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Chameleon
White Lies: The Scammer Who Left Brides In The Lurch And Couldn't Stop
00:35:58
Michael Esposito hired 50 journalists, promised them a dream job, and disappeared without paying a dime. Years later, he resurfaced under various new names, taking tens of thousands from couples on their wedding day. But one of his early victims never let it go in their attempt to unmask the scammer who just wouldn’t stop.
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- [00:02]
Josh Dean
Campsite Media.
- [00:05]
Justin Sayles
Hello.
- [00:06]
What is. What do you want me to say? What's going on? Oh, it's Justin Chameleon. Chameleon Chameleon Weekly.
- [00:15]
I can relate a lot to Justin Sales, a guy who wanted badly to work in a big media job. We both grew up in places that weren't exactly global hotspots for glamorous writing gigs. In my case, the Appalachian frontiers of western Maryland. In his case, Providence, Rhode Island. But Justin was ambitious and talented. So after a decade or so of unsatisfying jobs at local newspapers, he decided to move to Los Angeles to try and make his dreams come true. That was back in early 2016. Justin was in his late 20s and he hadn't been in LA long when he got a break.
- [00:53]
I was contacted by a headhunting firm that was looking to staff up a new media venture which claimed that it was, quote the Huffington Post, but better ambitious. That was the literal tagline for the company. The name of the company was New Zarati.
- [01:12]
Justin didn't exactly love the name or the tagline, but it felt like a good opportunity. He went in for an interview with the founder, a guy named Michael Esposito, who was basing his new venture in a downtown LA WeWork. It felt a little weird from the jump, but it seemed well funded and had big goals. Justin was one of nearly 50 new hires, and despite his limited experience, he landed the job of political editor. That night he called his dad to tell him the news.
- [01:41]
I said to him, like, something's off about this. I'm not sure if this is real. I'm not sure what's going on here. And he says to me, well, either you have a good paying job and you get what you want, or you get a really good story for the rest of your life.
- [01:56]
Dad, it turns out, was speaking some real truth there. Justin didn't know what to make of this guy, Michael Esposito.
- [02:04]
It became clear to me quickly that this guy wasn't who he said he was. He was so eccentric, he'd burst into rooms and he would tell stories about his friendship with Mariah Carey. I grew up on the East Coast. I grew up around a lot of Italians and he struck me as somebody who came from like a very East Coast Italian world. He did not strike me as having the very uber rich, cultured background that he was describing.
- [02:32]
Quite the opposite. Esposito was sharp, elbowed, short tempered.
- [02:36]
I remember one of the employees that I quote, unquote managed showed up at 9:01 and grabbed a cup of coffee. And I remember him approaching this person and flipping out on them, saying things like, after 9 o', clock, your ass is mine. That's my time. You don't get the coffee. And I'm thinking to myself, this is a wework. You didn't even pay for the coffee.
- [03:00]
There were frequent meltdowns, too.
- [03:02]
Like, there was a meeting where he tried to take everyone's cell phones away from them so he couldn't record them. He just had a really strange attitude with a lot of strange stories. Just a very eccentric guy who seemed like he had something to hide, which.
- [03:16]
Is the kind of thing an office full of ambitious journalists are going to pick up on. So Justin and his colleagues did what journalists do.
- [03:24]
We began to get very suspicious of him. Within a few days of working for him, I edited a couple dozen stories. At some point, about a week and a half in, I told all the people I was quote, unquote, managing that you actually don't need to write anymore because something's very strange here, so let's just spend our time figuring out what's happening. Then we found out people had been working for him for a while, had never been paid, and then at some point, after about three weeks, he abruptly shut down the company, saying that he'd send out checks. No one ever got paid.
- [03:54]
Justin had whiplash. He had been hired, given a lofty title and a job in a newsroom, handed a team to report political stories, and then, poof, Nusrati was gone.
- [04:05]
It was clear that there was something really scammy about this guy. So from there, started doing some research, stayed connected with some people, and that's how the story evolved. I could not figure out what the scam was. The question is, like, is it money laundering? Is he trying to build this up very quickly to sell it off to an investor, and then the investor quickly realized this isn't a real company? Or did he just have delusions of grandeur and think that he could pull this off? Off? Either way. Like, I didn't know what the scam was here, but I was immediately convinced that we had been taken in some way by a scammer.
