Hurricane Tim hits America: Lavish lifestyle of ‘conman’ revealed

The Australian family who moved into the colonial mansion on North Street in Greenwich, Connecticut, appeared to slide seamlessly into their new neighbourhood, a Wall Street banker dormitory town that counted 15 billionaires among its residents.

The home, which sat on three acres of lawn at the end of a sweeping driveway, had been owned by Moroccan events producer Richard Attias and his wife, Cecilia, the former first lady of France who famously walked out on Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007 during his presidency.

The new occupants employed a gardener, a nanny and a driver, moved their two Range Rovers into the four-car garage and put their oldest child into a private school.

The husband told business associates that his late father had owned the Australian equivalent of the Barnes and Noble bookstore chain and that he was drawing $20,000 per week from a trust fund.

They bought a puppy, joined the Greenwich Country Club, hosted pool parties and appeared to have settled in for good.

But Tim Alford was not what he seemed.

In January 2021, after just 18 months in Greenwich, the family upped sticks without explanation, leaving the security pad at their front gate hanging from its socket and the perfect lawn gouged with car tyre tracks.

When an agent inspected the property, light fixtures had been stripped, the carpet torn up, shutters ripped off their hinges and wood panelling pulled from the ceiling and walls.

Court documents reveal that Tim and Charlotte Alford had entered into a six-month lease with an agreement to finalise the purchase of the house from the Attiases at the end of the lease.

However, the Alfords were served with two eviction notices over $75,000 in unpaid rent. When the Attiases finally got rid of their tenants in January 2021, they sued for the unpaid rent and property damage.

Some of the damage at the Connecticut property that was leased by the Alfords.

The matter was later settled and, through his lawyers, Alford denied that he ever rented the house or that he was evicted or caused any damage.

A Herald and The Age investigation has revealed allegations that Alford, 41, is a serial con artist who is alleged to have manipulated stock markets, cheated business partners, failed to pay bills, forged documents and embezzled funds with impunity for more than a decade. His alleged victims include employees, investors, financial planners, brokers, lenders, bankers and lawyers. Several have given statements about Alford to the FBI.

In Connecticut, the Attiases weren’t the only locals out of pocket. Apart from local tradespeople who were allegedly owed money, the country club – on a gentleman’s agreement – had allowed the Alfords to use their facilities while awaiting Alford’s payment of the $80,000 initiation fee, which never came. The club has since tightened its rules.

There was no trust fund. Alford’s father died by suicide in 2013, two weeks before his discount bookstore chain, Allbooks4Less, went into administration. When Alford moved to the United States in mid-2019, he owed millions of dollars to dozens of his alleged Australian victims.

On July 1, 2019 – a week before the Alfords took up residency at their glamorous new Greenwich abode – Alford’s company AD Securities America borrowed $500,000 from Australian investor Hilary Hutchinson. In 2021, the NSW Supreme Court issued a default judgment against the company and, due to the mounting daily interest, that debt has blown out to more than $20 million.

Mounting problems

Meanwhile, the Alfords had been in Greenwich barely a month when, in Melbourne, embezzlement and fraud allegations were mounting against Alford. On August 6, 2019, John Darling V, a member of the famous Australian business dynasty, recorded a dying declaration accusing Alford of diverting millions of dollars of investors’ funds for his own benefit, including using funds to allegedly get himself out of his most recent bankruptcy.

Five days later, Darling, 67, was dead. His declaration, which was recorded and signed, led to the Victorian police issuing a warrant for Alford’s arrest. The warrant, which is still current, relates to obtaining a financial advantage by deception and making false documents. Alford has denied any wrongdoing.

The Herald and The Age spoke to more than 30 alleged victims or associates of Alford during the investigation, some of whom were reluctant to go on the record alleging they had previously been threatened by Alford or his connections. Life savings have been drained and relationships ruined.

After receiving questions from the Herald last week, Alford contacted at least one of his alleged victims – New York art dealer Walker Manzke – to promise that $45,000 he has owed for two artworks since 2019 would be paid by Tuesday. It is a story Manzke has heard many times before.

“It’s been quite a rollercoaster with this guy,” Manzke said.

“He’s told me the payment is coming probably 100 times. We’ve tried to get a lawsuit against him but it’s very costly and even if I win, the likelihood of him paying is probably zero. It’s a lot of money for me.”

