 | |
| Authors | Regina Milbourne Yvonne Carey-Lederer |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | memoir |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
Publication date | 2006 |
| ISBN | 978-0-06-174774-8 |
| Part of a series on the |
| Paranormal |
|---|
Miami Psychic: Confessions of a Confidante is a 2006 memoir published by the Regan Books division of HarperCollins. The authors are listed as Regina Milbourne and Yvonne Carey-Lederer.
The book purports to be a true memoir about a psychic named Regina Milbourne, who used her supposed paranormal "gifts" to help many of Miami's least desirable element: drug dealers, thieves, murderers and pedophiles. Regina claims that she "comes clean" in the book, "divulging the unimaginable horrors and shocking confessions that she witnessed throughout her career".[ citation needed ]
Shortly after the book was published, the true identity of "Regina" was revealed to be Gina Marie Marks, who had a series of arrests and convictions in Florida for perpetrating psychic fraud over many years. Marks continued her criminal activity after the publishing of the book. [1] [2] [3] [4]
In 2018, Marks was convicted of stealing more than $340,000 from five victims over three years using the pseudonym Natalie Miller. Although she pleaded guilty to psychic fraud charges, Marks blamed her misfortune on racism against "gypsies", saying "They're racist on my culture. We do have power. We’re not allowed to talk about it." [4]
On August 11, 2018, CBS broadcast an episode of its true crime TV show, Pink Collar Crimes, titled "The Psychic Didn't See Him Coming". The episode recounts the story of private eye Bob Nygaard and his numerous pursuits of Marks to obtain justice for his clients between 2008 and 2018. [5] [6] [7]
A séance or seance is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word séance comes from the French word for "session", from the Old French seoir, "to sit". In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "une séance de cinéma". In English, however, the word came to be used specifically for a meeting of people who are gathered to receive messages from ghosts or to listen to a spirit medium discourse with or relay messages from spirits. In modern English usage, participants need not be seated while engaged in a séance.
Milbourne Christopher was a prominent American illusionist, magic historian, and author.
Mediumship is the practice of purportedly mediating communication between familiar spirits or spirits of the dead and living human beings. Practitioners are known as "mediums" or "spirit mediums". There are different types of mediumship or spirit channelling, including séance tables, trance, and ouija.
The Psychic Friends Network(PFN) was a telephone psychic service operating in the United States in the 1990s. The company's infomercials were aired frequently on late night television at that time. In 2012, the business began to migrate to online services.
Mina "Margery" Crandon was a psychical medium who claimed that she channeled her dead brother, Walter Stinson. Investigators who studied Crandon concluded that she had no such paranormal ability, and others detected her in outright deception. She became known as her alleged paranormal skills were touted by Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and were disproved by magician Harry Houdini. Crandon was investigated by members of the American Society for Psychical Research and employees of the Scientific American.
Arthur Ford was an American psychic, spiritualist medium, clairaudient, and founder of the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship (1955). He gained national attention when he claimed to have contacted the dead son of Bishop James Pike in 1967 on network TV. In 1928 Ford claimed to have contacted the deceased spirits of Houdini's mother and later in 1929 Harry Houdini himself.
Gina Marie Marks is an American psychic and convicted fraudster. Using the pseudonym of Regina Milbourne, she co-authored Miami Psychic: Confessions of a Confidante, a memoir published by HarperCollins in 2006.
Joseph Dunninger, known as "The Amazing Dunninger", was one of the most famous and proficient mentalists of all time. He was one of the pioneer performers of magic on radio and television. A debunker of fraudulent mediums, Dunninger claimed to replicate through trickery all spiritualist phenomena.
Ann O'Delia Diss Debar was a late 19th- and early 20th-century supposed medium and criminal. She was convicted of fraud several times in the US, and was tried for rape and fraud in London in 1901. She was described by Harry Houdini as "one of the most extraordinary fake mediums and mystery swindlers the world has ever known".
The Maria Duval Scam is one of the most successful mail scams in history, having defrauded millions of people out of at least $200 million over twenty years. Targeting sick and elderly people through a combination of personalized letters and personal information databases, it has been shut down in the United States in 2016, but is still ongoing in many countries.
Hereward Carrington was a well-known British-born American investigator of psychic phenomena and author. His subjects included several of the most high-profile cases of apparent psychic ability of his times, and he wrote over 100 books on subjects including the paranormal and psychical research, conjuring and stage magic, and alternative medicine. Carrington promoted fruitarianism and held pseudoscientific views about dieting.
Fortune telling fraud, also called the bujo or egg curse scam, is a type of confidence trick, based on a claim of secret or occult information. The basic feature of the scam involves diagnosing the victim with some sort of secret problem that only the grifter can detect or diagnose, and then charging the mark for ineffectual treatments. The archetypical grifter working the scam is a fortune teller who announces that the mark is suffering from a curse that their magic can relieve, while threatening dire consequences if the curse is not lifted.
George Valiantine (1874–1947) was an American direct voice medium that was exposed as a fraud.
Joseph Francis Rinn (1868–1952) was an American magician and skeptic of paranormal phenomena.
Psychic Blues: Confessions of a Conflicted Medium is a memoir by Mark Edward about his time working as a psychic entertainer. Published in 2012, the book covers Edward's controversial career as both a performer and a skeptical activist.
Rose Mackenberg was an American investigator specializing in fraudulent psychic mediums, known for her association with Harry Houdini. She was chief of a team of undercover investigators who investigated mediums for Houdini in the 1920s. After Houdini's death she continued to investigate spiritualist fraud for over 20 years and was known as an expert on the subject. She testified in court cases and before Congress and was interviewed in national magazines and on television.
Bob Nygaard is an American private investigator (PI) specializing in the investigation of confidence crimes, most notably psychic fraud. He has been instrumental in the arrest and conviction of numerous psychics, helping their victims obtain justice including financial restitution amounting to millions of dollars. He has consulted for ABC News and 20/20 as a specialist in psychic fraud. Nygaard previously was a member of the New York City Transit Police and Nassau County Police Department, retiring from service in 2008.
Pink Collar Crimes is a true crime show that airs on CBS. The series focuses on real crimes committed by women and includes interviews with the suspects, victims, private investigators, police, and attorneys involved with the cases.
Janet Lee, also known as the Greenwich psychic and the Bedford psychic, is a self-proclaimed psychic based in Bedford Hills, New York. She has been working as a psychic since the late 1990s and claims to have been born with the gift. Her specialities include psychic readings, tarot card readings and past life readings.
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