FALL OF A WINE CON MAN

Charming deceiver took fatal leap as his $1.2M vino scam came uncorked

ON Tuesday, at 2:38 p.m., a naked Nicolas DeMeyer, 41, flashed one last smile at the security guards at The Carlyle hotel before jumping from his 33rd-floor window.

He leaped eight minutes after he was scheduled to appear before a Manhattan federal judge for stealing $1.2 million worth of rare wines from Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon.

DeMeyer’s body struck a 17thfloor balcony with such force that half of his body landed on a terrace two floors below.

It was a tragic end to a yearslong saga of deception, during which DeMeyer spent 14 months globe-trotting and evading arrest.

From 2014 to 2016, DeMeyer, working as the Solomon family’s personal assistant, pilfered more than 500 bottles of wine from his boss’ collection, including seven bottles of Domaine de la RomanéeConti, which Solomon bought for $133,650, court papers say.

DeMeyer sold them to a North Carolina-based wine broker, Ryan Chaland. By November 2016, Solomon had been alerted that his vintage assets were on the market.

Realizing he was going to be caught, DeMeyer met with Solomon and Solomon’s then-wife, Mary, that Nov. 8 as the couple dined at Locanda Verde, a source said, and confessed. He promised to meet Mary at a bank the next day to pay back part of the money.

Instead, an hour and a half later, DeMeyer was at JFK Airport, preparing to flee the country, prosecutors say. He charged a $5,300 Alitalia ticket to Rome on his American Express card and embarked on a whirlwind tour with stops in Capri, Casablanca, Marrakesh, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. He was arrested on Jan. 16, 2018, after landing in Los Angeles. At his bail hearing, DeMeyer said an ex-boyfriend was helping him get a job at an art gallery in California.

He got a jail cell instead.

Afamily friend of the Solomons says the Goldman Sachs CEO is shocked by DeMeyer’s theft and, now, his suicide.

“It’s so weird how little you know someone,” Solomon told the friend last week after learning of his former assistant’s death.

But those close to DeMeyer say the Findlay, Ohio, native has been deceiving people since his highschool days.

“Appearance and people’s opinions and money and material things were always very important to him,” said a high-school friend, Andrew Fitzpatrick, 40, who lives in New York City

“If he’s going to pull a scam, it’s going to be a very ‘I stole rare vintage wine’ kind of a scam, a kind of ‘f- -k you’ to everybody. He had a big chip on his shoulder, like a lot of people do who grew up in small towns. We want to be more than we are.”

DeMeyer grew up with his divorced mother, who runs a selfstorage business, and a stepfather.

“He was charming. That was his big thing,” Fitzpatrick said, noting he was voted “Best Dressed” in high school and drove a Mustang. “He was always good at kissing up to someone. No one ever felt that they could trust him.”

Fitzpatrick said DeMeyer was obsessed with his own appearance and that of his friends.

“He tried to be sophisticated and classy. I was probably a bit of a project for him,” Fitzpatrick said. “He bought me a Gucci watch at one point to wear. At least he said it was Gucci. With him, who knows?”

In high school, DeMeyer was known as Nickolas Meyer. According to The Weekly Standard, during college he set out to reinvent himself, claiming that Nicolas Von Meyer was his real name and that the Meyer listed on his official forms was an error. By the time he began working for the Solomons in 2008, he had changed his name to DeMeyer.

Fitzpatrick said DeMeyer kept his homosexuality under wraps throughout high school.

“We would sneak out and go to Toledo and go dancing in the gay clubs,” he said. “We would talk about art and wanting to get out of town and wanting to get to college so bad and go into big cities.”

DeMeyer’s wish came true when he enrolled at Vassar to pursue a BA in art history.

College classmates told The Weekly Standard that DeMeyer went to great lengths to conceal his humble Midwestern roots, telling some he hailed from Florida and dressing in designer clothes.

“He was mysterious in some ways,” Kelly Williams, who studied art history with DeMeyer at Vassar, told The Weekly Standard. “He had this radiating smile and presence about him.”

THE guise apparently worked. In 2008, the Vassar grad was hired as a personal assistant by Solomon, then co-head of Goldman Sachs’ investmentbanking division. According to the source, Solomon used a staffing agency to recruit DeMeyer.

“It was primarily a job working for Mary,” the family friend said. “There was an affinity between them.”

A Solomon insider said DeMeyer worked out of the family’s home at The San Remo on Central Park West. (Solomon sold the spread for $24 million in 2016. He and Mary divorced this year.)

“He was a trusted confidant of the family,” the insider said. Mary would even let DeMeyer and his boyfriend shack up at the Solomons’ Hamptons house during the off-season on the weekends.

One of DeMeyer’s responsibili-