Alan Todd May passed himself off as an oil magnate, insinuated himself into West Palm Beach high society, and conned people out of millions. In January, 2023, a retired style-magazine editor whom I’ll call Maria was heading to lunch at the National Croquet Club, in West Palm Beach, Florida, when she spotted two men who seemed like fun. The older of the pair introduced himself as Jacob Turner.
He was tall, in his fifties, with gleaming white teeth and blondish hair. “A major figure with a major belly,” Maria, an elegant, sharp-eyed widow, told me recently. Turner’s name appeared on the breast pocket of his all-white croquet outfit, and he wore a chunky gold neck chain that she soon urged him to lose.
Kevin Alvarez, Turner’s boyfriend, was around thirty and smaller—“a sweet shadow,” Maria said. She invited the men to lunch with her and her friends, and Turner amused them all with stories that emphasized his extravagant generosity—including one about how he’d met Alvarez. “I was buying shoes, and Kevin was my salesman,” she recalls Turner drawlling.
“I told him I’d buy shoes for everyone in the store if he went out with me.” Turner was from Texas and told Maria that he was an oilman. He claimed to own several wells.
“Royalties come in all the time,” he told her. Maria was intrigued: she knew famous people, but she’d never met an oilman before. A few weeks after their lunch, Turner came to her birthday dinner, at Bice, a white-tablecloth place .
