On Tuesday, at 2:38 p.m., a naked Nicolas DeMeyer, 41, flashed one last smile at the security guards at the Carlyle Hotel before jumping from his 33rd floor window.

He leaped eight minutes after he was scheduled to appear before a Manhattan federal judge for stealing $1.2 million worth of rare wines from Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.

The Post reported that DeMeyer’s body struck a 17th-floor balcony with such force that half of his body landed on a terrace two floors below. DeMeyer’s suicide was a tragic end to a years-long saga of deception, during which he spent 14-months globe-trotting and evading arrest.

From 2014 to 2016, DeMeyer, while working as a personal assistant for the Solomon family, pilfered more than 500 bottles of rare wine from his boss’ vast collection, including seven precious bottles of Domaine de le Romanée-Conti, which Solomon purchased for $133,650, according to court papers.

DeMeyer sold them to a North Carolina-based wine broker, Ryan Chaland, whom he found online. By November 2016, Solomon had been alerted that his vintage assets were on the market.

Realizing he was going to eventually be caught, DeMeyer met with Solomon and his then-wife, Mary, on Nov. 8 — election night — while the couple dined at Locanda Verde, a source said, and confessed to the crime. He promised to meet Mary at a bank the following day to pay her back a portion of the money.

Instead, an hour and a half later, according to prosecutors, DeMeyer was at JFK Airport, preparing to flee the country. He charged a $5,300 Alitalia ticket to Rome on his American Express card, and embarked on a whirlwind tour with stops in Capri, Casablanca, Marrakesh, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro. He was finally arrested on Jan. 16, 2018, after landing in Los Angeles. During his bail hearing, DeMeyer said an ex-boyfriend was helping him get a job at an art gallery in California.

He got a jail cell instead.

A family friend of the Solomons says the Goldman Sachs CEO is shocked by DeMeyer’s theft and, now, his suicide.

“It’s so weird how little you know someone,” Solomon told the friend last week after learning of his former assistant’s death.

But those close to DeMeyer say the Findlay, Ohio, native has been deceiving people since his high school days.

“Appearance and people’s opinions and money and material things were always very important to him,” said DeMeyer’s high school friend, Andrew Fitzpatrick, 40, who lives in NYC.

“If he’s going to pull a scam, it’s going to be a very, ‘I stole rare vintage wine kind of a scam;’ a kind of ‘f–k you’ to everybody. He had a big chip on his shoulder, like a lot of people do who grew up in small towns. We want to be more than we are.”

DeMeyer grew up with his divorced mother, who runs a self-storage business, and stepfather.

“He was charming, that was his big thing,” said Fitzpatrick, who added that DeMeyer was voted “Best Dressed” in high school and drove a white Mustang. “He was always good at kissing up to someone.

“No one ever felt that they could trust him because he knew how to infiltrate every group and use whatever knowledge he had for his own benefit.”

Fitzpatrick says “a beautiful” DeMeyer was obsessed with his appearance and even that of his friends

“He tried to be sophisticated and classy. I was probably a bit of a project for him,” he continued. “He bought me a Gucci watch at one point to wear. At least he said it was Gucci. With him, who knows.”

In high school, “Nicolas DeMeyer” was known as the more pedestrian, “Nickolas Meyer.” According to The Weekly Standard, midway through college, he set out to reinvent himself, claiming that “Nicolas Von Meyer,” was indeed his real name, and the basic “Meyer” listed on his official forms was merely an error. By the time he began working for the Solomon family in 2008, he had changed his name yet again to “DeMeyer.”

Fitzpatrick said DeMeyer struggled with his identity and kept his homosexuality under wraps throughout high school.

“We would sneak out and go to Toledo and go dancing in the gay clubs,” he recalled. “We would talk about art and wanting to get out of town and wanting to get to college so bad and go into big cities.”

DeMeyer’s wish came true when he enrolled at Vassar to pursue a B.A. in art history.

Former college classmates of DeMeyer told The Weekly Standard that DeMeyer went to great lengths to conceal his humble midwestern roots, even telling some he hailed from Florida and dressing in expensive designer clothes.

“He was mysterious in some ways,” Kelly Williams, who studied art history with DeMeyer at Vassar, told The Weekly Standard. “He had this radiating smile and presence about him.”

The guise apparently worked. In 2008, the Vassar grad was hired by Solomon, who was then co-head of Goldman Sachs’ investment banking division, to work as a personal assistant. According to the source, Solomon used a staffing agency to recruit DeMeyer.

“It was primarily a job working for Mary,” said the family friend. “There was an affinity between them.”

A Solomon insider said DeMeyer worked out of the family’s former home at the San Remo on Central Park West (Solomon sold the four-bedroom spread for $24 million in 2016; he and Mary divorced earlier this year after having been separated for a few years).

“He was a trusted confidant of the family,” said the insider. So much so, that Mary would let DeMeyer and his boyfriend shack up at the Solomons’ Hamptons house during the off-season on the weekends.

In addition to helping sort through packages and dealing with household logistics, one of DeMeyer’s responsibilities was cataloguing Solomon’s wine collection and shipping it to the banker’s various residences.

“For a real wine collector, you tag everything, barcode it all, for insurance reasons. DeMeyer was in charge of that,” said the insider.

