| With smuggled cell phones and a handful of accomplices, Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., took money from large bank accounts and bought houses, cars, clothes, and gold.  Illustration by Max Guther Arthur Lee Cofield, Jr., hasn’t stepped foot in the outside world as a free man since he was sixteen years old. But that didn’t stop him from stealing around fifteen million dollars out of the accounts of wealthy depositors while he was locked inside the walls of a maximum-security prison. Charles Bethea tells the twisting story of how Cofield formed a crew called Young and Paid (YAP), recruited accomplices on the outside, and flaunted his gains on social media while cultivating a folk-hero criminal persona known as YAP Lavish. In what was likely his biggest scam, Cofield impersonated a ninety-five-year-old Hollywood producer named Sidney Kimmel, setting up an online account for Kimmel’s holdings with the brokerage firm Charles Schwab and getting eleven million dollars transferred into a fraudulent checking account. Cofield then used that money to buy a stash of gold coins—the vast majority of which remains unaccounted for. We asked Bethea what surprised him most during his reporting. “Although Cofield is clearly a brilliant and ballsy schemer,” Bethea explained, “his successes also really depended on the apparent credulity of major financial institutions (‘Yes, Mr. Kimmel. Yes, sir.’) and the companies that he used to facilitate his precious-metal transfers (‘Let’s give him the V.I.P. treatment! Let’s get him that gold!’). It’s a reminder that, when there’s big money to be made, people will believe just about anything.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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