THE SWINDLES grew more audacious as he crossed continents, €70m passing through the nuanced hands of Kevin McGeever as he seduced investors in Australia, the United States, Europe and the United Arab Emirates.
Along the way, there was a fake bank in Liechtenstein, and a fake Austrian in Feldkirch, a fake paradise in Dubai, and a fake kidnapping, or two.
Some things, of course, were all too real. On January 29, 2013, a dishevelled man shuffled from a remote Irish roadside into the lights of an oncoming car. Through sleet rain, electrified on a black night, Catherine Vallely suddenly saw a red glow. For a moment she mistook McGeever’s red pants, his starved, gaunt face and his billowing, chest-length, white beard, for a traffic bollard, blurred in the lights.
People, all over the world, frequently mistook Kevin McGeever for something he was not.
Pattern of deception
In the course of making The Many Lives of Kevin McGeever, an RTÉ One television documentary, I spent three years tracing the intricate side-steps of McGeever. In a 30-year career, conning his way across four continents, the Mayo man has claimed to be many things: a developer, a roofing contractor, a Harvard-educated Doctor of Arbitration, a psychologist, a best-selling author, and President of the fictional World Trust Bank in Liechtenstein, where he purported to exclusively deal in $100m trades.
I discovered a pattern of deception that began in 1973, when, aged 29, he abandoned his first convertible Jaguar sports car at Dublin Airport and overnight, left behind astonished friends and a small, unfinished housing development he had been building in Naas, Co. Kildare.
The trend continued through the 1980s in Australia, where he abandoned his De Tomaso sports car at Sydney Airport in 1985, leaving behind his wife, Valmai, their two young daughters, Renee and Shanelle, and a luxury four-bedroom waterfront home in the southern suburb of Kareela. He also left behind at least five investors, each of whom had been conned into buying the same roofing business.
In 2000, with the FBI on his trail over an $8m fake bank scam, McGeever abandoned leased sports cars and the home he shared with his second wife, Jeany Nicole Chhay, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and came to Ireland to re-invent himself as a Celtic Tiger property developer
In 2000, with the FBI on his trail over an $8m fake bank scam, McGeever abandoned leased sports cars and the home he shared with his second wife, Jeany Nicole Chhay, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and came to Ireland to re-invent himself as a Celtic Tiger property developer. Ms Chhay eventually secured a divorce 10 years later, after court papers noted McGeever could not be traced.
In the meantime, McGeever had taken millions from up to 100 Irish investors who thought they were buying dream homes in Dubai. Instead, in 2007, McGeever double-sold properties; sold other apartments which were entirely fictitious; and used investors’ money to buy commercial property in Dubai for himself. He then sold the same commercial floors to multiple buyers in a scam that involved 48 different transactions, with buyers from Ireland, Russia and China.
Some got their money back, many did not. At least €70m passed through McGeever's hands, much of it unaccounted for. He spent €4.5m buying and refurbishing a mansion in Craughwell, which he named Nirvana.
Marked for life
While making The Many Lives of Kevin McGeever, we encountered as many characters as countries in McGeever’s convoluted and captivating story. But in the end, even after interviewing victims in Australia, in Palm Beach, in Dubai, and in Ireland, one essential question remained. Yes, McGeever had been lying, cheating and conning people, for 30 years. But this time, was he the victim? Or was Kevin McGeever the man who kidnapped himself?
Catherine Vallely occasionally picked up hitchhikers from the hippy camp and the Buddhist centre dotted along an old smuggling route, linking Swanlinbar in Co. Cavan to Ballinamore, 19km south, in Co. Leitrim. The former Sinn Féin local election candidate was returning from a Tuesday night writing class with her friend, Peter Reihill, when she spotted what she thought was a bollard on the road ahead. The moment they stopped, shortly after 10pm, for a frail, sodden, yet unfailingly polite 68-year-old stranger, a bizarre plotline began to unfold before the aspiring writers’ eyes.