In 2014, DeMeyer contacted Ryan Chaland, a North Carolina wine broker who owned a company called Wine Liquidators. Chaland, coincidentally, was the broker who purchased wines stolen during an infamous 2014 heist at California restaurant The French Laundry

“When a guy is advertising his company as ‘Wine Liquidators,’ it’s almost advertising: ‘Give me your stolen wine. We will get rid of it for you!’” said a lawyer, who has worked on wine fraud cases and is familiar with DeMeyer’s case.

DeMeyer reached out to Chaland, whose company was at the top of the Google search, using the alias “Mark Miller,” the name of a deceased vintner who put Hudson Valley wines on the map.

For two years, Chaland or associates would pick up the wines at DeMeyer’s Midtown West apartment.

“It was a beautiful flat, art everywhere, super modern furniture,” said Chaland, 30.

“He had pictures all over his walls of male genitalia.”

Chaland says he and DeMeyer, who would always “be dressed to the nines” in Diesel jeans and a button-down shirt, would sit and chat and sip espresso.

“Never did the wine seem of interest to him. He always sort of downplayed his wine knowledge. He said he had tasted things with his boss.”

Chaland purchased hundreds of bottles from DeMeyer over the course of two years, sometimes 40 bottles at a time, sometimes 80.

“Every time we made an offer on the wine, he said, ‘Okay, I need to talk to my boss.’ A day would go by, two days would go by and he would come back with a counter offer from his boss. We paid premium. There were never any red flags until the last deal we did.”

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, known to wine aficionados as “DRC,” is universally considered the preeminent French red Burgundy producer. The estate’s top wine comes from the Romanée Conti vineyard, after which the Domaine is named. The only two magnums of 2012 Romanée-Conti sold at auction in the last five years went for a whopping $31,980 and $38,242 each.

DeMeyer’s scheme started to unravel in October 2016 when Patrick Albright, a Napa Valley wine dealer, purchased the seven bottles of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti wines (including three magnums of Romanée-Conti) via Chaland for $90,500, $43,150 less than Solomon paid, according to invoices accessed by The Post. Chaland sold the Romanée-Conti magnums to Albright for $22,000 each — $12,175 per magnum less than what Solomon had paid for them.

Albright began to suspect the prized bottles had been stolen. He was able to trace the wine to Geoffrey Troy, who owns New York Wine Warehouse in Long Island City, and sells to Solomon.

Troy alerted Solomon. After Solomon confirmed that he never put those bottles up for sale, the East Hampton police were called to investigate. DeMeyer let the officers into the wine cellar himself.

The Solomon insider says no one suspected the handsome assistant.

“He was very forthcoming and even offered to turn over his phone to the police,” said the insider.

“One of the reasons the police, the wine seller and David and Mary, none of them thought it was Nicolas, is because he was so calm throughout the whole thing. He was as calm as calm could be,” said the source.

According to prosecutors, a detective off-handedly told DeMeyer that figuring out the culprit would take no time since the wine was traceable.

The next day, a spooked DeMeyer scheduled to meet with David and Mary at the Greenwich Hotel.

But instead of meeting Mary at the bank as promised, he fled the country.

A week later, he called Mary.

“He said he was scared, and he couldn’t go to prison. That’s why he left,” according to a prosecutor. Mary put the call on speaker and video recorded it.

According to court documents, most of DeMeyer’s dealings with Chaland were conducted in cash and DeMeyer retained more than $1 million from the illegal wine sales. At least $153,000 from Wine Liquidators was deposited into DeMeyer’s then-boyfriend’s account from May 2014 to March 2016. DeMeyer’s attorney told the court that the couple broke up in April 2017 and the boyfriend returned to Brazil. The boyfriend’s money has not been accounted for.

Six days before he left town, DeMeyer deposited $17,000 into his mother’s account. One day later, he deposited an additional $17,500.

Throughout his 14-month tour, she re-deposited $39,000 back to him via wire transfers, cash and money orders purchased at a Kroger’s, a grocery store in Findlay.

Before returning to the United States, DeMeyer’s attorney said he called his mother and asked her to hire him a lawyer.

When he returned to Los Angeles, he was promptly arrested (an arrest warrant was issued in New York in September 2017).

For two months, he was shuttled among jails in Los Angeles, Oklahoma City and Manhattan, before his mother put up $200,000 cash and her home for collateral for his $1 million bond.

DeMeyer, who had a GPS-monitoring ankle bracelet, went to live with his family in Ohio, the very place he yearned to flee for all those years. At Tuesday’s hearing, he was expected to plead guilty for charges of stealing $1.2 million worth of Solomon’s wine. If convicted, he

faced up to ten years in prison.

According to reports, DeMeyer phoned his sister after checking into Room 3307 at the Carlyle, which goes for $1,300 a night, and said he was afraid of life behind bars.

She called the hotel.

“I think he did it because I don’t think he could face people’s judgment and people seeing behind the curtain,” said Fitzpatrick.

“I don’t think it was a big deal having done [the crime]. I think it was living with the consequences of people knowing the truth, the lies exposed. Prison ruins the mystique and all that he has lied about.”

Security guards entered the room to find a naked DeMeyer sitting on the windowsill.

“The staff walked in and he smiled at him. That was Nick,” continued Fitzpatrick. “He gave them that charming smile that always had something behind it.”

“He always knew how to make an exit and when to leave.”