Fantasist. Violent crook. So how DID he marry a billionaire’s daughter?

NOT so long ago, James Casbolt was one of the select guests at a gala dinner in New York. He cut a dash in his tuxedo, sipping champagne and enjoying the company of some of the wealthiest people on the planet. The de Rothchilds were at the black-tie function. So, too, was billionaire tycoon Sir David Tang, a friend of Prince Charles, along with steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal.

The charity evening at Sotheby’s, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, was hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough to raise funds for the restoration of Blenheim Palace, the ancestral family seat in Oxfordshire.

A table at the exclusive do cost $10,000 — small change to those who attended.

So what were James Casbolt’s credentials for being at such an event? As the daughter of billionaire Hank Meijer, co-chairman of a giant American supermarket chain, glamorous blonde Haley Meijer Casbolt was his entree into a gilded world. How else, to put it bluntly, would James Casbolt, who was neither rich nor famous, have been mingling with society figures from both sides of the Atlantic?

Given what has happened since, the same question must be uppermost in the minds of many in Ms Meijer’s jet-set circle.

But then, no one at that event four years ago could have imagined the kind of man James Casbolt really was, still less the extraordinary and disturbing chain of events that would unfold shortly after the soiree.

Those events reached their denouement this week when Casbolt appeared in the dock in his native Cornwall.

The judge at Truro Crown Court, a man not given to hyperbole, called him ‘evil’ before jailing him for 12 years for blackmailing Haley, from whom he had split in 2013.

Casbolt had demanded money in exchange for removing sexually explicit pictures of his estranged wife from the internet. The 39-year-old had told her family that, if his demands were not met, he could ‘tickle the public interest for years’.

And Haley was not his only victim. He also stalked two young British women — offences reflected in the severity of his sentence.

The story of how James Casbolt, a loner from St Ives, inveigled himself into, then proceeded to terrorise, a super-rich American dynasty (Hank Meijer and his brother Doug are worth £ 5.5 billion, according to Forbes magazine) has the elements of a psychological drama and, at times, a spoof spy film.

For Casbolt, as absurd as it may now seem, portrayed himself as a British version of Jason Bourne, the fictional CIA assassin played by Matt Damon in the Bourne movies, to attract and manipulate women.

His CV posted on the internet reads like a cod Secret Service file: ‘Name: James Casbolt. Rank: Commander. Military bases worked: Boscombe Down, RAF Lakenheath.’

Casbolt goes on to claim that he worked for MI6 and a string of other intelligence agencies and, during his career with the security services, took part in sinister government programmes to create genetically engineered ‘super soldiers’.

Along the way, he says, he suffered amnesia (just like Jason Bourne, funnily enough).

It is difficult to believe that, in the cold light of day, anyone could believe such far-fetched tales.

But one of those taken in by ‘ Commander’ Casbolt was Haley Meijer, who went on to have a son with him. The two-year-old lives with her in the U.S.

Sadly for Haley, there was only one thing her husband did have in common with a secret service operative: he was ‘extremely dangerous’. These are the judge’s words, not mine.

Casbolt was just 15 when he came to the attention of the police — for an armed robbery on a Spar supermarket in Carbis Bay, near his home in St Ives.

His previous conviction emerged during the latest court case. Few details were given, but Casbolt boasts about the robbery in his ‘ autobiography’, which is still posted on the internet. Who knows if his former wife knew of its existence or ever took the trouble to read it? If she had, surely she would have been chilled to the bone.

‘I stuck my replica Beretta [pistol] in the face of the girl behind the till and demanded the money,’ writes Casbolt.

‘My friend made a few of the people, who were standing around, go to the back of the shop as he held them at gunpoint.

‘The girl went pale and became unresponsive as I demanded the money. I jumped over the counter and tried to open the till myself. I didn’t know what button to press, so I began to push randomly.

‘An alarm went off on the till and people in the back of the shop began to shout. I panicked. We ran out of the shop and ran home.

‘We told my father what we’d done and he seemed very proud of me. My father hid the replica guns at the back of the flat for us.

‘The next day, the robbery was on the local news and my father seemed even more proud of me.’

His father’s reaction is easier to understand when you learn a little more about his history.

Ostensibly, Peter Casbolt ran a ‘business’ importing antiques. But it was just a front. In reality, he was a drug-dealing gangster with a string of properties on the Costa del Crime.

He spent much of his life in and out of prison. He died, aged 53, from drink and drug-induced liver failure in 2003.

Like father, like son, in other words. The two may have pursued different criminal paths, but they seemed to have shared the same psychotic streak.

James Casbolt eventually served 28 days at Feltham Young Offenders Institution for the robbery at the Spar supermarket. He never really looked back.

Any chance he had to make something of his life disappeared when his parents split up when he was 17. He left Cornwall to live with his father and his second wife in Reading, Berkshire. He acquired a stepbrother in the process. Simon Millward is now 33 and spoke to us this week.

He was reluctant to tell us everything he knew, but said James spent the remainder of his teenage years and his 20s ‘ducking and diving for his father’ and ‘smoking too much pot’. He said James had never had a proper job.

‘I’ve seen all the stuff James has been writing online about M16,’ he said. ‘It’s to impress women. It’s amazing how many people have been taken in by it.

‘James is a very intelligent guy and that’s how he roped people in.’

By the time he met Haley Meijer via the internet in 2009, Casbolt, who has a 13-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, had built up a dedicated online following for his outlandish claims and adventures.

But how did he worm his way into the life of someone so privileged? Haley’s family home in Michigan, until her parents’ divorce a few years ago, was a mansion with a marbled hallway, central winding staircase, sun room with grand piano, wine cellar, gym and home cinema.

Casbolt, by contrast, had returned to Cornwall following his father’s death and was living with his mother

‘I stuck my replica gun in the face of the girl at the till’ ‘Pay me £2 million or your family won’t be safe’