IN EARLY 2024, a young Los Angeles musician who was down on her luck met with the FBI. She had a story that, at first, seemed unbelievable. Nine months earlier, her career faltering and her morale low, she was approached one night by a psychic.
The psychic said she could see that something was bothering her and offered to do a palm reading. The reading showed spiritual blockages hanging over the musician’s life, and the psychic said they would need to work together closely to clear them. The musician gave the psychic thousands of dollars, the amounts increasing over time, and even bought cars for her and her family.
At the psychic’s instruction, the musician lied to her own family, extracting what she could from them. When that wasn’t enough, the psychic put her to work. But now, confused and desperate, and overwhelmed by how she had even ended up in this situation in the first place, the musician needed to tell someone what had happened to her.
When the FBI ran the psychic’s name in their system, they discovered a familiar narrative of victimization had played out at least once before. Gina Rita Russell—psychic hustler, skilled manipulator, and pill-popping madame—was already on the FBI’s radar. And the story that put her there, beginning more than a decade earlier, was wilder than anyone could have imagined.
ONE NIGHT IN the fall of 2009, Jill Smith* was walking home through the streets of New York City, her self-esteem at an all-time low. Smith, 24, had just lost her job and gone through a devastating breakup. She felt vulnerable and rudderless, unable to launch her adult life.
She’d been crying herself to sleep every night. When she passed a psychic storefront in the West Village, Gina Rita Russell was sitting outside at a small table. Smith declined politely, but Russell was persistent.
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