Movie reviews aren’t really my thing here. I write Black Sheep to explore personalities behind bad business decisions and financial crimes. But so many of you tuned in to read or listen to my post a few weeks ago ranting about the new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, “You Can See Everything” (over 14,000 and counting), that I felt I had to test whether my initial thoughts (or rather complaints) were correct. A few fans of the filmmaker, Nathan Fielder, even explicitly put that challenge to me. It’s a fair ask, and I’m happy to oblige.

First, a short digression: Given that Holmes and her Theranos fraud are well-trodden territory, Fielder’s documentary needed a new “character” of sorts to reclaim a narrative edge. Everyone who packed theaters to see the film this past opening weekend knows that person was Holmes’ romantic partner, Billy Evans.

I had advance notice that Evans would feature prominently, though. It came in the form of a late-September email from Vanity Fair writer Dan Adler.

“Hi Christie, hope all’s well,” it began, continuing: “I’m working on a story about Billy Evans--Elizabeth Holmes’ husband at the center of the new Nathan Fielder documentary. It made me think of you for all the obvious reasons. I’d love to get your thoughts on that dynamic if you’re open to a call at your convenience? Thanks so much and hope to speak soon.”

All the obvious reasons? What were those supposed to be, I wondered. Of course, I knew he was referring to years ago, when I dated a notorious fraudster myself, Martin Shkreli (which, again, is detailed in my memoir, SMIRK). But that was just one parallel. I hadn’t seen or been briefed on the movie, so I was at a severe informational disadvantage about what other parallels Adler might try to force me into. Media tip for the unwary: A phone interview without parameters is a great opportunity for a reporter to fish for colorful quotes to put into whatever context they like, if they happen to be going for sensationalism.

As I am also a journalist, and have empathy for those in the trade, I try not to be rude or difficult. I replied quickly, directing Adler to my Substack post, “Truth, Lies, and Gimmick Documentaries,” and saying: “Feel free to quote from that obviously,” with a happy-faced emoji. I added: “If you have anything further, of course, let me know.” I also encouraged him to “bother A24” about the Shkreli documentary the production company had been hoarding, which I had participated in years ago.

Dan replied: “I will! And I will read this, looking forward to it--thank you. But do you have time for a quick call tomorrow as well? Just would love to get some live reactions too, you’re perfectly positioned.”

Live reactions? His motives were becoming clearer. I, again, referenced the Substack, adding that if he had any further questions after reading the post, I’d be happy to respond. I wondered if that would be the last I’d hear from Dan, but he sent me one more email the next morning: “OK I read it, enjoyed it, learned from it, but would still love to give you a call!”

Flattering, but hollow. A pickup line designed, again, to maneuver me into a very specific interaction where I would be rhetorically defenseless. I didn’t reply.

Now, with the benefit of having seen the film, I recognize I dodged a bullet. I had wondered whether Evans would come across as a mark taken advantage of by Holmes, which is the frame the media insisted on using for me at first when I went public about my relationship with Martin in 2020 (I fought back, and some eventually realized that was an awkward fit). But the reality was much worse. The film portrayed Evans, with little room for ambiguity, as a monster. He came across immediately as controlling and manipulative — with Fielder focusing early on a detail where Evans insists on taking over for Holmes in whisking eggs — and it went downhill from there. I won’t give away the key reveals, but the movie’s strongest catalyst of compassion for Holmes stems from seeing how she is treated by Evans.

But back to why I wrote this post, which was to tell you what I thought of the movie. To start with, as I’ve already explained, I find Fielder’s disorienting blend of irony and earnestness extremely off-putting. It’s not that I think he lacks talent as a filmmaker or that he is not doing anything innovative or worth discussing. Maybe I would even venture to agree with some of the most over-the-top praise from his fans: Fielder might be a genius. But that doesn’t mean his particular “genius,” or whatever it is, appeals to everyone.

That said, I might be in the minority. My X feed for the past three days has been nothing but “takes” on this movie from mostly enthusiastic viewers. I took myself to see it on Sunday afternoon, a matinee at AMC’s Lincoln Center location where every seat was filled. I managed to snag a spot in the second row on the far left. A woman who was probably 30 years my senior was next to me, along the wall, apparently also by herself. During the previews, she complained bitterly to me about how distorted the images on the screen looked from that angle.

The problem became more noticeable once the movie started. The film boasted no-holds-barred intimacy, including extreme close-ups of faces — pores, crow’s feet, and blemishes on Holmes, Evans, and Fielder all in high relief. Holmes’ blue eyes appeared as large as lakes in many scenes. The whites of Fielder’s eyes flashed frequently below his irises, calling to mind a pop culture theory that visible sclera signifies mental instability.

In the quiet setting of a San Diego beach house where she stayed with Evans and her two young children, Holmes tells Fielder: “All I know is my truth. And my love for my family.” Her frizzy blond hair surrounds her face like a warped halo, and tears leak down her cheeks.

“What a psychopath,” hissed the older woman next to me in the theater.

And so it continued, with Fielder climbing deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole with Holmes and Evans, grasping at multiple possible interpretations of the former Theranos CEO’s turns of phrase in a fruitless endeavor to determine if she had a core of oblivious honesty or was a pure con artist. It all felt eerily familiar to me in a way that I didn’t expect the rest of the audience could appreciate. I wanted to scream at Fielder that he was setting up a false dichotomy: “You know, self-delusion is an option with fraudsters, too, right? They might be sincere and still lying to themselves!”

Act I, as everyone knows, concentrates on Fielder’s time in the beach house before Holmes surrenders to prison. Act II, which you are probably somewhat aware of if you’ve been reading social media comments and reviews, becomes a sandbox for Fielder’s weird social experiments, namely getting Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in Hulu’s popular show “The Dropout,” to conspire with him in further interviews and stage reenactments of off-camera conversations. The device was clever…at first. But I got bored with this schtick, especially as the movie went well into its third hour. Fielder was using every ordinary impediment to interviewing federal prisoners as a hook to stage yet more reenactments. With other places to be, and my patience threadbare, I walked out of the theater with about 20 minutes remaining.

Homeward bound on the subway, I scrolled absently through still more “takes” from my various arm’s-length media acquaintances who had also seen the movie. My eyes lingered on one comment comparing it to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”

It solidified a connection in my mind: People had said the same thing about me.

I realized why watching Fielder’s strangely obsessive immersion in the Holmes story — his mixed emotions and confusion playing out on his face, amid the sympathy he was so obviously developing — had triggered such a sense of déjà vu. It hit me: It wasn’t Billy Evans that Vanity Fair should have been trying to liken me to in its search for a catchy angle on the documentary. It was Nathan Fielder.

These days, it’s hard to keep track of, let alone care much about, the things the Trump Administration is arbitrarily renaming. There’s the “Gulf of America” and “Lake America,” which everyone not trying to pick a fight with relatives at Thanksgiving still calls the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. Then there’s Mt. McKinley, rechristened from Denali, the name the Obama administration gave it in recognition of what indigenous Alaskans have called it for thousands of years. Disturbingly, from an international relations standpoint, the Department of Defense is now the Department of War.

And now, as the country reels from both the promise of wealth and portent of doom brought by AI, the administration has seized on it as yet another rebranding opportunity. As Trump explained in an Oct. 8, 2026, post on Truth Social, with his usual rhetorical restraint: “The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!”

As problematic as it is for a US president to demonize normal words, especially given that freedom of speech is enshrined in our Constitution, I was also struck by what seemed to have sparked this verbal crusade. Michael Smith, a North Carolina man who had scammed millions of dollars in royalties from streaming platforms using AI-generated songs and bots, and whom I previously wrote a Black Sheep post about, was sentenced on Oct. 6, 2026. The Department of Justice adopted Trump’s new naming convention, calling it “Super Intelligence-Assisted” fraud in its press release.

However, the sentence didn’t really support the super-villain-style upgrade. Smith got 18 months, translating realistically to a little over a year in a minimum-security camp, after “good behavior” and other credits. This would not be a vacation, to be sure, but it would be a far cry from “hard time” in a penitentiary. Curious about the dissonance and how Smith ended up with a relatively mild punishment despite the administration’s tough talk, I took a look through the docket. I found some potential clues.

The sentencing documents revealed that Smith’s scheme was hardly cutting-edge, at least by today’s standards, given how much AI has advanced since he started it in 2017. Using bot networks to “listen” to songs and collect royalties undoubtedly constitutes fraud, but bots are now ubiquitous across the internet, from social media to e-commerce websites. AI-generated music, meanwhile, has lost some of its original shock value, even as streaming platforms impose stricter rules around its use. It still raises hackles among human musicians, of course.

Also playing a potential role was the huge pile of letters from supporters Smith had amassed and submitted to the court. Mostly from friends and family, the 40 or so letters painted an image of Smith, 54, as a deeply caring man, a devoted father to six in a blended family, a survivor of an abusive childhood, and — perhaps especially helpfully, for leniency purposes — a passionate contributor to the music industry. Smith purported to be a “driving force” behind a BET hip-hop talent search show called “One Shot,” where he allegedly paid $100,00 in prize money to the winner “out of his own pocket.”

Smith also clearly made worthwhile contacts in the music business. A letter from one of these individuals, submitted in support of Smith, especially caught my eye. It was from Robert Diggs, better known as RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan.

Obviously, there’s no way of knowing exactly how much this particular letter influenced the judge, or whether it carried any weight at all. But I can’t imagine it escaped his attention. Whatever a busy federal judge spends time looking at in a case will almost certainly occupy some place in his or her mind when making an important decision.

[The full letter and the rest of this column are available for paying subscribers.]

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As I explained in a previous Black Sheep post, many obvious factors contribute to this ignominious parade: media focus on hype over substance, VCs setting goalposts based on statistical anomalies rather than realistic markers of success, and young founders demonstrating eagerness to please and prove themselves without the counterbalances of maturity and experience. But there was a force operating behind the scenes that might have had an even bigger impact—a person who conceived of the list from the start, expanded it into a cultural and money-making force, and may have insulated it against concerns about its socially irresponsible effects: now-disgraced ex-Forbes editor Randall Lane.

Before I get into all the ways Lane may have boobytrapped the founder playing field, I need to give a hand to New York Times media industry reporter Ben Mullin. Judging by LinkedIn posts chronicling the process, he seized on word about Lane stepping down from Forbes in July with the intensity of a shark getting a whiff of seal’s blood. Just a few weeks after posting a request for people to contact him on Signal about Lane’s departure, the Times published his scathing scoop: Forbes Fired Top Editor After Discovering He Received Secret $6 Million Payment.

