- 4/24/2024
These people cannot be trusted. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re examining the most notorious people who exhibit signs of sociopathy, those being antisocial behavior, manipulation, and a lack of empathy.
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00:00So we're taking the dream for your average person in America or wherever they are
00:04and saying for three days you can become Pablo Escobar.
00:07Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're examining the most notorious people who exhibit signs of
00:11sociopathy, those being anti-social behavior, manipulation, and a lack of empathy.
00:17Do you think about getting out of here?
00:19Well, well, legally, sure.
00:24Bernie Madoff.
00:25So is this easy money, would you say, that you're making with Madoff?
00:29Easy. Easy peasy.
00:31When it comes to financial manipulation, it's hard to beat the story of Bernie Madoff.
00:35Madoff had it all on Wall Street.
00:37He ran a multi-billion dollar company and held sway over the Nasdaq stock exchange.
00:42But his own hubris eventually got the best of him.
00:45Madoff was a family-dominated firm, so Bernie was the top of everything.
00:51His family had all the key positions.
00:53Madoff confessed to his sons, Mark and Andrew,
00:55that he had orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history
00:58through his investment securities firm, swindling investors out of billions.
01:03Mark and Andrew then turned on their father and reported him to the FBI,
01:06who arrested Madoff on a charge of securities fraud.
01:10He eventually pled guilty to 11 felonies and was sentenced to 150 years in prison,
01:15where he died in April 2021.
01:18The office has been secured.
01:20We have Bernie Madoff in custody, and we just know a lot of money is missing.
01:23Our biggest problem was we don't know how it happened.
01:27Richard Scott Smith
01:28I agreed to talk to you today because I want to get my story out,
01:33and I want everybody in the world knowing
01:36that I'm not the person that they've claimed me to be.
01:39Fans of Showtime's Love Fraud may recognize the name Richard Scott Smith
01:43as he was the primary subject of the four-part documentary.
01:46Smith was a serial con artist, running numerous online romance scams
01:50and ruining the lives of multiple women.
01:52These women appear in the documentary,
01:54sharing their harrowing stories of being duped and misled.
01:58You know, I may hate him for all these things,
02:03but I wouldn't have gotten in so deep if I hadn't thought I loved him.
02:08Smith would use a fake identity and marry his victims,
02:12then use their financial information to obtain a line of credit.
02:15He would then flee, off to marry someone else,
02:18leaving his previous partners both heartbroken and in severe debt.
02:21Smith was known to have married at least 10 times
02:24before he was arrested at the end of the series.
02:27I'm human, too. I've been a victim, Rachel, to things that are not true.
02:36Anna Sorokin
02:38I'm trying to, like, make my story to be like,
02:40oh, I made a mistake, but I'm trying to turn this around
02:43without trying to glamorize the mistake itself.
02:46Financial schemes are getting harder by the day,
02:48thanks to rapid technological advancements,
02:51but they still happen.
02:52Just ask Anna Sorokin, a Russian-born woman
02:55who defrauded various institutions of nearly $300,000.
02:59Having emigrated to New York in 2013,
03:01Sorokin quickly became a master manipulator.
03:04She doesn't go for the big money right away.
03:06It's not like she surrounds herself with, you know, hedge fund moguls.
03:11She surrounds herself with cool.
03:13She invented a new identity, Anna Delvey,
03:16and forged financial documents to appear like a rich German heiress,
03:20with access to a multi-million-euro trust fund.
03:23With these documents, Sorokin secured massive loans,
03:26which she used to sustain a lavish lifestyle.
03:29However, her deceit was exposed
03:31when she duped her friend Rachel Deloche Williams of over $60,000.
03:36Williams alerted the police,
03:37leading to Sorokin's arrest in a sting operation.
03:40She subsequently served two years in prison.
03:43I mean, you took advantage of people.
03:45I definitely did, yeah.
03:46And I was younger, and I learned from my mistakes.
03:49But did you?
03:51I did, yes.
03:51Did you learn from those mistakes?
