Parklea developments heiress victim of toxic $2m marriage con
The daughter of multi-millionaire Parklea property boss Andrew Facey was among the victims of cheating conman Paul Carter, with claims he tricked her into buying him Maseratis and luxury homes.
News
Don't miss out on the headlines from News . Followed categories will be added to My News.
Paul Carter hit the jackpot when he met his third wife.
The daughter of a multi-millionaire Melbourne property developer, Brooklin Carter says he lured her in with a false dating profile and before long she was head over heels in love.
She believes she was his biggest con victim.
The mother-of-three — including a son to Carter — claims she lost $2 million to him during their toxic marriage.
Today, she “would like nothing more than to see Paul Carter burn at the stake”.
Now living in Nassau, in New York State, she finalised their divorce last week.
She believes he has moved on to a new fiancee as a ploy to obtain a visa and avoid returning to Australia.
Brooklin describes Carter as a “pathological liar” and “incredibly manipulative”.
When he proposed to Katherine De Bois (who did not want to give her real surname) in 2014, she says he claimed that his previous partner had died of bone cancer.
“That’s probably the most despicable part of this situation for me,” Brooklin says.
Brooklin was obviously alive and they were still very much together, she says.
She had moved to the US with their son to set up a “new life” for the three of them, with Carter due to join his family abroad after finishing up business in Melbourne.
“I was in another country with no family or friends and had moved here to give us a fresh start,” Brooklin says.
After she learned of his affair with Katherine, she says she initially forgave Carter for the sake of their child, but the marriage finally disintegrated June last year.
“Being the conman he is, he was able to convince me the affair happened because I was not paying enough attention to him and it would never happen again,” she says.
Brooklin — born Paula Facey — is the daughter of multi-millionaire Andrew Facey, the founder of Parklea developments.
Parklea is the biggest landowner in Cardinia Shire, in Melbourne’s outer southeast, and has residential and commercial developments from Gippsland to the Great Ocean Road.
She has no doubt her cheating ex used her to get to her family’s wealth.
Her father was among those to hand over large sums of money to Carter, she says.
“He scammed money out of me, convinced my father to invest a significant amount of money in a business he had and lost within 12 months of the relationship,” she says.
“He always had a way of talking himself up and convincing you that what you thought was going on wasn’t going on and that everything was going to be great.
“I now appreciate that he lied to me about pretty much everything.”
She met Carter on dating website RSVP in June 2002.
“He put up a photo that was not of him and told me he was single and had no kids,” she says.
At the time Carter had three other children.
“I foolishly married him in September 2003,” she says.
His affairs and money grabbing began soon after they were wed, Brooklin says.
For six years, Carter went to elaborate lengths to convince her that he was to inherit a family property in Italy worth tens of millions of dollars.
Do you know more? Email: Aneeka.Simonis@news.com.au
In the meantime he had conned her into paying for Maseratis and luxury homes in Australia and the US, she claims.
“Every time we would get close to the sale closing, something would happen like the global financial crisis, and the deal would be put on hold,” Brooklin says.
“The next time, Homeland Security was holding the money because of the Patriot Act, and both of those excuses seemed reasonably legitimate to me.
“He had FedEx deliver contracts in Italian to our home address that he had fraudulently constructed but I Google-translated random sections, and they made sense.”
She says each time she questioned him “about Homeland Security still holding the money”, a phone call would come from a number with the prefix he said was for Washington DC, and he would “carry on a conversation as if Homeland Security were on the other end of the phone”.
“I have since found out that you can download an app to make it look like a phone call comes from anywhere,” she says.
“He printed fraudulent bank statements, fraudulent loan documents … the list goes on.”
READ MORE:
MELBOURNE’S CHEATING CASANOVA CONMAN EXPOSED
CASANOVA CONMAN’S TRAIL OF BROKEN HEARTS, EMPTY WALLETS
‘THAT’S BULLS**T! I DIDN’T TAKE ANYONE’S MONEY’
Brooklin says he turned her life “upside down”.
“He has lied, misled, manipulated and defrauded my son and I out of about $2 million,” she says.
She says she is still chasing him for child support payments.
And she hopes the man who fathered one of her children and who she spent more than a decade with will be made to return to Australia to face up to what he has done.