King’s Road in Chelsea is the chic boutique boulevard of West London: the origin of 1960s style, where Mary Quant and Vivienne Westwood blew the world of fashion wide open.
It’s less accustomed to being a crime scene – not least to one of the most mysterious and notorious deaths in recent memory.
In the early hours of Easter Monday, the Metropolitan Police was called to the street after being told a semi-naked man was lying fatally injured on the pavement.
Little did they realise that the dying man, who had fallen from a second-floor window, was a playboy and convicted fraudster who had been wanted in the UK for years – and had been living under detectives’ noses for six months.
Karl Cronin, thought to be either 59 or 60, had been wanted by the Met since 2008 over a £5million property fraud that took in landlords across Chelsea, Fulham, Kensington and Putney.
He was alleged to have used 11 aliases to pose as the owner of rented properties in order to remortgage them, after which he would take the cash and flee.
Despite a Crimewatch appeal in 2008 in which he was named number one ‘most wanted’, he was never found by UK police.
‘He’s travelled the world living in all the best hotels. He has gambled all over Kensington and Chelsea in casinos. He’s a playboy,’ Detective Constable Leon Munday of the Met Police is said to have told the BBC programme.
He was, however, traced by the FBI, and spent a year in a US jail before he returned to the UK seemingly undetected.
Fraudster Karl Cronin evaded justice in the UK for 18 years despite being suspected of a multimillion pound property fraud – and openly shared his adventures on social media
Cronin is believed to have fallen from a second-storey window on the King’s Road in Chelsea (circled). Police are treating his death as ‘unexpected’
Before he was arrested in Budapest in 2024 to face trial in the US on money laundering charges, Cronin lived in Bali, Indonesia (pictured with a bikini-clad young woman)
That he was found by American detectives may not be hard to believe, as it does not appear that Cronin was hiding his whereabouts after just a few years on the run.
But it prompts fresh questions for the Metropolitan Police as to why they were unable to find him and bring him to justice at home.
The Daily Mail has identified a social media account belonging to Cronin that shows him hiding out in Dubai and latterly Indonesia, where he lived under the names Karl O’Connor and later Jonathan Carson.
His pictures show him living a playboy lifestyle, often with a possessive arm around a young bikini-clad woman, at the helm of an expensive car, or enjoying first-class air travel. Incredibly, he appeared to be giving away his location all the time.
In one 2014 photo, he is at Roberto’s, an Italian restaurant in Dubai. In 2016, he shared that he had visited Strasbourg in France.
Another picture, shared at the same time, appeared to show him posing with three women outside Westminster Abbey in London.
During this time, he was implicated in a high-profile 2017 fraud trial that led to a model and her mother being jailed.
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Laylah de Cruz and her mother Dianne Moorcroft conned elderly late heiress Margaret Gwenllian Richards – who has since died – to raise cash against her home.
De Cruz was said to have encouraged her mother to take part in the fraud at the behest of her lover, Karl Cronin, who had paid off a £161,000 debt for her in Dubai.
She was jailed for five years, and her mother for three. Prosecutors said that there would be ‘significant interest’ in Cronin were he to come back to Britain.
Despite the case being widely reported in the media, the fraudster was never tracked down by the Metropolitan Police then, either.
By 2020, he appeared to have relocated to south-east Asia, sharing images from the Four Seasons Hotel in Jakarta.
He also spent a great deal of time on the Indonesian island of Lombok, sharing images from Selong Belanak Beach and Milky Wave, a Japanese restaurant.
He even made a visit to Tel Aviv, Israel in 2023, and advertised it on social media.
Throughout, he appears with a selection of women half his age, often in swimwear. One image shows two in his bedroom, posing for the camera as he appears to take the image from his bed. He captioned it: ‘Pillow party.’
