By late 1997, he was staggering through a swing-from-the-heels divorce, with his wife claiming in court papers that he had tried to choke her to death. The two were now haggling over financial terms. Smart insisted that money was tight; he claimed he earned only $2,800 a month, all from his oil leases. His soon-to-be ex claimed that Smart was hiding assets and demanded alimony. The court ordered him to pay just $1,000 a month for 84 months. Smart, who was proud of his status as an active member of Trinity Baptist Church, was allowed to retain ownership of his plaque of the Ten Commandments.

In 1999, he founded an oil-lease company called Quest Minerals & Exploration, but that was a dry hole. According to its tax return, Quest had total revenue in 2003 of about $25,000, with expenses of more than $32,000.

Smart, it seemed, was never going to get rich in the oil business. But investigators say he came up with an easier way to extract money from holes in the ground. He had heard about a guy desperate to unload some cemeteries in Michigan. All Smart and his cohorts had to do was convince a few people that Clayton Smart was an oil millionaire. To create that illusion, somebody somewhere had to put up some serious cash. He was about to meet the perfect mark.

Anybody who did business with David Strauss could easily figure out his philosophy: Don’t lie, don’t break commitments, don’t get greedy. Simple rules, and since 1995, they had guided his accounting and finance company in Houston, Partners in Funding. The firm never rained profits, but it brought in enough to keep Strauss happy.

In 2003, though, he began to sense that his business was on the verge of a financial breakthrough. He had heard through the grapevine about an ­under-the-radar Oklahoma oil millionaire looking to do some big deals. This Clayton Smart sounded like the type of person Strauss wanted to work with.

Strauss first learned of the mystery man from a wheeler-dealer named Andrew Armstrong, whom he had met through another client. Armstrong told Strauss he was working with Smart and that Smart was itching to buy coal-mining operations, steel-fabrication companies, and even cemeteries. All of that would require a crackerjack accounting and finance team, and Armstrong dangled the possibility that Strauss might be the lucky guy selected to provide those services.

The financial opportunity wasn’t the only thing that attracted Strauss. He liked that both Smart and Armstrong were churchgoing men; why, Armstrong even kept the Ten Commandments posted on his front lawn, a sure sign to Strauss, a devout Christian, that these were honorable folk.

They weren’t. Armstrong, who could not be reached for comment, was under investigation for diverting money from the pension fund of an Iowa company; he’d eventually be locked up for that crime, but not until long after he’d helped Smart take Strauss for millions.

The private jet cut smoothly through vast stretches of deep blue, winging Clayton Smart, Andrew Armstrong, and David Strauss toward Lansing, Michigan, for a meeting with Craig Bush. When the plane landed at a private airport, Bush was waiting for them, along with Mark Singer, who worked with Deutsche Bank’s brokerage division. Strauss says that Smart introduced him as a member of the transition team for the cemeteries deal. Then, everyone except Strauss, who had apparently served his purpose, went off to negotiate.

Months of haggling followed, and the pressure to sell weighed on Bush. The cemeteries were drawing bad press and the ire of state regulators. Lax maintenance had led to leaking mausoleum roofs, and presold mausoleums weren’t being built. Bush wanted out.

Another adviser for Smart emerged in the negotiations: William Leyton, who presented himself as president of Strategic Bancorp in Beverly Hills. But Leyton, who could not be reached for comment, was another con artist, a man who had just been part of a $35 million fraud in Florida.