The story was both wild and utterly believable. Lane, the architect behind the “30 Under 30” franchise, had done something that was quite possibly the most unethical thing any major media editor could do, the actual unspoken implication behind an aspersion that someone had gotten “too close” to a source: He took money—like, a lot of it—from someone who had a lot to gain from favorable treatment by Forbes. Yes, when he was found out, he was fired, but the deal was done.

More specifically, as Mullin reported, Lane had taken $6 million from research company founder RJ Shook, who had partnered with the magazine to publish wealth advisor rankings. Supposedly, Lane had forged a relationship with Shook during a humanitarian excursion to Liberia, organized by Forbes, in 2013. Three years later, Shook Research began its rankings partnership with Forbes. Sources told Mullin that Lane didn’t disclose the $6 million payment to his employer “because he saw it as a personal gift from a friend.” The truth came out after Shook sold a stake to a private equity firm, which discovered the payment.

Mullin’s article included an apology from Lane but didn’t give the impression that the former editor had suffered much beyond the loss of his job as a result of his indiscretion. As a kicker, the article noted Lane had founded a competitive horse-racing association and was staging a rock musical about Benjamin Franklin, called “The Sound of America.” In other words, he was living a sort of nerdy dream as a wannabe Lin-Manuel Miranda, along with fostering a long-running hobby among America’s old-money blue bloods. So all’s well that ends well for him. I guess.

What makes this particular transgression interesting is how it fits into the broader trend of publications monetizing their influence to offset the economic squeeze in print journalism. Well-known mastheads now routinely take money from the industries they cover through sponsored events and content, while affiliate links have even turned product rankings into a source of revenue. The deals are supposed to be disclosed, of course, but the larger point is that journalistic credibility itself can be for sale.

Putting aside morality for a moment, Lane’s and Shook’s $6 million arrangement, whatever it was specifically for, looks disturbingly rational. Though Lane supposedly wasn’t in charge of Forbes’ business dealings with Shook, the founder had a direct line to Lane, the magazine’s chief content officer, using him, reportedly, as an “unofficial sounding board.” If Lane understood that his years of advice might eventually be rewarded financially, the conflict is obvious.

The situation also calls to mind one of my favorite essays on the media business, published by Chuck Klosterman in 2003 in his book “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.” Drawing on his experiences working at local newspapers, he wrote: “What civilians in the conventional world need to realize is that journalists are not like you. They have higher ethics and less common sense.” Klosterman was trying to argue that these qualities helped keep bias out of day-to-day reporting. But unlike local news journalists working themselves to exhaustion covering city council meetings for a salary a school teacher would revolt at, always on the verge of being laid off, the reverse might have been true for Lane: A lack of ethics and too much common sense.

What does the sensible person with no ethics do if working in a dying industry, where the greatest assets are integrity, reach, and reputation? Scale it to its highest peak, maximize the value of those things for yourself, and then cash in. For Lane, I guess the going rate was $6 million.

Back to how this all relates to the “30 Under 30”: Aside from clearly being very good at befriending the wealthy, Lane really did orchestrate the powerhouse franchise. It was one of his first major projects at Forbes, based on lists of young professionals he had started at other publications that were well-received. Launched in 2011, the “30 Under 30” took on a life of its own at Forbes, though, as it collided with a cultural obsession with finding young genius founders, especially in the tech industry.

The magazine retained enough independence over the selection of people for its 30 under 30 lists that it could call this “journalism,” making the credential valuable. In a 2019 interview published on Medium, Lane called 30 Under 30 a “true meritocracy.” Young hotshots could not pay to get themselves on the list. The honorees weren’t there because of who they knew, he insisted, but because they had accomplished extraordinary things and survived a rigorous judging process. “The integrity of the list is everything,” he said.

He also candidly explained the business model, which went far beyond publishing a list. The print editions attracted sponsors; the live events assembled thousands of ambitious young entrepreneurs and future power brokers in one place; and corporate partners got the opportunity to reach this coveted population. Lane said Forbes was selective about which brands it admitted because of the trust surrounding the Under 30 name. He referred to the franchise as a “velvet rope” experience.

Lane milked that popularity for all it was worth, expanding “30 Under 30” into networking summits, branding opportunities, and a global community. It became a cultural phenomenon, setting expectations across industries; it also peddled unsustainable mythology. The number of young “30 Under 30” founders who turned out to have been faking their way to success, though relatively small, kept rising. This has been embarrassing for Forbes — the magazine acknowledged this by publishing a “Hall of Shame” — but the franchise continued.

When Mullin’s exposé on Lane came out, the irony was harder for the publication to dodge. Jokes at the magazine’s expense practically wrote themselves, flooding social media. Under one of Mullin’s LinkedIn posts, a reader made the same snarky quip I thought of when writing a title for this piece. “The 30 Under 30 Final Boss has been revealed! If you know you know,” he posted. Another replied: “You just knew it was always correlated.”

Some readers posted more substantive mockery, including one who said: “If Forbes is smart they’ll turn this publicity into some new lists,” including “Thirty Under 30 Years - Forbes’ young stars and editors, and the winning plea bargains they’ve struck” and “Best Reputation Scrubbers, by region and industry.”

All humor aside, though, there’s a more serious conclusion this leads to. It’s so cynical that most of us, including those laughing at Forbes and Lane, would probably reflexively write it off as a conspiracy theory. Still, it’s there, sitting like a lump of lead in the pits of our stomachs, poisonous, painful and unable to be purged.

The game is rigged…by people who are in it for themselves. Even those of us who manage to ascend on our own merits, doing things the “right” way and never compromising our integrity, have probably encountered a ceiling established by someone like Lane: someone who has learned how to monopolize and monetize his position as a gatekeeper to wealth and prestige.

Lane’s actions might not be a “crime” in the technical legal sense, as far as we know so far. But by perpetuating this sensibility, I would argue that the damage he did to society is far greater, and more lasting, than any fraud concocted by a striver on one of his lists.

A24 has done something completely different with its Elizabeth Holmes documentary. The production company bided its time, unveiling it only after the social media world had nearly forgotten the imprisoned Theranos CEO, using the element of surprise plus the promise of something exclusive and salacious to generate its own news hook. The plan worked amazingly well, though I was not especially surprised. I’m well aware A24 has also been hoarding a similarly immersive Martin Shkreli documentary (given that I was interviewed extensively for it); but more on that later.

As much as I admire the strategy behind its release, I’m less sold on the Holmes doc itself. With the provocative title, “You Can See Everything,” the premise is that the disgraced blood-testing company founder gave a huge amount of access to the filmmakers, including comedian and offbeat interviewer Nathan Fielder, during the 34 days before she reported to prison to serve her 11-year fraud sentence. Supposedly, she did it to push back against media narratives spun in earlier Theranos documentaries and the Hulu series “The Dropout.” A 90-second teaser clip released for the film indicated that’s not what actually happened; it shows a weird tête-à-tête between Holmes and Fielder, where she responds to his slack-jawed incredulity with wide, nearly unblinking blue eyes and comments that give the impression, in this particular context, of waving a giant sign saying “I’M A LYING SOCIOPATH.”

So yeah, it’s probably not going to do much to repair her reputation.

More importantly, though, looking at this as a journalist, I wonder: Is this film going to give us anything close to useful, salient truth? I have serious doubts. First of all, this type of work is seated within a category I like to refer to as “gimmick documentaries,” where instead of a relatively straight narrative, a filmmaker uses some sort of participatory set-up where he or she becomes a main character. Think Michael Moore and “Bowling for Columbine” or Morgan Spurlock and “Super Size Me.” This category also encompasses documentaries like Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat,” where the filmmaker takes on a fictional persona to essentially prank his or her subjects and get them to reveal something candid.

But more often than not in this style of work, heavy-handed or dishonest editing can turn it into another piece of fiction, propagating a new myth rather than real insight. Spurlock, for example, made audiences believe that he was “pickling his liver,” as a doctor called it, by eating nothing but McDonald’s for weeks, the experiment he performed on himself to give a narrative backbone to the film. Years later, the truth came out: Spurlock was a raging alcoholic who drank heavily during the filming. When the doctor remarked on camera that testing showed Spurlock’s liver looked “like an alcoholic’s after a binge,” he was more accurate than he realized.

Then there’s the other problem with the Holmes doc: Nathan Fielder. It’s not that he’s a comedian who interjects himself into serious topics. Shakespeare’s Fools were often a vehicle for truth, and so are ours. See “The Daily Show,” “SNL,” “Last Week Tonight,” The Onion, the Babylon Bee, and so on. It’s not even that Fielder sometimes exploits unsuspecting humans in pursuit of comedy. That’s a page straight out of Baron Cohen’s playbook, and I have enjoyed his films.

Here’s the thing: Though Baron Cohen duped and mocked people throughout “Borat,” he at least provided reliable cues to the audience about whether a joke was being made at someone’s expense. As a filmmaker, Baron Cohen can at least theoretically be made to confront his choices and explain whether they were justified. (Most of us might agree maybe so for many of the American subjects, and probably not for the Central Asian villagers he tricked into participating.) Fielder is different; he is shiftier, vague about his intentions even to the audience, and seems to weave between sincerity and humor in a way that feels unsettling and possibly cruel, not amusing or revelatory. Or at least not to me.

I have tried on multiple occasions, including just before writing this post, to watch his shows “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal.” I can’t get through more than five minutes of either without squirming and having to shut it off. If you’re unaware, “Nathan for You” was Fielder’s satirical docu-series where he pretends to be an expert consultant and gives struggling small-business owners preposterous marketing advice. The humor stems from the befuddled reactions of the business owners, who supposedly believe Fielder is sincerely trying to help.

The specific episode I tried repeatedly to get through, and failed, involved him convincing a frozen yogurt shop owner to offer a “poo”-flavored yogurt as a publicity stunt. I got far enough into the show to watch Fielder fake being shocked by a professional publicist telling him what a terrible idea it was. But I couldn’t make it past Fielder belatedly “discovering” that anything feces-like in a restaurant is inherently repulsive, and explaining his supposed new insight to the yogurt shop owner, who by then was probably deeply regretting his participation in the show.

