A struggling actor struck it rich in Hollywood—then the F.B.I. showed up.  Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro; Source photographs from Alamy; Getty; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, photograph by Carol M. Highsmith; Shutterstock Onscreen, Zach Horwitz, who went by the stage name Zach Avery, was a terrible actor. One director who worked with him described the process as “dealing with a dead horse.” But, offscreen, Horwitz turned out to be a master performer, hoodwinking his wife, swindling his friends, and pulling off the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of Hollywood. In a mere few years, he fraudulently raised more than six hundred and ninety million dollars, mostly in the name of big entertainment projects that never existed. In a riveting story from this week’s issue, Evan Osnos takes us inside Horwitz’s deceptions, which included faking e-mails from the Starbucks C.E.O. Howard Schultz, convincing someone to impersonate an HBO executive, and managing a mountain of falsified documents. As one of his closest friends tells Osnos, “I don’t know how the fuck he was capable of it.” Further reading: “Financial fraud is the crime of choice for arrivistes, insecure dreamers with a yearning eye for high society,” Ron Chernow writes, in his history of the Ponzi scheme, pegged to the Bernie Madoff scandal. “Desperate to feel rich and important, they tend to be excellent mimics of respectability.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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