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The hunt for 'UK's Wolf of Wall Street': Unsolved murder, £64m scam, and fugitive son - The Mirror


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Daily Mirror

EXCLUSIVE: The hunt for 'UK's Wolf of Wall Street': Unsolved murder, £64m scam, and fugitive son

£64m fraudster Anthony Constantinou is at the centre of an international police manhunt and is suspected of faking his own death in Mexico

Anthony Constantinou was three-years-old when his glamorous mother ran from their home in a cocktail dress and flagged down a passing motorcyclist. "Someone has shot my husband. Please help me," sobbed Elena Constantinou.


The stranger rushed into the 10-bedroom mansion on London’s Millionaires' Row and found Anthony's father, Aristos, lying dead in his private chapel. It became known as the 'silver bullet murder' because the rags-to-riches fashion tycoon had been killed with six bullets in polished nickel jackets, four shots to the body and one in each temple. Forty years on, the case remains unsolved.


The horrific scenes that unfolded in the early hours of New Year's Day in 1985 shed some light on how Anthony came to become one of Britain's most wanted men. Police are using new powers as the net closes in on the crook, described as “Britain’s Wolf of Wall Street”, after he vanished two years ago while on trial for a £64m in a Ponzi-style scam.


He is the focus of an international manhunt after being convicted in his absence of a string of fraud offences at Southwark Crown Court in June 2023. Constantinou, now 42, fled the UK before he was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment, and has been ordered to pay back £64m or face more jail time.

Interpol has issued a silver notice against him, one of the first obtained for a UK suspect. The new powers allow detectives to trace and seize his overseas assets, such as cars or properties.


Dept Commissioner Nik Adams, of the City of London Police, said: "This is a significant step forward in our commitment to delivering justice and compensating the many victims of Constantinou. We recognise the profound impact this has had on those involved, and we are actively working to ensure they receive the compensation they deserve.

"Through close partnership, working both nationally and with our international counterparts, we will now work to recover potential assets held abroad and apply to confiscate them."


Constantinou’s whereabouts are unknown, but police previously thought him to be in Turkey or Dubai after he was stopped in Bulgaria with a fake Spanish passport. He also has links to Greece, Cyprus and Mexico.

It was reported last year that a death certificate appeared to show he died of a heart attack in the central American country. But sources close to the investigation this week told the Daily Mirror that Constantinou is still the focus of an "active manhunt" with inquiries to locate him "ongoing".


We can reveal that the City of London Police has handed the search to their colleagues at the Metropolitan Police who are being assisted by authorities across the world. The force declined to comment on the case on Thursday.

After Aristos' murder, Elena took Anthony and his brothers to live in the US. He later returned to the UK and, after working for a pharmaceutical company for two years, got his first job in the City.

By the age of 34, Constantinou's foreign exchange trading firm - Capital World Markets - appeared to be booming. Investors were promised huge returns and he rapidly made a fortune.


With it came all the trappings of success. He spent £2.5m on his wedding on the Greek island of Santorini and more than £70,000 on his son's first birthday party. Constantinou splashed £427,000 on private jet trips and luxury cars lined the driveway of his rented Hampstead home, close to where his father had been killed.

CWM had high-profile sponsorship deals with Chelsea Football Club, Wigan Warriors rugby league club, Honda Moto GP, Cyclone Boxing Promotions and the London Boat Show. But it was all a front for a huge fraud that began to emerge in 2015 - around the same time Constantinou was accused of sex offences.


He was jailed the following year for molesting two women in an atmosphere of "sexual bullying" likened at the Old Bailey to the Hollywood film The Wolf Of Wall Street. In Martin Scorsese's blockbuster, Leonardo DiCaprio's trader boss character Jordan Belfort takes vast amounts of drugs while cavorting with prostitutes and engaging in rampant corruption and fraud.

Women who worked for Constantinou described something similar. They said he would throw wads of cash at staff, pour champagne over their heads and bully young employees into downing bottles of Grey Goose vodka. He pushed one victim up against the frosted glass of the office reception and went on to grope and kiss her against her will, a court heard.

While on bail for the attack, he assaulted another woman during drinks after a business meeting, shoving a chunk of Japanese hot wasabi paste in her mouth. Around the same time in 2015 CWM's office was raided by police after a tip off about the fraud and the business shut down.


In the corridor on the 21st floor of Heron Tower in the City of London were two leather chairs that once belonged to his father. "If anyone sat down on them, he'd get so upset," a former employee said. "Even the cleaners weren't allowed to touch them."

By that time, Anthony was estranged from his mother, who lives in Cyprus, with her third husband. According to the former employee, Anthony, like his paternal uncle Achilleas, believed that his mother was involved in his father's murder. She has always maintained her innocence. Elena said in 2002: "I have done all I can do to help the police. I have nothing to hide."

Anthony and his two older brothers had been staying with their grandparents when Aristos was killed. A year after the murder and having married Florida lifeguard Tim Nugent, Elena, then 28, told Hornsey coroner's court that the couple had returned from a New Year's Eve party to their home on The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead.


She was taking off her fur coat in the bedroom when she heard her 42-year-old husband scream downstairs, she said. Elena turned and saw a man in black. Close to tears she said: "He had a mask on... a monster type, like a deformed face."

She told the court that the man demanded the keys to the safe and then attacked her when she tried to run back to her bedroom where her husband kept a shotgun. She claimed she recognised the man's voice, something she had never previously mentioned.

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Two of the three men subsequently arrested had worked for her husband. They were never charged. The murder caused a bitter rift between Elena and the Constantinou family that remains to this day.

Talking to the Sunday Mirror from her home in the Cypriot capital of Nicosia in 2002, Elena said she had done all she could to help the police solve the case. And she added: "The children are now old enough to make up their own minds. All I can say is that they loved their father."

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