A former assistant to a Goldman Sachs executive has plunged from a hotel balcony in an apparent suicide before he was due to plead guilty to pilfering his boss’s wine cellar and selling rare bottles worth more than $1.2 million.

Nicolas DeMeyer, 41, former personal assistant to David Solomon, now chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs, jumped from his room on the 33rd floor of the Carlyle Hotel at Madison Avenue, New York, at about 2.30 pm on Tuesday.

Hotel security staff were forced to knock out the door to his room after being alerted by his sister that the man was contemplating taking his own life, The New York Post reported. The guards found smiling DeMeyer sitting on a windowsill completely naked. It was only moments before he jumped.

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DeMeyer repeatedly told his family and even the victims of his alleged heist, the Solomons, that he could not bear a life in prison. He was facing 10 years behind bars before he agreed to a plea deal.

One of the last words he ever spoke was “I can’t go to jail” to his sister, The Daily Beast reported, citing police.

On Tuesday, DeMeyer was expected to show up at a Manhattan court to plead guilty to stealing over 500 bottles of wine from Solomon’s cellar and selling them online. DeMeyer was tracked down by one of the end customers of his wine-selling scheme, a Napa Valley wine dealer, who suspected that seven bottles of a rare wine he purchased had been stolen.

The wine, that betrayed DeMeyer, who was reportedly emptying Solomon’s wine cellar for years, cost a whopping $133,650 per bottle.

Solomon, tipped off by the dealer, hired a detective to trace back the stolen bottles, prompting DeMeyer to confess to his crime in November 2016. At the time, DeMeyer told the Solomons that he only had stolen the seven bottles and vowed to reimburse the damage.

As a personal assistant, DeMeyer was in charge of transferring wine bottles purchased by Solomon from the financier’s Manhattan apartment to his Easthampton estate.

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However, on the night of his confession, DeMeyer boarded a plane to Rome and spent following 14 months globe-trotting, travelling to Europe and Latin America. He returned to the US a while later after apparently running short on funds. The prosecution, bewildered by DeMeyer’s sudden return, was told by the former personal assistant that he could not find a job in any of the places he visited and sought to use his past connections in the US to land one.

Instead, he was arrested and released on $1 million bond, that was partially secured by his mother’s home. Since then he was living in Findlay, Ohio. After he was declared indigent, his travel expenses were covered by the US Marshals Service so he could appear before a court in New York.