Difference between revisions of "LabeillePublishing.com"

Title

labeillepublishing.com/

Description

Excerpted from the website:

finds a box of old post cards and love letters she discovers that her Mother had a life of love and excitement before becoming “just a Mom.”

read more

Languages

English

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you...

The Wild and Wooly Story of L'Abeille Publishing

First, let's review what's happened here on the surface, then I'll tell you the behind-the-scenes.

A member here asked if anyone had info on L'Abeille Publishing. Nope, says we. CaoPaux says there are no obvious red flags on the website. New member katari shows up to show us articles about one Alexandrea Stewart/Andrea Delauren, who is associated with real estate scams. "Huh?" says we. "What does Alex/Andrea have to do with L'Abeille?"

Katari offers info by PM or e-mail, but doesn't wish to share her info on the board because she knows Alex/Andrea will be reading and that if Katari exposes the method she's using to track Alex/Andrea, she can't use it again. Katari says she's one of the victims of a real estate scam of Alex/Andrea's.

We're suspicious, which is fair. Alex/Andrea takes advantage of this by showing up under two anonymous screen names: FedUp and GeorgieGirl. As FedUp, she sends PMs. As GeorgieGirl, she responds to James' comment that L'Abeille can't get books onto bookstore shelves.

GeorgieGirl lies to us, pretending that she just happens to be a member of four writers' sites where katari has posted warnings, and so she went to her local Barnes & Noble and found two L'Abeille books on shelves. She purposely misspells L'Abeille, to look casual about it. I love that touch.

Someone says that no one here would be silly enough to submit work to L’Abeille, but in fact, at least two people on this site already have, which is why I think it’s important to get the facts for them.

And now for the fun part.

Here's what was going on: Alex/Andrea was writing to half the mods, desperately attempting to get us to erase this thread. She's been successful at scaring other website owners into removing threads about her before, so she thinks it'll work here. It won't.

Victoria, Charlie, and I tried to figure out what the story was-- who was telling the truth, and whether or not this thread belonged here. Alex offered to fax Victoria all kinds of proof that katari is a stalker, that Alex has never done anything wrong in her life, that she's a victim, victim, victim!

Alex tells us several things:

-That she believes katari is her ex-husband's new girlfriend, trying to force Alex out of the UK so he doesn't have to pay child support.

-That her "stalker" has relentlessly pursued her for years, posting personal information online

-That the Daily Record article is one big lie

-That she has a clean criminal record

-That she's written a book about being the victim of a stalker

-That she has indefinite leave to stay in the UK because her ex-husband is British and her kids were born there

-This stalker made her go bankrupt, ruined her second marriage, etc.

-She feels like she’s being raped “over and over again” in this thread. She tells me this in two different letters, to make sure I understand just how very raped she is getting.

In one of her long letters, she tells me:

"I have never been accused of being a con artist. I have never been charged with being a con artist. I have never been tried for being a con artist. i have never been convicted of being a con artist."

I think this is straightforward enough. So I decide to check on her story.

I find this.

And this.

(Click me! Click me, do!)

For someone who's never been accused, charged, tried, or convicted of being a con artist, it sure does seem strange that she's been accused, charged, tried, and convicted of being a con artist.

So I write to Maureen Hickey, the DA on the case. I show her one of Alex's letters to me, and Maureen responds:

Quote:

Dear Ms. Glatzer,

I appreciate you taking time to speak to me about Andrea Delauren. Andrea was arrested in La Crosse in 2000 for 3 counts of Felony Issuance of Worthless Checks and 3 counts of Misdemeanor Issuance of Worthless Checks. Based on our lack of information at the time of any history of crime, she was offered a Diversion Agreement, which is the program that I run. She had to admit her guilt of 2 felony charges, while also pleading guilty to 3 misdemeanors. She was convicted of the 3 misdemeanors and placed on 3 years probation. The 2 felonies were diverted meaning that if she complied with the terms of our agreement, which included paying over $17,000.00 in restitution, she would have the felonies dismissed. She was required to pay $2000.00 upfront, before being to return to New York.

She had us believing that once she returned to New York, she would make arrangements to obtain the required restitution and send it as soon as possible. She sent absolutely nothing and then, out of the blue, she contacted me by mail with a list of several reasons why she had not made a payment. Mostly, they were hard luck stories, saying how rough it had been financially and she was living in poor conditions.

