Goldman Sachs CEO’s Aide Commits Suicide After Stealing $1.2m Wine from Boss
Former personal assistant to David Solomon, Nicolas DeMeyer, 41, jumped from his room
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A former assistant to a Goldman Sachs executive has plunged from a hotel balcony in what seems to be a suicide, just days before he was to plead guilty to stealing and selling his boss’s wine worth an eye-watering $1.2 million.
The former personal assistant to David Solomon, Nicolas DeMeyer, 41, jumped from his room in the 33rd floor of the Carlyle Hotel at Madison Avenue, New York.
DeMeyer's sister had alerted hotel staff that he was suicidal before security was forced to knock on his door, according to the New York Post.
Security then found smiling DeMeyer sitting on a windowsill completely naked before jumping to his death.
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RT reports: 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 hunted down by one of the end customers of his wine-selling scheme, a Napa Valley wine dealer, who speculated that seven bottles of a rare wine he purchased had been stolen.
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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 transporting wine bottles purchased by Solomon from the financier’s Manhattan apartment to his Easthampton estate.
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.
