At least $7.3 million of investor money is alleged to have ended up in Bernhard Fritsch's personal accounts — funding a Rolls-Royce, a yacht, and a mortgage on his Malibu villa.
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On a sunny day in April, Bernhard Fritsch visits a hilltop near Lake Starnberg in Germany. After a hike against the backdrop of the Bavarian mountain panorama, he treats himself to a slice of cake with vanilla ice cream at the Forsthaus Ilkahöhe, a popular hikers' inn. Later, he uploads photos of the outing to Instagram, gushing over the view of the snowy Zugspitze mountain.Does someone who is on the run and wanted by the American federal police post something like that? It is, by far, not the only question raised by this bizarre case. A $150,000 bounty, a severed ankle monitor, escape from US authorities, and an arrest in Mexico — the Bernhard Fritsch file reads like a Hollywood script.On Thursday, the FBI added the 65-year-old German to its "Most Wanted Fraudsters" list.Fritsch studied audio engineering in Berlin in the 1980s before moving to New York in the 1990s. With his company MCY, he wanted to sell music over the internet — sort of a precursor to the streaming giant Spotify at an early stage of the dot-com economy.He told a reporter from the German Manager Magazin in 2000 that he had already won over Michael Jackson, Paul McCartney, Luciano Pavarotti, and the Backstreet Boys to his idea. "You wouldn't believe who's already walked through that door," he said at the time. He had met Michael Jackson in Munich the previous year.
