Who tried to steal Graceland from Elvis Presley’s family?
A trail of clues left by Naussany Investments, the fake company that tried to scam Elvis Presley’s family out of Graceland, led to a grandmother in Branson, Missouri.
BRANSON, Mo. — The search for the mysterious company behind a scheme to steal Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate led last week to a small, quiet city near the Ozark Mountains and the gnome-lined porch of a trailer, nestled along one branch of a winding lake.
The path there was just as circuitous, stretching across decades and state lines, traced through internet profiles, criminal backgrounds, family histories, legal records and old memories.
It began with a brazen plot that made international headlines in May: Naussany Investments, a company that did not seem to exist, run by people who did not seem to exist, had filed a claim seeking control of Graceland over what they alleged was an unpaid debt. Naussany Investments said Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’ only child, owed them millions of dollars in unpaid loans when she died a year earlier, and after failing to collect from the estate, the company would force the foreclosure sale of the historic Memphis, Tennessee, mansion as repayment.
Graceland in Memphis, Tenn.GAB Archive / RedfernsThe documents filed to support Naussany Investments’ case were clearly forged, and within days of the foreclosure sale being halted by a judge, the scammers admitted their plot.
After posing as “Kurt Naussany,” “Gregory Naussany” and “Carolyn Williams,” executives for the fictional Naussany Investments company, the scammers wrote to NBC News and other outlets that they were dropping the charade. Emails from a person calling himself Gregory Naussany said he was part of a ring of Nigerian identity thieves and boasted that even with the Graceland failure they would keep preying on people without fear of capture. “We sit back and laugh at you idiots and watch you make fools of yourselves,” read the email, written in clunky Spanish. “Come find us in Nigeria.”
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