In certain circles, Nelson Holdo was the go-to guy for fine jewelry and luxury watches.
He ingratiated himself with the wealthy, touting his charitable donations and trips to Geneva, the world’s watchmaking capital. He hosted extravagant poker nights where players smoked cigars and cashed out chips toward pieces worn by roving models. Clients offered glowing referrals to friends.
And so, they trusted him to brighten their special days. A father of three wired him $38,700 for three Rolexes — Christmas gifts for his kids after he beat non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A groom paid $27,000 for two Rolex Datejust watches for his father and his future father-in-law. A couple fell in love with a 3.6-carat diamond, splurging $60,000 for their engagement.
But for some, when it came time to settle up, Holdo was full of excuses. The gems never materialized.
As lawsuits piled up — dozens, over the decades — Holdo started new businesses in new places. More recently, even after prosecutors filed criminal charges accusing him of stealing from his customers, he made deals while free on bail.
Nelson Holdo at his arraignment at Harbor Justice Center on June 1 in Newport Beach.
(Scott Strazzante / For The Times)
“Over the years, people told me not to trust him,” said Loretta Savery, whose husband gave her a diamond ring from Holdo’s store for their 20th wedding anniversary in 2008. After all that time, her diamond still sparkled in the sun. So she had no qualms about seeking Holdo out last year for a gift for her future daughter-in-law.
“Turns out,” she said, “he is a crook.”
In an interview at an Orange County jail last week, Holdo said he is “100% innocent” and confident he’ll be cleared after presenting the facts to a jury. Holdo, who wore an orange “OC Jail” sweater and spoke from behind a plexiglass barrier, did not give specifics, saying it would be inappropriate to comment while the prosecutions are ongoing.
“The story that I need to tell needs to come out in a courtroom, not in a newspaper article,” he said.
Holdo’s attorney, George Newhouse, declined to comment to The Times. At a recent court hearing, Newhouse argued that Holdo had business problems and was short on cash — but he wasn’t a criminal.
“What really this amounts to, by the way, are breaches of contract,” Newhouse said.
Born in Pasadena in 1959 to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Argentina, Holdo was working his way through Caltech, studying organic chemistry, when his boss at a retail jewelry store offered to pay for him to study gemology.
He dropped out of Caltech and obtained a diploma from the Gemological Institute of America in 1981. Caltech confirmed he was a student there, and the Gemological Institute confirmed that he graduated.
After working at jewelry retailers through the 1980s, Holdo opened Asanti Fine Jewellers, which state business records show he incorporated in 1994. Around that time, he became certified as a gemologist appraiser through the American Gem Society.
Robin Sateriale was an investor of Asanti Fine Jewelers, the San Marino store of Nelson Holdo that closed in 2010.
(Michael Owen Baker/For The Times)
“Nelson had the best eye for colored stones that I’ve ever seen,” said Robin Sateriale, an Asanti investor who said he loaned Holdo hundreds of thousands of dollars. “He didn’t need to see a certificate on a stone to tell you if it was heated or treated in any way.”
And he played the part. A gregarious man who wore fine suits, French cuffs and expensive watches, Holdo dined often at Arroyo Chop House and attended swanky galas. In what some understood to be a wink and a nod to clients shopping for multiple women, he equated his commitment to customer confidentiality to the attorney-client privilege.
“What happens at Asanti stays at Asanti,” he told Instore magazine in 2009 about his San Marino store, which also had a small boutique inside the Langham Huntington in Pasadena, formerly the Ritz-Carlton.
In a 1995 article in JCK, another industry magazine, Holdo offered tips for a successful business. They included reading books like “Selling to the Affluent,” being visible at events for rich people and reading enough to be able to converse with them on subjects that might seem trivial, such as vacation spots.
Michael Merritt and Maria Dietz outside a now closed Mimi et Cie Fine Jewelers in Pasadena.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
“He really, really, really wanted to be looked at like a Harry Winston,” said Michael Merritt, a jeweler who owned part of Asanti during its early years. “He really wanted to live a lifestyle that these incredibly wealthy people could afford to live, and like to me, I don’t live that way — I’m a merchant.”
Yet Holdo’s financial problems started early on.
Ashley Brown worked for a firm that designed an annual holiday catalog in the late 1990s and early 2000s featuring Holdo and other jewelers across the country. She remembered that he was slow to settle the bills, sending incremental payments until the next year’s catalog. “We were always having to pull money out of him,” she said.
