Doctors Dean and Dana Deville were a pair of alleged diet ‘experts’ who became the target of a particularly elaborate con by the gang in Series 8's Eat Yourself Slender.
Character History[]
Although they presented themselves as official dieticians, even a casual inspection of their facilities revealed no sign that anyone there paid real attention to dietary and hygiene standards, and their ‘doctorates’ were acquired mail-order from a college in Taiwan, with Sean noting that Doctor Pepper was better qualified than the Devilles. Despite their lack of qualifications, the Devilles spent years staying just a few key steps ahead of official regulations, such as selling their ‘Eat Yourself Slender’ plan by marketing it as advisory so that they couldn’t legally be sued for a plan that actually caused people to gain weight rather than lose it. They had a large art collection, but this was done mainly for plans of future financial gain rather than any real interest in the art itself.
The Devilles came to the gang’s attention when Carol, a fellow grafter using the Eat Yourself Slender plan, not only gained weight on the plan, but actually suffered a near-fatal heart attack. Having done their research on the Devilles, Mickey concluded that they would need a particularly careful scam for the Devilles as their targets were essentially grifters themselves, recognising that they would need a particularly complex scam to get past the Devilles. The gang initially made contact by offering to acquire a particular Faberge egg for the Devilles, as the Devilles already had the egg’s matching counterpart- the two eggs being worth ten times as much when together than they were on their own- but had been unable to acquire the other from the gallery that owned it.
Once the team had made contact with the Devilles by discreetly presenting themselves as acquisitions experts- subtly suggesting that the team would be willing to steal the egg without ever explicitly saying so- they ran a secondary scam on the Devilles during the weeks spent planning the heist. With Ash acting as Mickey’s overweight driver, he spent the next six weeks turning up for each meeting with the Devilles in a progressively smaller fatsuit, until the day after the egg was stolen saw Ash at his real weight and appearance. When Dana questioned him about his weight loss, ‘Philips’ claimed that his ex-wife had worked for a pharmaceutical company that had perfected a new weight-loss drink that basically caused people to sweat the fat out and he had stolen a bottle that she had brought home from work, but the company were a year away from official human trials, his wife never saw the change as she left him shortly before he started using it, and he had finished the last of the bottle a couple of days ago.
Planting the necessary information on the drug in one of the company’s labs, the gang then tricked the Devilles into committing the ‘robbery’ themselves by allowing Sean to be arrested for the theft of the egg after the investigators found a receipt he dropped during the robbery, the gang claiming that Sean’s associates would be too closely monitored for the next few days for any of them to try something. The Devilles successfully carried out the theft, but as the entire operation had been recorded via a mini-camera Mickey had planted on Dana, this ensured that the Devilles would have to pay Mickey the quarter of a million pounds they had agreed on.
As a result, the Devilles soon learned that they were down by over three hundred thousand pounds, and all they had to show for it was a drink that inducing vomiting and a Faberge egg that turned out to be faked (the actual egg had been hidden in another case, Emma ‘discovering’ it after the Devilles had stolen the drug, while the gang gave the Devilles a fake).