In January, 2023, a retired style-magazine editor whom I’ll call Maria was heading to lunch at the National Croquet Club, in West Palm Beach, Florida, when she spotted two men who seemed like fun. The older of the pair introduced himself as Jacob Turner. He was tall, in his fifties, with gleaming white teeth and blondish hair. “A major figure with a major belly,” Maria, an elegant, sharp-eyed widow, told me recently. Turner’s name appeared on the breast pocket of his all-white croquet outfit, and he wore a chunky gold neck chain that she soon urged him to lose. Kevin Alvarez, Turner’s boyfriend, was around thirty and smaller—“a sweet shadow,” Maria said. She invited the men to lunch with her and her friends, and Turner amused them all with stories that emphasized his extravagant generosity—including one about how he’d met Alvarez. “I was buying shoes, and Kevin was my salesman,” she recalls Turner drawlling. “I told him I’d buy shoes for everyone in the store if he went out with me.”
Turner was from Texas and told Maria that he was an oilman. He claimed to own several wells. “Royalties come in all the time,” he told her. Maria was intrigued: she knew famous people, but she’d never met an oilman before. A few weeks after their lunch, Turner came to her birthday dinner, at Bice, a white-tablecloth place downtown. When the bill arrived—likely amounting to around two thousand dollars—Turner pulled out his platinum credit card and paid it, before another man at the table, who appeared to be courting Maria, could contribute. Then he handed Maria a bottle of “spring flower” perfume from Saks Fifth Avenue. “Five hundred dollars,” she told me. “And it’s not even that good.”
Turner quickly made friends at the club. A man I’ll call Jack, a retired book publisher, met him through Maria. “A generous man with a face full of sun,” Jack said, of Turner. “But even with lessons, he couldn’t play croquet.” Turner was a lavish giver. He showed up late to an Easter-weekend dinner with gift bags containing mini bottles of Veuve Clicquot and chocolate bunnies. Jack invited him to brunch a few days later, where Turner gave a young woman a hundred-dollar bill for taking a picture of them. “He always tipped well, unlike a lot of these people,” Jack told me. “And he never asked me for anything.” (Maria and Jack both requested pseudonyms, expressing concern about social repercussions for discussing the private club. Members had heard rumors that someone was once penalized for bringing penis-shaped “party whistles” onto the grounds. When I asked the club about this, they referred me to someone at the National Croquet Center, who said that she couldn’t comment on club matters.)
That March, Turner invited Maria to a boutique hotel where he had booked a suite for the weekend, to have a sumptuous meal of caviar and champagne. “Who buys half a pound of caviar?” Maria asked me. “But it was just heaven.” Next, she visited the couple’s penthouse apartment on South Ocean Boulevard, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. She was surprised to find that the building didn’t have a doorman. In his apartment, surrounded by new furnishings, Turner was grilling steaks he said he’d bought at eighty dollars a pound. “He murdered the meat,” Maria sighed. “But the company was divine.” When she left, she passed by the couple’s twin Mercedes-Benzes. She saw the men at a nineteen-twenties-themed club luncheon, wearing top hats and tailcoats. Turner seemed to especially relish dressing up and mingling with bigwigs. At one fund-raiser, he reportedly bought a table for ten thousand dollars, then raised his paddle at the auction and pledged a hundred thousand more.
When the first heat of summer arrived, West Palm Beach emptied out. As soon as Maria returned, this past August, she called up Turner to arrange a drink. His number wasn’t working, which seemed odd. Then one of her friends told her to Google “Alan Todd May.” Maria was soon staring at a mugshot: May, the man in the photo, was slimmer, and his hair was darker, but he was clearly the person she knew as Jacob Turner. He had escaped from a federal prison almost five years earlier, she read, while serving a twenty-year sentence for an oil fraud that had netted him millions. She called Alvarez, and he started crying on the phone. “Kevin, the truth: did you have any idea?” she asked. He replied, “I had no clue.”
I visited Maria recently in West Palm Beach, just as the heat was arriving again. We lunched at the croquet club, whose halls were filled with portraits of former club presidents and display cases full of trophies. I borrowed a mallet and stepped onto the club’s grass with a Texan named Gerry, who’d made his money in the jingle-writing business. The wicket was smaller than I’d expected. “It takes a while to catch on,” Gerry said, demonstrating how to “stalk” the ball. At dinner that evening, Maria showed me photos from her phone. There was May: standing with her on the croquet court, sitting with her at fancy meals, smiling brightly. She noted his apparent eagerness to move up in society. Earlier, I had skimmed a copy of the Palm Beach Daily News, whose society pages document galas benefitting the restoration of castles and dish about which millionaire bachelors are off the market. “That’s all anyone here wants,” Maria told me. “To be in those pages.”