03:53I mean, are you not going to do anything like this ever again?
03:55Absolutely not.
03:56Billy McFarland
03:57But was it more to prove yourself, or was it more for money?
04:01It was to prove myself.
04:02And once again, I was totally wrong, and I lied to investors to get money.
04:07Called the poster boy for millennial scamming by Vanity Fair,
04:10Billy McFarland is widely known as the man behind the ill-fated Fyre Festival.
04:15Well, ill-fated isn't the right word.
04:17More like manipulative.
04:19Taking place in the Bahamas,
04:20the Fyre Festival was marketed as a luxury music event
04:23with villas, gourmet food, the whole nine yards.
04:26I think we chose the right island.
04:29We got ours for $10 million.
04:31Freehold van, no lease.
04:32We own the land forever.
04:33Visitors paid good money to attend,
04:35but upon arrival, they were met with a horribly planned disaster
04:38that bore no resemblance to the promised opulence.
04:41Tons of lawsuits emerged accusing McFarland of fraud,
04:44and he was found guilty on two counts.
04:46He was ordered to pay $26 million in damages
04:50and served three and a half years in prison.
04:52Before we had the worst luck, I think we had the best luck.
04:56And like, it sounds crazy, but so many things had to go right
05:00to make it this big of a failure.
05:02Joe Exotic
05:04I am never going to financially recover from this.
05:06The Tiger King himself operated the Greater Winnewood Exotic Animal Park in Oklahoma,
05:11known for its prominent display of large cats.
05:14And as chronicled in the famous Netflix documentary,
05:16he had a fierce rivalry with Carole Baskin, the owner of Florida's Big Cat Rescue.
05:21Exotic displayed numerous sociopathic tendencies,
05:24which were on full display in the documentary.
05:27All these people think that everybody else in society are abusers but her.
05:34I mean, she's a master marketer.
05:36I'll give her that.
05:37Despite his purported love for animals,
05:39he was continuously alleged to have mistreated those in his park.
05:43Not only did he publicly accuse Baskin of killing her missing husband, Don Lewis,
05:47he also put out a hit on her, which failed and led to his arrest.
05:51Exotic was convicted on charges of animal mistreatment and attempted murder for hire,
05:55and sentenced to 21 years in prison.
05:58And I get letters from 8-year-old kids to 95-year-old grandmas,
06:03and every letter says it's because I was unapologetic,
06:08I stood up for what I believed in, and because I'm not ashamed of who I am.
06:12Dorothea Puente
06:14I used to be a very good person at one time.
06:16Known as the death house landlady,
06:18Dorothea Puente sounds like someone out of a fairy tale.
06:21She opened a boarding house in Sacramento and seemed like an upstanding member of the community,
06:26donating to various charities and using her boarding house to host AA meetings.
06:31She also aided her elderly guests in setting up their social security checks.
06:35However, this was all part of Puente's grand plan.
06:38This is what we would call the death room.
06:40This is where she brought her victims after she had induced drugs into their alcohol.
06:45Throughout the 1980s, the matron killed nine guests of her boarding house,
06:50buried their remains in her yard, and cashed their social security checks.
06:54It shows that Puente was a maniac who was highly aggressive
06:57and driven primarily by her own financial gain.
07:00I spent 15 years as a homicide detective,
07:03and in those 15 years I had seen many victims of homicide,
07:07but none of those compared to what I found when I was digging through the yard.
07:13Elizabeth Holmes
07:14Every person should have the ability to get that type of test.
07:18And speaking of people willing to deceive for financial gain,
07:21let's talk about the infamous Elizabeth Holmes.
07:24Like Bernie Madoff, Holmes manipulated investors with her company Theranos,
07:28which claimed to have revolutionized blood testing with a fancy new machine.
07:31However, this machine never actually worked.
07:34Holmes not only lied to investors about the company's capabilities,
07:38she also lied to her own customers through the machine's bogus results.