His body still shaking with the cold, he spoke in a rasped voice of how he had been kidnapped, and starved for eight months in a secret underground container
Dripping socks stepped into the back seat and McGeever’s eyes — huge, like a famine child’s — looked out. McGeever, wrapped in some kind of plastic sheeting, was holding a new flashlight and a mobile phone, containing just one pre-registered number in the contacts list.
His body still shaking with the cold, he spoke in a rasped voice of how he had been kidnapped, and starved for eight months in a secret underground container. He said he had been dumped in the area by three men in a van, but said he didn’t know where he was or what day it was.
He looked the part. Weighing about eight stone (112lbs), he had ‘thief’ — mis-spelt ‘tief’ — written in indelible ink on his forehead. His discoloured fingernails were more than an inch long.
“He had a pair of enormous eyes in a very thin face. He was rubbing his beard with fingers that had long nails. The beard was coming away in his hands. He was well-educated, well-spoken and polite,” Ms Vallely said.
Another con?
For 30 years, McGeever had taken a feline pride in his appearance. His expensive Baroni suits, tanned skin, sunglasses, jewellery and Church’s leather shoes spoke as much for his inner narcissism as the pulled and pinched plastic surgery lines either side of his eyes.
Every scam and con he’d pulled — from selling the same business five times in Sydney in 1985, to convincing 88 investors worldwide in 1998 to lodge $8m into his fake bank in Liechtenstein — was always predicated on his charismatic, constructed persona of wealth and success.
Here he was now, starved and gaunt, shoeless, grey, and defaced. If this was all just another con, it was being perpetrated in a way that was totally out of character
Yet, here he was now, starved and gaunt, shoeless, grey, and defaced. If this was all just another con, it was being perpetrated in a way that was totally out of character.
Ms Vallely didn’t know that the man in her back seat was wanted by the FBI and Interpol, or that he had recently spent time in prison in Dubai and Germany. She did find it odd, however, that he didn’t appear to smell. At least, not badly, for a man supposedly held underground for the past eight months.
Ms Vallely brought him to the nearest Garda station, where he appeared calm as a female Garda checked out his story.
Catherine noted how he retained a dignity, even as he devoured biscuits and warm tea, and then the curry chips he’d ordered from a nearby takeaway.
McGeever’s kidnapping claims initially rang true. Gardai in Gort, Co. Galway, confirmed they were investigating his disappearance. McGeever’s fiancée, Siobhan O’Callaghan, had reported him missing to gardaí in June 2012, almost eight months previously.
McGeever was taken to Mullingar General Hospital, where doctors noted some muscle wastage and minor injuries, but were relieved not to find the eyesight issues they had expected in someone who had been kept in the dark for eight months.
It wasn’t until days later that Catherine discovered Kevin Michael McGeever was a multi-millionaire with his own fleet of 13 luxury cars, with personalised licence plates like the MR KMM, which adorned his Hummer and his Mercedes SL55 AMG. She was startled to see photographs of a 14 stone McGeever standing before a helicopter, liveried with KMM, which was both his property company’s name and his initials.
Photoshop, phoney lawyers and the FBI
Like all of McGeever’s stories, there was some truth in there somewhere. He did own some luxury cars, but most were leased, just like the helicopter. He hired it for a day, from an Irish businessman who had invested more than €2m with McGeever in Dubai.
Unknown to the businessman, McGeever arranged for himself to be photographed in front of the helicopter. He photoshopped the KMM livery in later. Potential investors were always impressed to see a developer standing in front of his own company helicopter. Kevin pulled stunts like this all the time. He could be anyone for a day.
McGeever’s biggest con was establishing a fake bank in Liechtenstein, using a post office box in Salem, a shell company registered in the British Virgin Islands, and a phoney lawyer named James Sexton.
The scam duped lawyers and 88 investors across America, in Mexico, Canada, Britain and Ireland. Together they invested $8.8m into McGeever’s fake bank. More than $2m disappeared, before investors managed to freeze the accounts.