- [04:48]
A scammer far more effective and confusing than he ever imagined. This is Chameleon, and I'm Josh Dean. This week, the story of the wedding scammer, a guy who somehow just couldn't stop.
- [05:09]
Chameleon.
- [05:10]
Chameleon. This is Chameleon Weekly. I'll just say from the start here that things turned out okay for Justin Sayles. There's no reason at all to feel bad for him.
- [05:21]
You know, it's funny, I work at the Ringer now.
- [05:24]
The Ringer, if you don't know, is a wildly successful media company led by the famous sports and pop culture journalist Bill Simmons. It makes mostly podcasts these days. Justin hosts some of those. He also writes about sports and culture. It is quite literally the job he moved to LA to chase, and he landed it just a few months after his failed run at that bizarro scam startup.
- [05:48]
I kind of fell into my dream situation after kind of being sold a dream. There were people that left other good paying jobs because he promised them salaries that they were never gonna get. There were a lot of people who thought that this was their big break. They still feel very salty about the whole situation.
- [06:07]
So it worked out for Justin. But there were many others who were really burned by their experience with Michael Esposito, or whatever his name was after the Nusrati implosion. And fair enough, if you quit a good job to take a flyer on something and then that something turns out to be a house of cards, you're going to be angry. And if you're a journalist who suddenly has a lot of time on your hands, you're probably not just going to sit there and stew.
- [06:34]
In the early days, there were people who were like really hell bent on figuring out exactly who he was and how to get some kind of justice. And they set up Facebook groups and there were email chains and there was just like any shred of information that people could find, they would drop in there. But the thing is, Michael Esposito is a very common name. So it was hard to find anything. And eventually, at some point in 2018, the first thing that pops up is that he had been running catering businesses in the Los Angeles area.
- [07:10]
An odd pivot from starting a media company. Esposito was apparently now providing catering and other services for weddings. But there was one similarity with his old media business.
- [07:21]
He was in many cases not showing up or providing the level of service that like you or I could put together in 10 minutes right now and just pocketing tens of thousands of dollars.
- [07:34]
Turns out people were pissed.
- [07:36]
There were many lawsuits, and because he was using a fake name, he never showed up to defend himself in court.
- [07:43]
So again, this Michael Esposito, not his real name, seemed to be running a business that was not on the up and up. People were paying for services they either did not get or which did not meet the standards they were promised.
- [07:56]
There are a handful of default judgments against him in Los Angeles under the name Michael Esposito, where he just never showed up. So these people are technically owed this money. The funny thing is, what I would discover years later, when I actually started putting the pieces together is his background was actually in the culinary field. He had no media experience, but the catering business actually seemed like it made sense for him.
- [08:21]
Although the rest of the story he told himself seemed a very familiar type of bullshit.
- [08:26]
He said that his parents owned private jets and that his dad was a coal tycoon and that his mother was a brain surgeon. None of that ended up being true. And he did not present to me as somebody who grew up in that environment. He struck me as a normal guy, maybe a little street wise.
- [08:43]
For the first few years. The mystery of what this man's game was was just a small pebble in Justin's shoe. He had plenty of work he liked to do at the Ringer, but he could never really shake that pebble out.
- [08:55]
And then right before the pandemic, I get a Google News alert hit on the names Michael Esposito and New Zarate. And what had happened was the San Francisco Chronicle had reported on a very strange situation in late 2019 about a restaurant in San Francisco that went belly up.
- [09:20]
In short, a supposed restaurateur from New York calling himself Michael White took over a vacant space with a partner and opened a place called Cook Shop across from another location he rented and where he and his partner planned to open a second restaurant. That one never opened. Cookshop lasted three months. It then closed suddenly and controversially with a flurry of bad press, among other things. Yep, the staff had never been paid.
- [09:46]
And one of the business partners got arrested for selling liquor without a license.