I tolerated even less of “The Rehearsal,” which revolves around bizarre social experiments where situations are painstakingly engineered and “rehearsed” and then carried out in real life. From the moment the human subject of the first episode appeared on the screen, I was uneasy. He was a warm, earnest man who loved knowledge and trivia, but had lied to his trivia team about his educational background, claiming advanced degrees he lacked. Fielder had arrived supposedly to help this man come clean to his trivia team. As soon as Fielder started explaining how he approached his conversation with the subject by creating an exact replica of the interior of his house, and “rehearsing” the meeting with a hired actor, I couldn’t watch any more. It was just too creepy. The subject already seemed like he was being set up as a sacrificial lamb; I had no interest in watching the carnage.

I also tried to watch a clip where Fielder was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown on CNN about an episode of “The Rehearsal” dealing with airline safety. I couldn’t get far into that either, feeling too unbalanced by Fielder’s wandering facial expressions and tone of voice. Was this a gag, like some Andy Kaufman-esque, surreal attack on cable news (a worthy target)? Or a sincere attempt to expose a dangerous trend he had uncovered? It was too ambiguous.

To be fair, Fielder’s résumé of semi-fabulism provides built-in entertainment value as a Holmes interviewer — a sort of “it takes a con artist to know a con artist” sense that works as a storytelling paradigm. The short clip released publicly has already proven to have massive meme traction, with numerous people superimposing their own symbolism on Fielder, with his intensely stunned expression, and Holmes, with her serene (and perhaps artificially low-voiced) assertion: “I’m engaging with you as a human being. Why would I deceive you?” Which of these two is more fake? It’s really anyone’s guess.

But is this really shedding any new light on Holmes? Her story has been exhaustively investigated in both the media and the courts, and the fraud for which she was convicted caused enormous direct and societal harm. She has been portrayed in complex ways: as an ambitious fraudster, as a woman subject to manipulation herself, and as some combination of villain and victim. What potentially unseen reality are we getting a window into through Fielder? Mostly, it seems, a profoundly destabilizing moment where a woman who once graced magazine covers as “the next Steve Jobs” is preparing to spend a decade behind bars. Someone is bound to act odd in those circumstances, with or without a documentary crew present.

Which brings me back to that Martin Shkreli documentary lurking somewhere in A24’s library, and why I am not sure it will ever see the light of day.

Martin, as you might remember, or can read more about in SMIRK, was extraordinarily hostile to the media as the viral spotlight continued to shine on him over his drug price hikes and securities fraud conviction. He was just as nasty to many would-be documentary makers, quickly dissecting their approaches as dishonest, manipulative, or voyeuristic. Though one documentary, “Pharma Bro,” did get out into the world, mostly via sheer determination by the filmmaker, Brent Hodge, Martin did not participate at all. Throughout the film, he is seen only through excerpts of his livestream videos and media coverage.

However, as Martin was nearing release from prison, he did engage with one filmmaker — an old friend of his from high school, who was working in Hollywood. The filmmaker caught Martin leaving prison and working on putting his life back together in some form or another over the ensuing weeks. Martin and I were no longer dating at the time, but I agreed to be interviewed, to be filmed interacting with Martin, and to help “Shkreli wrangle” occasionally. Martin notoriously lives in a logistical cloud of his own creation, and getting him to appear in certain places or do certain things as needed on a filming schedule did take a skill that I seem to uniquely possess.

There was no wacky comedian, no elaborate prank, no artificial experiment designed to produce a reaction. The hook, if there was one, was simply access: a person who had spent years snubbing documentary filmmakers allowed an old friend to follow him at one of the strangest and most vulnerable periods of his life.

That may also present A24 with a very different set of variables than it had with Holmes. A famous, convicted fraudster subjecting herself to weeks of intimate, awkward interrogation before heading to prison can obviously generate numerous memes and headlines, with judgment already passed and sensationalism seeding curiosity. A documentary that simply watches a notorious person emerge from prison and attempt to get back on track is harder to package, particularly if what it captures doesn’t conform neatly to the character the audience already knows.

Of course, one can never say mid-production how exactly a documentary will turn out, but late into the process, one of the producers told me she had seen a rough cut, and it left her with tears in her eyes.

It wasn’t a gimmick, or a prank, or a myth. It was real.

A24 may be sitting on it, strategically waiting for a moment when audiences will be ready for that kind of thing, but who knows if it will ever come.

For the past three weeks or so, I was in the “old country,” or more accurately, several “old countries.” I was with my family, tracing our heritage across a wide swath of Europe. Sounds relaxing until you consider that we were not doing this trip as 20-something backpackers; we were five fully aged adults, including me, my senior citizen parents, my brother, and his husband, plus their three-year-old son, encumbered by a stroller the toddler mostly refused to ride in, and significant quantities of luggage.

We journeyed by plane, train, boat, and rental car, up numerous stairs and down many cobblestone streets, toting all this stuff. Our path, charted by my hyperpolyglot brother, took us from Northern Italy all the way to the Baltics. For ancestry reasons, we were particularly interested in southwestern Germany and Lithuania, the wellsprings of most of Dad’s and Mom’s genes, respectively. Delirious from exhaustion, we all entertained fantasies of moving to these places. They felt on a strangely innate level like a version of “home.”

Pained with guilt over being too busy and tired to write, I thought often of this Substack, especially about the two accused international-traveling fugitives I last covered: alleged $220 million cattle Ponzi schemer Josh Link and social media-based penny-stock pumper Eddie Constantinescu, AKA “Mr. Zack Morris.” Link was in China when the indictment against him was unsealed in early 2026, lured back to the US by desperate pleas from his wife, Tia, who was cooperating with the government. Constantinescu allegedly cut off his ankle monitor the day a federal judge erroneously dismissed his case in March 2024. Not long after an appeals court restored the charges in October 2025, he was in his ancestral stomping grounds, Romania. If his X account is to be believed, he’s still prowling somewhere around Eastern Europe or the Balkans.

Though both men declared to US investigators (in colorful language) that they had no intention of returning to the US, they are now arguing (in totally separate cases) that they were never trying to escape justice at all, and only innocently traveling abroad…to nations where extradition is complicated at best. That makes for a creative line of reasoning; we’ll see how it fares. In any event, during my vacation, I got a tiny sense of what it might feel like to be on the lam, hopping from country to country. I can’t say it seems enviable.

For starters, let’s look at Link. Captured at LAX in March 2026, he has been locked in a Texas jail ever since, after being denied bail for posing “a serious risk of flight.” He and a new lawyer he recently hired have been fighting these findings, going so far as to file an appeal with the Fifth Circuit. Court papers explain that the Midwestern cattle dealer held a ten-year Chinese business and residency visa, permitting him to remain in the country indefinitely. He argued he had gone there for legitimate work and that he returned willingly to the US.

And then there is Constantinescu. Charged with orchestrating a $114 million pump-and-dump scheme through social media, he and his codefendants managed to persuade a federal judge who was apparently not overly familiar with securities law that they couldn’t be liable because they had only deprived victims of economic information, citing a recent Supreme Court ruling in a construction bid-rigging case. The 5th Circuit later set things straight, noting that the bid-rigging case really had nothing to do with the basic theory behind most financial fraud: that someone lied to someone else to get them to part with their money. The original judge in the case later recused himself after being so soundly reversed.

While the rest of his social media influencer codefendants stayed put in the US through these twists and turns, Constantinescu had other plans. He got his passport back from federal authorities and took off, posting photos and videos of himself happily abroad, striking vanity poses at the gym, holding various European beers, and providing running commentary on his continued stock promotion activities.

Baked into the evidence in both Link’s and Constantinescu’s cases, however, are clear signs of strain over their international sojourns. As I promised in an earlier post, I will provide paid subscribers with a fuller transcript of Link’s recorded calls with his wife, Tia, which she made at the government’s behest, persuading him to return from China. Though the text is stripped of the emotion that must have been embedded in their voices, it’s easy enough to imagine plausibly. Link had been away from home on the other side of the world, estranged from his wife, for many months. The conflict between his obvious suspicions about what she was up to and his desire to resume something like normalcy was apparent.

And Constantinescu, though telegraphing bravado at scale through social media, apparently suffered significant mental turmoil, too. Before he ventured to the “old country” in Eastern Europe, a girlfriend of his testified in court that he suffered from PTSD and possibly bipolar disorder, that he had been on an antidepressant but “it was not working,” and that he had “his entire life ripped from him” by the criminal case. At the time, he had been in Mexico. “He’s just hurt, and he needs to heal,” she told the judge.

Wary of his overseas antics, prosecutors asked a Texas judge to order Constantinescu to appear in the US on Aug. 26, 2026. The judge denied that request, noting it didn’t meet certain criteria under the Bail Reform Act. A new hearing was scheduled for Sept. 25, 2026, to determine whether any conditions will “reasonably assure the appearance of the person as required.” So the clock is ticking for him.

More on both cases below:

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The movie “The Fugitive” presents a romantic image: Harrison Ford’s character was an innocent man caught in a cat-and-mouse game, using stealth to evade detection, and tirelessly searching for his wife’s real killer. Two real-life fugitives, recently charged in separate fraud cases in Texas, behaved very differently, as alleged by the government — fleeing the country, posting on social media, and taunting prosecutors from afar. One man was lured back to the US through his wife, and now sits in jail awaiting trial; the other remains at large, though not remotely secretive about his whereabouts, and maybe not as safe as he thinks.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on.

Love Gets Link Caught

As featured in my series A Ponzi Scheme on the Prairie and follow-up coverage, one of the men I was referring to above is Josh Link, who stands accused of running cattle investment business Agridime as a fraud. Having been investigated by regulators for years, Link was long gone, hiding out in China, when his indictment was unsealed. But he had left someone important behind: his wife, Tia. Charged as an accomplice, she ultimately played a key role in his capture.

Call transcripts filed recently with the court showed that Tia had been cooperating with the government almost since the inception of the case. Snatches of dialogue from the calls, which she placed to him in February and March 2026 with investigators listening in, revealed why: She felt abandoned, that Link was only out for himself, and that she had no choice but to handle the case however she could on her own.

“I’m scared,” she told him on Feb. 25, 2026. “Like, I need your help, and you’re not understanding that, and it doesn’t really sound like you care.”

She continued on March 5, 2026: “You do understand that you are the one that’s hiding during this and I’m having to face this by myself,” she told him. “You understand that, right…I have to move forward on my end, and you are leaving me out to dry.”

