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How Allison, a stout redhead from Gibson City, Ill. (pop. 3,600), came to be involved with Frankel is revealing of his bizarre proclivities. She had answered his tele-personal ad and flown from Mission Viejo, Calif., to meet Frankel in Greenwich. What she found when she walked into the $3 million mansion was a halfway house of sorts, a community of women gathered from personal ads and Internet chat rooms, all in the employ of this monied recluse who spent his days hunched over trading terminals in the mansion's digitally locked bedroom-cum-offices.
"Some of the girls were his girlfriends, some of them he had sex with, and some were his ex-girlfriends. But a lot were just friends, like me," says Allison. "It was a fun life, but the women fought all the time. I used to tell him all these people were with him for the money. But then, maybe that's why I was there." Whenever Allison needed money, she filled out a requisition form, usually for about $4,000. "You always got what you asked for," she recalls.
Allison flew off to join Frankel in Rome on June 18. She felt sorry for him, she claims. He had sounded desperate when he called her from his Rome hideout, terrified of being alone, eager to engage in idle chat and already growing nostalgic for the life he had left behind. He had grown wistful, coming to realize that there was no returning to his Greenwich mansion and the financial Xanadu he had created.
Frankel's traveling companions eventually began to fall away, disillusioned with life on the lam, leaving Allison and him at the sparsely furnished Via Asmara apartments. "Marty used to ask me where we should go," Allison says. "He began to realize how small the world really is when everyone is looking for you."
During all this time, Frankel was losing a race to access his ill-gotten fortune before the law could seize his assets. He set up checking accounts in Rome under Allison's name, hoping to transfer funds from another of his Italian accounts. But that $500,000 stash was frozen by the Italian government. A Justice Department warrant mentioned his loot, and that made selling the diamonds too risky.
"He began to get really quiet, kind of introverted," Allison says. "And he would keep asking, 'Do you think they're going to catch me?'" Finally, after an evening meeting with an Italian business partner who Allison says had been aiding him, Frankel came back and announced they were leaving Rome.
At dawn the next morning, June 29, their luggage was loaded into a blue Mercedes, and they headed north, driving 14 hrs. through Tuscany, Milan and the Austrian Alps to Munich. Frankel had hoped an associate there would help him get at his money. After two days, though, Frankel began to sense a trap, and at midnight they checked out of the Astron Hotel.
"We asked the chauffeur, 'Should we go to Amsterdam?'" Allison says. He told them Amsterdam was dangerous. "We told him to drive north. Marty was real quiet most of the way." As the speeding Mercedes passed through the Bavarian night, Frankel asked Cindy if she still believed in God.
Cindy, raised a Roman Catholic, told him she did. Frankel shook his head. "How can you believe?" asked the man who had once established a phony Catholic charitable organization, the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, in the hope of legitimizing his fraudulent operations.