- [09:53]
This was the second guy, Lawrence Tonner, was held and extradited back to New York City on a parole violation connected to a series of felonies from nearly a decade earlier. An SF area blog called Broke Ass Stewart summed up the episode like the.
- [10:07]
Josh Dean
Two Catch Me if youf can con men who came into San Francisco this past spring and rented separate restaurant spaces are gone. One is in police custody, the other is at large. We are writing this article not just because it's a fascinating story, but to warn people not to work for these hucksters in the future. And since they are likely to use fake names again, publishing their pictures at this time is all we can do to warn people.
- [10:32]
Justin Sayles
Now all of a sudden, like, okay, now I have confirmation that this guy is at least using aliases. Maybe Michael Esposito is his real name, but he's using aliases. It mentions new Zerati in the article. It's of course, like, now it's in San Francisco, so it has moved five hours up the coast from Los Angeles, and we're seeing a pattern of behavior.
- [10:56]
This blog had Justin's radar just before the pandemic lockdown struck. And so he soon found himself with more time on his hands. Like the rest of us, he was stuck at home and feeling antsy. He decided he wanted to solve this mystery to find out once and for all who this Michael Esposito was and what he was up to.
- [11:15]
First, I thought it would be a written piece for the ringer.com but by this point, I had consumed a lot of true crime podcasts. We really had, like, the true crime podcast boom in the wake of Serial. And by early 2021, I was convinced this was a podcast, which was right around the time the first season of Chameleon was coming out. Right. And I hadn't heard it yet.
- [11:40]
Okay, I need to acknowledge how meta this is, but Justin means the limited series we at Campside made that I hosted in 2020 that gave rise to the Chameleon name, literally the franchise you're listening to right now. It told the story of a bizarre scammer who had been nicknamed the Hollywood Con Queen.
- [11:59]
I remember pitching to people at the Ringer, and they're like, oh, you gotta hear Chameleon. This sounds like Chameleon.
- [12:04]
They loved the idea of diving deep into the Esposito mystery.
- [12:08]
People were really out money. There were a lot of emotional stakes in this story, just like in Chameleon. And I think there is, like, a through line in both of these stories where these are people who, using very deceptive means, are preying on people's dreams because the person at the heart of it is a ridiculous human being who has done ridiculous things.
- [12:33]
It was a successful pitch, but this wasn't a story yet. He needed more dirt on the guy. He also needed to understand the con.
- [12:41]
They were like, this is great. We love the idea. We have no idea if there's anything here.
- [12:48]
So Justin spent the better part of 2021 chasing leads and banking interviews with victims who told him a series of variations on the same story. A guy going by several aliases made promises, often in food and hospitality, and left people in the lurch.
- [13:04]
And on the third day, I found, I think I personally believe the people that he had scammed the most in the most egregious way.
- [13:14]
Something Else Justin discovered that day the alleged scammer's real name, Carl John Bucco.
- [13:21]
I always imagined this to be this, like, big, mind blowing reveal, but instead it's like, oh, I got his name. But it unveiled a lot because he had a criminal record in New York dating back to the 2000s that included $361,000 in credit card fraud that was reported about in the New York Post, with a lot of the details that matched up with what I knew.
- [13:43]
Justin now had a name, many victim accounts, and a wild yarn. But he lacked something very important, a third act, something that at least pointed toward an ending of this adventure he was now on. That's what his podcast editors needed.
- [13:57]
I remember saying to one of my bosses that not being able to land the plane on this podcast at that point was my greatest professional regret because I put so much work into it. I was so convinced there was a good story there, but they were right.
- [14:19]
He had to keep going.
- [14:21]
I knew he was in Texas at that point because I was able to find some addresses, but I didn't know what name the scammer was using, and I didn't know what business he was running. And I didn't know if he was still scamming. I didn't know what he was doing. It just needed something else, and it needed what was happening in Texas. It also really needed the way it came together. So the way it ended up coming together was, I think, one of the most fascinating pieces about this.