Whether it was from pure paranoia or recognition that something was “off” about Tia’s demeanor, Link wasn’t buying that there wasn’t some ulterior purpose to the calls. He repeatedly asked who else might be listening. “Thankfully, I’m not stupid,” he said on Feb. 25. “Do you know how many other people are on the phone with you?” He quizzed her about moments from their marriage, and about their dog, to test her responses; he told her he couldn’t trust her.

“You don’t even love me,” he told her on March 5. “You’re perfectly fine to go turn me in. Happily. But you can’t even say that you…,” he trailed off. “That is the weirdest thing.”

Still, her distress about struggling evidently sounded genuine enough to him to nag his conscience — or made him realize she might cooperate against him (she already was). He took her up on her offer to buy him a plane ticket home, with the idea of turning himself in and planning a defense strategy together. He arrived at LAX on March 9, 2026, and was immediately taken into custody. He now remains in a jail somewhere near Fort Worth.

Twice, Link has asked the federal court to grant him bail. Twice, he was rejected. As part of a 118-page package of evidence objecting to his second attempt in June 2026, prosecutors disclosed the call transcripts and Tia’s cooperation. They showed that investigators had called Link around the time the case was filed in early 2026, and asked him to surrender. Refusing to say where he was, he told them he would “make it impossible” for them to find him. The investigators reported that he “graphically” explained to a female agent “how she could go ‘fuck herself.’”

Prosecutors also disclosed comments he had posted on Facebook, arguing they demonstrated a posture of defiance. Days after his call with the FBI agents, he commented on an image of a wanted poster for himself on Facebook, and he posted a screed where he compared himself to assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

More screed below:

The government argued: “In summary, from 2025 to 2026, Defendant’s actions demonstrate that if released from custody he is a flight risk and release on any terms or conditions will not ensure his appearance at proceedings in this matter.” In a terse ruling of just two paragraphs, the judge agreed. Link’s attorneys have appealed the decision to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the chances of it overturning the findings are remote at best. U.S. courts rarely, if ever, give second chances to defendants who run.

“Zack Morris” Living It Up On the Lam

And then we have our other defendant in question, Edward Constantinescu. Known by his X persona “Mr. Zack Morris,” Constantinescu and a team of online compatriots are accused of encouraging hundreds of thousands of followers to buy penny stocks, then quietly exiting their positions at huge profits, leaving remaining investors to suffer losses in an inevitable crash. More colloquially, this is called a “pump and dump” scheme.

After the case was initially filed in 2022, the crew managed to get their indictment dismissed based on a questionable interpretation of a recent Supreme Court ruling; on appeal, the Fifth Circuit swiftly reinstated the case. Prosecutors have been rounding up the defendants once again to set new bail terms, but have come up short with Constantinescu. He was already in Romania (now supposedly Montenegro), posting profanity-laced comments about his escape on X and other platforms, along with prolific posting about stock trades and his workout routines.

A new filing in the case paints the situation even more clearly. In a motion filed in July 2026, the government asked the court to order Constantinescu to appear in person given his “stated intention not to return to the United States.” The prosecutors observed that the “very day” Houston court initially dismissed his indictment in May 2024, Constantinescu posted a photo on his Instagram account where “he appears to have cut his ankle monitor,” adding a caption “time to f*ck sh*t up.”

The government also pointed to repeated follow-up social media posts by Constantinescu, including a response on X to a user who noted that a public defender had been appointed for him. Constantinescu posted: “I didn’t request one lol I’m not part of the system anymore. I am never going back to that sh*thole. Keep swinging on my nuts f*gg*ts.”

In another post, Constantinescu declared he was “gone for good.”

Bizarrely, in response to the government’s motion, Constantinescu claimed he wasn’t trying to escape at all, that the government’s framing of his leaving the country was “false” and “wrong,” and that he was merely traveling lawfully. “The Government claims only that Mr. Constantinescu left the country while this case was dismissed, while he was subject to no order of this Court.”

Prosecutors further replied: “By his logic then, [Constantinescu] can evade this Court’s authority indefinitely by simply choosing not to appear. But that is not the law, and this Court is not powerless.” They are correct. Defendants can’t refuse to face active federal charges because they were briefly dismissed, and courts can always require individuals to appear in person under threat of contempt. Refusal to appear can also make you a fugitive, and legal mechanisms to apprehend you can be invoked accordingly.

The next court date is scheduled for Aug. 26, 2026. I, for one, will be very curious to see more about how this plays out.

Stay tuned for Part II, which will offer paying subscribers a more detailed look at the filings, including fuller transcripts of Tia’s calls with Link, and more about the government’s efforts to bring “Zack” to justice.

Skyscrapers define New York City’s skyline, but on the ground, another form of architecture lies closer to our hearts: the brownstone. These graceful townhouses sprang up in the 1800s near Central Park, in Brooklyn, and in Harlem as the city rapidly amassed wealth and power. They were a status symbol then, and they remain that way today. Gazing at their wide stoops, proud facades, and generous windows, the typical NYC transplant can’t help but feel a tug of longing to own one someday, followed by a more practical question: “I wonder what that costs?”

The answer, of course, is “a lot.” Though a fair number of current owners snapped up their brownstones in the crime-ridden 1980s and 1990s, when many were abandoned and sold for a pittance, these properties now command well into the millions of dollars. Even a crumbling brownstone in need of a gut renovation could go for a million dollars or more, despite historic preservation rules restricting what can be done with them. Often passed down through generations, these homes may fall into disrepair and distress when elderly owners fail to keep up with never-ending maintenance and property taxes. Enter a specific kind of predator who exploits these murky situations: the deed thief.

The whole idea of “deed theft,” literally stealing a person’s property through con artistry and forgery, seems a little unreal. Going through a real estate closing involves so much paperwork, especially in New York, where lawyers are required to advise throughout the process. I did it once, and my hand literally cramped from signing my name so many times. But I guess old properties and old documents, with titles transferred between spouses and family members, still present loopholes. According to the New York attorney general’s office, that’s how deed thief Joseph Makhani did his work.

A self-described real estate developer, Makhani was convicted in July 2026 of a scheme to defraud and criminal possession of stolen property over his taking ownership of two Harlem brownstones, valued at a total of $4.7 million. His tricks included fake deeds, forgery, shell companies, and legal proceedings, all to persuade authorities and even the real owners of the homes that he had actually purchased the properties. He was so convincing, apparently, that one elderly owner ended up living in a homeless shelter, believing they no longer owned the home, while Makhani illegally collected rental income from it.

It’s an ugly tale, what happened with these two houses, and 63-year-old Makhani will likely spend a significant portion of his remaining life in prison because of it. But when I started digging, I found an even more interesting thread that had gone without mention in recent press accounts. Legal documents revealed that Makhani had been engaging in various alleged deed-theft tactics for many years. In one case from the early 2010s, a would-be victim fought back….and won (somewhat). This is his story.

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As anyone who keeps opening my Substack emails probably realizes, I care deeply about writing stories people actually want to read. That means hours of real reporting, hunting for fresh angles, and stitching together complex narratives with characters, tragedy, irony, and, when warranted, a little sparkle of comedy.

This summer has been unusually hectic, especially over the past week, and I’ve run out of time to give you a new piece that meets my own standards. I’m still working on it, and it will be out next week.

For now, consider this a “rerun” show: a quick tour through some of my recent best‑read Black Sheep posts and the reactions or new context around them. If you missed any, this is a good moment to catch up and see more about how the pieces landed. Enjoy!

Is The AI Boom A Mass Hallucination?

Sep 28, 2025

I was early to the party in calling out misaligned incentives in the current AI frenzy. While acknowledging the promise of the technology, I took aim at the hype, pointing out that it did not (at that time, and maybe still not yet) deliver enough everyday value to justify its staggering costs. I noted that past mega-innovations like electricity and the internet changed the world because ordinary humans found them useful (notwithstanding the false starts and failures in the development process), and that VCs and tech CEOs, even armed with tens of billions of dollars, can’t force that connection to happen from the top down. Looking through the lens of the current whiplash over “tokenmaxxing” and how to rein in the costs, I think a lot of it still holds up, even if the bubble hasn’t actually popped.

The post has ~2,800 reads so far, and the podcast (basically me just reading the post in one take, possibly with the sounds of my cats making mischief in the background) was downloaded 1,421 times.

The Most Powerful Jacket in Tech

Jan 11, 2026

On a similar theme, I zeroed in on an unlikely market stabilizer: the Nvidia CEO’s leather jacket. As Jensen Huang became the de facto face of the AI boom, his signature garment evolved from personal style into a kind of collective talisman, signaling that someone competent was still at the wheel. I traced how Huang’s optimistic pronouncements, amplified by that visual branding, helped mute critics and keep investors committed even as doubts mounted about AI’s profitability and the sustainability of its infrastructure spending. His own comment that “the whole world would’ve fallen apart” if Nvidia stumbled suggested he saw his confidence as a load-bearing beam for the economy. I haven’t seen as much of Huang in his leather jacket lately, so I’m not sure what that portends for us.

The post has ~2,500 reads so far, and the podcast has 876 downloads.

The Corruption Probe That Just Won’t Quit

Jun 29, 2026

You know that feeling when a mystery novel gets yanked out of your hands mid‑cliffhanger? That’s where I was after the feds dropped their 2025 indictment of Eric Adams. But just when you thought the corruption saga was over, prosecutors pivoted hard: in June 2026, they charged Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone, with taking $120,000 in kickbacks to help Chinese developer Yan Po “Andy” Zhu land a migrant‑housing contract for his Long Island City Microtel. The photos and texts between Carone and Zhu (wine cellar hangs, “Thank you my big guy”) read like a textbook bribery playbook, and the way the case was revived seemed to suggest investigators raided the grab bag and pulled out the theory most likely to survive political interference.

The piece so far has ~1,400 views.

A Ponzi Scheme On the Prairie

March 1, 2026

A Missouri man, Josh Link, allegedly sweet-talked $220 million out of 2,000-plus investors by selling them stakes in cattle that, in large part, didn't exist. The scheme was called Agridime, which claimed to offer sustainable beef, farm-to-table vibes, and returns of 15–32%. Prosecutors allege that it actually amounted to a ghost herd of mostly fictional steers, conjured from recycled ear-tag numbers. When regulators first started taking action, Link stood his ground, but he eventually bolted, leaving behind his wife, co-defendant Tia, to face the indictment alone. I wrote this as a three-part series, all published in March 2026. By coincidence, Link was caught at LAX by US Customs agents just hours after I published Part II, seemingly mid-journey to somewhere that wasn’t a federal courtroom. I’ve been continuing to follow the case after finishing the series, as it yields more developments.

