Betrayal, Cons, and A Faked Death: Investigating How Rebecca The Musical Fell Apart - Vanity Fair

Betrayal, Cons, and a Faked Death: Investigating How Rebecca the Musical Fell Apart | Vanity Fair 4/18/19,
4/18/19, 12)19 PM
Sign In Subscribe
The Road to Manderley

Rebecca, the Musical, based on the renowned du Maurier novel, was veteran producer Ben Sprecher’s shot at
the big time. Believing he had found the next Phantom of the Opera, he fully expected to have a Broadway hit
on his hands. In a saga that veers from tragedy to surrealism, David Kamp details the blows to Sprecher’s
dream: the “death” of a key investor, the discovery of a con, and the furtive maneuverings of a seeming ally.
BY DAV ID K AMP | MAY 16, 2013 12:00 AM
! " #
HOT PROPERTY Left, Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers and Joan Fontaine as Mrs. de Winter filming Alfred
Hitchock’s Rebecca, 1940. Right, The burning staircase from the Stuttgart production of Rebecca—Das
Musical, November 26, 2011., Left, © Selznick International Pictures/Photofest; right, by Morris Mac
Matzen/stage entertainment/Picture Alliance/DPA.
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/06/rebecca-musical-betrayal-fake-death Page 1 of 24
Betrayal, Cons, and a Faked Death: Investigating How Rebecca the Musical Fell Apart | Vanity Fair 4/18/19, 12)19 PM
t should have all been happening by now. Had everything gone
I according to Ben Sprecher’s plan, Rebecca, the Musical would

have opened on Broadway last November, a juggernaut loosed
upon American theater. The show’s logo, a flaming, curlicued
capital R, would have hung proudly above the marquee at the
Broadhurst Theatre, on West 44th Street, and reproductions of the logo
would have adorned the sides of city buses trundling up and down the
avenues of Manhattan. On Saturdays, giggly packs of teenage theater-
arts girls would have been spilling out of the matinee, belting out “Last
niiiight I dreammmmt of Mannn-derley!” in imitation of Jill Paice, the
pretty actress cast as the show’s nameless protagonist: a dowdy young
English innocent recently married to the wealthy Maxim de Winter, and
soon haunted by the spectral presence of his deceased first wife, the
titular Rebecca.
The reviews—well, they might not have been outright raves, and
probably Ben Brantley of The New York Times would have faint-praised
some of the musical numbers as “serviceable Lloyd Webberian pastiche
with the odd Mitteleuropean touch,” or something like that. But the
notices would have been good enough, and, besides, the show had been
engineered to succeed without hipster cool or critical gush. Sprecher’s
PowerPoint presentation for potential investors notes that Rebecca is “a
production that is targeted directly at the key demographic that drives
Broadway—Women,” who “drive 69% of the purchase decision.” The
1938 Daphne du Maurier novel upon which the musical is based is a
school-lit perennial and a favorite among girls and women, with more
than three million copies sold. What’s more, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940
film adaptation won the Oscar for best picture, the only Hitchcock film
ever to do so. “Manderley,” the name of Maxim de Winter’s Cornish
seaside mansion, has almost as much cultural resonance as “Rosebud.”
Subscribe to Vanity Fair and get an exclusive tote. Join Today
It was a slam dunk: a proven property built, as the PowerPoint

presentation promises, “to run and run and run at a profit.” Sprecher, a
seasoned, 58-year-old Off Broadway guy taking his first shot at being the
lead producer of a big Broadway musical, made no bones about it:
Rebecca had the potential to be the next Phantom of the Opera.
Watch Now: How Steve Bannon

Manipulates His Followers
In the mainstream media.
-2:40
But something strange happened on the road to Manderley. Many

strange things, actually. First of all, Rebecca was originally supposed to
open in March of last year, not November, but the start date was
postponed when a key investor
In scaled back the size of his investment.
In the
the mainstream
mainstream media.
media.
Then it was supposed to go into rehearsal in early September, but the
show was postponed again because a different key investor suddenly
died . . . of malaria . . . leaving a $4.5 million hole in the show’s projected
$12 million budget. Then a New York Times reporter started raising
questions publicly, in print, about whether the dead man had ever
existed.
It would eventually come to light that, indeed, he never had, and that,
according to a federal complaint, he was the invention of a Long Island
stockbroker named Mark Hotton, whom Sprecher and his co-producer,
Louise Forlenza, had hired to bring in backers. Hotton, the feds say, is a
serial con man whose other misdeeds allegedly include defrauding
several people out of their personal savings and forging a signature on a
bank loan so he could buy a 50-foot yacht that he named Hott Catch.
It says a lot about the acute peculiarity of the Rebecca saga that the
serial con man with a boat named Hott Catch isn’t even the most
peculiar aspect of the story.
“Oh, My God—That’s It!”
precher Entertainment occupies a building on West 52nd
S Street that abuts the August Wilson Theatre, where the

musical Jersey Boys has been playing for more than seven
years—precisely the kind of lengthy, open-ended tenancy that
Sprecher dreams of for Rebecca. His offices are on the fifth
floor, but, if you enter the building, you’ll notice that the buttons in the
confessional-size elevator go up only to four. You take the elevator as
high as it goes, and then you have to walk up a flight of scuffed stairs.
Every working day, literally, this producer must put in extra effort to get
to the top.
A framed photo on Sprecher’s office wall shows him looking young and
perky, reveling in Mitzi Gaynor’s carnal embrace on the set of a touring
production of Anything Goes. Now his eyes are weighted with bags—
bags that puff up further when he cries, which he is prone to do when
discussing his star-crossed Rebecca journey.
He gets so emotional, he told me, because he has staked his reputation,

his finances, and his very career on bringing the show to Broadway. For
all the obstacles he has encountered, Sprecher has not given up. As he
put it to me the first time we spoke, “I cannot tell you how much I
believe in this musical as a commercial project and as a piece of art. I am
still . . . fucking . . . AT IT.”
Ben Sprecher (the name is pronounced Spreck-er) grew up in Southern