Soon after Sara Geiling took on an accounting role at Asanti, she said she noticed that Holdo “kited” checks between different bank accounts, moving the amounts back and forth to inflate his balance as the checks were processing. He signed in Sharpie with big loops over the account and routing numbers, which she suspected he did to obscure the information and slow down the banks’ staff. At one point, vendors began calling her to complain that they hadn’t been paid.
(Los Angeles Superior Court Archives and Records Center)
By 2001, lawsuits had begun trickling in. A judge that year found that Holdo engaged in “check kiting” with Citizens Business Bank and Community Bank. In 2005, two lenders sued Holdo for failing to pay back money he borrowed.
Around that time, Holdo owed about 25 note holders nearly $5 million, according to Sateriale as well as Asanti records attached to later court filings. Sateriale told The Times that he and a friend offered to buy up all the notes for 75 cents on the dollar and take over the store, with Holdo running it. But Holdo declined.
Financial turmoil dominated the company in private. Emails from a bookkeeper in 2005 reviewed by The Times point to “huge reconciliation issues” and cash flow struggles.
In public, however, Holdo spent lavishly.
He bought billboards and advertisements in Town & Country, Geiling said. On several occasions, he flew employees out on a Friday night for steak dinners in Las Vegas, treating them to Opus One wine, cash to gamble and rooms at the Venetian, a hot new hotel at the time, she said. They then took an early flight Saturday to get back in time for their weekend shifts at the store.
“We never paid a dime,” Geiling said.
In the 2009 interview, Holdo boasted of selling a 20-carat D-flawless diamond for $1.3 million.
“I called a guy I knew could afford it who had become a reasonably good client by that time, and I went into his office and sold it to him,” Holdo said. “It’s not like he came in looking for it.”
Behind the scenes, investors were growing increasingly frustrated. In a March 2010 letter drafted for noteholders reviewed by The Times, Holdo said that business was battered by the economic recession — 2008 was the worst Christmas season in 10 years, and the following December was only marginally better.
“If Asanti is to survive, I need you to believe in your own store, and to speak well of it to your friends and acquaintances. It is the only hope for all the shareholders involved,” Holdo wrote.
He went on to offer them store credit. Customers sometimes received “fantastic” deals from Holdo because he was so desperate for money, Sateriale said.
One investor, Petros Kitsos, said in court filings that he lent Asanti $600,000 so Holdo could buy several pieces, including an emerald necklace and matching earrings. When the money was due, Kitsos said, Holdo told him it had actually gone toward operating expenses. Kitsos sued in 2010, saying he had been repaid only $120,000, and a judge allowed authorities to seize the remainder from the store.
Asanti declared bankruptcy a couple of weeks later, pausing the Kitsos case, and closed its doors.
According to court filings, Kitsos testified that Holdo was running a Ponzi scheme, borrowing from new investors to pay off old investors while funding his own lifestyle. Kitsos declined to comment for this article.
Nelson Holdo and his wife, Meshell Sohl, attend a car show at the Balboa Bay Resort in 2024.
(Niki Cram Photography)
Holdo’s wife, Meshell Sohl, started as an employee at Asanti and became vice president in 2004. They were engaged in Paris in 2007 and married six months later.
In the 2009 magazine interview, he called her his “secret weapon.” “It’s rare that we meet someone we can’t sell together,” he said.
Reached by phone, Sohl declined to comment.
By the time Asanti filed for bankruptcy, paperwork for a new business, Mimi et Cie, LLC, was already in the works. Sohl started the new store that month in Pasadena.
Holdo worked at Black, Starr & Frost, a jewelry company in Newport Beach, for about three years, according to his LinkedIn profile and customers. He eventually became more involved at Mimi et Cie, which Sohl sold to him in 2020, according to the store’s website.
Soon after, Holdo moved with his family to Newport Beach and joined the exclusive Balboa Bay Club. In 2023, LA Gems Private Jewelers was formed, and Holdo organized a new business called Brivetti in a quaint office along East Coast Highway in Corona del Mar in 2024. The Mimi et Cie store closed in late 2024.
The complaints began ramping up again — this time, mostly from customers.
In 2020, Maria Dietz was fighting breast cancer when she got in touch with Holdo, whom she had met at a dinner party a couple of years earlier. As medical bills and school tuition for her two daughters accumulated, the Pasadena resident was looking to sell her Rolex Datejust watch.
