Agency added Mary Carole McDonnell to Most Wanted list for loan fraud tied to phony heiress story
When Nigel Bellis went to work as a show runner for Bellum Entertainment in 2017, a friend gave him a warning: “They have a habit of not paying on time.”
Bellis spent the next several months in New Orleans, helping churn out more than 50 episodes of a true-crime TV show called Murderous Affairs. Though his payments came late, they always arrived. So when the company’s owner, Mary Carole McDonnell, offered him a new role in Los Angeles, he took it.
Within a month of arriving in his new town, Bellis found himself sucked into his own true-crime story, as McDonnell was revealed as an alleged fraudster who had duped banks into handing her multimillion-dollar loans by posing as a wealthy heiress of the McDonnell Aircraft family. Somehow drowning in debt despite those infusions of cash, McDonnell’s production company went belly up – still owing Bellis backpay and money to help him relocate.
“I had very little after the move,” Bellis said. “I was absolutely counting on that money.”
