"It's $160,187," she says, indicating the residual amount. "But I'm not going to give that to him because he's going to be charged for punitive damages for what he has done to me." Anything left over after these expected damages are paid, she insists, must go toward his psychological treatment. "I will pay the rehab and the patient center," she says. "He has to go to a healing center. He is insane."
Diesel says such statements are part of a ploy by Gamboa to discredit him. As a character reference, he directs SF Weekly to Paul Fleiss, a Los Angeles pediatrician and the father of Heidi Fleiss, the notorious "Hollywood Madam" who was arrested in 1993 for running a prostitution ring catering to celebrities. The elder Fleiss pleaded guilty in 1995 to helping his daughter launder money from the operation.
Frank Gaglione
Pearlasia Gamboa says she has paperwork to prove that her Philippine gold mines are legit.
Frank Gaglione
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In a telephone conversation, Fleiss says he has known Diesel for four or five years. He describes him as "a very smart man" who appeared to be fairly wealthy when they met, and who enjoyed buying gifts for his acquaintances. "He is a little extravagant," Fleiss says. "He would hike in the park with bare feet, and he would wear two ties. He was very eccentric. He met a lot of people, and he was very friendly to all of them. A lot of Koreans."
As her own reference with regard to the Diesel saga, Gamboa directs a reporter to Gustavo Xar, a Guatemalan mover who helped transport some of Diesel's property from a house in Southern California to storage in Redwood City under her supervision. Xar, who has been copied on the dozens of antagonistic e-mails that have flown back and forth between Gamboa and Diesel over the past few months, expresses an agnostic view of the pair's relationship. "I don't know which one's lying and which one's not," he says in thickly accented English during a telephone interview from Arizona, where he now lives and works. All that he remembers from the moving job, he says, is eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant in L.A. last year with Gamboa and Diesel. At the time, they seemed like good friends.
Gamboa has flirted with bizarre fraud schemes on and off for at least two decades, and continues to attract a flow of cash from unwitting investors. How does she do it? Experts say this is not unusual. Financial crimes of all sorts are resource-intensive to investigate and difficult to prove. Korem was most recently apprehended only after one of his associates ratted him out to the federal government, allowing agents to record a phone conversation about illegal activity related to ZNext stock. Penalties in civil court can serve as a deterrent, but are less effective when a defendant decides, as Gamboa has, to ignore the legal proceedings against her.
Penny-stock fraud, which involves a virtually unregulated market easily accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, is notoriously tough to police. "It is fairly easy for a person with limited capital to acquire a shell corporation and then use that corporation to engage in a pump-and-dump scheme, if that person has the ability to tell a compelling story," says Ryan Dwight O'Quinn, a former federal prosecutor who directed the South Florida crackdown that led to Korem's arrest. (He declines to say whether Gamboa was ever investigated by his office.)
Gamboa appears to have gone a step further. She doesn't just tell a compelling story; she lives a fantastic one. From her bogus island nation to her questionable overseas gold mines, Gamboa has more or less protected the borders of an enigmatic empire of suspect business ventures. Over lunch at a Salvadoran restaurant in downtown Redwood City on a recent afternoon, she says she has the strength to deal with future challenges, whether from Diesel or federal agents, in part because of the hardships she has already faced.
Last year, she says, amid the stress of the SEC proceeding and the arrest of her husband, she suffered a serious aneurysm. When asked what her resulting condition was, she responds without missing a beat.
"I died."
You died?
"I died. At least, that's what I call it."
She says she was dead for three days, not unlike another well-known religious leader, and then returned to the world of the living. Pressed about the details of her resurrection, Pearlasia Gamboa, aka Elvira Gamboa, aka Pearlasia, aka Bae Catiguman — princess of peace, declarer of war, past president of a country that does not exist — simply bats her dark eyelashes and smiles.
"It was a miracle."
