Con artist who swindled millions from developers worldwide performed his first scam in Naas in 1973

A Mayo man who swindled hundreds of people out of millions of euros across four continents began his illicit conning of gullible business people and vulnerable property buyers by leaving an unfinished development sitting in Naas in 1973.

Kevin McGeever, from Swinford in Mayo, hit national headlines in January 2013 when he emerged from eight months of 'captivity' in a dishevelled state in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim. It was eventually found out that McGeever had faked his own kidnapping, saying that he was bundled into the boot of a car by three men and held in captivity. He looked the part too, with long grey hair coupled with inch-long discoloured fingernails and weighing just 51 kilos after self-starvation. He also had the word thief misspelled as 'tief' in indelible ink on his forehead.

Brian Carroll's piece in today's Irish Daily Mail details the life of Mr McGeever over the past 40 years, which saw the Mayo businessman swindle money from investors in Australia, the US, Europe and the United Arab Emirates. He posed as a property developer, and double sold properties all over the world, while he also received money for properties that didn't even exist.

Carroll states in his story that McGeever's first noted con was when he left a small housing development unfinished in Naas, before jetting off from Dublin Airport and leaving a convertible Jaguar sports car abandoned in the airport car park. He was just 29 back then and went on to pull of some miraculous scams, selling one business in Sydney five times and eventually coming under the microscope of the FBI over an $8 million bank scam.

A documentary on Mr McGeever's life will be on RTÉ later this month and is titled We Need to Talk About Kevin.