Karl Cronin is shown with a pair of women in a photograph shared on his social media
Cronin is seen posing with a Rolls Royce he appeared to have purchased in Dubai
Cronin appears to take a drink from a bottle of Dom Perignon vintage champagne at a nightclub in Dubai
After leaving Dubai, Cronin relocated to Indonesia, and is seen here on Selong Belanak Beach on the island of Lombok
An image Cronin appears to have taken from his bed of two women in swimwear, which he captioned: ‘Pillow party’
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on the part of those who socialised with Cronin, or that they had any clue as to his true identity.
But his world appears to have come crashing down 18 months ago, when he was arrested in central Europe extradited to the US to face money laundering charges.
In October 2024, after a court indictment was unsealed in New York, Cronin was arrested in Budapest, Hungary on suspicion of conspiracy to money launder.
He swapped the beaches of Bali for Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Centre, courtesy of the FBI, where he was held on pre-trial detention for the next year.
US prosecutors said he and a co-conspirator, Lee Cohen, laundered cash for an undercover federal agent posing as a stock promoter and set up shell companies in Singapore for future criminal endeavours.
In a recorded phone call Cronin told the agent: ‘When you send us the money, we will wash it, and supply the money into that company so it’s completely clean, and you’ve got full control.’
The FBI wired him $100,000 to launder, twice – and each time he sent just under $65,000 back, having taken a ‘fee’ of 35 per cent.
The case was marred with drama after he used an illegal mobile phone to send his lawyer Jeffrey Chabrowe photographs of a skin condition whilst in prison, having suffered a decline in his health.
He dropped Mr Chabrowe as his attorney – then sought to claim back the $35,000 retainer he had paid to his lawyer after Mr Chabrowe. The request was denied by the courts.
Cronin changed his plea to guilty on the money laundering charge on June 11 last year. He was then kept in prison until a sentencing hearing in October, whereupon he was released having been sentenced to time already served in prison.
Judge Natasha C Merle also made Cronin subject to a one-year supervision order and slapped the former playboy with a forfeiture order for $70,435.
To date, the only payment made towards the order appears to be the $9,900 US dollars and small amounts of Thai and Indonesian currency that were taken from him upon his arrest in Budapest.
Cronin is then thought to have returned to the UK a month later, and had been living in the Chelsea flat for a short time before his death.
Cronin shared an image of himself with three women outside what appears to be Westminster Abbey. It is not known when the photo was taken
Most of Cronin’s photographs show him posing with young women. There is no suggestion of any improper conduct on their part, nor that they knew of Cronin’s true identity
Karl Cronin appeared in a 2008 Crimewatch appeal (top left), in which he was described as the number one ‘most wanted’ that month
Laylah De Cruz was convicted of a property fraud in which Cronin was implicated. She had been his lover in Dubai and a court was told he paid off a six-figure debt on her behalf
How he had evaded justice for so long is a question to be asked of the Met, which did not appear to know that he was back in London.
But many of those who knew him are not mourning him today.
One told the Chelsea Citizen, which first identified Cronin as the dead man on King’s Road: ‘He did a lot of bad things in his life and destroyed many, many lives. He lived through lies and deceit and he had a ruthless streak.
‘All he cared about was money, dating young women, and having a good time. It did not matter who got hurt along the way.
‘There have been a lot of people laughing that his life has ended this way. There’s the feeling that he got what he deserved.’
Another friend added: ‘He was a loveable rogue, almost like an Arthur Daley figure. He was always good company, the life and soul of a party and someone who was living life to the full.
‘But he caused a lot of damage, there is no doubt about that.’
The Metropolitan Police is treating the death as ‘unexpected’. However, the force has today declined to answer questions on why Cronin had been able to live under the radar in the UK for so long.
A spokesperson said: ‘At around 05:00hrs on Monday, 6 April, police attended King’s Road, Chelsea where a man was located with serious injuries after a fall from height.
‘Officers called the London Ambulance Service and performed emergency first aid. Sadly, the man in his 50s was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics. His next of kin have been informed.
‘His death is being treated as unexpected and an investigation is ongoing.’