Creature of habit

In 2021, as Greenwich locals were waking up to Alford’s alleged deceptions, he was off to a fresh start in Charleston, South Carolina.

“In this life, you have to be a shark,” Alford is alleged to have said to friends. “If you stop moving, you’ll die.”

But Alford was a creature of habit.

Ashley McCarthy, who had worked for Alford on and off since 2018, was shocked to receive a legal letter from South Carolina attorneys in October 2022, serving her with an eviction notice for the non-payment of rent on a Charlestown office.

She had not even realised that Alford rented the office in her name.

“He was a master at skipping out on bills and gaslighting you into thinking that you were wrong all along if you ever assumed he had anything other than your best interests in mind… at least that’s how he was with me,” she recalled.

Only recently, McCarthy suffered the humiliation of discovering she’d been blacklisted when she went to check into the Petit Ermitage Hotel in West Hollywood.

In mid-2021, she was assisting Alford, who was working on a deal in LA. Alford, who’d been staying in a suite at the boutique hotel for almost a week, checked out early, citing an urgent meeting interstate.

“When I went to check out of the hotel, the card on file was declined and he had left me stranded with a massive bill,” McCarthy said.

Tim Alford with Ashley McCarthy at Santa Monica in September 2018.

The hotel confiscated McCarthy’s belongings and refused to release them until the bill was paid. “It was humiliating,” she said.

Despairing of her husband’s erratic behaviour, Charlotte and the children moved back to Australia after about six months in Charleston, Charlotte telling friends that he kept promising to send her money “tomorrow” while spending lavishly on himself.

He stayed at fancy hotels in LA, Miami and Las Vegas, dined at expensive restaurants, showered new acquaintances with largesse and indulged his alleged penchant for sex workers and cocaine.

He partied with a cigar king and a street artist in Hollywood, hung out with Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee in southern California and took different women out on his friends’ yachts.

“He’s a lot of fun, I’ll tell you that,” recalled glassblower and bong designer Jason Harris, who invited Alford out on his yacht at Marina del Rey and clubbed with him in Las Vegas.

“He threw money around like it was going out of style.”

Harris recalled Alford working two tables at once in the same restaurant, moving between the groups to pull off a deal.

“He had this story that he had a lot of money and was able to invest in them, and people would give him the world,” Harris said.

“Nobody knew he was a grifter at all. Nobody knew it until the end.”

Modus Operandi

Alford operates in over-the-counter stock exchanges, which are less tightly regulated than major exchanges such as the Nasdaq or ASX (Australian Securities Exchange).

He allegedly convinces investors to tip funds into a company that he says is about to list on the stock exchange. But the deal does not go ahead, and the money allegedly makes it no further than his own company bank account, which he uses to fund his lifestyle.

Instead of returning investors their outlay, it is alleged he tells them it has been converted into shares in another company that he claims is about to list, which buys him time until that deal falls through. And then he converts their shares into yet another company again.

An Australian judge found in 2014 that Alford had engaged in “misleading conduct” by reneging on his promise to return investors’ funds if a particular company did not list.

“There was no evidence that any steps were taken to obtain an ASX listing. The documents produced indicated that none were taken,” District Court Judge Phillip Taylor said. The judge also found that much of the $700,000 that had been advanced by investors went straight to Alford.

Ty Rohrer, who managed a Californian cannabis business that Alford offered to float on the stock market in 2021, said he was astonished by how many investors accepted Alford’s claims at face value.

“He’s a true conman,” Rohrer said. “He talks really well. He seems informed. There was a lot of information I gave him that he grasped really quickly and was able to put out to investors. He had a lot of people convinced.”

In mid-2021, Alford came up with a new concept of merging several luxury consumer brands under a single entity called Global A Brands and floating the company.

He pitched the idea to Manny Lopez, founder of a medical start-up, and offered him the position of chief executive, saying that if each of them tipped $250,000 into the company, they would be able to take it public through a reverse merger with an existing shell company.

Lopez raised his share of the capital, but according to his subsequent legal claim, Alford suffered repeated setbacks and delays. He kept being held up by auditors, while asking Lopez for personal loans because there was a problem with his account due to his immigration status.

As chief executive, Lopez needed access to the company account, but the signature cards Alford claimed to have sent to him never arrived. Meanwhile, Alford continually asked investors for more cash to progress the deal.