At the time, she agreed to pay at least something every month. That did not happen until I sent her a notice of a hearing to revoke her Diversion Agreement. She was suddenly able to come up with $500.00. If the motion is granted, she will also have the 2 felony convictions on her record and would face up to 10 years in prison.

The person she refers to as her exhusband's girlfriend is just one of many victims of her scams in New York. The more we search, the more we learn of Ms. Delauren's criminal behavior in numerous con games. She has set up multiple new businesses where she is able to get people to pay for a service which they never receive. Ms. Delauren then takes off, leaving people wondering what happened to them. She also skipped out on employees who were never paid.

She was convicted in California on 2 counts of Felony Possession of Check With Intent To Defraud. She served time in jail and was placed on probation. She was ordered to be deported to England. Our investigator spoke to Inspector Duncan Hamilton of the Glasgow, Scotland Police. He has been investigating this woman due to a complaint of having paid Delauren for a rental property, which was never paid to the proper owner. Apparently, there have been other reported complaints which resulted in the paper printing an article and BBC broadcast a program warning others about her. I am sure you didn't want to hear all this. I am upset that she has cheated so many people and is able to slip through the cracks to continue her cons. Please question any dealings with this woman.

Maureen Hickey La Crosse County District Attorney's Office La Crosse, WI, US

I asked Maureen if I might share that letter here, and she granted permission.

I noted that one of the “proofs” Alex offered about why the Daily Record article was bogus is that they quoted a police officer from “Connie County.” “There is no Connie County in the United States!” Alex told us. Right. It was a misprint. It was an officer from La Crosse County. The Daily Record may have screwed up their spellings, but they didn’t make up this officer. His name is Captain Jeffrey Wolff, and he provided her mug shot for the article, too.

I also wrote to the DA's office in San Bernardino, CA about another likely alias of Alex's-- Vivian Smith. Same date of birth and social security number. They told me, "Vivian Smith pled guilty to check fraud on April 6, 2001. She failed to appear for sentencing and a bench warrant was issued for her arrest. Further information can be found at the San Bernardino County Superior Court Web site."

Which is here: http://170.164.50.60/openaccess/criminal/DefendantCharges.asp?courtcode=X&casenumber=FWV022 060&otnmseq=0&defseq=1&defnbr=995543&dsn=

It says she’s a fugitive.

Meanwhile, we hear from another victim of Alex’s real estate con, and an ex-employee, who back up katari completely and tell us more. We also find a long string of urls that Alex has registered, mostly real-estate related, but also a purported film company with lots and lots of movies in production (the site is now down).

I also hear from Alex, who is furious that I've outed her as GeorgieGirl and can't figure out what was wrong with that. "I went online as Georgie Girl in response to james saying that there are no books in stores and giving the impression that there must be something wrong with the company. So I posted what? That I have been watching with interest? That is an understatement. That the books are available in Barnes and Noble? They are. But again, if this is an issue why wouldn't you email me personally and say 'whats up?' You decided instead to post in a really imflamitory way."

Um, yeah. I didn't e-mail you, Alex, to say "what's up," because we are not friends. You came to my message board and lied to people. Why do you suppose I should defend you?

Well, by now we were all certain that Alex/Andrea was full of it, but what I couldn't prove was whether or not Alex/Andrea ran L'Abeille. I knew she did, based on numerous things-- but I wanted it to be airtight-- otherwise, why have the warning here at all?

So I asked Alex, “What is your relationship to L’Abeille Publishing?” She didn’t respond. I asked again. She said she didn’t get my first e-mail because her computer was always getting hacked. Then she told me that she wrote the Stalkers book for LAbeille (no apostrophe-- trying to look casual again?). I asked, “Is that your complete relationship with L’Abeille-- that you wrote one book for them?” “No, that is not my complete relationship,” she told me, then changed the subject and complained that I had pushed her off on Victoria earlier and that all those faxes would prove her innocence, and... and...

I told her I’d be happy to discuss other things after she gave me an answer to my direct question, which was: What is your relationship with L’Abeille Publishing? She didn’t answer again.