She left the watch with Holdo at Mimi et Cie. In the days that followed, she was overcome with regret. She called and said she had changed her mind. It was too late, he told her — he had already sold it for $10,000.
He paid her, she said, but she felt duped. Since it was 18-karat solid gold, the watch was unique, and she thought it was worth more than triple that price.
Maria Dietz’s 18-karat gold Rolex Datejust watch.
(Maria Dietz)
Dietz moved on from the debacle until five years later, last September, when a Facebook message from a stranger caught her attention: “Did you recently purchase any diamonds or jewelry from jeweler Nelson Holdo?”
Dietz learned that the woman was a single mom who needed some extra money and had decided to part with a beloved heirloom — a platinum 2.63-carat cushion cut diamond ring from Tiffany & Co. that she said had been purchased for $80,000. The woman reluctantly gave it to Holdo at his Brivetti office in May of last year. She was about to travel, and he assured her it would be locked in an “virtually impenetrable” safe when not with him: “Much safer with me than it is with you I promise you,” he texted, according to screenshots reviewed by The Times.
The woman was in no rush to sell the ring, and if Holdo wasn’t able to get a solid offer, she wanted it back, she said in an interview. Eventually, he convinced her that she wouldn’t be able to get more than $30,000, and she agreed to sell.
She went to pick up her check, and strangely, Holdo asked her to wait a few days before depositing it, a request he kept trying to extend. Then, the check bounced, she said. She later noticed that it wasn’t even dated.
The woman said she went to the Newport Beach police and was told it was merely a contract dispute. She started messaging Holdo’s Facebook and Instagram friends.
She and Dietz teamed up, cold-calling people who had sued Holdo and making a spreadsheet for detectives.
Dietz kept hearing the same thing — victims were embarrassed or ambivalent about going to the police. Or authorities told them that the situation should be resolved in civil court. She found out that Holdo had already been charged with grand theft in Orange County in 2023 and in L.A. County in February of last year. He has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
Maria Dietz wearing her Rolex.
(Photo courtesy of Maria Dietz)
The Times interviewed more than a dozen clients and investors who said they were cheated by Holdo, some of whom asked to remain anonymous because they did not want to be associated with him.
Danielle Dear, an alleged victim in the L.A. County case, treated herself to a $16,000 Rolex Batgirl in 2023, never received it, then saw Holdo advertising the same watch — using the exact same photo — on Instagram more than a year later, she said at a March court hearing and in an interview with The Times. After Dear left a comment calling Holdo a thief, she testified at the hearing, he called her from an unknown number saying that he is licensed to carry a concealed weapon and knows where she lives.
Other alleged victims in the L.A. County case included a Texas couple who bought an eternity ring from Mimi et Cie in 2013 and stored it there for possible consignment, a detective testified. In 2023, the husband asked for a photo because his wife thought she might want the ring back.
Sohl told the husband that she had already sold it to a man planning to propose, according to screenshots of their text exchanges reviewed by The Times.
“He will be asking her over the holidays. Hopefully it’s a yes!” Sohl wrote in November of that year. Sohl said the ring sold for $25,000, which matched what the couple had paid many years earlier. “I had to give him a discount because he has family in the industry,” Sohl texted.
The detective testified that Sohl, who is not charged in the case, went on to tell the husband that she no longer ran the business and that Holdo would help him get paid, which never happened.
“This overall plan and scheme and objective is to, essentially, live his life victim to victim as a Ponzi scheme,” L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Frances Young said at the hearing.
In an interview with the detective in November 2024, Holdo said he was facing financial hardships and personal issues, and was aiming to pay his clients back by the end of the year, the detective testified at the hearing.
As word got around, Dietz connected with other victims in unexpected places.
Her hair salon passed along some names. On the operating table during a breast reconstruction surgery, she said, she found out that an uncle of a nurse in the room lost $32,000 after buying a Rolex Yacht-Master from Holdo that never arrived. A manicurist sent Savery, whose husband gave her the diamond ring for their 20th anniversary, her way.
During a mani-pedi last Halloween, Savery told The Times, she vented that she had paid $5,000 for ruby earrings to welcome her future daughter-in-law to the family, but the jeweler never delivered.
He blamed delays on the manufacturer’s summer vacation. Then a wrong shipping address. When he failed to provide the earrings by her deadline, he promised a refund in a text message, which was reviewed by The Times. But she never got her money back.
