A Sarasota, Florida, man with the too-good-to-be-true-name of Beau Diamond used part of the $36.5 million he stole from investors in a foreign currency Ponzi scheme to pay for a Newport Beach home where is also accused of having assaulted a woman with a taser device.
A criminal complaint unveiled in Florida today states that Diamond took 200 investors for that amount and “used part of the money-$2.2 million-to live lavishly, paying for a $200,000 Lamborghini, a waterfront condominium in Sarasota and a high-end home in Newport Beach, Calif.,” reports the Tampa Tribune, which adds he allegedly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling in Las Vegas.
The 31-year-old will face fraud and money-laundering charges at a preliminary hearing next week.
An earlier Herald-Tribune story reports Diamond used at least part of his Diamond Ventures windfall to rent the Newport Beach vacation home for a few months in 2008 (the first of three payments came straight out of the investors' account). This is also where the alleged assault occurred.
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The paper cites a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court that stemmed from that alleged crime. According to the suit: Diamond invited his ex-girlfriend and two of her female friend to stay at the home in August 2008. One of the women said Diamond made unwanted advances toward her, and when the three shunned him, he became enraged.
The female guest who filed the suit claims that at 6 a.m. one day, she was violently awakened by an electrical shock running down her spine and the smell of burning flesh. She awoke to find Diamond standing over her holding a black Taser/stun gun against her, the suit claims. She says a roll of duct tape was on the floor with rolled-up socks next to the bed, and they had not been there when she retired the night before.
Her screams alerted Diamond's ex- and the other woman, who saw the shocked female run out of the room wearing only a white sheet. Another man who had been staying at the home took the three women to safety at his Anaheim home, the suit contends.
According to the Herald-Tribune, which had been unable to reach any of those present in the home that day for comment, a report on the attack was filed with the Newport Beach Police Department. The case was then presented to the Orange County District Attorney's Office, which declined to prosecute.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.