Things got worse when Tony’s parents divorced, and his brother went to live with their father. “The one person who meant anything to me, my brother, who I took under my wings, was taken from me,” Gignac later testified. He suffered a mental breakdown, and spent time in two psychiatric hospitals and a halfway house as a ward of the state. “But he ran away at age 17,” his attorney wrote. “He was alone on the streets, and felt that his mother had abandoned him.”

Determined to avoid repeating the life of a street kid, Tony set out to remake his entire identity. Convincing an Arab family in Ypsilanti, Michigan, that he was a prince, he warned them that his father’s secret police would pay them a visit if they didn’t take him in. Around the same time he was living with them, he had one of his first run-ins with the law: at age 17, he was caught masquerading as “Prince Adnan Khashoggi,” the notorious Saudi arms dealer, who was then the world’s richest man.

Two months later Gignac turned up in Los Angeles, where he was convicted of using a credit card with the name “Omar Khashoggi” to bilk a limousine company out of $8,650. “He was attracted to Hollywood because of all the glamour and wealth,” recalls Lisa Whitehead, who became his mother’s partner after the divorce. “That’s where he said he met a prince—a real prince.”

Whether or not the prince was real, the story provided Gignac with the perfect pose for what would become a series of elaborate cons. “I had a sexual relationship with certain members of the Saudi royal family since I was 17,” he testified at a 2007 sentencing hearing. “This is one of the most powerful families in the world. They are secretive. There is no information about these people on the Internet.” Because homosexuality is a crime in Saudi Arabia, Gignac seemed to suggest, the prince was forced to support him for the rest of his life—or face the consequences. “You are killed, executed, pushed off a high mountain,” he told the court, “which is what they do to homosexuals.”

The Saudis have denied any connection to Gignac. “He was not a member of the Royal Family nor associated in any way with the Saudi Royal Family,” an assistant to the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia told federal officials in 2003. But to Gignac’s family, it all seemed real. “When he got arrested, he would have the prince’s credit card,” says Whitehead. “Somebody always paid the bills. Maybe they wanted to keep him quiet? We actually worried for his safety.”

The person who seemed to fall for the story most deeply was Gignac himself. As a street kid from Colombia growing up in a lily-white town in Michigan, it had been tough to fit in. His voice was feminine, he wore his hair in a bowl cut, and he struggled with his weight. “He was just a short, fat, talking machine,” says one of his former attorneys. Now, with a kiss from a supposed prince, the boy who felt like a frog was instantly transformed into a prince himself.

Gignac, claiming to have legally changed his name to that of a real Saudi prince, Khalid bin al-Saud, started off with small-time grifting. “Prince of Fraud,” the Los Angeles Times dubbed him in 1991, when he “stiffed the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel for $3,488 in room and food charges during a four-day binge in July. He racked up $7,500 in limousine bills burning up the freeways from Torrance to Malibu on excursions that lasted until dawn. He talked Rodeo Drive shopkeepers out of a set of Louis Vuitton luggage and a rare coin collection, only to leave the hotel in handcuffs despite repeated promises that his father, the prince, would make good on his debts.” Employees of the famed Wilshire Boulevard hotel addressed him as “Your Highness.” He was 21.

The prince’s favorite companion was Foxy, his beloved Chihuahua, whom he draped in diamonds and designer clothes.

A year later, after serving a brief stint in jail, the freshly crowned prince moved into the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. Using an American Express card under the name of “Khalid bin al-Saud,” he bilked the hotel out of an extended stay. After serving 53 days in jail, he fled the city, failing to report to his probation officer. Flying to the idyllic Halekulani Hotel in Honolulu for the Christmas holidays, he conned an unsuspecting couple into writing him a check for $8,500—“for a share in an oil field in Saudi Arabia which didn’t exist,” according to court documents. Convincing another couple, Gilbert and Irene Goetz, that he had “reasons to fear for his life,” he duped them into paying his $20,912.20 resort tab—a scam that, 25 years later, still seems to sting.