Across Part I, Part II, and Part III, the posts collectively got ~6,200 reads. The podcasts, collectively, were downloaded ~1,100 times.

The Billionaire Who’s Blowing Himself Up

Jun 21, 2026

I used HBO’s “Silicon Valley” as a frame to analyze Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, tracing how the founder’s journey from scrappy Richard Hendricks–type to Gavin Belson–adjacent tyrant tracks with the company’s implosion under AI missteps and mass layoffs. The piece leans into the irony that a company once known for utopian perks and intellectual freedom now has employees calling it “the gulag,” while leadership responds to despair with… more snacks and a hackathon nobody asked for. I argue that Zuck’s real problem isn’t his eccentric hobbies (sword-forging, cattle-slaughtering, whatever), but the yes‑man echo chamber that convinces him he can jiu‑jitsu for two hours a day and still run a 70,000‑person tech empire without consequences. Spoiler: he can’t.

The post has ~1,600 reads so far, and the podcast has been downloaded around 147 times.

The Highest-Altitude Scam

April 12, 2026

Every spring, the world’s highest peak becomes a traffic jam of amateurs chasing bragging rights, and an entire ecosystem of guides, insurers, and medevac operators has learned to monetize their oxygen-starved poor judgment. I dug into this after a 2026 headline landed in my Google alerts: Nepali authorities had charged 32 people in a $20 million scheme involving staged helicopter rescues—and, in some cases, climbers allegedly poisoned with baking soda, uncooked chicken, or rat droppings to trigger fake emergencies. The real origin story, though, goes back to 2018, when a local journalist tracked down the ins and outs of the con through very literal boots-on-the-ground reporting. The moral ambiguity is especially interesting here; do you really feel sorry for Everest hikers who get scammed if they did no basic research at all before showing up to climb the mountain?

The piece got ~1,800 views, and a preview for the podcast was downloaded 107 times.

A Long-Overdue Checkup On “Zack Morris”

Jun 14, 2026

Back in 2024, I wrote about how a crew of penny-stock pumpers led by “Zack Morris” (real name Edward Constantinescu) managed to “beat the Feds,” winning dismissal of a $114 million fraud indictment just weeks before trial. I was skeptical that it would hold on appeal, and sure enough, the Fifth Circuit revived the charges in late 2025. Since then, things have only gotten weirder: the original judge recused himself, Constantinescu’s lawyers dropped him, and he started publicly taunting prosecutors online: posting photos of weapons (and, yes, a Power Rangers sword), doxxing government staff, and even offering a $5,000 bounty to his followers for information about them. Then he fled, first to Mexico and now, by his own X bio, to Romania, where he’s been posting smug videos about how much he loves his “mother country.” A new trial date is set for May 3, 2027, but whether Constantinescu ever shows up (and whether Romanian citizenship shields him from extradition) remains to be seen.

Across both “Zack Morris” posts, there were ~5,800 reads and ~450 podcast downloads.

A Fourth of July Flameout

Jul 5, 2026

Once again, I got hooked by an unfolding drama in my home state of Missouri with this post. AM Pyrotechnics, run by fireworks enthusiast Aaron Mayfield, went from "fell in love with fireworks as a toddler" to perennial bankruptcy filer after two fatal warehouse explosions, in 2018 and again just before Thanksgiving 2025, left employees dead and the company drowning in OSHA penalties and insurance woes. I traced how the firm's second Chapter 11 filing in early 2026 set off a domino effect of canceled shows across Missouri and Arkansas, angry local organizers, and an Arkansas attorney general investigation, even as Mayfield insisted he was still trying to pull off shows and sell the business.

The post currently has about 1,400 views, and the podcast has been downloaded 58 times.

Most countries do not derive a sense of patriotism from explosions. Not so in the United States, where rockets and bombs factor prominently in our national anthem. On Independence Day, nothing shows love for 'Merica like blowing stuff up, especially in the Heartland.

That’s why the story of the collapse of AM Pyrotechnics, a fireworks show producer from my home state of Missouri, struck such a chord with me. While trolling the internet a few days ago, I came across an outpouring of woebegone local news coverage of the aftermath.

”Third Mid-Missouri fireworks show canceled following AM Pyrotechnics bankruptcy,” central Missouri-based station KRCG 13 reported on July 2, 2026. The article noted that a Mexico, Missouri, Lions Club chapter and “communities across the Lake of the Ozarks, including Osage Beach and Camdenton,” have been forced to cancel or postpone celebrations due to the company’s failure.

An article from Arkansas station 40/29 News focused on an annual celebration at the state’s Beaver Lake that had to be dropped at the last minute. Reporter Lakyra Banks noted that this year’s display was “expected to be the largest ever” in honor of “America’s 250th anniversary,” and that it was funded entirely by local donations. An organizer vented to the reporter: “We're just incredibly frustrated, more than a little angry.”

News articles further reported that the Arkansas attorney general had launched an investigation, and communities were considering lawsuits. Still, given that the company was under bankruptcy protection, refund prospects were dim. So it was a sad state of affairs. When I looked closer, though, I realized the story was even darker and more tragic than it first appeared. Here’s a quick recounting:

“Fell in Love With Fireworks”

First of all, let’s establish one key fact: AM Pyrotechnics was not just some faceless corporation that happened to go belly-up, leaving customers in the lurch. It had a face, a founder that community members undoubtedly felt they could relate to. His name is Aaron Mayfield. Judging by what I could find on the internet about him, fireworks weren’t just a business for Mayfield. They were a passion.

According to the website for “Sky Wars,” an invitational fireworks championship run by the Missouri Pyrotechnics Association (yes, all real things), Mayfield has been selling fireworks for almost 30 years and manufacturing them for nearly 20 years. His bio claims he “fell in love with fireworks as a toddler,” adding: “As he grew older, he literally saved his pennies to purchase fireworks that he choreographed by color on his bedroom floor before he shot them in the sky.”

The site also highlights that his wife, whom he met on eharmony, is a “leading female fireworks shell creator.” Intentionally or not, the bio leaves a distinct impression: AM Pyrotechnics is not just a fireworks seller; it is a family-run artisanal explosives maker.

As bizarre as this blend of danger and wholesomeness might sound, it is surprisingly on-brand for Missouri. While Americans in general adore setting off fireworks, regulatory restrictions for selling them to the general public vary across the country. Missouri, however, is in one of the more “permissive” categories.

How permissive? Well, here is an image of a fairly common type of establishment scattered across rural Missouri. Based on what you see, try to divine where my home state lies on the continuum between “safety first” and “try not to blow off too many of your fingers this year.”

Sorry. That was a bit of a trick question. As you see, the establishment pictured above is a combination fireworks emporium and gas station. When something goes wrong here, you’re going to lose a lot more than fingers. I think we can safely conclude that if there are any states where parents might routinely allow their toddlers to play with fireworks, this is certainly one of them.

The Darker Side to Blowing Stuff Up

Running a business, though, had its challenges for Mayfield. Fireworks revenue streams are lumpy and inconsistent, with the biggest chunk coming around the Fourth of July. Margins are thin. The company struggled to pay bills in the mid-2010s, running up substantial debts for inventory (while the company manufactured fireworks, it also ordered some from other producers), insurance costs, and payroll taxes. Swamped with debt, AM Pyrotechnics filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (for the first time) in July 2014. The company managed to reorganize, but things only got worse. Much worse.

On July 3, 2018, a 28-year-old woman who worked for Mayfield, Samantha Dean-Wood, was visiting the company’s facility in southwestern Missouri (Google Maps image below) to prepare for an upcoming show. According to a local news report, Dean was alone in a warehouse that night when some unknown accident occurred, sparking an explosion.

According to the Kansas City Star, ten local fire departments responded to the blast, and the building was a “total loss.” Dean-Wood was taken to the hospital with third and fourth-degree burns covering 60% of her body. She held on for a week before passing away, leaving behind an 8-month-old son. In an interview with a local TV news station, her mother said she made the call to tell doctors “to stop and let her be at peace.”

The woman added, “I want somebody to blame. I want something to blame. But it was a pure accident.”

Local news reported that a GoFundMe account raised more than $11,000 to help cover hospital bills. The company was hit with $34,734 in OSHA penalties for “failing to protect employees from physical, chemical, fire, and explosion hazards” and the actual fatality incident.

But that wasn’t the last tragedy to befall AM Pyrotechnics.

Disaster Deja Vu

Financial difficulties continued to plague AM Pyrotechnics and Mayfield, who piled up personal debts to help support his company’s operations. However hard he was working to make ends meet, though, he couldn’t overcome what happened the day before Thanksgiving in 2025. Once again, an employee was alone at the AM Pyrotechnics facility. Once again, there was an accident, and a building was blown to bits. And once again, an employee died. His name was Chad Eaves.

Based on news reports from that incident, it sounds like it took investigators at least a few days to identify his remains. Various agencies, including OSHA and the US ATF, launched investigations, but a Missouri Department of Public Safety spokesman told reporters the “extent of the fire and structural damage” made it impossible to determine what exactly happened. OSHA eventually assessed $27,238 in initial penalties.

A relative posted a heartfelt message about Eaves on social media after his death, mentioning that he was a 46-year-old father of three who had recently become a grandfather. “Please pray for them,” she urged. “May God give them comfort and clarity as they walk through this heartbreaking loss.”

When the Fireworks Faded

On Feb. 27, 2026, AM Pyrotechnics filed for Chapter 11 protection for the second time in a little over a decade. The case records note that Mayfield also filed for personal bankruptcy, that the company was facing outstanding legal claims from creditors, and that the troubles were “compounded by the death of an employee on its premises in late November 2025.” The docket references insurance difficulties for the company. A bankruptcy trustee attempted to convert the case to Chapter 7 (a liquidation). Mayfield objected, trying to hang on and maintain some sense of control.

On June 1, 2026, the company’s lawyers proposed a reorganization plan:

Strategic Path Forward. The Debtor's strategy to emerge from Chapter 11 is to sell the business as well as land related to the business, owned by both the Debtor and Mr. Mayfield personally. For the sake of this Plan, and because no motion to sell has been filed yet in Mr. Mayfield’s individual bankruptcy case, the Debtor will assume that it will not recognize any benefits from the sale of land owned by Mr. Mayfield. To the extent that is incorrect, the funds will constitute a cushion to support feasibility and will likely push this to a plan paying 100% to general unsecured creditors.