Manny Lopez with his former business partner Tim Alford at a 2022 Super Bowl party in LA.

“Alford always had a story as to why we need quick cash and that his funds would come in next,” Lopez stated in his complaint. “Throughout this transaction, Alford’s story changed many times.”

One of the brands that was to have been brought into the company was a mezcal liquor business whose co-founder, Australian expat Carl Halvorsen, had been introduced to Alford through an associate at the Greenwich Country Club. Their mutual friend, an entrepreneurial billionaire, had enthused about the 80 stockbrokers that Alford had working for him in Australia and New York.

“I distinctly remember he said, ‘[Tim] has so much money he flew over Arabian horses from Australia to Connecticut for his daughter to train on’,” Halvorsen said.

“And I thought, wow, that’s hardcore. And for him to be part of that network in Greenwich, the private country club, I was like, ‘OK, we’ve pre-screened, he must be part of the crowd’.”

But the billionaire was wrong about the 80 stockbrokers and the Arabian horses, and after Halvorsen introduced Alford to his investors, Alford had a change of heart about the mezcal company. The investors were rolled into Global A Brands instead.

“And all the time I was left with nothing,” Halvorsen said. “Like, what just happened?”

In early 2022, Alford celebrated his unbridled run of lies and deception by hosting a Super Bowl party at the trendy Hollywood nightclub Academy LA.

Like other corporate sponsors, he agreed to pay $200,000 to have the name of one of his companies, GammaRey, emblazoned on the sponsor board, and invited his own guests to mingle among celebrities, including rappers Wiz Khalifa and Lil Jon, Fox Sports personality Jay Glazer and NFL player Terrell Owens.

Unlike the other corporate sponsors, he declined to pay the bill.

“This has been the most unprofessional business relationship I have personally ever been a part of,” the furious event organiser said in an email to Alford. The bill remains outstanding.

Tim Alford with television personality Jay Glazer at Craig’s, a popular West Hollywood restaurant.

But Alford continued to coast on sheer chutzpah. On a visit to Las Vegas to meet Halvorsen’s former business partner, Johnny Mahoney (not his real name), he managed to convince Mahoney’s next-door neighbour to invest $300,000 in his companies and the neighbour’s doctor friend to throw in $50,000 as well.

“Tim has a good read on people, and this guy [the neighbour] wanted to be liked,” Mahoney said. “[Afterwards] he said, ‘Tim is like Dracula. He looks at everybody as blood to suck dry’.”

By this time, Mahoney was becoming frustrated with the progress of the float. He did not understand why Alford kept asking him to raise more money to float the business when Lopez had told him there should be enough to start trading.

“He would direct the news very clearly,” Mahoney said.

“He would say, ‘Don’t talk to Manny, Manny’s an idiot’ or ‘Don’t trust the lying Mexican’, and he would tell Manny the same thing about me.”

Lopez, meanwhile, was yet to be furnished with copies of the company’s accounts.

“It’s like an abusive relationship because you’re reliant on him to get money because you have no access to the accounts,” Lopez said.

“He would go dark on you for being a drama queen and wouldn’t answer his phone, and then you’re trying to be nice so he doesn’t go dark on you again.”

Ashley McCarthy, also working on the Global A deal, was equally fed up with Alford’s continual excuses. He started most of his sentences with “I just can’t believe …” and ended them with a fresh excuse or “blame shifting” as to why he couldn’t do something, she recalled. “Eventually, he became like a ticking time bomb,” McCarthy said, explaining that his “demeanour completely shifted when caught in a lie” and escalated into a “full-blown psychological attack if you pushed at all down the wrong lane.“

In July 2022, Lopez finally obtained copies of the company’s bank account. It left him “absolutely sickened”.

On almost every occasion that investors had wired a large sum of money to Global A Brands, it was immediately transferred to Alford’s AD Securities account. He could see now that the acquisition of a cannabis skincare company in Switzerland had fallen over because Alford transferred investors’ money to his own company instead of the Swiss company. It was clear that a second acquisition was about to fail because there was not enough money in the account to pay for it.

The bank records later obtained by Lopez also showed payments to individuals who claimed Alford owed them money and a young woman who Alford had met in Miami at the Faena, a five-star hotel that features a 24-carat gold-plated woolly mammoth skeleton at its entrance.

