WASINGHTON, 15 Dec. - (ANA) - 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.”

 

The FBI revived interest in McDonnell, 73, this week when it added her to the agency’s Most Wanted list. McDonnell faces federal bank fraud and identity theft charges in the central district of California, where she is accused of swindling the Banc of California out of $15m.

 

McDonnell and her then-lawyer Barry Rothman allegedly presented the bank with fraudulent documents showing that she had an account with $28m sitting at another institution and a trust worth another $80m. (Rothman died in 2018.)

 

But McDonnell told Banc of California she needed a $15m bridge loan while she was waiting for her trust to pay out the next year, according to a civil complaint brought by the bank.

 

The Banc of California gave her the money, but later found out the supposed $28m collateral account didn’t exist. McDonnell defaulted on the loan. She is also accused of similarly defrauding other financial institutions, netting a total of nearly $30m, according to the FBI.

 

The FBI believes that McDonnell split for Dubai before her 2018 indictment and that she was still living there, FBI spokesperson Laura Eimiller said. The agency hopes that this week’s notice will prompt people to come forward to help locate and extradite her.

 

“Publicity is an investigative tool,” Eimiller said. “In recent times, we’ve also received new information. We believe that she is continuing to defraud from where she is now.”

 

But while McDonnell is best known for fleecing banks, she also stiffed a long list of workers and contractors at Bellum Entertainment, her short-lived company specializing in true crime television. Many of them won judgments against her years ago. She owes Bellis $500,000, including back pay, damages and a penalty for failing to pay him after enticing him to relocate from another state.

 

But workers say they worry that with such powerful financial interests involved, they will never see their money.

 

“I assume if she’s caught her assets will be seized,” Joshua Koffman, a former Bellum producer, said. “And selfishly, I’m concerned that there won’t be any money left over for the little people who worked for her.”

 

Workers described Bellum as a pressure-cooker operation, constantly producing new shows at a breakneck pace and attempting to finance them with money from old shows sold at dirt-cheap prices. All agreed that McDonnell was a gifted salesperson – a talent that surely explained her success as a grifter.

 

Stephanie Manos loved the job she landed with Bellum Entertainment in 2016. On paper, she was an office manager. But as the only salaried employee working out of the company’s New Orleans office, she acted as an extra hand on the set. She dressed sets, wrangled extras and repeatedly played the mother of victims or murderers in re-enactments. Having worked tough jobs in the garment and food industries, the work felt both fun and easy.

 

The job had required a tremendous leap of faith. She had to relocate to New Orleans – giving up a $750 per month apartment on a private street in Echo Park, where she had lived for two decades.

 

When Bellum flopped and McDonnell’s alleged criminality was exposed, it was all but financially impossible for Manos to return to Los Angeles. The apartment she left now rents for $2,800 a month, she said. Instead, she stayed in New Orleans, where after a months-long job search that plowed through her savings, she found work at a funeral home.

 

“It was like a knife in the back,” Manos said. “She took advantage of all of us.”   - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/15 December 2025 - - -