In bankruptcy lawyer speak, this amounts to a description of wishful thinking.

The court has not yet issued a ruling. It stands to reason that before any determination is made, the judge will hear from at least some of the community organizers ghosted by the company on the eve of Independence Day festivities. That won’t look good for Mayfield.

In public statements, Mayfield apologized to disappointed would-be revelers, citing an inability to “secure qualified personnel” and ensure safety. He also claimed the company was still completing numerous shows as scheduled. AM Pyrotechnics’ website remains up, as Mayfield apparently clings to hope. But his labor of love, I suspect, will end in broken dreams.

Note: I will continue to monitor this case as it develops, and I may publish follow-up articles as I learn more. Stay tuned.

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For some reason, taxi and Uber drivers like to regale me with their conspiracy theories while I’m in the back of the car, a captive audience. Most are cliché: 9/11 was an “inside job,” elites do mind control through 5G, etc. Yet one guy, a South Asian native, driving me home from LaGuardia in 2023, told me a yarn that sticks with me: He claimed that if he paid off a certain city official, he could get a green card.

Now, anyone who knows on a basic level how our government works would find this assertion laughable. No municipal bureaucrat, no matter how powerful, can direct the workings of federal immigration agencies and get paperwork approved. But when I posed these counterpoints to the young driver, he provided an oddly reasonable response: He said he didn’t know exactly how the official accomplished this task, but greasing the right wheels was certainly part of it.

Looking back, what made this unlikely quid pro quo seem plausible was that it occurred during former NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. Based on the corruption allegations that emerged as he continued to cling to his office in disgrace in 2024 and 2025, I got a nagging sense that something was fundamentally wrong in how the administration operated. But it was impossible to tell, from the surface, how far and deep the rot might go.

As if I’d had a mystery novel snatched out of my hands, I was disappointed when the Justice Department dropped its indictment against Adams in February 2025. The decision caused several federal prosecutors to quit in protest, as they believed it was influenced by President Trump (a new ally of Adams). But the Feds found a way to breathe new life into the case. In June 2026, they brought charges against Adams’ former chief of staff, Frank Carone. Let’s take a closer look.

[Want more of my take on the Adams debacle? See previous Black Sheep posts on our former mayor’s continuing shenanigans after leaving office (free) and a mysterious side-character involved in the Turkey-related charges (paid).]

The first thing I couldn’t help but notice about the accusations against Carone was that they had virtually no overlap with the scheme Adams had been charged with. Adams was accused of offering favors to the Turkish government in return for free vacations and heavily discounted business-class airline tickets. Instead of finding an offshoot of that mess involving Carone, prosecutors pieced together a whole new alleged scheme involving the former chief of staff: He had supposedly taken $120,000 in kickbacks in exchange for helping a hotel owner secure a contract for housing migrants.

Adding more intrigue to the situation, the hotel in question, a Microtel in Long Island City, Queens, was owned by….

Read more

Seven years after it ended, HBO’s “Silicon Valley” remains the most searing satire of the tech industry. Many of its scenes still feel fresh. One clip from the 2019 season, in which Gilfoyle’s bot “Son of Anton” deletes code bases as the “most efficient” way of fixing bugs, and orders 4,000 pounds of meat when tasked with finding cheap hamburgers, has taken on a second life as a viral critique of today’s AI.

But the show’s deeper theme is even more enduringly relevant. Every founder, at first, is some version of scrappy hero Richard Hendricks, trying to beat the odds and turn a brilliant concept into reality. If they’re successful, though, they risk becoming Gavin Belson: ensconced in privilege, surrounded by yes-men, high on their own superiority complexes, and constantly throwing their power behind bad ideas they no longer know how to gut-check.

Let’s look at where Mark Zuckerberg falls on this continuum.

When I was in college, I knew him as the Facebook founder wunderkind, decked in a hoodie, building something that, for better or worse, changed the world. Now what is he doing? Apparently practicing jiu-jitsu for hours each day, raising, hunting, and slaughtering his own meat, dramatically engaging in watersports (as seen above), forging Japanese swords, and nurturing fantasies about becoming an MMA star.

Oh yes, and still running his $1 trillion-ish, 70,000-headcount company, which as of late has descended into turmoil and revolt. First, he changed the name to “Meta” in 2021 on a bet that everyone would soon be living and working in a virtual reality “metaverse.” That was a dud. More recently, he took a similar headfirst dive into AI, shifting 7,000 workers and billions of dollars toward Llama, its AI Superintelligence Labs, and other projects. Though AI overall is significantly more promising than the metaverse, this has nonetheless gone poorly for Meta.

First, the company’s lost its chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, over his concerns that Meta’s priorities for AI development were short-sighted, and too focused on LLMs rather than building more comprehensive visual-based AI. Then, like turning a shower knob that can only do “hot” or “cold” and no in between, the company at first encouraged massive “tokenmaxxing,” or using AI as much as possible for every single task, no matter how complex or mundane. Then, as tens of billions of dollars in costs stacked up, Meta rapidly shifted almost 180 degrees, suddenly throttling AI usage, according to The Information.

On top of the whiplash, the company conducted a mass layoff in May 2026, axing 8,000 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce. The workers were told in a memo from HR that the cost-cutting was needed to “run the company more efficiently” and “offset other investments we’re making.” Zuckerberg directly tied the move to the company’s AI ambitions, saying “we’re transforming the company.” Meanwhile, misery reportedly increased for everyone who was spared.

According to Wired, an employee described the atmosphere as “literally the gulag.” Engineers claimed they had been forced into repetitive tasks, like labeling data, creating puzzles for AI, and ranking outputs, which shattered their sense of autonomy and purpose. At least one worker interrupted an internal meeting with an expletive-laced rant, while others distributed flyers and signed a petition against new employee-tracking for training data, Reuters reported. According to Business Insider, CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth later admitted morale was “among the worst it’s ever been” in the company’s history.

Instead of assuring workers, Meta’s attempts to contain the damage only inflamed grievances. The company’s leadership offered increased meal and travel budgets as a morale boost. On X, a nonprofit labor organizing group quipped, “No pizza party tastes as good as a union feels,” while gifs and memes mocking the company and comparing it to the dystopian TV series “Severance” collected thousands of “likes”.

Zuckerberg sent an internal memo attempting to lift spirits and revive camaraderie with a three-day AI hackathon. It got a chilly reception. Gadget Review wrote that “internal messages paint a workforce that sees the hackathon not as a gift but as uncompensated overtime dressed up with snacks.” Observers joked online: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

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Now, it’s obvious that Zuckerberg, no matter what havoc he wreaks, doesn’t exactly map to Gavin Belson. Belson is overtly vain and sociopathic. Zuckerberg is more of a supercharged nerdy goofball; despite making questionable choices for his company, he appears to have a healthy family life with his wife, Priscilla Chan, and supports a range of social causes he seems to genuinely care about, like education and child health initiatives.

But there are striking parallels. In the show, Belson is constantly trailed by sycophants, a traveling echo chamber that causes him to mistake his own petty impulses for vision. His Google-like company “Hooli” launches massive, foolhardy initiatives at his whim, only to shut them down and mass-fire people when the plans inevitably end badly.

He also displays a stunning lack of self-awareness that provides fodder for some of the show’s most memorable quotes. For example, when proclaiming his supposed altruism, Belson says: “I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.”

The Meta chaos looks much like Hooli’s chaos. And Zuckerberg’s “hackathon” memo displays almost as much tone-deaf absurdity as Belson. While young Zuckerberg was a likely inspiration for Richard Hendricks, the middle-aged version has since drifted uncomfortably close to the Dark Side.

The problem isn’t having exotic billionaire-style interests, no matter how pointless and bizarre they may sound to the rest of us, like making Japanese swords or slaughtering your own dinner by choice. The problem is being surrounded by too many people who will only tell you what you want to hear. For Zuck, that might be hearing he can devote 100% of his focus to all his activities simultaneously and excel at them — while also keeping one of the world’s largest technology companies thriving. The problem is isolation from reality, and living in a bubble of your own making.

The irony baked into this unfolding mess at Meta is that — like many big Silicon Valley tech firms — it has been known for being generous with compensation and perks, with six-figure salaries, free food at many of its campuses, and a historical culture of encouraging job-related intellectual exploration. Compared with the typical workplace, that’s almost utopian. Zuckerberg’s mistakes were a cold and abrupt counterpoint. They are a reminder that a flash of genius that makes someone a billionaire doesn’t last forever, that hubris corrupts judgment, and that the same person who can build a great company can just as easily push it off a cliff.

Back in 2024, I wrote about how a crew of social media-based penny stock pumpers, led by a guy who went by the persona of “Zack Morris,” managed to “beat the Feds.” Charged with a $114 million fraud scheme for allegedly promoting stocks to their followers and quietly selling at the peak, they won the dismissal of the indictment just two weeks before trial. The judge’s ruling hinged on a creative interpretation of a recent Supreme Court precedent and findings that the pumpers were “too far removed” economically from the investors who got stuck with the losses.

This seemed questionable to me and unlikely to survive an appeal. I wrote: “After all, even a conservative-majority Supreme Court probably would not give carte blanche to ‘pump and dump’ schemes.”

Lo and behold, I was right.

When I checked back in on the case this week, I found that not only had the Fifth Circuit revived the indictment, but a whole host of bizarre developments had unfolded. Among them: the original judge suddenly recused himself; “Zack’s” lawyers dropped him as a client. He had repeatedly harassed and threatened prosecutors online, including posting suggestive photos of real weapons (along with a Power Rangers sword), and he offered a $5,000 bounty (!) to his followers for information about the lawyers. But he wasn’t thrown in jail for all that; he has fled the country.

How did all of this unfold? What was the reaction in court? Will he ever face justice? I will do my best to bring paying subscribers up to speed — with receipts.

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It’s probably difficult for fragmented, attention-limited, slop-fed audiences of the 2020s to grasp Eddie Murphy’s box office power in the 1980s. His perceptive comedy leapfrogged demographic divides, launching whole franchises (see “Beverly Hills Cop”). He didn’t just mix levity with racial and social commentary; he set the tone for entire studio hits that might be unworkable, or maybe unthinkable, without him. Of course, I’m most specifically referring to 1983’s “Trading Places.”

