Nickolas Meyer spent his early adulthood trying to hide the fact that he hails from Findlay, Ohio. But a return to his hometown is probably the best he can hope for after being arrested for allegedly stealing and selling $1.2 million worth of wine that belonged to his former boss, Goldman Sachs president David Solomon.
Meyer’s bail agreement, set at $1 million last Tuesday in the Southern District Court of New York, would let him leave Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) for his Ohio home. But Meyer has yet to deliver the collateral the court agreed to accept: a $200,000 bond on his mother’s house in Findlay. According to an FBI spokesman, he appeared at his first pre-trial conference on Monday and, not having satisfied the bail conditions, he remains in custody at MCC, a prison that’s been unfavorably compared to Guantanamo Bay.
Were he to make bail, Meyer, who appears in court documents under the alias “Nicolas De-Meyer,” would be GPS-tracked by an ankle bracelet and not allowed to leave the county he dreamed of breaking away from as a charismatic kid who, his friends tell me, was fascinated by wealth.
Meyer concealed his Midwestern roots from his classmates at Vassar, where he studied art history in the hopes of one day opening an art gallery. Classmates I’ve talked to say they assumed, based on the expensive brands he wore, the mannerisms he adopted, and the crowds he ran with, that he was another New York City kid. He told some he was from Florida. It’s not a complete departure, Meyer’s Findlay High School friend Ryan Barton told me via text. His mother did vacation in Naples, Barton recalls, adding, “She probably just rented a condo.”
Partway through college, one friend recalls, Meyer also started to leave behind his real name: According to a classmate described to me by another as “inseparable” from Meyer during freshman year, he started telling everyone that his surname was actually “Von Meyer.” He claimed “Meyer” was a mistake, corrected those who used it, and requested a change on official forms. His senior yearbook lists a “N. Von Meyer” among the members of a club I’m told he belonged to, but it’s still “Nickolas Meyer” under his official photo. (Likewise, the college registrar turned up a Nickolas Meyer, class of ’99, art history major when I called them last month.) And he’s altogether absent from the yearbook’s senior directory: a list of names, addresses, and numbers compiled to help alumni keep in touch in the years before social media.
In the decades after college, a former classmate who crossed paths with Meyer, or “Von Meyer”, or “Nicolas De Meyer”—as he was calling himself by 2008, when he started working for Solomon—got the vague sense that he was a pampered jetsetter too polite to tell you outright that he didn’t have to work for a living. The same “inseparable” friend remembers running into him at their 15th reunion in Poughkeepsie. “As far as I understood, he had a boyfriend who was from Rome. I thought they were living together in New York, but I never met this person.” Attempted sleuthing turned up nothing: “Nickolas was not on a social media.”
Every year of college he graduated into another “fast” group of friends, variably described by those he left behind as “the theater crowd,” or the “mischievous” group that would run off to the city at every chance. “He hung out with this crowd that was sparkling, funny, laughing,” recalls Kelly Williams, who knew him from art history courses they took together. “They knew something was going on that the rest of us didn’t know.”
The fact that Meyer went on to work as a personal assistant for a billionaire banker seems to fit: For him, the right crowd and accoutrement were of foremost importance, while what lay beneath the surface stayed tightly concealed. “In a way he was someone who was, I wouldn’t say quiet, he was very gregarious—but he never divulged too many details about his past,” says the one “inseparable” friend. “He had more of a kind of smugness about him, and an air of being able to out-smart people or systems.”
Ryan Chaland, the North Carolina wine dealer who tells me he unwittingly purchased Solomon’s wines from Meyer for years—and then cooperated with the FBI in tracking him down—says these accounts from Meyer’s younger days don’t surprise him one bit. Chaland’s business, Wineliquidators.com, purchased wine stolen from the Napa Valley restaurant The French Laundry in 2014, so Meyer wasn’t the first wine thief Chaland has worked with. But he was the best, Chaland tells me.
“He was the best of the best of the best,” he says, describing meetings at Meyer’s Midtown apartment, where they’d sip espresso and strike deals. What did surprise Chaland, he says, was that Meyer was playing him all along: He used the previously reported alias “Mark Miller” when he reached out online and claimed he had wine to sell on behalf of a private and powerful boss whom he never named. Chaland describes himself now as the victim of a talented con artist. “He had a really good thing going for him apparently,” he says. “He screwed over his boss, he screwed over people like myself.”
Chaland, who says he visited Meyer’s apartment multiple times but more often dispatched drivers to collect bottles over the course of two years, claims he grew suspicious toward the end—although it was Meyer who abruptly stopped calling. “He was a very clean cut, super well-spoken gay guy in New York City,” Chaland says. When he turned out to have been a talented liar, “I was shocked. To this day, I’m still shocked.”
Another Nickolas Meyer associate I spoke to, however, sees these details of the saga as somewhat predictable. “It doesn’t surprise me that he was in that world at all,” says Kelly Williams, Meyer’s Vassar art history classmate. He had a talent for maintaining appearances and concealing unwanted details—valuable skills for a personal assistant. Williams, who lives in Nashville, has also worked as a personal assistant for many years for the great and the glittering, “Some of them in the entertainment business, some of them on the Fortune 500 list.” The Meyer she knew loved beautiful things and, though he would’ve loved to live in that world, wouldn’t have been content to live too long in the shadow of a great man.
“He was mysterious in some ways,” Williams recalls. “He was always really well dressed, impeccably dressed, always put together. His hair was always perfect.” He was so composed as to seem foreign from the normal ’90s-era grunge of college kids. “He had this radiating smile and presence about him so that you just knew he just had it together. And, you know, we’re 19 years old. That was something different. He’s different from us.”
And she understands the type of impulses Meyer might have felt. “You’re in these absurd situations as an employee, where you find yourself transporting someone’s wine collection that’s worth more money than you will ever see in your life.” She’s been there: “There are definitely moments I’ve been surrounded by stuff, or just in situations, and there’s this impulse: What if I just ran away?”
Williams describes the panic she felt when she accidently drove home with one of her boss’s designer gowns still in the backseat of her car—and the resentment-tinged relief when she realized her boss would never miss one dress out of several closets full. Her life was not her own.
As a personal assistant, “you’re living your life, but it’s a small part of somebody else’s life. It’s a weird, weird feeling.” In Williams’s years working for magnates and musicians, “I have definitely run across personal assistants who have lost touch with the fact that they’re not the person who they work for, that life is not their life.”
The Meyer she knew certainly seemed susceptible to that degree of dissociation. Especially if he aspired to have wealth of his own, she adds, how could he stand so many years tending to the trappings of someone else’s? Listening to Williams, an explanation of how Meyer might have turned to crime finally starts to crystallize. “It’s a job that burns you out pretty fast,” she tells me, adding that very few personal assistants stay with one family for as long as he did.
“It’s more common to find people who work for two, maybe three, years with one person and then switch jobs and work for another person.” Other personal assistants in a small discussion group she belongs to would feel the same, she says: “Five years is the longest that you would work with one family.” Meyer was with the Solomons for eight years, from 2008 until 2016. And for the last two, he was surreptitiously selling their wine to Ryan Chaland.