- [14:50]
That story after the break. Welcome back to Chameleon Chameleon. One of the people Justin Sales interviewed during his pandemic reporting spree was a food influencer named Ali Tongue, who was featured prominently in the SF Chronicle article that had been Justin's skeleton key. Ali had been hired to do some work by the alleged scammer, Michael Esposito, or Mike White, as he was then calling himself. But surprise, surprise, she was never paid. Ali, like Justin, didn't just let the experience go. She also kept after it. And because she had a following online information also found her, like two women in Texas who reached out after doing $40,000 worth of work for a guy who called himself Lance Miller. And yep, they were never paid either one of those women. Amy Civil is told by a friend of a friend, someone in the wedding industry, that it might be Michael Esposito.
- [15:54]
So she looks up Michael Esposito, scam wedding. She finds the San Francisco Chronicle article she calls Ali Tong. So many people had done their own digging on this guy and spoken to so many of the same people that we all found Ali, and Ali eventually is like, look, I haven't looked into this guy since 2019. You need to call Justin.
- [16:21]
So Amy and her friend did just that.
- [16:23]
They insisted on doing a zoom because there was a piece of them that worried that whoever the person they had been texting with me popped on the zoom, it would actually be Carl. They worried that they were being taken again.
- [16:36]
The stories Justin heard were very familiar, eerily reminiscent of previous scams in LA and San Francisco.
- [16:43]
The basic mechanical level of the scam is taking money for services that are either never provided or provided at such a bad level that they may as well have never been provided. A lot of these things are occurring on people's wedding days. A day that you really only get one shot at a wedding that he just really. He showed up for and actually did, but did it such a poor level and provide none of the services that he promised and, you know, made out with like $20,000 for probably providing minimal work.
- [17:17]
It doesn't seem, on the face of it, like a very effective scam, but clearly the hustle worked. He just seemed to keep going and going in ever so slightly evolving versions of the same thing. Justin, Amy, and her friend knew the guy they all now know as Carl Bucco was still in the area, still active to some degree, and they began to scheme. Justin decided to fly to Houston and plot a sting of sorts with his new friends.
- [17:44]
He had an open house at the wedding venue he was operating. And we went in there one night, and it was really reliant on the fact that he would not remember this guy that he owed 3,4000 bucks to from seven years earlier. It was one of the strangest nights of my life because there aren't too many times in your life, especially as an adult, that you can do anything resembling espionage. I went to Best Buy and bought.
- [18:12]
A LAV mic to record this encounter with Lance Miller, slash Michael Esposito, or whatever he was calling himself.
- [18:20]
I shaved my chest, taped a wire to my chest, which might have been going a little overboard, but if you're going to do it, you got to commit. And if you're in Texas, you really got to commit. And I put on a cowboy hat, and wearing the cowboy hat, I looked like the most Los Angeles ass versus wearing a cowboy hat you've ever seen in your life.
- [18:36]
He believed the story Justin told that he'd recently moved to Austin with his fiance, and they were looking for a nice wedding venue in Houston. Something exactly like this. Beautiful venue here. We're sitting in talking to you.
- [18:49]
So the confrontation is. It's really actually, in hindsight, like, one of the dumbest things I've ever done, if you really look at it from the outside.
- [19:07]
Justin had no idea how the guy was going to react. He didn't bring security or have really any sort of exit plan, but, like.
- [19:14]
For the sake of making content, I really couldn't have imagined doing another way.
- [19:18]
We've all been there. Making a podcast. You're seduced by the idea of exciting tape.
- [19:24]
Toward the end of the evening, Amy takes him aside to have a conversation about the 30, $40,000 that he owed her. And while she's doing that, I come out and I sit down right across from him. Hey, Amy, I was looking for you. How you doing? Lance?
- [19:47]
You're hearing the audio of that encounter now?
- [19:49]
You guys talking about anything? We need some privacy. What are you talking about?
- [19:56]
Carl John Bucco
Is everything okay?
- [19:58]
Justin Sayles
And Amy and I will never forget it for the life of me. And she has this great Texas drawl.
- [20:02]
Carl John Bucco
She says, lance, this is gonna get really uncomfortable.
- [20:06]
Justin Sayles
Justin turned up the pressure.
- [20:08]
Is your name Carl Buccio?
