“Think of a person,” Mr. Rice wrote, “going through difficult times. Perhaps it’s a death in the family, addiction, they could have just been let go from their job, even an illness or physical injury. Each one of those people you are thinking of has the potential to be a future victim of this crime.”

Ms. Delmaro’s case has been the subject of several articles in The New York Times, and is notable for the amount of money involved — Mr. Rice paid a total of $713,975 to her and another fortuneteller he had met before her — as well as the improbability of the psychics’ promises.

Mr. Rice, dissatisfied with visits to the first fortuneteller, who has not been identified or charged, visited Ms. Delmaro’s psychic shop in Times Square in 2013. He was upset that his feelings for a woman named Michelle, whom he had met in a drug-treatment center in Arizona, were unrequited. Ms. Delmaro promised to bring him and Michelle together — with the help of special crystals, a time machine and an 80-mile bridge made of gold.

Later, Mr. Rice discovered Michelle had died, but Ms. Delmaro assured him she could reincarnate the woman’s spirit into another body, going so far as to say a woman Mr. Rice was seeing in California was the new Michelle, Mr. Rice said in an interview last year.

Throughout the ruse, Ms. Delmaro told Mr. Rice her work was putting her in danger and wiping her out financially. In his statement to the court, he said he “believed Ms. Delmaro had sacrificed her business, home, car, was in $100,000 of credit card debt and had been living in a church for the last six months, all to help me.”