Fraud by the book

On November 15th, 2006 Rebecca Hauck was sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

Now, one thing remained: To catch her accomplice in fraud, the accused con man behind it all— Matthew Cox.

Those who’d lost money on his alleged scams hoped that somehow, he’d still get what was coming to him—

Holman: This is a very hard crime to stop. That’s the reason we need to get this guy off the street.

Brown: He just, at the closing table was nice and kind as could be, but the whole time, he was taking us to the cleaners.

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: How angry are you all three?

Dobrow: I’m pretty angry. I’m not a violent person but I would sure like to see this guy locked away for a very long time.

Morrison: What drives him? Is it the money..is it..?

U.S. Attorney Gale McKenzie: It’s the money and the game.

U.S. Attorney Gale McKenzie’s manhunt had now gone nationwide.

Law enforcement was alerted to his many aliases, and the habits that could give him away: His love for vanilla lattes at Starbucks, movies about criminals, the habit of painting huge murals in a very specific style, and the method of using young single mothers as accomplices.

Morrison: More than likely then, some other young woman is setting herself up for a stay in a federal prison somewhere?

McKenzie: That is a real possibility.

And then, out of the blue, there was news.

And it happened on the very week Rebecca Hauck was sentenced in Atlanta.

There was a tip from Nashville, Tennessee, just 200 miles away: It was a babysitter who said something about a man she worked for didn’t seem right.

He called himself Joseph Carter from Florida, she said. He lived with this single mother.  She’d done some research on the Web, and bingo—there he was, a wanted man.

Secret Service Agents scrambled to a home in Nashville but it was empty.  Matthew Cox was gone.

Where was Matthew Cox? Had somebody tipped him off? Well in fact the truth was too strange to make up. Just days before, Cox had learned what it felt like to become the victim of a crime. Armed robbers had burst into his house, and stolen watches, cash, a car. An Infiniti, of course. And Cox became so worried that somebody was after him that he scooped up his new girlfriend, and her son and moved into a hotel.

Amanda Gardner: He said he would take care of me, he said he would take care of my son, he’d do his best to make sure that we were happy…

Her name is Amanda Gardner. She said she and Cox or “Carter” as she knew him, had set up a home remodeling business, the “Nashville Restoration Project.”

Gardner: I was completely and totally dumbstruck in love…

Amanda had settled down with a man who took her to Greece on vacation, loved crime movies, and vanilla lattes from Starbucks. And sure enough, he asked her to have breast enhancement surgery.

And then, one day, Cox and Amanda returned home from that hotel where they were hiding.

On November 16^th, just like that, Matthew Cox was caught. He was taken down by Secret Service agents who’d been searching for him for two long years.

And his new girlfriend denied any wrongdoing. She claimed she was a victim too—sounding a lot like the last two.

Gardner: I learned that he was not the caring, giving person that I thought he was. I learned that he was unscrupulous, he damaged my business, and he sabotaged a year worth of my work because he got greedy.

And so we now find ourselves back at the beginning of our story—or more accurately, at the ending of Cox’s novel.

Cox’s novel: “I am not a criminal,” Christian continued to tell himself. He had not meant for anyone to get hurt.

Cox’s ending, it turns out, was indeed a fairytale. People had been hurt. Authorities do consider him a criminal.

Novel: He was free and about to start a new adventure. A new life in a new country…

There’ll be no sailing away on an ocean-bound cruise ship, no millions in cash, no girl by his side.

Instead, Matthew Cox faces charges which, if he’s convicted, could put him in federal prison for decades.

McKenzie: The book is fiction, and the real life ending is yet to be written.

His lawyers say Matthew Cox is expected to plead guilty to a laundry list of charges as part of a plea bargain deal with the government. He may be sentenced in the next two months.

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