Much fiction, from Pride and Prejudice to The Talented Mr. Ripley, focuses on the male con man—the Lothario who engages with the aspirations of beautiful, intelligent, and often wealthy women, enticing them to relinquish their bodies and fortunes. Keith Raniere, the 58-year-old leader of NXIVM, a cultlike organization based for decades near Albany, New York, was one such man, though an unlikely Don Juan. He was a former I.T. guy who founded a pyramid-scheme-like grocery business in the 1980s, then hawked vitamins, and, some two decades later, transformed into the guru to heiresses, actors, and general deep-pocketed enlightenment-seekers. But the guru thing was merely instrumental—a means to an end. In secret he was enacting a jaw-droppingly bizarre sex scheme for his own pleasure, intertwining themes of madness, pain, and love like a story by Edgar Allan Poe.

On Wednesday afternoon Raniere was convicted of sex trafficking, among other charges for which he could receive life in prison, in the modern New York City courthouse where cartel lord El Chapo recently lost his case. Raniere attracted similar attention, with HBO documentarians and national reporters in the courtroom cheek by jowl with Raniere’s followers, some of whom now believe he’s evil and others who remain by his side. Raniere, stout and short of stature, sat at the defense table with his attorney Marc Agnifilo. He has a ruddy face, with large blue eyes concealed by Coke-bottle glasses; though he used to be partial to casual clothes and athletic gear, in court, the collar of a white dress shirt poked above a monochromatic sweater.

The best way to describe Raniere is a nerd Charles Manson, though Raniere didn’t use acid to get people to believe (or instruct them to butcher victims); his flock was stone-cold sober, and his tricks were often those of a pickup artist, like negging. Both men, however, were sexually predatory, and had the same canniness for exploiting social trends. Just as Manson capitalized on the imperfections of the free love movement, Raniere enticed women into believing he could take the 2010s empowerment smorgasbord—wellness, activism, feminism—to its highest, purest level. Those who followed him, he insisted, would become stronger, emotionally and physically, or, as some of them called themselves, “badass.”

Unsurprisingly, Raniere’s rap concealed his deeper motivation, according to the prosecution: having sex with as many women as possible. He was a horny holy man, and far from the first. Raniere’s inner circle was like an episode of Big Love; his girlfriends, whom the government said were monogamous with him and numbered about 20, lived in homes and town houses in a totally conventional, characterless corner of a nice Albany suburb, sometimes two or more to a house, sometimes alone. It all couldn’t look more normal, more American, but in the evening, Raniere would tomcat down the shadowy suburban streets.

In a testament to the women’s devotion, this part of all their lives was mostly kept a secret. By day they worked at Raniere’s outward-facing business, a self-actualization-seminar corporation that sometimes went by the name Executive Success Programs. This army of business casual life coaches, often wearing brightly colored clothes and appearing relentlessly upbeat in their promo videos, provided therapeutic strategies to the elite, or at least anyone willing to take on debt to pay the hefty fees. Thousands took their classes, which often lasted 10 hours per day and promoted Raniere as the font of all of their knowledge and “the world’s most ethical man,” akin, perhaps, to Bishop Desmond Tutu. But the seminars were also a sort of Trojan horse: by probing each student’s personal history, the coaches inhaled information about attachments, relationships with parents, sexual hang-ups, and other tidbits that would make one easy to manipulate if Raniere so commanded. (Wealthy followers, like Clare Bronfman, an heiress to the Seagram fortune, also picked up the tab if the business experienced a shortfall.)