By BERNIE BELLAN This is the fourth part of a story about a delusional Winnipegger who believes he is someone of great wealth and has spent the better part of 30 years contacting people all over the world telling them that he wants to invest in their businesses or projects.

The other three parts have been posted here at: Part 1: “The delusional Winnipeg con man who actually believed his own elaborate con and led one victim in Africa to consider committing suicide”; Part 2: “Meeting the con man for the first time in 2021; and Part 3: “An explosive email arrives in my inbox on January 16.”

As I noted in my last chapter, it was some time after that January 16 email arrived before I realized it had been sent by the person I’m calling Rick here – even though the email was supposedly sent by someone else. I still don’t understand why Rick chose to disguise the fact that he was the one who sent the email that detailed the litany of deception that the man I’ve been calling Fred Devlin perpetrated.

There are so many things I still don’t understand about Rick. He’s gone from being extremely cordial to vicious and back again to being cordial.

At first I didn’t keep a record of all the texts I received from Rick. He kept throwing out names I had never heard of – as if I had any idea what he was talking about. I tried to get him to slow down, just tell me who all these different individuals were whose names he was citing.

Rick kept coming back to one name in particular. I’ll call him Jonathan. Rick wrote that Jonathan was trying to get the RCMP in Ontario (where apparently Jonathan lived) to conduct a criminal investigation of Devlin. Since texts are often jumbled I had to keep asking Rick to explain why Jonathan, in particular – out of all the names Rick had mentioned to me who were victims of Devlin’s vast cons, had a story that might convince a police force in Canada to investigate Devlin. What about the others? I wondered. Didn’t they all have reasons to file complaints with police forces.

Over a period of days – in which I was constantly exchanging texts with Rick (I should explain that I’m mostly retired and can devote myself to writing about stories that grab my interest, as opposed to what I used to have to do previously, which was often to write about subjects in which I had no real interest.), I kept asking Rick more and more questions to get a better idea of the scope of Devlin’s activities through the years.

I told Rick that the January 16 email I had received whetted my appetite to the point where I would publish on my website that email along with my own story how I had come to meet Devlin. My original intention was to keep adding to that story as I learned more information about Devlin’s bizarre pattern of duping individuals into thinking he was rich and powerful. However, as I’ve already explained I was intimidated into pulling that story off my website once I got that libel chill letter from a lawyer.

Even though I chickened out on that one, I told Rick I still wanted to pursue talking to the various individuals he had named in various texts whom he described as having fallen prey to Devlin’s machinations. In time I was able to speak to seven different individuals, all of whom gave me permission to record my conversations with them. Strangely enough, once I had wrapped up speaking to everyone who I thought could offer a piece of the puzzle that is Fred Devlin, I was contacted by one more individual, whom I happen to know very well. That person’s name had come up in some of Rick’s texts – and not in a favourable way.

That particular individual said they knew their name had been discussed in negative terms by one or more of the individuals with whom I had spoken and they wanted to set the record straight – but not on the record. They kept me on the phone for more than two hours, but always insisting that nothing they had said could be reported. So, what was the point of their calling me in the first place? I wondered.

That particular conversation, frustrating as it was, was no stranger than some of the other conversations I had with some of the other individuals whose names had been mentioned at various times in Rick’s texts. Conversations were often meandering and had little to do with the story I was trying to chase down. But, I’m a good listener – and I let everyone who wanted to ramble on do that. Trying to make sense of what they told me had happened between each of them and Devlin wasn’t easy and I kept coming back to the original question that first occurred to me when I met Devlin: How long would it have taken you to realize the guy was a nutcase?

Following are excerpts from texts I received from Rick – and remember, I din’t have a clue who he was talking about in most cases. Again, names have been changed to protect individuals’ identities where they asked not to have their names divulged. The texts may seem somewhat disjointed and incoherent, but reading them will give you a sense of how wide a net Devlin cast in his delusion that he was a hugely successful businessman.

The first text here begins with a reference to someone named Bryan. I had been told earlier by Rick that Bryan Hunter was with the RCMP and was working on an investigation of Devlin at the behest of Jonathan who, as I noted earlier, was urging the RCMP to investigate Devlin.

“…just waiting for Bryan to get to work on Tuesday so he can transfer the case from York police to Winnipeg RCMP and get started with the investigation

“Charlie in Africa is still getting death threats and harassment from random strangers

“Avi … is ready to speak with you now and share his story about Fred – his number in Vegas is …

“Also Dan Winthrop is ready to speak with you now too. He’s the guy Fred used to fly around the world to these imaginary meetings to buy millions of dollars of planes and airports and all kinds of crazy stuff. He’s been with Fred for years doing this and has all the evidence and stories about everything. His number is …

“I’m still trying to get Jonathan Soloway to call you but he has trust issues with journalists

“Once you talk to Avi and Dan, you’ll have all you need.

“I’m telling you man this is almost like a major motion film it’s so beyond crazy.

(The following text is about someone whom I’ll call Dan thanking Rick for the work he’s done to try to bring Devlin to justice, also referring to being willing to talk to me.)

“Dan says ‘Thank you so much I do really appreciate the tone of your email and also your great work. It was very timely for you to do this and the end result from my 40 year project was absolute devastation. Fred destroyed and lied in person to top executives of an international company for years and now I’m in the mud because I associated with him. Yes I definitely will talk with this guy’ (That would be me).