California. In the early 1980s he settled in New York and, over the next
two decades, made a name for himself as an Off Broadway producer and
landlord. He owned both the Promenade Theatre, on the Upper West
Side, and the Variety Arts, in the East Village, and also managed the
Lucille Lortel, in the West Village. His theaters hosted the original New
York productions of such plays as Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women,
David Rabe’s Hurlyburly, and Donald Margulies’s Dinner with Friends.
As time went on, Sprecher gained some Broadway-producer credentials,
albeit not as the lead producer, on such straight plays as the 2005
revival of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, with Nathan Lane and Matthew
Broderick. A flattering 1995 profile of Sprecher in The New York Times
presented him as “a driving force Off Broadway,” with no less a
Broadway eminence than Gerald Schoenfeld, the chairman of the
Shubert Organization, whom Sprecher regarded as a mentor, vouching
for his talents.
The Rebecca that Sprecher wants to bring to Broadway is actually an

adaptation of a German-language production, Rebecca—Das Musical,
which had its premiere at the Raimund Theater, in Vienna, in 2006.
Forlenza happened to be in Europe on business at the time and was at
the Raimund on opening night. “I called Ben the next day, and I said—
my exact quote—‘Holy shit! You have to see this production,’ ” Forlenza
told me.
Sprecher flew to Vienna three weeks later and needed no further

convincing. “I’m watching this thing,” he said, “and I’m thinking, Where
are the Shuberts? Where are the Nederlanders? I’ve sat in the theater for
thousands and thousands of shows. But when you see something you
didn’t see coming, and, at the same time, is a phenomenally compelling
story, beautifully gorgeous to look at, with fantastic music—I went, ‘Oh,
my God—that’s it!’ ”
In 2008 he and Forlenza secured the English-language rights to Rebecca

—Das Musical. The original plan was to unveil the show in London’s
West End, in 2011. Sprecher hoped to re-create the Vienna production’s
most dazzling effect, wherein the spiral staircase of Manderley catches
fire and collapses into the ground. To achieve this effect, the Raimund
Theater had been fitted with a large revolving floor mounted on an
elevator that plummeted beneath the stage. However, when exploratory
excavation was done at *Rebecca’*s designated London theater, the
Shaftesbury, to see if it could accommodate such an elevator, the
excavators hit water and the theater’s basement flooded. *Rebecca’*s
producers dropped the London plan and decided to open on Broadway
in 2012, with a new production design that required no excavation. The
Shubert Organization promised Sprecher one of its theaters, the
Broadhurst, and invested $500,000 in the show.
Yet money problems bedeviled the production from the start. Sprecher’s
hopes of opening the show in March 2012 were dashed when Norton
Herrick, a Florida real-estate developer and frequent Broadway investor,
decided against making the seven-figure investment that the two men
had discussed. (Herrick remains a six-figure investor in Rebecca.)
Broadway shows are always a risky enterprise, with only one in four
turning a profit, but, on the face of it, Rebecca doesn’t seem like the
most reckless of bets. The original production in Vienna ran for three
years. Foreign-language adaptations have had or are still having
successful runs in Tokyo, Seoul, Budapest, Helsinki,
READ MOREBelgrade, and
FROM VANITY FAIR
Stuttgart. Furthermore, Sprecher hasFawcett's

been able to wrangle top-shelf
Photos: Farrah Now You Can Experience
talent: to adapt the book, the playwright
Swimsuit Shoot Christopher Hampton, an Game of Thrones the Way
Oscar winner for Dangerous
by STAFF Liaisons and the man who skillfully George
by JOANNA R.R. Martin Intended
ROBINSON
translated Yasmina Reza’s ‘Art’ and God of Carnage for Broadway; and
to co-direct, Francesca Zambello, the Vienna production’s original
overseer, and the venerable Michael Blakemore, who, in 2000, became
the only person ever to win a Tony in the same season for both best
direction of a play (Copenhagen) and best direction of a musical (Kiss
Me, Kate).
ith all these factors in its favor, why would Rebecca
W have trouble raising money? Sprecher and Forlenza

attribute at least some of the difficulty to the
depressed financial climate. Others in the theater
community think that it’s a matter of Sprecher’s
being a Broadway small-timer; unlike such established Broadway
producers as Roy Furman and Daryl Roth, he is not independently
wealthy and has no core group of dedicated investors to draw upon.
The other widespread theater-world theory is that Rebecca is a

European-style “sung-through” show—operatically bombastic, slim on
spoken dialogue—that might not translate to U.S. audiences. This last
characterization is particularly infuriating to the show’s creative team,
who feel the U.S. show has been pre-emptively judged without so much
as a single rehearsal. “I expected the Euro-pop charge to be leveled,”
Blakemore told me, and he says that he and the original show’s
European creators, the German lyricist Michael Kunze and the
Hungarian composer Sylvester Levay, have consciously revamped the
show for its proposed Broadway run. Besides, added Kunze, “what have
been the biggest hits on Broadway? Phantom, Les Miz, Mamma Mia!
Eurotrash is actually doing really great in New York.”
Nevertheless, as of early last year, *Rebecca’*s capitalization was stuck

at about $6 million, only halfway toward its producers’ goal. Sprecher
and Forlenza needed to find someone to help them get all the way to the
promised land. Enter Mark Hotton.
Terrible News
t was Forlenza who served as Hotton’s point of entry. A certified
I public accountant from a working-class Bronx family, Forlenza,

now 63, has done well for herself, cultivating both a wealthy
clientele of financiers and an active involvement in theater
production. One person she met through her clients is a man
named Jeffrey Troncone, who was not interested in investing in Rebecca
but offered to bring potentially interested parties her way. Some of the
Troncone referrals were solid, and one, to a Bronx auto-dealership
magnate named Bruce Bendell, panned out—Bendell has $250,000 in
2 ARTICLES LEFT Get unlimited
Rebecca. But Tronconeaccess to Vanity that
also suggested Fair +the
a free tote. Subscribe
producers Now
get in touch Sign In
with Hotton. (Troncone, who could not be reached for comment, has
variously turned up in Web bios and executive profiles as a talent agent,
a radio producer, and a tech start-up entrepreneur. In 1991 he pleaded
guilty to two counts of mail fraud.)
ADVERTISEMENT
Hotton told Forlenza and Sprecher that he was a stockbroker who had
worked for Oppenheimer & Co., a prestigious boutique investment firm.
True enough: he was employed by Oppenheimer from 2005 to 2009.
What he didn’t tell them, they say, was that he had filed for bankruptcy
LAST FREE ARTICLE

LAST FREE ARTICLE

only a year earlier, claiming $15 million in debts, or that he had settled
two cases out of court in 2006 in which he was charged with
CLOSE
YOU'VE READ HALF