The FBI established that McGeever bought himself a $67,000 Mercedes and an $18,000 church organ from the proceeds, and traced the rest to accounts set up by the fake lawyer, James Sexton, in Panama and Belize.
Sexton initially claimed he had handed over the $2m to an Austrian named Kurt Schmied in Feldkirch. Mr Schmied was, like so much in Kevin McGeever’s life, a fiction. Sexton eventually died in prison, while another accomplice, Doug Johnson, entered a plea, and agreed to give evidence against the fugitive McGeever.
An FBI arrest warrant remains active for McGeever. The FBI confirmed to RTÉ that he would be arrested should he return to the United States.
Insidious charm
After a six-month investigation into his kidnapping, Mr McGeever was charged with wasting garda time. He was also charged with knowingly making false reports and statements to gardaí on various dates in 2013, relating to allegations of false imprisonment, assault and threats to harm.
If his kidnapping claim was just another con, it meant McGeever had permanently defaced himself. The ink is still visible on his forehead, even beneath the layers of cosmetic concealer McGeever applies daily. The overriding aspect of McGeever’s character is his vanity. Could someone so vain, and so at ease with fleeing countries, really have done that to himself?
He wouldn’t give an interview on camera, but we met and spoke at length on several occasions and had numerous hour-long phone calls, during which he appeared to suffer from wild mood swings, his initial aggression giving way to tears and an insidious charm, which left you liking him immensely, despite all the lies and broken promises.
I was buried alive for eight months and a day. I was starved and beaten. Do you really think I’d do that to myself, write that word on my forehead forever?
He would promise wholeheartedly to produce documents which would clear his name, or to set up interviews with people who could prove his claims, but always, he would stage a u-turn, or deny ever making such promises in the first place. He told me he has had 14 sessions with a tattoo removal specialist to slowly burn the skin and fade the word ‘tief’ permanently inscribed on his forehead.
“I was buried alive for eight months and a day. I was starved and beaten. Do you really think I’d do that to myself, write that word on my forehead forever?” he asked me.
He promised to allow me to film and interview him as he underwent the treatment to remove the word 'tief’, yet like all the other commitments, it never materialised. Could a man so irrevocably narcissistic really have done that to himself, lost more than four stone, hidden himself away from everyone, including his dying partner, Siobhan O’Callaghan? And if so, why?
Last month, at Galway Circuit Criminal Court, McGeever admitted fabricating his own abduction. He was given a two-year suspended sentence. The court heard that he was being pursued by Irish investors who had lost millions buying properties in Dubai, and concocted his abduction story in order to frighten off his creditors and to prove he couldn’t have any money to pay up, because he’d held out for eight months in captivity and still not relented.
Kidnapping claims
While making The Many Lives of Kevin McGeever, I spoke to a Galway woman, who is owed over €100,000 by McGeever. She told me about a previous fake claim by McGeever that he was kidnapped. The woman, who still holds out hope of getting money back from McGeever, asked not to be named.
“I bumped into him in early 2012, after he had failed to turn up to a number of meetings about paying us back. He told me he had been kidnapped in Nigeria in December.
"I reminded him that he had texted me on New Year’s Eve to wish me a happy new year. I suggested that if he was kidnapped, he might have been better off calling the police. He’d forgotten about the New Year’s Eve text. He just laughed it off.”
The Irish Criminal Assets Bureau has been investigating McGeever for several years, and four High Court judgments have been secured against him, with his Galway mansion the sole available asset for recovery. CAB believe he has money overseas, possibly in Belize, Panama, Queensland and the Canary Islands.
I spoke to one investor who managed to get money from McGeever — two cheques totalling €9m, both of which cleared.
At one point McGeever was a multi-millionaire, and at least €70m went through his hands. Whether any of it is left, or can be recovered by duped investors, remains to be seen.
The Many Lives of Kevin McGeever is available on RTÉ Player
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