Alan Todd May was born in 1964, in Houston. His father, Albert, worked at a copy machine-rental-and-repair shop, and his mother, Mary Kathryn, dabbled in selling flowers. Albert’s grandfather was a cotton ginner, who had managed to secure a small oil-and-gas interest in Nacogdoches, Texas, worth a hundred dollars a month, before his death, in the late nineteen-forties. The claim had been passed down to Albert, teasing at a life larger than the one he led. “Todd was smarter than everyone, and, I guess, he wanted more than what we had,” May’s middle brother, Chris, told me. In 1984, both May and his mother were incarcerated, separately, for passing bad checks. (May’s mother could not be reached for comment, and Chris told me that she wouldn’t be interested in speaking to me.) From his cell, the twenty-year-old filed a class-action lawsuit against the county, arguing that inmates should have access to newspapers. He also sued the county and the federal government for a total of eight million dollars, alleging that his parole officer had used his power to “manipulate” him to “indulge in various sex acts.” The officer resigned, but May soon dropped the suit, saying that he had willingly participated in the tryst (The parole officer could not be reached for comment.) May had previously noted that he had “homosexual tendencies” and promised a judge that he would go to church, marry a woman, and make an honest living. He married in 1986, but divorced a year later, on the same day that he was sentenced to six years in prison for another check-fraud conviction.
Incarceration did little to dampen May’s ambitions. By the early nineteen-nineties, he was out and living in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, with a second wife. Beth Morean, their landlord, said that they replaced her rental beach house’s wicker furniture with mahogany and marble, hung English hunting scenes on the walls, and laid out issues of Forbes and Fortune. “His whole aesthetic was expensive, but not nice,” Morean told me. “Very new-money.” Dozens of stray checks addressed to May were scattered around, Morean recalled, “like Chevy Chase in Caddyshack.” He was a charming young man with red hair, who told her that his family had oil money, and were “high society” in Texas. He claimed that he was a graduate of Rice University, whose logo appeared around the house. He noted that he’d come to the area to organize a women’s expo. He frequently rented limos, taking Morean and others out for extravagant steak dinners. He bought Louis Vuitton neckties for Morean’s then-partner, and expensive pottery for another new friend named Chelley Tighe. “He had us over to these buffets of caviar and champagne,” Tighe told me. “It was all out of proportion.”
Not long after the Mays’ stay in St. Petersburg Beach began, they crammed a U-Haul with their paintings and expensive glassware and left in the middle of the night. (May’s second wife did not respond to requests for comment.) In the coming days, Morean found checks in their mailbox and red hair dye in the trash. She spoke with the police and the F.B.I. May had been signing convention-center rental agreements using false identities, soliciting venders with slick brochures and newspaper ads, then disappearing with their booth deposits. He’d been at these types of scams since his early twenties, one detective subsequently said. May was arrested a month later, in Indianapolis, where he was advertising a “Cosmopolitan Women’s Show.” A newspaper described May as a “high-roller who used charm and financial smarts to play people like a pinball machine.” A woman at an answering service in St. Petersburg, whom May owed money, described him as “a handsome guy with a college boy look. Any woman young or old would be infatuated with him.”
May went to prison, but his scamming continued. In 1995, he advertised a Christian family expo in Dallas, and Joleen Tropp Mullins, an author who hoped to sell her children’s book about a virtuous superhero there, spoke to him by phone. (An accomplice on the outside placed conference calls for May, to avoid the automatic disclosure that came with calls from prison.) “He said how well I was going to do,” Tropp Mullins told me. May had a floor plan overnighted to her, and she sent a deposit for a few hundred dollars to an address that he provided. But when Tropp Mullins phoned the convention center, she learned that the expo had never been scheduled. He carried out the same scam all over the South and the Southwest. Even the I.R.S. reportedly fell for the con, and paid for a booth at a women’s trade show that he’d made up.
Around 2000, May met a high-school senior named Jason in an AOL chat room. He was now out of prison, and they dated for the next three years. May, then in his mid-thirties, was magnetic, Jason recalled, and took the eighteen-year-old shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue. He bought a fake Ph.D. online to burnish his résumé, according to Jason, and eventually opened several businesses, including a dry cleaners in a tony neighborhood of Houston that he opened in his and Jason’s names; they took the clothes to another cleaner and returned them to their customers at a markup. “I naïvely went along with his plans, which kept getting crazier,” Jason told me. May used Jason’s credit card to buy dozens of Prada shoes for himself, as well as gifts for others. “He bought me an electric razor for graduating high school,” Jason recalled, still incredulous. “With my own damn Sears card.” For reasons Jason didn’t initially understand, May kept them moving: Dallas, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Atlanta. At one point, the authorities showed up at Jason’s parents’ house to ask about suspicious accounts opened in Jason’s name. Eventually, authorities tracked the couple down in Decatur, Georgia, and found May hiding in the bathtub. Jason told me that his credit score was ruined. (He requested that I use only his first name, for fear of retribution from May.) “Not the ideal first boyfriend,” he said.