Continue reading this article with a Vanity Fair membership.
misappropriating his clients’ money, or that hePlus,
had get
a record
a freeof iffy-to-
tote.
criminal dealings dating back to 1990.
Get unlimited access to vanityfair.com, the print and digital edition of the magazine
and the exclusive, V.F. InsiderJoin Now Plus, get a free tote.
newsletter.
Forlenza first met Hotton
JoininNow
January 2012 at a diner near his home, on
Long Island. He was a beefy, cocksure man in his mid-40s. To Forlenza,
Sign In Create An Account
he simply seemed a typical specimen of his type: “He wore the uniform.
He wore the suit. He had the handkerchief, the perfect posture, the
$40,000 gold Rolex watch.” The one thing that gave her pause was that
Hotton said he and some friends had invested in some West End shows,
in London, and had done “very well.” “I was kind of taken aback by
that,” Forlenza said, “because most people in theater don’t say they’ve
done ‘very well.’ ”
Still, she and Sprecher agreed to keep in touch with the broker, and a
few weeks later he came back to them with good news: while he himself
could not invest in the show, he had a group of foreign investors lined
up, to the tune of $4.5 million—a huge score, and one that would more
or less complete the show’s capitalization. Delighted, Sprecher and
Forlenza worked out an arrangement in which Hotton would receive a
proportionate percentage of the general partnership’s profits from the
show in return for bringing the investors aboard.
According to the federal complaint, Hotton’s investors were led by one

Paul Abrams, who was said to be a prosperous businessman from South
Africa—though Abrams’s subscription agreement (the packet of
documents that investors fill out to ratify their investment) gave his
hometown as Hawthorn, Australia. A close inspection of these papers
might have, and perhaps should have, raised some eyebrows: Hawthorn
was misspelled as “Hawthorne,” and Abrams gave his e-mail address as
miltonc@aol.com, a curiously unprofessional-seeming address (no
company’s or law firm’s name?) for a man instigating a $2 million
transaction. The remaining $2.5 million was to come from three Abrams
associates: Roger Thomas, of Guernsey, Julian Spencer, of Chichester,
Sussex, and Walter Timmons, of London.
Hotton was seemingly clever enough to assign these men credibly low-
key Anglo names rather than something like Sir Nigel Moneybags, yet
they too had strange e-mail addresses: pbranson687@gmail.com for
Thomas, for example, and info@CPSEquity.com for Spencer. I asked
Sprecher about this—why he, as the producer of a major Broadway
show, did not find any of this shoddy or suspicious. “You’re looking at it
in hindsight,” he said. “You know, I have an e-mail address for a guy
who’s invested $400,000 that’s ‘peachfuzz2012.’ ”
Sprecher added that he had, in fact, spoken on the phone to someone

purporting to be Timmons, but said with a sigh of resignation, “I accept
the responsibility. . . . I’m not trying to defend this. I just wasn’t looking
for it.” Forlenza, for her part, says she “fell off the track for February,
March, and April,” the period when the investor correspondence was
running heaviest, because it was tax season, the busiest period on her
calendar.
ADVERTISEMENT
Over the course of the spring and summer, Sprecher and Forlenza gave
Hotton various sums of cash that added up to more than $60,000—not
as payments, they insist, but as advances against his future earnings
from Rebecca. The biggest was an expenditure of $18,000 for an African
safari that Hotton said he had embarked upon with Abrams and his son
in order to sort out the details of the investment. “Am I gonna say, ‘You
shouldn’t play a round of golf with somebody in order to secure an
investment’ ?,” Sprecher asked me.
I replied that a round of golf is one thing, and an $18,000 African safari
is another.
“O.K., so I’m a schmuck!,” Sprecher said. “I’m trusting. I don’t assume

people lie to me.”
And, in fairness, a non-imaginary Australian investor in Rebecca by the

name of Ben Smith—a real-estate developer whose three-man group
currently has the biggest stake in the show, at just under $2 million—
told me that Hotton did a plausible job representing himself as a well-
connected man of the world. “I actually spoke to Mark on a telephone
hookup for a producer conference, and he was remarkably convincing in
his presentation, well rehearsed in his responses,” Smith said. “He
mentioned two or three prominent businesspeople he knew in Australia.
It made me a little suspicious. One of them was deceased, and I said, ‘He
passed away.’ But Mark said, ‘I understand—I deal with his family now.’
He rolled with it well.”
s the summer of 2012 began, Sprecher was confident that
A Rebecca was well on its way to an autumn opening. The

delivery of the Abrams group’s investment, however, soon
turned into a problem. Rehearsals were scheduled to begin
on September 10, and yet, as of July, the Abrams group was
the only one not to have made good on its release of funds. Sprecher e-
mailed Hotton with increasing urgency. Then, late in July and early in
August, Sprecher and Forlenza received a series of e-mails from Hotton
forwarding them messages from Abrams’s assistants—one named
Allison Montgomery, the other Jessica (no last name). These messages
explained that Abrams had fallen ill during a long trip that had taken
him from Africa to Monaco to his home in London. Specifically, Abrams
had been “infected with Malaria and is in ICU for a artemisinin-based
combination therapy.”
Jessica’s August 1 update was reassuring. Abrams, she wrote to Hotton,

was “holding his own, still in ICU but OK.” But on Sunday, August 5,
Hotton forwarded to the Rebecca producers a note he had received from
Jessica that informed him, “I’m sorry to relay such Terrible news, Mr.
Abrams passed away this evening and the family has asked for your
attendance at the services.” Hotton assured Sprecher and Forlenza that
he would travel to London right away to sort out the financial
implications.
Sprecher was beside himself. He spent the next few weeks pestering
Hotton and a man purporting to be the executor of Abrams’s estate, a
Mr. Wexler (no first name), about getting the Abrams group to make
good on its $4.5 million investment. These efforts proved fruitless. By
the beginning of September, it was evident to Sprecher that there was no
choice but to delay the production. On September 6, he and Forlenza
summoned the show’s publicist, Marc Thibodeau, to an emergency
meeting at Forlenza’s apartment, on the Upper East Side, in which they
asked Thibodeau to draft a press release announcing *Rebecca’*s
postponement.
ADVERTISEMENT
On September 8, a Saturday, the press release went out. That very

afternoon, Patrick Healy, the New York Times theater correspondent,
posted an item on the paper’s ArtsBeat blog in which he related the
producers’ story about the death of the investor, whose name they would
not divulge. Two days later, a fuller, updated version of Healy’s story ran
in print.
Curiouser and Curiouser
ealy’s dire article had an unexpected, providential effect.
H A day after its appearance in the paper, Sprecher received

an unsolicited e-mail from a stranger named Larry
Runsdorf. “I read about your production in the New York
Times and that one of your investors has passed away,”
Runsdorf wrote. “Perhaps I can become an investor and at least partially
defray your shortfall.”
Sprecher suspected the note might be a prank, but he replied to it

immediately, offering his phone number. Forty-five minutes later,
Runsdorf called Sprecher, and Sprecher found himself bolting across
town to Runsdorf’s office on East 42nd Street, to meet his potential
savior. “He’s a nice guy, dressed in jeans, very affable,” Sprecher said.
“He has my Web site up on his computer as I walk in.” The
septuagenerian Runsdorf explained that he ran a company based in
Florida called Breckenridge Pharmaceutical. Sprecher launched into his
Rebecca sales pitch, concluding with the words “Sir, I don’t really know
what world I’m in here. Are you a $50,000 player? Are you a million-
dollar player?”
After some back-and-forth, Sprecher asked Runsdorf point-blank if he

