Nick Meyer, 40, became briefly famous a few weeks ago for allegedly stealing more than $1 million of wine from his banker boss. As Goldman Sachs president David Solomon’s personal assistant from 2008 until 2016, Meyer’s job involved such chores as the transport of hundreds of bottles of extremely expensive wine between New York and the Hamptons. It also presented him tempting opportunities, like the $1.2-million theft of said wine, which finally caught up with him. FBI agents were waiting for Meyer in Los Angeles International Airport when he touched down on a Tuesday last month.
The feds reportedly tracked his travel to Rome, Argentina, Morocco, Brazil, Switzerland. Meyer had been on the run for more than a year—ever since November of 2016, when he confessed to Mr. and Mrs. Solomon and promptly fled the country.
A week after his arrest, THE WEEKLY STANDARD reported that for years, after moving to New York from his Ohio home for college, Meyer employed an alias: “Nicolas De Meyer.” It’s a slightly ritzier variant of the one he was born with, and perhaps it was better-suited to the high-flying life his high school friends now say he always wanted. While he’s awaiting arraignment, due to arrive any day now to New York’s Southern District Court, per an FBI spokesman, Meyer’s old friends are thinking of him. They remember a charming young man enamored of the trappings of wealth. And to them, he’s more hero than villain.
Ryan Barton, 39, an interior designer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, told me TWS’s story linking “Nicolas De Meyer” to his high school friend brought back a flood of memories. A charismatic kid with an obsessive love of the finer things and a powerful sway over nearly everyone he met, Meyer also had a dramatic flair and a dishonest streak.
Barton remembers hearing from a mutual friend more than a decade ago that Meyer was in Rome, and from another that he worked in some capacity at Goldman Sachs. But he didn’t really believe it, he says.
“He would always lie about things to impress people, things that you could kind of see through, that couldn’t be believable.” Meyer told his prom date, Barton recalls, they were going to take his father’s Porsche to the dance and get her a dress to match. But, according to Barton, “There was no such car.”
One family friend, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me: “People back here that knew him, when they read the story, we all view him as a folk hero in a way.” He’s “kind of a like a Robin Hood figure.”
He was a good kid, this friend said, recounting how at Meyer’s elementary school, the private Catholic St. Michael’s, a classmate who was routinely bullied for a behavioral disability needed a defender. “Nick stuck up for her and stopped it,” when no one else would, the friend says.
“People make fun of us for being backwards,” the family friend says. “And I guess in some ways we are.” But that only makes the source of Meyer’s notoriety more impressive: “This kid raised up, a lot of his raising up was out in the country—literally on a farm, where his grandparents lived—here’s this small town kid, from flyover country, he goes into the big city and snookers the bigtime guy.”
But most importantly: Meyer didn’t hurt anyone vulnerable with his epic heist. “He didn’t steal from some little old grandma or take advantage of somebody that couldn’t stick up for themselves. He went to elaborate lengths—and did it right under the nose of Solomon,” this friend says, laughing lightly.
Andrew Fitzpatrick, 39, a close friend of Meyer’s from high school, also compares Meyer to Robin Hood: “It’s kind of like the whole ‘stealing from the rich to give to the poor.’ Although I highly doubt he gave to the poor.”
Fitzpatrick lives in New York City and summers in Provincetown, where he’s better known by the stagename Mona Mour. But he remembers Findlay High School and Nick Meyer with a bittersweet fondness. “It doesn’t surprise me that he would work for a billionaire and have keys to the kingdom,” he says.
The Robin Hood comparison may half-fit the circumstances of Meyer’s theft from Solomon and subsequent fall to the feds. But he’s more like Sebastian from Brideshead Revisited, Fitzpatrick says: “Kind of sad, but not sad. Gorgeous on the outside, but devious. And you can’t fully trust him.” Like Barton, Fitzpatrick remembers Nick Meyer’s lies. “It’s no surprise that he would do something dishonest. It ain’t no thang, but he’d lie about anything to get out of class.”
Still, he feels, as ever, a regret-tinged admiration for his fearless, scheming friend. “I’m by no means a grand success,” he says. There are times he’d rather be a Broadway star than a summer stock drag queen. “But I’ve been thinking about the difference between us. I’ll live in a fantasy. I’m a drag queen. I’ll make up whatever I need to make up.” But when the lights come up, the fantasy fades. Nick, on the other hand: “He was determined, somehow, to have that fantasy.” Maybe, for that last lost year on the run, he finally did.
