A trail of lies and deception

Tracey Gordon, a forger and thief with a penchant for Hilton hotels, has admitted to fraud across three continents. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

Tracey Anne Gordon is petite and unobtrusive, dresses smartly, speaks softly with a speech impediment, and is partially deaf.

When she sat in the Auckland District Court this week she all but disappeared behind the dock but for a neat brown bob, perfectly shaped thin eyebrows and a baby face.

But this woman is not what she seems - she is a forger and thief with a penchant for Hilton hotels, whose crimes spanned three continents.

Gordon, 38, has admitted to what police say was large-scale fraud. The Samoan-born woman has pleaded guilty to eight charges of theft, forgery, using and altering documents and obtaining $128,000 by deception from 2001 to 2004.

Her defence lawyer Michael Corry says she's not devious, just gullible, and has "difficult personal characteristics".

According to several people the Weekend Herald has spoken to, there's far more to the Tracey Gordon story than the police investigation, which was limited to the crimes she committed in New Zealand.

They are family members, former friends and strangers she met in bars, and they tell similar tales of empty promises, deception, affairs, worldwide travel and sheer cheek. Most use the same word to describe her: manipulative.

Gordon's sentencing has been put off for three months to give her time to cough up with promised reparations.

If she doesn't, Judge Stan Thorburn made it clear she will go to jail.

The murky story began in Britain, with relatives Gordon first visited in 2001.

The couple say the three or four days she was there were the most costly of their lives.

They say Gordon is a clever woman with an outward display of warmth and decency that hides a manipulative, venomous streak.

"I don't think your average human being could think up the stories and the tales and make them sound as plausible as she does," says the husband, who asked not to be named. "She stole every penny that we had."

Gordon had a high-yield, low-risk investment opportunity for them. He kicks himself now, but says they "very stupidly" invested 50,000 ($128,420).

"We kept saying to her, 'look, what is the risk associated in it?'

"She said, 'No risk whatsoever. I wouldn't get you involved in something that would give the opportunity of losing your money'.

"You'd never think for a minute that your family would do that to you. We trusted her for that reason and that reason only."

The returns she promised never arrived. Instead, they received more promises.

"We must have spent a fortune on calls trying to phone her.

"Every time we got her there was a different excuse. 'Oh, I'm glad you got me, I've actually been unwell, I've been in hospital, I've been here, I've been there, I broke my arm, I broke my leg.' It went on and on. By this time we were starting to smell a rat."

The couple had also handed their credit card details to Gordon, after she offered to book them cheap flights to Los Angeles.

Shortly afterwards, Gordon made the seemingly magnanimous gesture of flying her parents to Samoa business class for their wedding anniversary.

She also paid for her business partner, Mele Jackson, to fly to the United States, hired a rental car and bought other goods over the internet and by telephone. By the time the card was declined, she'd spent 8000 ($20,547), the couple say, of which $7000 is included in the court case.

As for the couple's investment, Gordon had, according to her lawyer, decided not to deposit it into the high-yield fund - which he says was a known international scam called prime bank instrument.

Instead, says Corry, "Ms Gordon fell under the power of a woman by the name of Mani Fryauff".

She "foolishly" put the money into a housing project promoted by Fryauff, an Indonesian-born American woman, in the false hope she would make a profit for her relatives.

"This was fairyland stuff," says Corry.

While Gordon paints herself as Fryauff's victim, Fryauff is returning the favour.

She told the Herald from her Maryland home that she met Gordon in Jakarta in the early 1990s. They worked on business deals that came to nothing, and Gordon lived at Fryauff's expense while persuading her to hand over money for investments that yielded nothing.

Fryauff says she persisted with their friendship because Gordon owed her money, and kept promising to pay it back.

"Oftentimes I felt manipulated. She's very convincing. I think you can see that in the record of how many people who fell into the trap.

"You kept hoping that this person was going to change. Sometimes she makes me feel sorry for her because she would cry and she would say, 'because I cannot hear and I cannot speak you're treating me this way and that way'."

The friendship continued until 2003, when yet another project fell through, Fryauff says. She was by now living in the US and Gordon was staying with her. Fryauff kicked her out and Gordon sought refuge in the Hilton Hotel in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

At the bar, she met Jim*. He is one of three men who report similar encounters with Gordon at the bar, but is the only one who came out with his bank balance intact.

Jim says Gordon had affairs with many men she met at Maryland bars.

He says his business partner was preparing to sue a bank in Saudi Arabia and he discussed this with Gordon. She said she was interested in investing money in their bid.

He gave her documents they were planning to use in evidence, he says. Months later a man turned up in Saudi Arabia trying to sell the documents to the bank. Jim suspects Gordon was behind it.

Apparently thwarted, Gordon sent Jim a US$31,839 ($46,590) invoice for expenses she had incurred trying to get finance for the litigation.

The invoice lists flights between the US and New Zealand, accommodation in New Zealand, Australia and the US - mostly at Hilton hotels - and a retainer for her services for three months, at US$7500 ($10,975) a month.

According to documents supplied by Jim, she then enlisted Baycorp Advantage in Auckland to collect a $31,374 debt from him (the currency is not stated) and instructed an Auckland lawyer to threaten his business partner with legal action unless the original invoice was paid.

Jim rejected her demands. Another man she met in the hotel bar, Chris Monarca, was not so lucky.

Gordon told Monarca she had business ventures she wanted to get him involved in, according to the police case.

She fraudulently obtained his credit card details, and used them to run up a $5600 bill at Auckland's Hilton Hotel in late 2003.

American Chris Oliver tells a similar tale. He says he lost US$80,000 ($117,068) to Gordon.

However, the charges against her that involved him were withdrawn after she revealed in court they had been in a relationship.

He admits to the Herald that he was seeing Gordon for a time. "It wasn't a relationship. It never got to that point," he says.

He, too, met Gordon at a bar, in 2001. He says she portrayed herself as an investment banker and tried to sell him a share in a Samoan hotel.

"It looked like it was a viable deal. So I invested in that and of course nothing happened. And then there was a high-yield return that she discussed and I invested in that, and of course there was no return on that either.

"She'd say she needed some cash to pay her hotel and that she was waiting for some funds to transfer, or her father's credit card, or couldn't get a hold of her father, so I would give her some money.

"It was ongoing things like that, with promises after promises after promises that it's coming, it's tied up in New Zealand or it's tied up in Samoa, it's tied up with the Government, the bank hasn't transferred the money yet, I haven't gotten paid for this to be able to pay that - it was just an ongoing saga."

Oliver says that lasted for about eight months. When Gordon returned to New Zealand she asked him for his credit card details so she could secure a room, which her father would pay for.

Then Oliver says he started getting odd credit card bills - for Pizza Hut, KFC, rental cars and hotels.

"She would be lying to you while looking you straight in the face. You could not tell, at all. But I don't know if she didn't know what the truth was, or she was that good at it."

Gordon's lawyer, Michael Corry, says she acknowledges she did wrong but she "could be described as a gullible person".

"This was not devious offending, of the sort commonly seen in fraud cases. It was unsophisticated."

Gordon, now employed and earning $3500 a month, intends to repay her victims in full, with her family's help, says Corry. She has already paid $8000.

Corry says Gordon thought she was doing the right thing by her relatives.

"It's not as if she's running around buying furs and diamonds."

Judge Thorburn agreed to defer the case until late October to give Gordon time to demonstrate she had good faith by making reparations of more than $10,000. If not, she faces jail. The most serious charges come with 10-year maximum sentences.

*Not his real name