- [20:10]
Carl John Bucco
I'm not gonna talk to you about that.
- [20:11]
Justin Sayles
Is your. Have you gone by Michael Esposito, Mark White, Lawrence Tonner? No.
- [20:19]
Carl John Bucco
Okay, listen. What is it that I can do to assist you today?
- [20:24]
Justin Sayles
He and Amy also laid out the information they'd assembled. News stories, arrest records, old newspaper ads for scammy businesses that had his picture on them.
- [20:32]
You know what? I've heard your story from a lot of people. I would like to hear your story from you. I started showing him these things one by one. I said, do you remember this? Do you remember this? Do you remember this? And every time, he's just like he is again. He is a turtle at this moment. He is, like, quiet. He is not this, like, loud, boisterous person that I had come across so many times. He is, at this point, scared. And I could see it in his eyes. And then the last thing I show him was my employment contract from the fake media company Newseradi. Because you hired a bunch of journalists about seven years ago, right? Yeah, you did. You hired me a newserati. And I said, do you remember this? And he looks at me and said.
- [21:23]
Carl John Bucco
I knew you looked familiar.
- [21:24]
Justin Sayles
You knew I looked familiar. You hired me a nusrati, right?
- [21:28]
Carl John Bucco
Yeah, I think. I honestly don't remember exactly who you.
- [21:31]
Justin Sayles
Are, but that's fine.
- [21:33]
What Justin Baddeley wanted, needed, was a full confession on tape. That's what he'd hoped would happen like the climactic scene in a movie, but it did not play out that way.
- [21:45]
Because the thing about people who have spent their entire lives manipulating people is they are very good at manipulating people.
- [21:52]
Carl John Bucco
So what. What is it that you want from me right now? Are people, you know, not allowed to make mistakes? But you have come here and, like, purposely lied to everybody. First of all, I have not lied to anybody. You withheld your true identity from people. I am not going to. Well, I. I mean, and even with me, it's like you have refused to pay me. You have.
- [22:16]
Justin Sayles
Amy.
- [22:17]
Carl John Bucco
I have paid College park flowers $87,000 this year.
- [22:20]
Justin Sayles
You did. And.
- [22:20]
Carl John Bucco
And so, I mean, I. I could tell you that at this point, they.
- [22:26]
Justin Sayles
Went back and forth, back and forth, but they didn't get anywhere.
- [22:29]
This guy had a story for everything. In fact, the only thing that he admitted to doing wrong was, was not paying people at Nusrati. Everything else was everybody else's fault. I'm asking him about specific wedding couples and specific situations, and he's firing back with this, this, this, and this. I'm asking him about the situation in San Francisco, and he's telling me that he's placing blames on his business partner. He's basically reversing the point of view in the story. Things that they're telling me that he did wrong, he's saying that they did wrong. It's just he's turning into this big game of he said, she said. My head is spinning. And I remember walking out of there and I called my producer and I'm like, I don't know if we have a podcast anymore. And I told him what happened. He goes, you're out of your mind. This is, like, great stuff.
- [23:14]
What Justin couldn't believe is how well Carl, that is his real name, Carl Bucco remembered things, every detail of every alleged scam, every jilted couple, failed wedding.
- [23:25]
He was such an expert level liar that he was able to have this incredible recall because he had to live with so much of this stuff and keep his story straight. Like in San Francisco, he was going by three different names depending on what town he was in. On some level, there's some genius at play because just his ability to remember these things and his ability to, like, keep his story straight all these years later.
- [23:52]
This is, I have to say, a thing I have heard myself say many times about some of the most successful, successful scammers of our era, including the suspect at the center of Chameleon Hollywood Conqueen, the podcast that helped Inspire Justin Sales to take on the so called wedding scammer. These people are, I hate to say it often freakishly talented.
- [24:14]
The number one reason we don't lie is because we shouldn't lie to other people. The number two reason is because it's really, really hard to lie and keep your story straight for so long. You're gonna get caught. You can't remember all the details and something's not gonna check out.
- [24:27]
Not the case with Carl Buccio. He just didn't slip.