could “replace the dead guy,” Abrams, with an investment in the $2
million range. Runsdorf said yes, and they shook hands.
It had seemed almost too easy. Sprecher called his entertainment

lawyer, Scott Lazarus, to explain what had just happened, and Lazarus
told his client not to count on this scenario panning out. Yet Lazarus
soon heard from two attorneys representing Runsdorf: Jonathan A.
Lonner, a New York entertainment lawyer well known in the theater
business, and Lawrence D. Levien, a partner at the Washington, D.C.-
based powerhouse firm Akin Gump. Runsdorf ultimately committed to
an investment of $2.25 million, with an important condition: he wanted
anonymity.
On September 21, Sprecher went public with the good news that
Rebecca was once again on track. Between the pending Runsdorf
investment, a bridge loan Hotton was supposedly lining up (using
properties owned by him, Sprecher, and Forlenza as collateral), and a
pass-the-basket solicitation of further funds from his existing investors,
the producer believed he would have adequate capitalization to get

things rolling.
ADVERTISEMENT
Meanwhile, Healy continued to investigate the dead-investor story,

placing several calls to Sprecher, Thibodeau, and others involved in the
show. (Healy declined to comment for this story, noting that Rebecca is
an ongoing beat for him.) The reporter independently confirmed the
identity of the purported dead man as Paul Abrams and started looking
into his background. He found nothing: no business Web site, no
biographical information, no obituaries.
On Tuesday, September 25, the Times published a front-page article by

Healy headlined “REBECCA” SEES INVESTOR FADE, AS IF DREAMT.
The article, slightly bemused in tone, detailed Healy’s findings, or lack
thereof, about the elusive Mr. Abrams. Healy had gotten hold of
Wexler’s e-mail address, but, when contacted, Wexler refused to offer
the Times any comment. The address, Healy reported, had been created
only the previous month—curiouser and curiouser.
Sprecher told me that, at the time of Healy’s page-one article, he, too,
had come to suspect that something fishy was afoot with Paul Abrams,
but nothing, he insisted, that made him suspicious of the man who had
brought Abrams his way, Mark Hotton. What he had on his hands, he
thought, was a breach-of-contract situation, and he and Forlenza
planned on filing suit against the Abrams estate and Messrs. Thomas,
Spencer, and Timmons—but only after Rebecca was up and running. “It
was a problem for another day,” he said. “Our immediate focus was
making sure that we were set for rehearsal on October 1.”
So, as much of a public-relations black eye as Healy’s article appeared to

be, Sprecher didn’t really care—not as long as the Runsdorf investment,
the linchpin of *Rebecca’*s revival, was moving forward.
Wednesday, September 26, marked the moment that the saga of

Rebecca went from farcical to surreal. For one thing, it was the day that
two F.B.I. agents presented themselves at Sprecher’s office door, asking
him, politely but firmly, for all of his documentation pertaining to Paul
Abrams. Sprecher called up a family friend, Ronald G. Russo, a criminal-
defense attorney, for advice. Russo told me that it was clear to him that
day, based on what Sprecher recounted, “that they’re suspecting him of

criminal conduct”—that the F.B.I. investigators had reason to believe
that Sprecher was himself complicit in the invention of Abrams and the
perpetration of some kind of fraud.
Sprecher met with Russo and handed over all the subscription
agreements from the Abrams group. Russo studied them and came away
convinced that Sprecher was innocent of having fabricated the investors,
though he noted that these investors’ common denominator was the
middleman: Hotton. Now confident that Sprecher had nothing to hide,
Russo placed some calls, kept the F.B.I. agents at bay, and arranged for
the producer to meet with representatives of the bureau and the U.S.
Attorney’s Office on Saturday, September 29.
Meanwhile, things were looking good on the Runsdorf front—sort of.

Thursday, the day after the F.B.I. agents’ appearance, *Rebecca’*s
lawyer, Lazarus, informed Sprecher and Forlenza that Runsdorf’s
lawyers had received their client’s signed, executed subscription
agreement. However, a small wrinkle had developed. On Tuesday
afternoon, the producers learned, Runsdorf’s New York attorney,
Lonner, had received an e-mail from a “Bethany Walsh,” from a Gmail
address, that alluded to Healy’s page-one article. It read: “it is very very
important that u read page one of todays newyork times if you havent
already as there is serious possibility of fraud of grave concern.”
The following day, Levien, Runsdorf’s Washington attorney, received his

own “Bethany Walsh” e-mail, albeit from a different Gmail address. This
one simply attached a New York Post article by Michael Riedel,
published that day, which followed up on Healy’s piece and cast doubt
on Sprecher’s claim to have replaced the lost Abrams money, caustically
suggesting that Sprecher’s new investors were the Tooth Fairy and the
Easter Bunny.
Fortunately for Sprecher and Forlenza, Bethany Walsh, whoever she

was, proved not to be a deal breaker. It was alarming, to be sure, that
someone had the inside information to target the attorneys of a man
who had predicated his participation on anonymity. But Runsdorf’s
lawyers merely requested that, as one last step, the subscription papers
be re-drafted in the name of a business entity rather than in Runsdorf’s
name.
*Rebecca’*s producers raised no objection. By that point, they had

already instructed the cast to report the following Monday to the New
42nd Street Studios, a mid-Manhattan rehearsal facility. Despite all the

delays, despite all the snags, despite Sprecher’s looming sit-down with
the F.B.I., it was full steam ahead.
The Friday before rehearsals were to begin, September 28, was a day of
palpable excitement for *Rebecca’*s cast. Led by Jill Paice (the new Mrs.
de Winter), Ryan Silverman (Maxim de Winter), Karen Mason (de
Winter’s deranged housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers), and James Barbour
(Rebecca’s sinister cousin), the group had forged an unusual closeness
through the postponements and setbacks. “We were all sending out e-
mails: ‘Can’t wait to actually start this!’ ” said Mason. An actress and
singer warmly regarded in the theater and cabaret worlds, Mason is one
of those troupers who have put in years as an understudy or
replacement and was finally slated to get her big chance in a chewy,
showy, pipes-showcasing, unabashedly Tony-baiting role. “I thought,
I’m gonna go out and buy my first-day-of-rehearsal outfit! I splurged
and got a really beautiful pair of pants,” she told me, pausing for
dramatic effect. “Good thing they were returnable.”
Enter Ms. Finkelstein
hat Friday began hopefully, if hectically, for Sprecher and
T Forlenza. The only item they needed to complete the

underwriting of the bridge loan seemed to be a copy of the
title on a property that Hotton supposedly owned in
southern New Jersey: one piece of paper. “I said, ‘Louise,
we cannot rely on anybody else, no lawyers, no nothing, to get this
paper,’ ” Sprecher recalled. So, in the pouring rain, the two of them, in
Sprecher’s black 2003 Ford Expedition, set out for the New Jersey town
where the title was allegedly filed.
They got as far as Newark when, shortly before one P.M., Forlenza
received an e-mail from their production’s lawyer, Lazarus, with
Sprecher also on the recipient list. Attached to Lazarus’s message was an
e-mail that had been sent directly to Larry Runsdorf himself at 7:21 that
morning. It was from a “Sarah Finkelstein,” again using a Gmail
account, and it didn’t mince words. Forlenza read it aloud to Sprecher:
The walls are about to cave in on Mr Sprecher and the Rebecca

