A Michigan man’s 20-year con posing as a Saudi prince came crashing down last year when a real estate developer he was trying to woo noticed him eating a very non-Halal pork dish.
Prosecutors say Anthony Gignac posed as a Saudi prince on and off for two decades, but was really from Colombia and adopted as a child by a Michigan couple.
The Miami Herald released new details this week on what led to the 47-year-old’s eventual capture in November, when he was caught traveling from London to New York with a passport under a different name.
Anthony Gignac in 1991, left, and the real Sultan Bin Khalid al Saud (right), who he has admitted to impersonating
Miami real estate developer Jeffrey Soffer, right, tipped federal investigators off to Gignac last year
Gignac’s scam appears to date back to 1991, when documents from a 2008 Michigan court case show he passed himself off as a Saudi prince and defrauded a hotela nd several companies in that state of approximately $10,000.
Despite running into problems with the law, he continued to live the life of a wealthy foreign royal, with a penthouse apartment on the exclusive Fisher Island in Miami and multiple luxury cars.
Gignac brought his princely alter-ego out again in March 2017, when one of his representatives reached out to Jeffrey Soffer of the Turnberry Associates to make a $440million investment in Miami’s Fountainebleau resort. That came out to be about a 30 per cent stake in the property which Turnberry remodeled and expanded for about $1billion.
Soffer found it suspicious when he noticed Gignac eating dishes with pork, which a Muslim would not eat
Gignac was posing as a Saudi prince last year in a failed attempt to invest in the Fontaineblea resort in Miami, which Soffer’s company helped renovate and expand
Two months later, Gignac had his first meeting with Soffer, during which he was introduced as Saudi Crown Prince Khalid bin Al-Saud.
Soffer bought Gignac’s royal pedigree – at first.
As a prospective investor, Gignac was invited to stay at the Fountainebleau in May, and he rolled up to the hotel in a 2016 Ferrari California with what appeared to be diplomatic license plates (it was later revealed that he bought them off eBay).
In August, Gignac returned the gesture by inviting Soffer to his penthouse apartment, where he showed him a letter form the Bank of Duabi, guaranteeing him for $600million. Gignac also showed off two luxury cars from his collection, both which had diplomatic license plates on them as well.
On Gignac’s Instagram account, he showed off American Express black cards, Rolex watches and other jewelry
Gignac went under the name PrinceDubai_07 on Instagram, and was careful not to show his face
In one post, he showed off a suitcase of cash. When he was arrested on November, investigators looked through his Miami apartment and found large amounts of cash as well as phony diplomatic plates
Later that month, Gignac flew Soffer in his private jet to Aspen to further discuss the deal. During that trip, Soffer gifted Gignac a Cartier bracelet worth thousands of dollars, at one of Gignac’s associate’s suggestion ‘because the honor of the sultan had been questioned,’ according to the indictment.
It was during this trip that Gignac told Soffer that he was required to check in with the State Department every few hours due to his diplomatic status.
He also boasted of his special diplomatic priviledges when he drove Soffer recklessly in his car.
“When [the developer] complained that Gignac was driving recklessly, Gignac responded that nothing would happen if he was pulled over because he had diplomatic immunity,” according to the criminal complaint.
It was around this time that Soffer grew suspicious of Gignac, due in large part tothe fact that he had seen the alleged devout Muslim eating dishes containing pork.
Cignac is pictured in 1995. In reality, he was born in Colombia and adopted by a couple in Michigan
He had the Fontainebleau’s security team look into Gignac and they confirmed that he was a fraud.
Soffer then turned over what he had found out on Gignac to federal authorities, who initiated their own investigation.
They reviewed the surveillance footage from Gignac’s penthouse complex and determined that the diplomatic license plates ewre indeed fake.
He was eventually arrested in November, when he flew from London to New York under another man’s name.
His arrest led authorities in Florida to obtain a search warrant on his apartment where they found business cards under his many aliases, more fraudulent diplomatic license plates, a phony diplomatic security badge, unauthorized credit cards, thousands of dollars in cash, and financial documents in the name of a member of the Saudi royal family.
Gignac pleaded guilty in May to charges of impersonating a foreign diplomat or foreign government official, aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to commit fraud.
He is due to be sentenced next month.