I posted it here on the thread, too, which she has been reloading and reloading and reloading, but not answering.

So I did some investigating.

The phone number on L'Abeille's site doesn't work. The New York City address is a mail forwarding service-- and the man who runs that service says that the woman from the UK who ordered this service for L'Abeille gave him a hard-luck story about how she was getting a divorce and then would be moving back to NYC. But one problem: The woman never paid and never signed the contract, and he's been trying to get her to remove the address from her website.

The domain registration address, under “Amy Lynch,” is a Mailboxes Etc. They searched for all the names I could give them: L’Abeille Publishing, Alex/Andrea/Vivian DeLauren/Stewart, and came up with nothing.

There is no record of L'Abeille Publishing in the NYS Dept. of State Division of Corporations database, even though it's listed as L'Abeille Publishing, Inc. on their website.

It was a no-brainer to figure out that Alex had written the only two books L'Abeille has actually published-- the "renting an apartment in NYC" guides-- because that's what her con games were all about. It made plenty of sense that they were published anonymously, too. And she had already told me she was working on a book about stalkers, which was the subject of the only other book on the website with a full description and ISBN.

The press releases on the L'Abeille site were a dead giveaway, too, because of one word:

“IMMIDIATELY”

I show you Exhibit A, from their website:

Quote: Contact: Amy Lynch Press and Publicity Manager 212-502-7941

FOR Quote: IMMIDIATE RELEASE

In two different e-mails to me, Alex used the word "immidiately." I love consistent misspellings when I'm on a trail.

But I shouldn't have bothered with all the detective work. Victoria was out of town for a few days, and when she got back, she showed me Alex’s "proof" and latest sob letter, which included this: "L'Abeille Publishing is my own personal publishing company for my books and the books written by some of my friends. This site isn't indexed on google because it is just for us and for bookstores or retailers that carry the books. There is nothing for sale on the site, there is no offer of vanity services or any services at all. About two months ago we started getting hundreds of emails about submissions. I contacted ‘firstwrite’ and told them that we don't want submissions. The fellow suggested that someone had signed up the company but at our request the submissions stopped."

Well, it sure is interesting that they don’t want submissions, considering that they offered a contract to a person right here at Absolute Write, and that their submissions page invites query letters and agented manuscripts.

http://www.labeillepublishing.com/id21.html

Oh, and in this letter, she says the stalker has ruined her third marriage, not her second.

So, a few conclusions:

-As backed up by the Wisconsin DA, katari is exactly who she said she was from the start: a victim of Alex’s real estate cons in New York City from a few years back. She is here because she has continued tracking Alex in the hopes of warning others not to do business with this criminal. It may have sounded odd that she was willing to give info by PM, but I have verified that there was a good reason for this, so just trust me on that much. Have I ever steered you wrong?

-The person who runs L’Abeille Publishing is a convicted criminal who has written bad checks, was charged with burglary, run off without paying clients and employees, used aliases, was arrested at the airport trying to leave the country in 2001, has an outstanding arrest warrant in California, owes a great deal of restitution to a great many people and has not paid it, and is being investigated in Scotland. She has been in jail before and may be brought back to the US do prison time for her previous felonies.

-If that doesn’t matter to you, the publishing company uses Lightning Source for print-on-demand (no print run). Thus far, it has published two anonymous nonfiction books with awful covers and lousy editing (see excerpt page: http://www.labeillepublishing.com/id32.html). These two books have sold a combined total of less than 150 copies.

I want to put that last part in flashing neon letters, but don’t know how, so I’ll just say it once more: 2 books. Less than 150 sales in total. Is that what you want for your book? Will selling 75 copies make you happy?

-The person who runs L’Abeille Publishing (Alexandrea Stewart/Andrea DeLauren) verified those numbers to me by e-mail. I’m not making them up. Consider that when you reread this sentence: "In the meantime, the popular Nouveau Native’s No Fee New York rental guide series is proving one of the most popular regional property series ever."

So my final analysis, ladies and gents, is that a writer would really have to be self-hating to get involved with this criminal and her self-publishing venture.

Hugs to Victoria for all your help, as always.

Thank you. The prosecution needs coffee now.

Related Domains

External Links

• Alexa: LabeillePublishing.com
• WHOIS for LabeillePublishing.com