Broadwayproduction. It is a near certainty that the man Paul Abrams was
made up several months ago to defraud other investors as a placeholder to
give them a sense of security as well as the owners of the theater the
Shuberts while Mr Sprecher continued to try and raise money. When that
money wasn’t raised by August Mr Sprecher or someone associated with
him came up with the story that Paul Abrams had died. Mr Sprecher hasnt
been able to come up with any information to prove that Paul Abrams was a
real person. In fact any information he has provided has proven to be

extremely suspicious. It is inevitable that the truth will come out in a matter
of days or weeks that the Paul Abrams story was definitively made up and at
that point there will be charges of fraud, lawsuits etc.
The e-mail went on a bit more, concluding with a warning from

Finkelstein that the only reason to invest in Rebecca would be for a tax
write-off or to get caught up in a fraud trial.
Such was Sprecher’s sudden state of tearful agitation that Forlenza told
him to pull over into the parking lot of a nearby McDonald’s. While
sitting there, the two producers got word from Lazarus that Runsdorf
was withdrawing as an investor. (Neither Runsdorf nor his lawyers
responded to requests for comment. Lazarus also declined to comment.)
Sprecher stepped out of the car, into the rain, sobbing uncontrollably.
“He was crying and crying and crying,” Forlenza said. “He was very
upset. And I certainly didn’t want anything to physically happen to him.
And I got his wife on the phone, and, somehow or other, we kind of
brought him back to reality a bit.” They turned the car around and drove
back to Manhattan, where Sprecher commiserated with his wife and
with Russo, his legal adviser.
On top of everything else that Sprecher had to worry about, there was
the appointment with the F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney’s Office the
following day. Russo decided that, before the meeting took place, he
wanted to check out this Mark Hotton character face-to-face. At Russo’s
urging, Sprecher placed a call to Hotton and put Russo on the phone.
Russo asked Hotton if the three of them could meet the next morning.
Hotton agreed, naming a diner out on Long Island as the rendezvous
spot.
That evening, Russo arranged for a fourth man to attend the breakfast:
Thomas Kelly of the private-investigation firm Stroz Friedberg, whom
he would introduce to Hotton simply as “my colleague.” In the diner,
Russo quizzed Hotton about Abrams. Hotton confidently related tales of
the high life he had enjoyed with the now sadly departed malaria victim:
in Abrams’s Learjet, at the Savoy hotel in London, at the restaurant
Nobu. After Hotton left the diner, Kelly told the remaining two men that
he did not find the middleman credible. Sprecher swears that this was
the first time he had any notion that Hotton might be a crook.
precher and Russo proceeded straight from the diner to the
S U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York,

in Lower Manhattan. With F.B.I. agents present, Sprecher
spent about three hours answering questions from Sarah E.
McCallum, a federal prosecutor. When he got out of the U.S.
Attorney’s Office, Sprecher was told by Russo that he should never again
speak to Mark Hotton.
Checking his phone after his grilling by the feds, Sprecher was shocked
to find an agonized e-mail message from Thibodeau, the publicist,
tendering his resignation. “When you and Louise told me the entire
Abrams story three weeks ago,” Thibodeau wrote, alluding to Abrams’s
alleged death and the shortfall it created, “I completely believed you,
and felt nothing but compassion and a desire to help in every way I
could. But since then I have felt nothing but stress, and as the days have
gone by, the amount of questions have just grown, and the plausibility of
the story has evaporated.”
Thibodeau went on to describe how he’d tried in the intervening weeks

to raise red flags about Abrams and Hotton, but “you immediately said
you didn’t want to talk about it, and changed the subject.” He concluded
the note by telling Sprecher, “You’ve been nothing but a good guy to me,
and I know what an incredibly difficult time this is and has been for you.
And I really hope it somehow can still work out, but for my own well-
being, I just can’t be part of this anymore.”
By this time, a decision had already been made to convene the

producers, the creative team, and three senior members of the cast—
Mason, Barbour, and Nick Wyman, a veteran character actor who also
happens to be the president of the Actors’ Equity union—in Sprecher’s
office on Sunday afternoon, where everyone would get the bad news:
once again, Rebecca would not be going into rehearsal. Sprecher felt he
needed Thibodeau more than ever to help manage the crisis. He called
the publicist and pleaded with him to stay on for one more day, just long
enough to send out a press release explaining that Rebecca had once
again encountered a crippling shortfall, this time on account of a vicious
e-mail that scared off the show’s new angel investor. Reluctantly,
Thibodeau agreed to see the process through.
The Sunday-afternoon meeting unfolded funereally. “Ben read the

anonymous e-mail aloud, but he couldn’t continue—he got choked up, so
he had his lawyer, Russo, continue,” recalled Wyman. As the meeting
concluded, Thibodeau, who was not present, fulfilled his final obligation
to Rebecca before being allowed to walk: clicking “Send” on the latest

Rebecca-postponement release.
wo weeks later, Mark Hotton was perp-walked out of his
T waterfront house in West Islip, New York, by federal agents

