A Bangor woman who posed as an heiress to a fictional Irish royal family has been convicted in Northern Ireland of defrauding people out of more than $100,000.
Known as the “Queen of the Con,” Marianne ‘Mair’ Smyth stole the six-figure sum from friends and customers while working as a mortgage adviser between 2008 and 2010, police said.
Smyth also allegedly hired herself out for sex to a dozen men a month on a “sugar daddy” website before blackmailing her callers with threats to tell their wives.
She has posed as a Satanist occultist and an alternative healer called Lucia Belia, describing herself as an Emissary of Satan and a practitioner of Black Magic, according to the Daily Mail.
The 56-year-old Bangor native had dodged justice in Northern Ireland for over 15 years after prosecutors said she stole money from “customers” convinced their cash was being invested in property and high-interest bank accounts.
Smyth was extradited from the U.S. to Northern Ireland last year after being arrested in Bingham, Maine, in February 2024. She had begged American authorities not to extradite her to Northern Ireland, claiming she would be murdered by the IRA.
However, she was flown to the UK last summer and finally convicted at Downpatrick Crown Court last week.
Smyth faces up to ten years for each of the eight charges leveled against her by Northern Irish prosecutors.
Jonathan Walton, a Los Angeles resident and reality television producer, is among the people who have claimed to have been scammed by Smyth over the years.
Walton produced a podcast, “Queen of the Con,” about her.
Between 2013 and 2017, the podcaster said Smyth became one of his closest friends. But over the course of that friendship, Walton said Smyth conned him out of bogus legal fees and for other made-up emergency situations.
Smyth, who has also lived in Madawaska, was born in Bangor in 1969 as Marianne Clark, the middle daughter of Charles and Wilda Clark’s five children.
She graduated from Bangor High School in 1987. She later joined the U.S. Navy, stationed in Florida serving as a corpsman.
She once practiced hypnotherapy and satanic “self-help” services in Kennebunk under the business name Satan’s Eye of the Storm LLC.
Smith’s globetrotting fantasy came to an end last year when she was arrested in Bingham and then sent back to Northern Ireland for trial.