07:41What I know is that I've put the best people in place to be able to
07:46investigate every aspect of this and ensure that
07:49we meet the quality standards that we hold ourselves to.
07:52Theranos raised more than $700 million,
07:55and Forbes valued Holmes as the youngest self-made female billionaire in American history.
08:00But it all came crashing down when investigators looked into the company,
08:04and uncovered a massive web of deceit.
08:06Holmes was charged with fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
08:11If a female leader can build a company from nothing to something that impacts
08:16people's lives every single day, it's like there's nothing we can't do.
08:20Diane Downs
08:21They kept telling me, if you just remember, they told me I had voids in my memory,
08:25that there was 25 minutes of time missing, that I was hiding something, protecting something.
08:30Called a deviant sociopath by one psychiatrist,
08:33Diane Downs gained notoriety for a particularly heinous crime conducted in 1983.
08:39On May 19th, Downs shot her three children, then wounded herself in the left arm.
08:44She subsequently rushed them to a hospital,
08:46claiming they had been the victims of an attempted carjacking.
08:49He did not take time to point the gun and shoot me,
08:52obviously, because he would have shot me the same way he did the kids.
08:56However, hospital staff was immediately suspicious of her story.
08:59Two of the children survived, but one tragically passed from her injuries.
09:03Following an official investigation, Downs was arrested nine months later,
09:07and convicted largely on the testimony of one of her surviving children.
09:10She supposedly committed the act because the man she was entangled with
09:14didn't want kids in their lives.
09:16In 1984, Downs was sentenced to life in prison.
09:19To my complete surprise, Diane was non-emotional, not a tear in her eye.
09:27Ted Bundy
09:28Clearly, they're people.
09:29Clearly, they're flesh and blood and they have, you know,
09:32all the characteristics of human beings,
09:34but he would not allow himself to feel those emotions for the victim.
09:40Ask any professional and they will tell you that Ted Bundy was as mean as they come.
09:45His own attorney, Polly Nelson, called him, quote,
09:47the very definition of heartless evil.
09:50Biographer Ann Rule said that he was a sadistic sociopath.
09:53Even Bundy labeled himself as the most cold-hearted son of a gun you'll ever meet.
09:58Gun is our own word.
10:01If someone's crazy enough and nutty enough to do something like that,
10:04I can't stop them.
10:06There's nothing I can do.
10:07Bundy was an attractive man who skillfully manipulated his persona to enchant women,
10:12often luring them into his car, where he would restrain and kill them.
10:16Even after his arrest, Bundy tried to maintain his innocence,
10:20weaving lies for lawyers, the media, and visitors alike.
10:23However, as the truth closed in,
10:25he eventually realized the game was up and confessed to killing 30 people.
10:30I deserve certainly the most extreme punishment society has,
10:36and I deserve, I think society deserves to be protected from me and from others like me.
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10:58Charles Manson
10:59If you hold the negative up to the light,
11:02you don't see the light, you just see the negative.
11:05So I'm a reflection of your negative, there's no doubt about that,
11:07and I can handle that also.
11:09At his 12th parole hearing,
11:11Charles Manson was said to have a quote,
11:13history of controlling behavior.
11:15That is putting it lightly.
11:17Perhaps the most infamous cult leader of all time,
11:20Manson was the head of his eponymous family,
11:22which gained notoriety in 1969 after killing actress Sharon Tate.
11:27Do you feel blame?
11:28Are you mad?
11:29Do you feel like...
11:33But Tate was just one of nine victims,
11:36most of whom Manson murdered by proxy through his manipulated family members.
11:40His motive is still ambiguous,
11:42but author Vincent Bugliosi believes that he intended to start a race war.
11:46At the aforementioned parole hearing,
11:48the panel also indicated that Manson had no remorse for the crimes
11:52and harbored a total lack of empathy.
11:54He died in prison at the age of 83.
11:57I'm not ready, your honor, I need more time.
12:00What do you make of these stories?
12:01Let us know in the comments below.
12:04Check out these other clips from WatchMojo
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