—and they weren’t even arresting him for the Rebecca
fraud. The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New
York, which covers Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and
Staten Island, had Hotton hauled in, along with his wife and three co-
conspirators, for an alleged $3.7 million wire-fraud and money-
laundering scheme.
On the same day, though, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District,
which covers Manhattan, unsealed a complaint charging Hotton with a
scheme to defraud the producers of Rebecca, the Musical. The
complaint offered concrete proof of what many had suspected: that Paul
Abrams was a Hotton invention, and that the e-mail addresses and Web
sites associated with Abrams, Wexler, Jessica, et al. had all been created
by Hotton. (Hotton has pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against
him, both in the Eastern and Southern Districts. His alleged co-
conspirators have also pleaded not guilty.)
Left unexplained in the complaint, and still a source of puzzlement, is

what Hotton’s long game was. Given that he is alleged to have fleeced
other victims of six- and seven-figure sums, the $60,000 in cash he
extracted from Rebecca is nothing; presumably, there was a Part Two to
his Abrams scheme. For now, though, we can’t find out; Hotton is
incarcerated without bail, and Ira London, the attorney defending him
in the Southern District, would not comment on his case.
Sprecher and Forlenza wasted little time in filing a $100 million suit
against Hotton and his wife, but what troubled them more was the
mystery of who had chased off their angel investor, Larry Runsdorf. Was
Hotton somehow in on that too?
By naming in their complaint not only the Hottons but also the
“John/Jane Does” who sent the pseudonymous e-mails to Team
Runsdorf, the Rebecca partners’ lawyers obtained subpoena authority to
trace the messages. In November, Google informed Russo’s law firm
that the two “Bethany Walsh” Gmail accounts had been created on
September 25, and that the “Sarah Finkelstein” account had been
created on September 28. All three accounts had an I.P. (Internet
protocol) address in common, traceable to Jersey City, New Jersey. It
took until December 12 for Verizon, the Internet-service provider for the
client using this I.P. address, to cough up a customer name: Marc

Thibodeau.
Sprecher’s lawyers immediately forwarded the Verizon document to

their client. When he clicked it open, he stood up in shock, walked over
to a diagonally sloping wall in his office, and leaned his head on it,
sobbing anew. He had never suspected.
Acting Alone
arc Thibodeau lives in a neighborhood of glassy towers
M in Jersey City. He is a tall, athletically built man, 52

years old but younger looking, as sleekly attractive as
Sprecher is exhaustedly schlubby. His apartment affords
beautiful panoramic views across the Hudson to
Manhattan. Though his firm, the Publicity Office, keeps offices in 1650
Broadway, Thibodeau often works at home, on a laptop, from this quiet
perch above the river.
Thibodeau is widely regarded as a benign, low-key industry figure,

known for representing such long-running warhorses as The Phantom of
the Opera and Chicago. “As a publicist, I would say I’m atypical,” he told
me when I visited him at his home. “I can’t stand any attention or focus
on me.” Which is why he is mortified to be involved in the Rebecca
mess, even if unapologetic about his actions. Yes, he did it—he sent the
e-mails. But, he made plain, he felt he had a moral obligation to do so.
It was on September 6, the day he was summoned to the meeting at

Forlenza’s apartment, that Thibodeau learned of the Abrams situation
and heard Hotton’s name for the first time. He sensed that the
announcement of yet another Rebecca postponement would get a lot of
negative play in the press, and, he told me, he urged Sprecher and
Forlenza to be as open as possible. He subsequently drafted a press
release announcing the death of Paul Abrams, and, hence, the
postponement of Rebecca. He also asked the producers for biographical
information about Abrams. At this, he said, “they immediately called me
and said, ‘You gotta take his name out of the press release,’ and ‘We have
to protect our investors’ privacy.’ ” The release went out on September 8
without Abrams’s name.
In the two weeks that followed, Thibodeau said, Healy, the Times
reporter, was “digging and digging and digging” on the dead-investor
story, trying to ID the stiff and putting lots of pressure on the publicist
to give up the name. Thibodeau refused, he said, but warned Sprecher
and Forlenza that the Times was on the case.
In the two days preceding Healy’s front-page September 25 story,

Thibodeau did some reporting of his own. He performed a Google
search with the keywords “Mark Hotton” and “Long Island” and found
stories about frauds that Hotton was alleged to have perpetrated. He
scrutinized the Abrams subscription agreement and discovered that
Hawthorn was misspelled as “Hawthorne,” that the street address listed
was nonexistent, and that the telephone number listed was nonworking.
“I am not doing a thing with this other than telling you,” Thibodeau
wrote to Sprecher in an e-mail on September 23, referring to what he’d
found out about Hotton. “Ive never mentioned the name to Healy and
wont.” Thibodeau said Sprecher’s reaction was essentially to tell him
that he should leave the matter alone, that “people like Mark, who deal
with wealthy people, there are all these things out there about them all
the time.”
The following day, Thibodeau drafted an e-mail to Sprecher laying out

the discrepancies between the information in Abrams’s subscription
papers and the reality on the ground, concluding, “Everything I’ve
seen/found out the past few days makes me increasingly more
convinced you’ve been scammed somehow.” Before he could send the e-
mail, Sprecher called him, so Thibodeau aired his concerns verbally.
“And all Ben says to me,” he said, “is ‘Marc, you know what? We’re not
gonna talk about this anymore. The only thing I want to talk about is our
strategy for announcing we’re going back into rehearsals.’ ”
ealy’s big article ran in the following morning’s paper.
H Thibodeau was at that point convinced that Abrams was

fictitious and that Hotton had something to do with
whatever was going on. Thibodeau was also queasily
unsure if Sprecher, the man he was working for, was
merely an innocent bystander. Based on the way Sprecher had brushed
off his concerns about fraud, Thibodeau said, “I started to think, Maybe
he is aware of it. That’s when I lost faith in him.”
For Thibodeau, his discoveries about Abrams and Hotton created

another ethical quandary: about himself. Larry Runsdorf, he realized,
had come forward with his $2.25 million after reading a Patrick Healy
story that was triggered by a press release that he, Thibodeau, had
issued—the September 8 one that stated that Rebecca had been
postponed because of the death of an investor. “I actually take a lot of
pride in the releases I send out always being truthful,” he said. “I had
come to realize that the press release that went out from me and my
office, that pulled [Runsdorf] in, completely perpetuated this whole
fictional fraud.”
Thibodeau felt tormented by the notion that he had become an

unwitting accomplice in the potential fleecing of Runsdorf. He felt
compelled to take action. Privy to *Rebecca’*s investor information, he
located the e-mail addresses of Runsdorf’s attorneys and sent each of
them a message that, he explained to me, “was saying, You know, there’s
a serious possibility of fraud here.” Thibodeau doesn’t know exactly how
he arrived at the name Bethany Walsh—“My mother’s maiden name is
Walsh, and maybe I had seen Bethenny Frankel on the Today show that
morning”—but he thought he had covered his tracks by sending the e-
mail to Levien from a pay-as-you-use computer in a coffee shop and the
e-mail to Lonner from a similar computer in a FedEx Kinko’s.
“I’m not completely stupid, and I know that e-mails can be traced. But I
always thought it was where the e-mail was sent from,” he said. “It’s
actually everything: where the Google account was created, where the
account might have been checked,” and so on. In any event, to
Thibodeau’s frustration, Bethany did not receive a response. “If either
one of them had said, ‘Thank you for sending this to us—we will look
into it,’ it would have made me go, ‘O.K., I’ve done what I feel should
have been done and it’s in their hands now,’ ” he said.
And so, with the days to rehearsal counting down—“and each day Ben
had been saying that the final piece of money would come in that day,
and then the day would go by with that money not coming in”—
Thibodeau grew increasingly agitated. Early the morning of Friday the
28th, unable to sleep, he located Runsdorf’s work e-mail address online,
taking care not to use the personal address in the Rebecca files, and
composed the Sarah Finkelstein e-mail.
I asked Thibodeau a question that many people, including Sprecher,