No one has ever seriously talked about “rebooting” this movie. It’s too edgy (a whole scene leans on extremely insensitive cultural stereotypes, including Dan Aykroyd in blackface), and way too nerdy. In the chaotic climax, Murphy and Aykroyd get rich while putting the villains, “the Dukes,” in the poorhouse by shorting commodity futures using insider information. But the original holds together, remaining beloved for decades, almost certainly because of Murphy.

“Trading Places” has had such an enduring appeal, especially among finance nerds, that it managed to do something exceedingly rare in the world of blockbuster Hollywood comedies: It directly inspired actual market regulation. Colloquially, policymakers called it “the Eddie Murphy rule.”

The rule was enacted as part of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2011, and incorporated into the Commodity Exchange Act. But it gathered dust for years. Now, with the first‑ever criminal case invoking the rule, over a Polymarket bet on the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the policy and enforcement wonks who adore “Trading Places” are dorking out.

****

Case in point: I didn’t take interest in the Maduro/Polymarket situation when I initially saw news on it, while scrolling through Google Alerts. But a few weeks after the indictment was unsealed, at a New York City Bar Association event in May 2026, I saw a former prosecutor I remembered from my days of covering Brooklyn federal court talk about the case on a white-collar crime panel. The most intriguing part to him, clearly, was the Eddie Murphy nexus, the precedential nature of which he explained with great enthusiasm. He added: “I do expect with the rise in prediction markets and the value of content-driven information that you will see this becoming too much more active." Being a policy and “Trading Places” dork, myself, I was hooked.

So here’s what it’s all about:

In the dead of night in early January 2026, an elite U.S. military tactical group carried out the raid to arrest Maduro on narco-terrorism and cocaine-related charges. For obvious reasons, the mission was a closely guarded secret, being extremely dangerous, and also very likely in violation of major components of international law. All that aside, Trump’s tough talk on Venezuela had been ramping up, and for better or worse, really nothing is off the table in his administration. Polymarket, a cryptocurrency-based trading platform where users can speculate on world events, had been taking bets for months on the various possibilities.

According to the Justice Department, one of the soldiers tapped for this covert operation, 38‑year‑old U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke, decided to use his insider knowledge to his financial advantage. He allegedly invested about $34,000 on Polymarket, putting “yes” positions on questions like “will Maduro be out of power” or “will U.S. forces enter Venezuela.” Polymarket allows people to trade on binary questions like this, putting down a portion of a dollar for each bet and getting a full dollar back if the prediction comes true. Van Dyke’s trades allegedly paid off handsomely: He walked away with about $400,000, roughly 12X what he put down, according to the indictment.

Van Dyke is now facing five federal criminal charges: unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and an unlawful monetary transaction. While the statutory maximums add up to decades in prison, he will probably receive much less, if convicted, owing to his impressive military service. Still, it’s a worthy cautionary tale.

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But what does this all have to do with Eddie Murphy, you might be asking. A fair question. To answer, allow me to explain more about the wacky plot of “Trading Places.” (P.S., this is riddled with spoilers, but the movie is 43 years old, so the statute of limitations has long passed.) In the story, the greedy, sociopathic Duke brothers own a commodities brokerage firm. They decide to toy with the lives of two men — played by Murphy and Aykroyd — as an “experiment,” using various manipulations to cause them to exchange places in society. Aykroyd plays an Ivy League-educated star office manager for the firm, who is fired, arrested on trumped-up theft and drug charges, and kicked out of his townhouse. Murphy plays a street hustler who is hired to take his place, paid a handsome salary, and given the townhouse.

Murphy’s character eventually discovers the scheme and reveals it to Aykroyd’s character. The two also come to realize that the Dukes are insider traders who have plotted to steal government crop reports, which they intend to use to corner the market on “frozen concentrated orange juice.” The heroes track down the operative who stole the report, take the information to use for themselves, and pass along a fake report containing the exact opposite information to the Dukes.

In the climactic scene, which takes place in a commodities trading pit, the Dukes arrive believing the government will eventually announce a poor orange harvest, which would cause the price of the futures to shoot up. They instruct their trader to buy as many shares as he can, as quickly as he can. Murphy and Aykroyd, meanwhile, show up armed with the real data — it’s a bumper crop — and they plunge what little money they can scrape together into a highly leveraged short bet. At first, the share price shoots up, driven by the Dukes’ aggressive buying. Then a television monitor shows the Secretary of Agriculture announcing the crop results. The price plunges far below where it started, and Murphy and Aykroyd’s characters make a killing on the difference.

****

The market mechanics in the scene were reasonably authentic in 1983, including one intriguing aspect: At the time, it wasn’t really “insider trading,” in the legal sense, to use insider government information to gain an edge in commodities trading. This sounds odd considering that doing virtually the same thing with insider corporate information and public stocks can land someone in prison.

For decades, things remained like that, until after the 2008 financial crisis. Hoping to prevent another similar debacle, regulators and lawmakers proposed a vast compendium of new rules and restrictions, which ultimately was packaged together as the Dodd-Frank Act. Amid the discussion and debate, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair (undoubtedly a fan of the movie) pointed out the lapse. As explained by the former Brooklyn federal prosecutor on the Bar Association panel:

In the lead‑up to the passage of Dodd‑Frank, Gary Gensler, who was then the chair of the CFTC, went before Congress and pointed out that what happens in “Trading Places” was not actually illegal under the commodities laws at the time, and so lawmakers instituted a ban on insider trading using not just orange juice concentrate information, but all non‑public information misappropriated from a government source.

Not actually illegal! Imagine that! Through the magic of the legislative process, that all changed. Now we have the “Eddie Murphy rule,” AKA Section 4c(a) of the Commodity Exchange Act, which makes it unlawful for any federal government worker to use information obtained “by virtue of the employment or position” for commodities trading, if the data isn’t available to the general public. For good measure, the next two sections of 4C make just using insider government information you happened to have that you know is non-public, or stealing such information, also illegal.

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The thing is, though, tracing the impact of insider information on commodities trades is tricky. Massive macroeconomic forces usually drive price changes. A single report from the Department of Energy is probably little more than a blip on oil futures prices. Where would enforcement even begin to investigate how your special access led to minor profits? Converting insider government information into commodities profits is also hard. Can an average person, even a government worker with special access to information, predict how secret geopolitical news might affect gold or nickel prices? Not impossible, but it requires serious analysis.

But now we have Polymarket, and that tide is turning. The prediction platform, based offshore after an earlier regulatory settlement, has become largely normalized despite being morally dubious — allowing for betting on global events, no matter how horrific. As the Van Dyke case shows, it provides a straight path from government insider information to illicit returns, per Section 4c(a) of the Commodity Exchange Act.

As more people become tempted to place bets on the platform, using data or details that shouldn’t be traded on, some could eventually find themselves in handcuffs. They can thank Eddie Murphy.

Despite combing the internet and poring over court filings, what I could find out about the man spanned little more than a paragraph. His name was Jed Hansel Wood; he lived in Fort Worth, a city with deep ties to the cattle industry, where Agridime was based. He was in his 60s, roughly twice Link’s age. And he had some money — enough, at least, to back the venture and later hire himself a high-end defense attorney.

The address listed for him in court records turned up Google images of a modest ranch-style house built in the 1950s. A LinkedIn profile that appeared to be a geographic match lacked a photo and described the individual as a former aerospace engineer and logistics specialist, an upper-middle-class job at best. To the extent he had wealth, he was doing an excellent job of not flaunting it.

But criminal charges and the looming possibility of prison have a way of forcing even the quietest characters to reveal themselves. When I checked the docket recently, Wood had already made his move. Just six weeks after his arrest, he pleaded guilty. The decision might have been prompted by an honest urge to come clean, or a more self-serving instinct to lock down the best possible deal. Either way, it was bad news for Link.

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Like the cursed undead, Builder.ai’s profile lingers on LinkedIn, its pleas to “SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT” echoing in a digital wasteland. The once $1.5 billion startup filed for bankruptcy eleven months ago, insolvent despite initial big backers like Microsoft. The bigger scandal: It billed itself as an AI-based app developer, yet allegedly outsourced work to hundreds of human engineers in India.

The set-up conceptually resembled a famed 18th-century hoax in Vienna known as the “Mechanical Turk,” in which a mannequin, built for whatever reason to look like a Turkish person, was said to be able to play chess entirely by automation. However, its movements were controlled by a grand master hidden in a compartment through levers and magnets. Fake gearworks of the machine were shown to impress audiences. The human who did all the thinking was not.

The Wall Street Journal initially exposed the discrepancy at Builder.ai in August 2019. At the time, the company called itself Engineer.ai, and the founder, Sachin Dev Duggal, claimed to have an AI bot called Natasha that allowed “anyone to build custom software like ordering a pizza.” But employees told the WSJ the company’s AI code-generation capabilities were more hype than reality. A former chief business officer at the company, who sued for wrongful termination and an assortment of alleged false promises, claimed in his lawsuit that the founder was telling investors the company was “80% done with developing a product that, in truth, he had barely even begun to develop.”

While an obvious reputational problem, this revelation didn’t kill the company. Engineer.ai changed its name and kept going. Meanwhile, LLMs advanced, surpassing the capabilities Duggal had pitched to investors years earlier. Builder.ai eventually did provide the AI code wizardry it had promised — using Claude, not legions of outsourced humans. But by June 2025, when the company failed, the past claims of AI con artistry were resurrected. The Business Standard in India published a short, punchy item: “Builder.ai faked AI with 700 engineers, now faces bankruptcy and probe.” This time, it hit an AI-wary public’s schadenfreude sweet spot, and the news instantly appeared all over the internet.

As with many viral headlines, that one oversimplified the situation. An analysis by the blog Pragmatic Engineer poked holes in the “700 engineers” headline by pointing out that a “Mechanical Turk” scheme would have been ridiculous in 2024 and 2025, when just about anyone could have an LLM spit out code at the touch of a few buttons. Further, as Bloomberg detailed, Builder.ai had far worse problems than being mocked for alleged fake AI output. It was rapidly burned through cash, wasting millions of dollars constructing unnecessary internal versions of widely available tools like Slack. Before its collapse, creditors accused the company of vastly overstating revenue, seizing a considerable portion of its assets.

Yet the company’s LinkedIn death rattles show what caused the most lasting harm: not fudging financials, not wasting cash, but allegedly passing off (however briefly) the fruits of human labor as the output of machines. During the company’s final days, someone — maybe Duggal himself — posted the series of screeds to its account that I referenced at the beginning of this post. The all-caps provide an unmistakable sense that a nerve had been touched

*****

This is a familiar pattern for me. As you can read more about in SMIRK, my multifaceted relationship with “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli gave me an unusually detailed view of viral social media cycles. Some of the parallels are striking. Just as with Builder.ai, with Martin, it wasn’t the first “punch,” the reporting on his shocking drug price increase, that was the “knock out,” so to speak. It was the second: his dramatic early morning arrest months later on securities fraud charges.

