TV Producer Vanished With Millions and Her Own Star Had No Idea

Antonio Sabato Jr picked up the phone and learned his own TV boss was an FBI fugitive.

Federal agents say the woman behind two hit true crime shows invented an entire family fortune to steal millions.

Nearly eight years later, nobody knows exactly where she is or how she pulled it off.

Bellum Entertainment Could Not Make Payroll When the Fake Trust Fund Story Began

Mary Carole McDonnell ran Bellum Entertainment out of Burbank, California.

Her company made It Takes a Killer and I Married a Murderer, two true crime shows built on real killers and real victims.

By late 2017, Bellum could not pay its own employees.

Creditors had already filed more than $1 million in lawsuits against the company.

That is when McDonnell allegedly invented a new identity for herself.

She claimed she was secretly an heir to the McDonnell Douglas aircraft fortune, sitting on an $80 million trust fund nobody had ever heard of before.

She used that fake fortune to reassure lenders and her own staff that Bellum's money troubles were temporary.

Banc of California believed her.

The bank handed over $15 million in loans, and McDonnell walked away with roughly $14.7 million of it, according to federal prosecutors.

She did not stop there.

Other lenders across Los Angeles and Orange counties coughed up more, pushing her total haul toward nearly $30 million.

A federal grand jury in Santa Ana indicted her in December 2018 on five counts of bank fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft.

By the time agents came looking, McDonnell was already gone.

Antonio Sabato Jr Found Out From Reporters Not His Boss

Sabato hosted Fix It & Finish It, a home renovation show syndicated nationally under McDonnell's company.

He had no idea his own executive producer was wanted by the FBI.

"I didn't know anything at all until you guys called," Sabato told the New York Post.

He said he was left "speechless" once he understood what prosecutors say his former boss had done.

The FBI has not made an arrest in almost eight years.

Agents believe McDonnell fled the country and is now hiding in Dubai.

In December 2025, the bureau placed her on its Most Wanted list for white collar crime, tagging her with a string of aliases including Mary Carole Carroll, Mary Carol McDonnell, and Mary Carroll McDonald.

She is 5-foot-7, roughly 145 pounds, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a scar on her right knee, according to the FBI's official notice.

The Bureau's Los Angeles Field Office is leading the search and is asking anyone with information to contact them or the nearest U.S. embassy.

Why Millionaire Fraud Fugitives Keep Landing in Dubai

McDonnell's alleged con follows a script Americans have watched before.

Anna Sorokin invented a fake German heiress persona named Anna Delvey and swindled New York banks and hotels years before Netflix ever turned her con into a hit show.

McDonnell's version just added a production company and two hit series to sell the lie.

The FBI's own agents have a name for this style of theft.

Special Agent Michael Pickett has explained that trust "can sometimes take the place of due diligence, and that's when individuals are more susceptible to being victimized."

McDonnell did not need thousands of strangers to fall for her story.

She needed one loan officer at one bank to believe a fake trust fund was real, and the rest of the money followed.

Dubai is not an accident either.

Two executives accused of stealing millions from Chicago's Loretto Hospital fled to the same city and were spotted living large there while investigators tried to drag them home.

The United Arab Emirates has no extradition treaty forcing it to hand American fugitives back to face charges, which is exactly why criminals with stolen millions keep landing there.

Fugitives who make it to the UAE can sit there for years while Washington tries to negotiate a way to bring them home, if that day ever comes.

If agents ever close that ocean gap, prosecutors already have the paperwork ready: five counts of bank fraud, two counts of identity theft, and a trust fund that was never real.

Sources:

• New York Post Staff, "Former TV Host Talks Mary Carole McDonnell's FBI Manhunt," New York Post, August 30, 2026.
• Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Mary Carole McDonnell Wanted by the FBI," FBI.gov, 2025.
• CNN Staff, "FBI Adds True Crime TV Producer to Most Wanted List for Loan Fraud Tied to Phony Heiress Story," CNN, December 9, 2025.
• Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Beware of Affinity Fraud," FBI.gov, December 18, 2017.
• NBC News Staff, "Anna Sorokin, Fake German Heiress Who Scammed Friends and Banks, Released From Prison," NBC News, February 2021.
• Block Club Chicago Staff, "The Flashy Fugitives: Ex-Loretto Hospital Leader and Associate Accused of Stealing Millions Are Living Large in Dubai," Block Club Chicago, July 22, 2025.