Russo, and members of the Rebecca cast, have asked rhetorically: Why
didn’t he just quit? Why, if he thought that Sprecher was, at best, a
blinkered scam victim, or, at worst, a scammer, didn’t Thibodeau just
hightail it out of *Rebecca-*land without sending any e-mails, thereby
extricating himself from the production and sparing himself future
entanglement in a protracted legal brouhaha?
“Why didn’t I just wash my hands of it all and say, ‘You know, not my
problem’?” he asked back. “I just felt it was not right, you know?”
Thibodeau, though he had never met Runsdorf, felt that the man
deserved a fuller picture of what was going on in Rebecca than had been
provided to him. “My intent was really, truly, just to make sure this man
had the information, the truth,” Thibodeau said. “And then he could do
whatever the heck he wanted with it.”
Thibodeau had contemplated resigning the day before he became Sarah

Finkelstein, drafting an e-mail of resignation on September 27 not
unlike the one he finally sent to Sprecher on September 29. He opted
not to send the Thursday one because, with all the coverage Rebecca was
getting, with all the phone calls he was fielding from Patrick Healy, there
was no way to resign quietly, and “the last thing in the world you want to
do as a publicist is become the story”—an indication of just how
muddled his state of mind was.
It got even worse for Thibodeau when he did resign. Sprecher begged
him to stay on just long enough to handle the press release announcing
the delay of Rebecca, the Musical due to an “extremely malicious e-mail,
filled with lies and innuendo.” So insistent was the emotional Sprecher,
pleading, “I need you to do one last thing for me, then you never have to
talk to me again,” that Thibodeau gave in, on the condition that the
release not be issued on his company’s letterhead. Sprecher and
Forlenza provided a list of people to whom the statement was to be sent,
and, on the evening of Sunday, September 30, from Jersey City,
Thibodeau, the very e-mailer deemed “extremely malicious” in the
statement, sent out the release.
“It was the most bizarre moment in my life,” he said. “It was horrifying.”
Although Thibodeau has not been charged with a crime, he hired a

criminal-defense attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, almost immediately after
resigning from Rebecca. He did this, he said, because Sprecher, not yet
wise to the identity of the mystery e-mailer, told him, “This is a vicious
crime, and we’ve gone to the F.B.I. about this person, and we’ll get him.”
Lichtman, in a telephone interview, told me that he views his client as

someone who blew the whistle on an illicit operation, and that Sprecher
was “either directly involved in a fraud or it was conscious avoidance,
which is the same thing legally.” The U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission, he noted, has launched its own investigation of Rebecca,
specifically looking into how Sprecher represented the show to
Runsdorf. (Sprecher described Lichtman’s comments to me as an “out-
and-out misrepresentation of the facts.” Of the S.E.C., he said, “We are
an open book and have welcomed their investigation.”)
The weeks and months that followed *Rebecca’*s late-September

collapse were harrowing for Thibodeau. “I was just in complete, utter
fear,” he said. “I expected a knock on the door all the time. I was scared
to go to the office. There was one day I rode around Liberty State Park
on my bike for six straight hours, just in circles.”
So it was, perversely, something of a relief to Thibodeau when, finally,

on January 29 of this year, he was served with Sprecher and Forlenza’s
lawsuit. The suit contained a surprise. Sprecher and Forlenza’s civil
complaint not only names Thibodeau but also extends to “Defendants
John/Jane Does 1–3,” described as “an unknown individual or
individuals who induced Thibodeau” to send the three e-mails. These
mystery defendants “are individuals having an interest in seeing
Plaintiffs’ efforts to produce Rebecca fail and Plaintiffs’ rights in and to
Rebecca lapse.”
n other words, the producers and their lawyers are allowing for
I the possibility that there are larger forces at work, and that
Thibodeau has been rewarded for doing someone else’s bidding.
Some rumors have been floated: Thibodeau represents Phantom
of the Opera; Andrew Lloyd Webber sure would like to make the
“next Phantom” go away, now, wouldn’t he? Wait, Thibodeau has for
years worked with the producer Cameron Mackintosh—and wouldn’t he
like to get his hands on the Rebecca rights! Thibodeau is exasperated by
the paper existence of Defendants John/Jane Does 1–3. “I am saying,
unequivocally, that I acted alone,” he told me. “That has been the most
terrible part of this, that they’ve put that out there—to the industry, to
the press, to the public. Because anyone can judge if I should have gone
ahead and sent the e-mails. They can judge if I should have quit first.
But this notion of conspiracy has upset me. There’s not a shred of truth
to that.”
What upsets Sprecher is that Thibodeau drew legal conclusions before

any law-enforcement authorities did, and acted upon them in a
surreptitious rather than aboveboard way. “He’s the judge, now he’s the
jury—and then he says ‘Guilty!,’ ” Sprecher said. He is adamant that he
didn’t dismiss Thibodeau’s concerns about Abrams and Hotton, but,
rather, was in tunnel-vision mode, preoccupied with rounding up the
final financing and moving forward. Given the pending influx of
Runsdorf’s funds, Sprecher said, “we had already solved the problem
with the Hotton investors.”
And if Thibodeau had really been so morally conflicted about what he’d
learned, Sprecher said, he should have either notified law enforcement
or worked harder to get Sprecher’s attention. “Why didn’t he call the
police?” he said. “Why didn’t he call the F.B.I.? He stayed with me! He
gave me the impression that I had an ally. Let’s assume I’m completely
wrong: I’m daft. I fucked this up big-time. I’m a schmuck! Why didn’t he
come over, like my friend, and go, ‘Asshole, what’s wrong with you?’
Maybe he had to come in here and slap me around a couple of times.
Why did he have to crash the show?”
The Show Must Go On
s of this writing, the suit against Thibodeau and Hotton
A remains unresolved. The Broadhurst Theatre has been