- [24:30]
There's always a piece of me that wants to believe that he thinks that this time is the time he's gonna run a legitimate business. But at every point, he's very much reliant on, on robbing Peter. To pay Paul, he needs to take the security deposit from this thing to pay for this thing. He needs to not pay this employee so he can make sure he does this wedding. And then eventually, at a certain point, that money dries up. But the thing I've noticed a lot is that he starts out apologetic, promising to give everyone their money back and try to make things right. And like the amount of times I've heard people say or I've heard recordings of him say, we're going to make this right is like actually crazy.
- [25:26]
As happened to all those journos at Nusrati.
- [25:29]
It was like, I'm going to get you your money. Checks in the mail. He literally said, the checks in the mail. And of course it never came. It's just a lot of trouble to go through. People ask me, like, if he was never going to give me this money, why did he waste all this time saying he was going to give me this money? It's so much work. Here's another thing. He went to the Culinary Institute of America. He, he's a good chef. He could get a job being a chef somewhere. And now that's hard work, I understand. But what he's doing is also hard work. He has created really like the world's, I think, most complex scam. So we can get like 7,000, $15,000 a pop, but every now and then he lucks into something a little bit bigger. But this is a lot of work to get there.
- [26:21]
If you're wondering why Michael Lance, Carl was never arrested for any of this alleged wrongdoing, well, the answer is that scams like this are just very hard to stop. The individual cases, even if they meet the definition of fraud, are often too small for cops to devote any real resources. And when a scam covers so many jurisdictions, it Creates confusion because you then have multiple departments that really can't be bothered. I almost hate to commit this to tape, but it's just very easy to get away with most scams. It's hard to pull them off, but it's easy to get away with it if you're good.
- [26:57]
You know, on a personal level, none of this is low level scam. These are like, again, I can't stress this enough, incredibly high personal stakes. But when you bring this to the FBI, these numbers aren't great enough for them to get involved. And a lot of times the police will shrug and say, we don't really know what to do. Sue him. Not realizing that you can't sue a ghost. If he's using a fake name and he doesn't live in the place anymore, what good is suing him going to do?
- [27:25]
Justin took this part personally. The Wedding Scammer podcast ended up doing very well. Some cops and prosecutors took notice, and he honestly hoped that one of them would now finally stop this man. That didn't happen.
- [27:39]
I felt pretty deflated because, again, like, I was proud of what we made. I was hoping that it would spur someone to take action. I was legitimately confused. And there was a piece of me that was always like, did I get this whole thing wrong? Look, my lawyer would probably get upset if I said that it got personal. But it did get a little personal, and I feel comfortable with that being on the record now. It got personal because I became very close with a lot of the people who were very affected by him.
- [28:08]
In fact, the reality that this podcast was widely heard and resulted in no arrest seemed to only embolden Carl Bucco. Just to be clear, the scammer's actual real life name.
- [28:19]
I've seen emails that he sent to clients using all the different aliases that we mention in the podcast. His name's Carl, so he signs it Lance Michael, comma, Carl, comma, whoever. And it's like, the ball's on this guy. He started saying things about me that are absolutely insane. And they are the one part that I do not want to spoil.
- [28:42]
From the epilogue, an epilogue that Justin made back in the summer of 2025 that put a button on this story in which he gets ahold of some tape where the scammer is making some truly wild accusations about him. I'd encourage you to go listen to that epilogue and the whole series while you're at it. Suffice it to say that Carl was not exactly quaking with fear once the dust settled from the podcast's. Release, Carl leased a new wedding venue in Austin. This time not for long, but long enough that he was able to sublease it to the media company axios during the 2025 south by Southwest Festival for $80,000, which he apparently used to pay the rent at a venue in Houston he was still renting to brides and grooms. Well, he allegedly used some of the money for that.
- [29:28]
He also used that money to buy Louis Vuitton an expensive cologne and just like fund this lifestyle.
- [29:38]
Image Justin says was always a big motivator for Carl Buccio.
- [29:42]
He loved Louis Vuitton. They allegedly knew him on a first name basis at the Louis Vuitton store in Austin, which is like all he's ever wanted because he always told these stories about having this rich upbringing and the dad being the cold tycoon and like being sent to school in New York and them rol out the red carpet at the Gucci store. This is all he's ever wanted.