“ ‘I will probably fly to Winnipeg to have a chat with him. I’ve been reviewing my story in my head and trying to make it succinct. So I will send you my story before I talk with this guy. Your timing was absolutely excellent. I don’t know if my work will ever continue that I’ve spent so many years on. But you as a businessman and a publisher knows what it’s like to persevere. I accept the suffering that I’m going through now and better to face that Fred is a psychopath now than further down the road. Fred definitely needs to be stopped and is using the names of top leaders in Winnipeg as companies that he says he owns.

“ ‘So you’re doing great work and I honor that.

“ ‘Thank you’ “

A couple more weeks passed between texts with Rick. I wrote to him: “…you keep saying charges are about to be laid, and from what I can see all that the RCMP have done is assigned a case number to Jonathan’s complaint.

“It’s hard for me to believe that the RCMP was taking the complaint seriously.”

Rick responded: “You have no idea the obstacles and challenges we’ve been through to get to this point. I’ve already cried about every obstacle along the way, so I’m not gonna repeat myself and bore both of us. I understand I’m just frustrated and I want this to be over with and I want that psychopath to be locked away, so he can’t hurt any more people.

I wanted to know though, what exactly Devlin had done to Rick that caused him such anguish. I asked him: “Can you quantify how you lost millions of dollars? Was it put into some sort of investment?”

Rick responded: “I didn’t lose millions through a direct cash investment. The loss was through reliance and opportunity cost over roughly two years. Fred promised a $10 million investment to acquire and scale my magazine and represented that $1 million would be advanced to stabilize me personally while the larger transaction was finalized. Based on those representations, I stopped pursuing other investors, shared my full business plan, disclosed confidential and personal information, and spent thousands of hours in daily calls, planning sessions, and operational preparation with Fred, my staff, and outside collaborators.

“We had approximately 20 people lined up and ready to execute once funding arrived, and the company’s growth was effectively put on hold while we waited. During that time I passed on other legitimate opportunities and investors because I believed the deal was real and imminent. The financial loss is the value of years of diverted labor, stalled growth, foregone funding opportunities, and business damage caused by reliance on repeated promises that were never fulfilled. That is what I mean when I say I lost millions of dollars.”

I returned to asking the original question that had been troubling me from the first time I received that original email on January 16: “How can so many highly intelligent people have been conned by Fred – and for so long? I smelled a rat the first time I met him. What was it about him that persuaded so many ostensibly intelligent people to go along with the nonsense he was spewing out when what he was promising could never be backed up?”

Rick responded: “That question is exactly the right one, and it’s really the heart of the story.

“Fred didn’t succeed because people were unintelligent. He succeeded because he was highly adaptive and targeted people’s specific vulnerabilities. He didn’t tell the same story to everyone. He mirrored each person’s values, language, and aspirations, then slowly escalated his claims once trust was established.

“In my case, I’m highly intelligent and have run a successful media company for decades, but I’m also autistic. That combination can mean I take people at their word. I’m less attuned to manipulation cues, and I’m more willing to suspend disbelief if something feels theoretically possible. Over time, especially with constant contact, that matters. When someone speaks with absolute confidence day after day, hour after hour, the brain normalizes the claims.

“The unifying factor across victims wasn’t stupidity, it was money used as leverage. Fred consistently dangled imminent, life changing financial relief. Promised investments, salaries, ownership positions, acquisitions. Once people believed funding was coming, they reorganized their lives around it. They stopped pursuing alternatives. They waited. That waiting is where the damage happens.

“He also used social proof. He placed people into roles within a supposedly massive organization, introduced them to each other, referenced meetings with officials, institutions, and high status figures. Each person assumed someone else had already verified the claims. No one realized they were all operating on the same unverified promises.

“Some victims were vulnerable due to age, idealism, faith, or personal hardship. Others were experienced professionals who believed they were seeing only a small piece of a much larger, already validated operation. Fred exploited optimism, trust, and the very human tendency to believe that extraordinary opportunities sometimes really do exist.

“In hindsight, the claims were impossible. But cons don’t work in hindsight, they work in real time, incrementally, when skepticism is postponed just a little longer each day because the payoff is always right around the corner.

“That’s how intelligent people get caught. Not all at once, but slowly, while trying to act in good faith.

“I’m absolutely willing to go on the record and share every aspect of my experience in detail, including timelines, communications, documents, and the specific representations that were made to me over the two year period. My goal is transparency and preventing further harm to others. I will also work with everyone I’ve interviewed and spoken to so that they can share their stories with you directly as well.”

After reading that particular text – which was well written, I came to the conclusion that the January 16 email I had received had been written by Rick, not by Charlie. I wondered why that was, so I asked Rick why he had used Charlie to send that email? Rick refused to answer that question and said that he felt like he was being “interrogated” by me. I told him that his response only added to my puzzlement over this entire story – which I still find so baffling to understand. Rick’s responses to subsequent questions became increasingly frazzled.

In our final exchange of texts – when I persisted in asking him why he had written that January 16 email, not Charlie, he wrote: “You’re throwing a monkey wrench into the whole thing right now by being a little too pushy and a little too aggressive

“This is always been about stopping Fred from taking more victims, not about you writing a story about our traumas

“The only person who benefits there is you”

In the meantime, I wanted to begin speaking to others who had been victimized by Fred Devlin.

The first person I spoke to by phone is someone I’m going to call Dan Winthrop. Dan Winthrop was an aeronautical engineer who had a plan to bring jet planes from Israel and convert them into water bombers.

Coming next: Dan Winthrop’s story