given over to Lucky Guy, starring Tom Hanks. The sets for
Rebecca sit, fully built, in a storage facility. Sprecher still
holds the English-language rights to the musical through
the end of this calendar year, and he insists that he’s making progress
toward an autumn premiere. In mid-March, he presided over a backers’
audition at the New Jersey home of a wealthy lawyer couple, Barbara
and Phillip Sellinger, in which his four leads, Paice, Silverman, Mason,
and Barbour, performed a medley of Rebecca songs before more than
100 living, breathing affluent people—a percentage of whom, he is in the
process of finding out, just might bring the show to its optimal
capitalization. Given the delays and cost overruns, Rebecca has gone
from being a $12 million musical to a $16 million musical. “I can do it
for 14, but I’d like to have the 16,” Sprecher said.
Though he has his doubters and belittlers, Sprecher retains the support
and sympathy of his creative team and cast. Nick Wyman, who, it bears
mentioning again, is the president of the actors’ union, told me he would
still gladly drop everything, including the play he was doing up in
Albany when I talked to him, if Sprecher announced, for the fourth time,
that Rebecca is going into rehearsals. He trusts Sprecher more than he
trusts Thibodeau.
“Marc’s defense that he’s a whistle-blower, saying he wanted to protect

this person from throwing good money after bad—that smells to me
more than Mark Hotton!,” Wyman said. “What is the basis of my
industry if not throwing good money after bad? That’s the story of
investing in Broadway!”
SHARE ! " #
David Kamp has been a Vanity Fair contributing editor since 1996, profiling such
monumental figures of the arts as Johnny Cash, Lucian Freud, Sly Stone, and John
Hughes.
YOU MIGHT LIKE
Photos: Farrah Fawcett's Now You Can Experience The Best Vanity Fair Stories of Why Women Aren't Funny Inside Come from Away, a Laurel Canyon, Home of the
Swimsuit Shoot Game of Thrones the Way 2018 Vanity Fair Musical About Airline Sixties and Seventies
Vanity Fair George R.R. Martin Intended Vanity Fair Passengers Stranded After 9/11 California Music Scene
Vanity Fair Vanity Fair Vanity Fair
DAY
JOIN TO
BECOME A V.F. INSIDER

Get unlimited access.
Subscribe today and get a free, wraparound
Vanity Fair logo tote.
Subscribe
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP FOLLOW VF
SUBSCRIBE " # $ % &
VANITY FAIR WORLDWIDE: VISIT OUR SISTER SITES CONTACT VF
UNITED KINGDOM CONDÉ NAST STORE NEWSLETTER
ITALY REPRINT/PERMISSIONS SUBSCRIBE
MEXICO VF MEDIA KIT CUSTOMER SERVICE
SPAIN PROMOTIONS ADVERTISING
FRANCE INSIDE THE ISSUE
CAREERS
DIGITAL EDITION
SITEMAP
ACCESSIBILITY HELP
© 2019 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement
(updated 5/28/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/28/18). Your CA Privacy Rights. The material on this site may not
be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.
AD CHOICES

Betrayal, Cons, and A Faked Death: Investigating How Rebecca The Musical Fell Apart - Vanity Fair

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Betrayal, Cons, and A Faked Death: Investigating How Rebecca The Musical Fell Apart - Vanity Fair

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Betrayal, Cons, and a Faked Death: Investigating How Rebecca the Musical Fell Apart | Vanity Fair 4/18/19,

The Road to Manderley

t should have all been happening by now. Had everything gone

I according to Ben Sprecher’s plan, Rebecca, the Musical would

Subscribe to Vanity Fair and get an exclusive tote. Join Today

It was a slam dunk: a proven property built, as the PowerPoint

Watch Now: How Steve Bannon

In the mainstream media.

But something strange happened on the road to Manderley. Many

“Oh, My God—That’s It!”

precher Entertainment occupies a building on West 52nd

S Street that abuts the August Wilson Theatre, where the

He gets so emotional, he told me, because he has staked his reputation,

Ben Sprecher (the name is pronounced Spreck-er) grew up in Southern

The Rebecca that Sprecher wants to bring to Broadway is actually an

Sprecher flew to Vienna three weeks later and needed no further

In 2008 he and Forlenza secured the English-language rights to Rebecca

Stuttgart. Furthermore, Sprecher hasFawcett's

ith all these factors in its favor, why would Rebecca

W have trouble raising money? Sprecher and Forlenza

The other widespread theater-world theory is that Rebecca is a

Nevertheless, as of early last year, *Rebecca’*s capitalization was stuck

t was Forlenza who served as Hotton’s point of entry. A certified

I public accountant from a working-class Bronx family, Forlenza,

LAST FREE ARTICLE

LAST FREE ARTICLE

YOU'VE READ HALF

According to the federal complaint, Hotton’s investors were led by one

Sprecher added that he had, in fact, spoken on the phone to someone

“O.K., so I’m a schmuck!,” Sprecher said. “I’m trusting. I don’t assume

And, in fairness, a non-imaginary Australian investor in Rebecca by the

s the summer of 2012 began, Sprecher was confident that

A Rebecca was well on its way to an autumn opening. The

Jessica’s August 1 update was reassuring. Abrams, she wrote to Hotton,

On September 8, a Saturday, the press release went out. That very

Curiouser and Curiouser

ealy’s dire article had an unexpected, providential effect.

H A day after its appearance in the paper, Sprecher received

Sprecher suspected the note might be a prank, but he replied to it

After some back-and-forth, Sprecher asked Runsdorf point-blank if he

It had seemed almost too easy. Sprecher called his entertainment

the producer believed he would have adequate capitalization to get

Meanwhile, Healy continued to investigate the dead-investor story,

On Tuesday, September 25, the Times published a front-page article by

So, as much of a public-relations black eye as Healy’s article appeared to

Wednesday, September 26, marked the moment that the saga of

day, based on what Sprecher recounted, “that they’re suspecting him of

Meanwhile, things were looking good on the Runsdorf front—sort of.

The following day, Levien, Runsdorf’s Washington attorney, received his

Fortunately for Sprecher and Forlenza, Bethany Walsh, whoever she

*Rebecca’*s producers raised no objection. By that point, they had

42nd Street Studios, a mid-Manhattan rehearsal facility. Despite all the

Enter Ms. Finkelstein

hat Friday began hopefully, if hectically, for Sprecher and

T Forlenza. The only item they needed to complete the

The walls are about to cave in on Mr Sprecher and the Rebecca

real person. In fact any information he has provided has proven to be

The e-mail went on a bit more, concluding with a warning from

precher and Russo proceeded straight from the diner to the

S U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York,

Thibodeau went on to describe how he’d tried in the intervening weeks

By this time, a decision had already been made to convene the

The Sunday-afternoon meeting unfolded funereally. “Ben read the

Nevertheless, as of early last year, Rebecca’s capitalization was stuck

Rebecca’s producers raised no objection. By that point, they had

The weeks and months that followed Rebecca’s late-September