- [30:07]
Does this sound like a fatal flaw in Achilles Heel? Because it turns out to be precisely that.
- [30:14]
So he gets really cocky. He's doing this stuff again. And then early 2025, the money starts to dry up and he keeps taking money for weddings, but he's not paying his rent. So he's taking money for weddings that are supposed to happen in May, in June, in September, knowing that he's about to get evicted. Now, whether he thought he could figure something out to make those weddings happen, I don't know. But he took the money for those weddings, in some cases up to $54,000 and the wedding never happened. The couple that gave him $54,000 showed up to their rehearsal dinner the night before their wedding and the venue was chained shut.
- [30:58]
Let's just pause for a second here to really think about this. This is a one time shot, supposed to be the most important day of these people's lives to this point. That for me really gets at the depravity of this scam. It's just so cruel.
- [31:14]
Their wedding never happened. They didn't get their money back. They are in a situation where they have to find a new wedding venue and caterer and everything on like 18 hours notice. And it's just an absolute disaster. And that happened several times over this spring after he got evicted. And this is when the local media picks it up and this is when the police there start reaching out to me and the local media is reaching out to me.
- [31:46]
This seemed like the moment when this fraudulent wedding caterer was about to finally be served. I'm sorry, but I'm just gonna say it. His just desserts.
- [31:55]
Josh Dean
We begin with the story of an alleged wedding scammer now behind bars.
- [31:59]
Justin Sayles
Tonight, a man accused of stealing hundreds.
- [32:02]
Of thousands of dollars from brides to.
- [32:03]
Be is in jail.
- [32:05]
Carl John Bucco II. On August 15th this past August, he got arrested and charged with second degree fraud for the stuff in the Houston area, which is all the wedding stuff, and third degree larceny in Austin.
- [32:24]
That was it, though. Nothing from San Francisco, nothing from Texas.
- [32:28]
This is not Bernie Madoff. This is not crime of the century money on an individual level. But when you start to add this money up, before you even get into the personal stakes, there's a lot of money that this guy owes people.
- [32:41]
So where is Carl Buccio today?
- [32:43]
He's currently sitting in jail. I should at some point stress that all of this is allegedly. And based on my reporting, et cetera, et cetera, based on affidavits, I don't know how he could ever pay this money. He has not made bail. As of October 2nd, he's still sitting in a jail in Texas. Hasn't made bail. And that's the thing. The bail was set at $116,000. $100,000 for one crime, $8,000 for another, $8,000 for another. You don't need to come up with 11,600 bucks to make that still sitting in jail. Somebody cannot come up with $11,000 of his money, of their money to get him out of jail. Right now. The thing that felt really good was when the both affidavits come out, the. The one from Houston and the one from Austin. The podcast was mentioned in both of them. You know, as true crime podcasters, we are not the police. We can only do so much. But after a year and a half of feeling like I did my best, but maybe my best wasn't good enough, ultimately, I think it did do some good having it all out there.
- [33:54]
Justin has not spoken with Carl since that undercover encounter at the Houston venue.
- [33:59]
I tried to get in touch with him through his public defender. I've tried every means to. To just, like, give him the right to respond to these things. There is a piece of me that feels like I lived with the story for so long that it's just time for me to just hang it up. But who knows? Maybe a jailhouse interview would be the best thing we could do.
- [34:18]
What Carl Bucco is alleged to have done was a betrayal of trust in some of the most vulnerable, meaningful moments of people's lives. We like to believe that bad actors get what's coming to them, that if you hurt enough people, eventually the consequences will catch up. But sometimes that takes years in a podcast, a sting and a whole lot of receipts to make it happen. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's written and hosted by me, Josh Dean, and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff, sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack, theme music by Ewin lightroom and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriadis, Matt Sher and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help, and if you have any feedback, tips or story ideas, you can email us@chameleonpodampsidemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number We've set up, 201-743-8368, dial plus one from outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week.
- [35:53]
I think Chuck would approve.