May went to prison again for a few years, occupying his time, in part, with an inheritance dispute. His father, Albert, had died the year before, and left two wills: in one, he bequeathed everything to May’s stepmother; in another, he left everything to his three sons. Everything did not amount to much: a truck, a small home, and a modest business. Also: the oil and gas rights, worth a hundred dollars a month. But May coveted this. His youngest brother, Joe, urged him not to fight, writing, “You have chosen money and vengeance over justice and mercy.” But for May, the oil rights seemed to be symbolic. “The only interest we have and have had all along is the oil and gas royalty my father inherited from his mother,” he wrote to a probate judge, in his cursive hand. “That’s it. Just the legacy from our great-grandfather.” Both from prison, and eventually back on the outside, May wrote letters to Jason. In one of the few that Jason told me he actually read, May referenced living in England. At one point, Jason recalled, May said that he was considering changing his name to David Abercrombie. (He had previously used “Johnathan Fairchild,” and had mentioned trying out “Joe Rothschild.”) May had also succeeded in the inheritance dispute. The oil-and-gas interest had been divided into four equal shares, one for each of Albert’s sons and one for his adopted daughter. Alan Todd May was now, in the vaguest possible sense, an oilman.
The discovery of oil at Spindletop field, in 1901—the first big gusher in Texas—helped usher in, along with climate change, an era of cars, planes, and countless other conveniences. It also brought about one of the great American archetypes: the Texas oilman, who was aggressive, charismatic, and unabashed. He often came from nothing. Michel Halbouty, the son of a Lebanese immigrant and grocer, had, according to the Horatio Alger Association, “made and lost two fortunes” by 1939, when he was thirty. Glenn McCarthy, a poor wildcatter, became Diamond Glenn, the owner of newspapers, a radio station, a major hotel, and a chemical company, and the creator of a brand of bourbon. Oilmen were American aristocrats, of a sort, and they wielded considerable political influence. In 1962, The Nation declared that “virtually every Radical Right movement of the postwar era has been propped up by Texas oil millionaires.” The oilman Hugh Roy Cullen was the largest contributor to one of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaigns; T. Boone Pickens bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against John Kerry. The fantasy of the American oilman was that, with a little ingenuity and will, you could become a titan. In 1952, the Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists published a paper titled “Toward a Philosophy of Oil-Finding,” noting, “Where oil fields are really found, in the final analysis, is in the minds of men.”
In 2008, while still on parole, Alan Todd May started an oil company in Dallas called Prosper Oil & Gas, which claimed to be “engaged in the exploration of oil and natural gas in Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Colorado and North Dakota.” The next year, Dawn Dandridge, a Dallas resident in her thirties, became Prosper’s accountant. The job posting she’d stumbled across had noted the company’s “tremendous growth,” “progressive working environment,” and “paid monthly valet parking.” Dandridge recalled her interview with May, in his office in a high-rise in downtown Dallas. “It seemed like he was trying to intimidate me,” she said, noting that he’d silently stared at her. Through classified ads in the Wall Street Journal, online listings, and billboards, May had attracted more than a hundred investors, including a piano teacher and the president of a small bank, who together eventually put some seven million dollars into Prosper’s coffers. May sold them royalty interests: a percentage of the revenue that his wells produced, which, he said, had historic annual returns of up to thirty-eight per cent on each investment. The bank president, Jon Pope, described May to me as “decked out in a suit, clean-cut, professional. An oil guy.”
The other employees were almost all gay men. May obtained expensive cars for senior staff—a Mercedes, a BMW—and Rolex watches, which he bestowed during parties at his Dallas mansion. “Everyone with a watch would stand in a line with their arm out, and then the new person would get crowned with one,” Dandridge told me. A Dallas County sheriff running for reëlection attended one party. May’s parole officers did, too. (One of these officers was later prosecuted for taking five thousand dollars worth of bribes to ignore May’s parole violations.) Dandridge also recalled seeing a local preacher visit May at the office. “Todd seemed to know everyone,” she said. May took his employees on trips, including one to Midland, Texas, to see some of Prosper’s wells. Afterward, he proposed flying to Aspen. No one had brought gear, but he told them, “I’ll buy you ski clothes when we get there.” The group was soon in Aspen, though they spent more time in hot tubs and bars than on the mountain; apparently, no one knew how to ski.
In the previous few months, Dandridge had noticed odd things about the company. Investors received their payouts slowly, if at all. Pope, the bank president, received twenty thousand dollars in royalties—about fifteen per cent of his investment—and only after pestering May for it. The piano teacher had to nag him, too. May made excuses—staffing cuts, misplaced checks, and an illness in his family—and told Dandridge to stall, or to say a check was in the mail. One day, in early 2010, Dandridge went to deposit a company check and a banker quietly told her that authorities were investigating Prosper. Dandridge told May. “He said to take the money out and put it in another bank,” she recalled. She did. “But I also started looking for another job.” In March, 2010, she heard a commotion in Prosper’s reception area, and someone shouted, “Come out with your hands up!” Federal agents were there with guns drawn. A court-appointed receiver working with the Securities and Exchange Commission conducted interviews on-site and eventually confiscated more than a dozen Rolexes and luxury cars. Dandridge, who never received a car, was able to drive home.
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