Aspiring actor and West Hollywood resident Vivek Shah was indicted on extortion charges related to Cline and four other wealthy people last month.

Shah was arrested near his father’s home in Illinois on August 10 and has been scheduled to go to trial for the charges on October 29.

Cline, who is the owner of St Louis-based coal miner Foresight Energy, was the highest-profile victim in an affidavit which detailed a complex scheme involving foreign banks, aliases, rental mailboxes, prepaid credit cards and a fake driver’s licence.

The affidavit said Shah sat in a parked car outside a number of Los Angeles-area Starbucks cafes in order to access public wireless internet and further the convolutions of the extortion scheme.

The research and detective work outlined in the statement describe a series of telephone calls to the Antigua Overseas Bank, Mauritius Commercial Bank in Mauritius and the Bank of Valletta in Malta.

The calls were connected to prepaid credit cards and rental mailboxes paid for by the aliases Ray Amin and Rohan Gill.

In July, police confirmed Shah was in possession of a fake driver’s licence with the name Ray Amin. The address on the fake licence matched a billing address in one of the extortion letters.

Other connections were established between details in the threat letters and the pattern of behaviour attributed to Shah.

The affidavit also said Shah had placed four calls to a Los Angeles gun range and had scheduled a handgun training session last month.

The complaint accused Shah of targeting the chairman of an internet company, a film studio founder, and two oil and gas company founders as part of an elaborate multi-million-dollar extortion plot.

Although the available official documentation and a gag order from presiding judge Irene Berger have limited access to information about the case, Indian-American newspaper India West identified Oscar-winning producer Harvey Weinstein and Groupon chair Eric Lefkofsky among the people allegedly aggressed by Shah.

Cline’s Foresight Energy focuses on high-sulpher thermal coal in the Illinois Basin and reported 10.4 million tons of total production for 2011.