“I think he was trying to win me over with money,” the woman said. “If I was crying about something or had a bad day, he would send stuff to me, like clothes or perfume. I was 22 years old, and I’m going to take the money.”

She cut off contact in 2023 after they went on a date to the US Open with front-row, centre-court tickets worth $10,000 each. About two weeks later, she received a call from the broker who sold the tickets, asking where Alford was as the bill had not been paid. “I started getting bad vibes,” she said.

By the time Lopez saw the bank statements, he was getting more than bad vibes. Everything that had troubled him – the ongoing issues with auditors, the unpaid lawyers and accountants – suddenly made sense.

Now, he let loose, calling Alford a thief and promising to report him to the FBI. Alford goaded him. “You can’t close a deal,” he said in a text message, referring to the fact that a public float was yet to occur. “It’s loser Central... so call or go hard because I will fuck you up. I don’t need to be lecturer [sic] by a Mexican.”

Nevertheless, according to Lopez’s statement of claim, Alford offered to settle the dispute with a $1.4 million payment that accounted for all the money moved out of the account. The money has never been paid, although on three occasions, Alford has claimed to have paid Lopez back in shares while incorrectly filling out the stock transfer form.

Lopez has given a statement to the FBI.

Alford’s personal assistant, Gaelle Morrisseau, a New York model with little previous administrative experience, sued Lopez and Alford for the non-payment of her wages. According to her legal complaint, she was virtually unpaid for two months and not paid for overtime. They agreed in May to settle for $20,000 but defaulted.

Lopez alleges his investors alone lost at least $8 million.

But though he has obtained a judgment for $1.6 million in his favour, he has little chance of recouping the money since he alleges Alford does not have any bank accounts in his name.

“I struggle to find words to capture the effect that Tim Alford has had on my life,” Lopez said. “He is a man without conscience, nothing more than a thief whose actions ripped apart my family. I am certain that no one is better off from knowing Tim, and I look forward to the day he faces justice.”

“I’ve been through a lot in my life,” Ashley McCarthy said, but “what he does to people is next-level psychotic abuse.”

She likened the experience to the metaphor of the frog in the pot of boiling water. “By the time you realise what’s been going on, you’re usually cooked,” she said. “I feel so bad for people who lost their entire livelihoods, homes, whole families destroyed.”

Emotional and financial toll

Johnny Mahoney lost his girlfriend and, for a long time, could not talk to his parents and friends who lost money investing in the business. His neighbour and the doctor friend who met Alford through Mahoney never saw their money again.

In late 2022, a court ordered Alford to return $50,000 to the doctor, who had sued him for breach of contract and unjust enrichment. The neighbour was so angry with Mahoney for introducing him to Alford that Mahoney moved house.

“He started throwing dog poop into my pool and threatening me every day,” Mahoney said.

At one point Alford told Mahoney that he was coming back to Vegas, but then he cancelled.

“He said, ‘Why would I come? I’ve taken all that I can, there’s no more money that I can get out of Vegas’,” Mahoney said.

“It was such a swindle. It’s been the most devastating thing in my life.”

But Alford’s life also appeared to unravel last year.

He was spotted in the foyer of the Fontainebleau in Miami, allegedly claiming that the card to his room wasn’t working. Associates have told this masthead that he was sending bag men to pick up his luggage and the tab at hotels where he owed money. A phone video doing the rounds among his disgruntled investors and former associates shows him lying on a New York street, unable to rise to his feet, as cars whizzed past.

His last sighting in the US was in July, outside an apartment he was renting in New York City, where he looked like he had been beaten up. He was next detected at a budget hotel in Canada. There were rumours that he had crossed a crime family, that he wanted to go to Dubai, that he was headed to London. Manzke, the art dealer, heard he was living in Colombia.

Through his lawyers, Alford claimed the allegations put to him by this masthead were incorrect and inaccurate and he had been given insufficient time to respond. He said he was living in the US and had renewed his visa for two years in December 2023 but did not give an address.

A Miami victim told the Herald: “He rips off 10, 15, 20 people in a city and goes to the next city … Charleston, Vegas, LA, New York, Miami.”

The unsuspecting residents of a fresh foreign city are about to meet him.

NEXT: The twice bankrupted, twice jailed, struck-off lawyer who was the chairman of Alford’s board.