He called her out for not apologizing for what she did.
Jonathan hoped that both the recording of that car ride confrontation and the text exchange would become evidence in a case against Mare, but she never caved. She doubled down on her denials. With or without a documented admission from Mare, though, Jonathan still felt he had a case. This woman took him for close to a hundred grand through lies and deceit. Thanks to his background as a television producer, his stack of proof was hefty.
So, he went to the police. Jonathan walked into the police station days later in March of 2017, armed with his pages upon pages of evidence. They turned me away. Immediately, the cop is like, "This isn't a crime. It's a civil matter. You gave her the money. Go sue her in court. This is not a crime." Unfortunately, it's not an uncommon response in these kinds of cases. But Jonathan was persistent.
This got the officer's attention.
He wanted to know what kinds of shows Jonathan worked on. Anything he would recognize? Jonathan began to list out his CV. And the cop's like, "Shark Tank?" His eyes light up. And he's like, "I have something I want to pitch to the Sharks." And I'm like, "Oh, well, absolutely. I'll help you pitch whatever. I'll help you write up a pitch." There's no shame in working with what you've got, right? And he leans in and says, "All right, I'll write a report, but I don't, you know, you have a snowball's chance in hell of getting this investigated. But
You need to call about this case every day. The officer informed Jonathan that with each phone call, his case would be moved from the bottom of the pile to the very top. His advice to Jonathan was essentially, be a nuisance. Call every day, ask when the case will be investigated, and stay on top of it until they realize that the only way to get rid of you is to either dismiss the case or file charges and move it to the district attorney's office.
And, God, that was the greatest advice I've ever received from anyone, and it's helped me. So that's exactly what he did. Call after call, Jonathan made himself a known element. He wasn't going away. Finally, his case was assigned to an investigator. But even then, the response was not encouraging.
Jonathan kept up with his daily practice, this time calling the investigator who held his case file asking for updates, but the updates were scarce. As Jonathan told me, so many of these scam and con artist cases close without any justice. They require stamina on the victim's part to keep the investigation moving forward. Oftentimes, victims simply don't or can't devote their time and energy to the effort.
It's unfortunate, but that's how it seems to play out. The burden is on the victim. And without any encouragement from the investigators working the case, the victim cuts their losses and moves on. But you should know by now that Jonathan is not one to move on. He knew what he had to do. I need to start investigating this myself.
Jonathan Walton launched his own investigation, leaning on his reality TV producer chops to learn more about Mare Smith. Turns out that wasn't her real name, and she wasn't Irish, but American, born in Bangor, Maine. Jonathan also learned that he wasn't Mare's first and only mark.
On the next episode of Dark Down East, Jonathan Walton takes action. Big, bold, public action.
and it exposes the con artist he once called his best friend. I would go on to find 46 other victims all over the world, in Florida, in Michigan, in Maine, in Tennessee, others in California. And then I get a call one day from a police detective in Northern Ireland. He'd been looking for her for 10 years. With each new victim that came forward, Jonathan's evidence against Mayor Smith got stronger.
But his fight to bring her to justice wouldn't be easy. What Jonathan learned through his own investigation, her laundry list of scams, the trial of Mayor Smith, and what she's doing now. Where does she go as soon as she gets out? As far the F away from California as she can get and still be in the contiguous United States. She goes to Maine. All that and more in Part 2: The Convict.
Dark Down East is on a summer schedule, releasing episodes bi-weekly. But I won't make you wait two weeks for part two of this story. It drops next Monday, August 8th, 2022. Follow Dark Down East and listen to Jonathan Walton's own show, Queen of the Con, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. And thank you to Jonathan Walton for appearing on this show to share his story.
Any sources cited or referenced are listed at darkdowneast.com so you can do some digging of your own. If you have a personal connection to a Maine or New England case that you would like me to cover on this podcast, send me an email at hello at darkdowneast.com. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East. At Leidos, a brilliant mind is smart, but a brilliant team is smarter.
A ship that finds enemy subs is smart, but an autonomous fleet, that's smarter. Defending against cyber attacks, smart. Stopping attacks before they start, smarter. And using AI tools is smart, but integrating trusted mission AI into your technology is smarter. We're not just making technology solutions and national security and health. We're making smart, smarter. Leidos.
Ever dream of a three-row SUV where everything for every passenger feels just right? Introducing the all-new Infiniti QX80 with available features like biometric cooling, electronic air suspension, and segment-first individual audio that isolates sound.
Right to the driver's seat. Discover every just right feature in the all new QX80 at infinityusa.com. 2025 QX80 is not yet available for purchase. Expected availability summer 2024. Individual audio cannot buffer all interior sounds. See owner's manual for details.