The manicurist later recounted the tale to another client.
“Was it Nelson Holdo?” the client asked, according to Savery.
There were many more: Brown, who used to handle Holdo’s ads in holiday catalogs, said she bought a Rolex for her cousin’s friend as a favor and, since she was the middleman, had to dip into her retirement fund to pay him back more than $40,000.
Thomas Hill, a watch broker, ate the cost of a 2013 Rolex Milgauss he bought for his client, a retired police officer. “My reputation is worth more than $9,000 to me,” he told The Times.
Another man’s engagement ring wasn’t ready in time for a trip to Europe where he intended to pop the question. For the entirety of the weeklong trip, he told The Times, Holdo was promising to fly out and personally deliver the ring. Holdo never showed up, and the man proposed without it.
A man in Corona del Mar wired Brivetti $60,000 in September for a 3.6-carat, cushion modified brilliant diamond for an engagement ring for his girlfriend of six years. He showed The Times his full text message correspondence with Holdo, as well as the statement he provided to Newport Beach police and an invoice from Holdo purporting to show the purchase of a stone from an unidentified supplier.
Over the course of three weeks after the purchase, Holdo leaned on the familiar excuses. Shipping delays were due to the Yom Kippur and Sukkot holidays. Then, he snapped a photo behind the wheel, saying he was braving Friday afternoon traffic to L.A. to pick up the stone. An hour and a half or so later, Holdo claimed he found a note on the door saying the dealer was closed through Columbus Day.
The following Thursday, Holdo texted another traffic photo, followed by a video of him ringing a doorbell with no response.
“I want my money back tomorrow. period. Or I’m going to the police,” the man texted back. “I’m dead serious.”
The Times identified the business where Holdo rang the bell. A man there said he did not know Holdo and does not work with anyone in Orange County.
Mary Pat Earl speaks with Supervising Deputy Atty. Gen. Sterling Winchester after a hearing.
(Scott Strazzante / For The Times)
As he was getting heat from the Corona del Mar man, Holdo appealed to a longtime client, Mary Pat Earl, saying he needed $60,000 to buy a diamond for another client who wanted to pay at the time of delivery.
“None of my friends and family usual suspects are liquid at the moment to help close this deal,” he wrote, saying she’d make $6,000 off the deal. “God, I really need a bank line of credit.”
Earl declined. Months later, Holdo urged her to sell him three gold coins he said he needed for a client, and she did. He then stopped payment on the check he gave her, she said, eventually giving her only $2,500 of the $15,300 he owed.
At some point, Dietz learned that Holdo had caught the attention of the state attorney general’s office — and she routed the victims she met to investigators.
By mid-April, Earl was livid. Holdo wasn’t returning texts or calls. She said she resorted to leaving notes on the door of his office in Corona del Mar, and one day, noticed his belongings were gone.
She posted a message on his Facebook page.
“Does anybody know how to reach Nelson Haldo?” Earl wrote, misspelling his name. “His voicemail is full and he moved out of his office and he bounced a check for $15,300.”
Soon, she learned why he was impossible to reach. He had been in jail for the last two weeks, arrested the day after he sent her the $2,500 payment. During that time, his wife, Sohl, filed for divorce.
Based partly on evidence from the victims Dietz had referred, the state attorney general has charged Holdo, 66, with more than two dozen counts of grand theft and other financial crimes, saying he stole nearly $1.5 million from his clients, including allegations that he committed some of the crimes while on bail. He has pleaded not guilty.
Dietz now tracks court dates and provides updates to a growing network of victims, some of whom have showed up to the hearings.
In the interview at Theo Lacy Facility in Orange, Holdo said he lost his wife, his home and his mother, who died, during his first month in jail. He did not answer a question about how he used the money his clients gave him, asking a reporter to hold off on publishing a story until the trial.
When asked how he was faring, he sighed heavily, looked down and paused for a long time, struggling to find words.
A judge in the state attorney general’s prosecution decided that if Holdo posted bail, set at $500,000, he’d have to prove he didn’t obtain the funds illegally.
At a hearing earlier this month, Holdo’s public defender requested that he be released on his own recognizance, arguing that his family is in Southern California, he has no assets in his name, no money in his bank account, no cars and no home.
He would be willing to turn over his passport, the public defender said, and abstain from jewelry and watch sales. The judge was not swayed. Holdo remains behind bars.