In the public eye, the two events fused into one plot, complete with images of Martin scowling in a hoodie, paraded by FBI agents. Containing all the ingredients for propulsive outrage, the arrest story instantly swept the internet. It also developed a stubborn distortion. Most people assumed Martin was criminally charged for drug pricing, while the truth was banished to the realm of quirky factoids, the stuff of barroom trivia.

But on a deeper level, the conflation made sense. Drug pricing had evolved into a particularly searing topic by the mid-2010s. It was a concrete element of the vast and amorphous problem of excessive healthcare costs. Martin offered a cocky face onto which people could project their hatred for an entire industry. Regardless of the specific legal charges involved, the arrest had an obvious connection to price gouging in their minds: It was karma. No amount of explanation could change that.

Similarly, Builder.ai collapsed as public sentiment about AI plummeted. Virtually everyone was proclaiming it would widely replace jobs, despite not really performing most tasks as well as skilled human workers, or at least not without substantial guidance from skilled human workers. But corporate executives, as usual, eagerly bought into hype and used it as an excuse to slash headcount. People saw Builder.ai’s predicament as a sign of cosmic justice. A sampling of online comments:

• More people taking jobs from AI. Disaster!

• Did no one at Microsoft think to ask why the AI needed chai breaks?

• Raise your hand if you’re shocked. No, AI — your third hand.

• Humans 1 AI 0

• AGI = "A Guy from India"

*****

Now, I’m not denigrating all uses of AI. There are compelling examples of it being integrated into workflows in intelligent ways that actually do make complex tasks faster and easier. But that can take a high degree of coordination between people developing AI tools and the workers who use them, to ensure they are calibrated to appropriate functions. I think we can assume many corporations don’t approach AI rollouts with that level of care.

And that brings me to an irony I couldn’t help but see: While Builder.ai was roasted for allegedly using humans to perform what was supposed to be AI-generated work, lots of other companies today are — in a more subtle way — doing more or less the same thing. Numerous articles have highlighted a stark divide between how much work executives think AI is doing and how much employees are secretly taking on themselves. Often, AI deployments lead to more labor, not less, for remaining human staff, with many putting in extra hours to fix what has been termed “workslop.”

The net effect ends up the same as in the assumption about Builder.ai. The machine serves a performative role, while humans still toil in the background. Only they do even more work than previously, because the executives have decided to either stop hiring or lay people off. We punished Builder.ai for a story about fake AI, while embracing circumstances where AI is real, but its role in many companies is significantly exaggerated. If you think I’m overstating things, be aware that plenty of comedians on Instagram and TikTok have made this same point with far more sting.

This yet again reminded me of the Pharma Bro story. The media spotlight aimed at Martin landed squarely on a pharmaceutical industry practice that had previously escaped widespread attention: acquiring decades-old first-line treatments for deadly diseases, mostly ignored by the industry and lacking any competitors, and jacking up the price. Having seen a dramatic example, people were better positioned to understand and object to further instances of the same tactic by other companies.

With Builder.ai, the claim of its army of 700 human engineers pretending to be AI struck a similar strong chord that people couldn’t forget, sharpening public scrutiny of an entire industry. It was an emperor’s new clothes moment with a new moral: FOMO may drive companies to chase AI, but Builder.ai’s final all-caps shrieks of desperation show that devaluing human workers also comes at a profound cost.

New York City weather usually alternates between flavors of misery, but for a few days in spring, it’s bliss. New Yorkers shed their puffer coats. Windows fly open to breezes. Children scamper down sidewalks, their parents swearing in vain. On a stroll through a park, you might catch yourself humming a tune, smiling as you notice a vagrant on a bench doing the same. You can feel the city inhaling, exhaling, unburdened.

This spring, New Yorkers got an extra reason to collectively rejoice as the sun warmed their spirits: The leader of an organization that has routinely scourged the city, crowding its streets with sloppy, ill-behaved drunks dressed as Santa Claus, was arrested and charged with fraud.

On April 14, 2026, the federal court in Manhattan unsealed charges against Stefan Pildes, organizer of New York City’s SantaCon, over allegations that he stole $1.4 million of the proceeds of the purportedly charitable bar crawl for personal expenses like parties and luxury vacations.

The victims of this alleged scheme were the “Santas,” thousands of young people who streamed annually into the heart of Manhattan, decked in holiday attire, to engage in a messy display of public drinking, carousing, urinating, puking, fighting, and countless other disruptive activities. Born on the West Coast in the 1990s as a countercultural prank, SantaCon helped inspire Chuck Palahniuk’s vision of Fight Club’s Project Mayhem; but when the event came to New York City, it swelled into an even more unruly and more despised tradition.

On the Internet, New Yorkers unleashed their snark. When the US attorney’s office in Manhattan posted a tweet asking to hear from people who believed they were “victimized in the alleged SantaCon fraud,” replies included:

• “Santa exposed himself to my 3 yr old daughter last SantaCon. It’s ruined Christmas. The holiday traumatizes her. Who should I speak to about this?”

• “does trying to commute to work while it’s happening count?”

• “Does having to dodge vomit on the street count?”

• “Every New Yorker is a victim of santacon.”

• “what if you have been victimized by SantaCon, but also brought it upon yourself?”

No one expressed any real concern for the Santas. To the extent their plight was considered at all, the overwhelming theme was “they had it coming.”

This sparked a philosophical dilemma that often arises for me when writing about criminal cases: How should journalists and the public interpret the situation when the victims themselves are unsympathetic, somewhat at fault for their predicament, or even bad people? The default frame is the one prosecutors use in trials, portraying defendants as villains. But that starts to fall apart when the individuals they supposedly harmed seem to be on the receiving end of karma.

Follow this reasoning far enough, and it ends in dark places: like the widespread support for fresh-faced alleged populist vigilante Luigi Mangione, accused of gunning down a health insurance CEO in broad daylight. Or on a less macabre level, you have situations like the Mt. Everest rescue con I wrote about in my last Black Sheep post, targeting ill-prepared amateur climbers who have been overrunning the mountain, trashing the delicate environment and creating “traffic jams” along narrow summit paths at dangerous altitudes. Writing that, I couldn’t help but want to root for the alleged scam artist sherpas a little bit.

But no matter how much you might despise the harsh realities of capitalism, murdering executives is never the answer. Nor is it OK to defraud someone just because they are obnoxious and seem like they should be defrauded. These are the terms we must accept as conditions of living in a civilized society; when laws are broken, the agreed-upon legal process should have a chance to run its course, however out of sync it might seem with our personal notions of poetic justice.

And that brings me back to the Bad Santas. Here’s a sober look at the facts (ok, pun intended):

Unsurprisingly, there have been suspicions about sketchiness and SantaCon funds for at least a few years. Gothamist did an investigation in December 2023, analyzing the nonprofit’s financial filings and finding that a significant portion of the money went to “crypto and Burning Man.”

The federal indictment now alleges Pildes raised $2.7 million from 2019 to 2026 by selling $10 to $20 tickets to the Santas. He also took a cut of sales from the 60ish bars that agreed to be “official stops on the SantaCon route.” While not mentioned by the Feds, a TimeOut New York article on SantaCon 2025 notes: “This year, there’s also a VIP ticket option for $360, which includes line-cutting privileges and an exclusive SantaCon keepsake badge.”

In marketing, Pildes claimed all the money went to good causes, including “arts funding and fighting hunger,” telling attendees on the event website that they could “brag that [they] actually gave to charity this year.” According to prosecutors, the group also sent an email to an attendee who questioned the purpose of the ticket, saying that it was a “donation” and “that good feeling will warm your heart faster than whiskey and gingerbread.”

The vehicle Pildes used to gather all of these funds was a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called, strangely, “Participatory Safety Inc.” The group’s Form 990s, which you can find on the IRS web page, describe its mission as raising “funds and community participation through a costumed city-wide event” to support “Arts Projects and “causes and charities that align with our goals and mission.”

However, according to federal prosecutors, about half of the money went to Pildes, himself. The indictment lists purposes including “extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, luxury vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and Vail, extravagant meals, and a luxury vehicle.” SantaCon also allegedly covered his Manhattan rent and a “$100,000 investment in a boutique resort in Costa Rica founded by a personal friend.” A lot of the funds were allegedly diverted through a separate corporate entity he controlled, even more amusingly named “Creative Opportunities Group Inc.”

Now out on bail, 50-year-old Pildes is charged with wire fraud. The government is seeking the forfeiture of his lake house, among other assets. If convicted, his future probably includes at least a few not-so-jolly or boisterous holiday seasons in a drab prison camp.

*****

Looking over all of this, one could easily argue that thousands of Santas are no worse off for allegedly unintentionally “donating” $10 or $20 or so to Pildes’ living expenses and luxurious lifestyle. One could also plausibly argue that being conned out of such a small sum is far from the worst thing that could happen when getting black-out intoxicated in the middle of Manhattan.

But here’s the annoying thing about principles: They are impossible to shake off, even if the immediate harm appears nominal. And deeper truths tend to emerge, showing they were important all along.

Thinking back to my original question in this piece, I arrived at some answers, at least as applied to this situation specifically. There’s no point in feeling sorry for the Santas. The victim frame doesn’t fit them. Their raucous antics make city living more challenging than usual for a day. Skimming a little off the top of the hundreds of dollars each probably spends achieving peak drunken idiocy might seem benign.

However, there are real losers, even if they don’t technically meet the legal definition of “fraud victims.” While not directly robbed, the charities that were supposed to receive the donations — or, more accurately, their beneficiaries — come to mind. We will never know what good works could have been done with the money if it had gone where it was promised.

Another “real” victim is New York itself. Claiming that an event is for charity does exactly what the organization says: it warms the heart and makes a participant feel good about themself… even if they end up puking on their shoes. Who knows how many Santas might have reined themselves in and behaved a little better if they didn’t get to wear an artificial halo.

Superlatives are like siren songs to the middle of the bell curve, promising a brush with something special or extreme.

For marketing, they work like magic. Plenty of subpar restaurants stay in business by selling what someone has declared the “hottest” chili, the “tallest” stack of pancakes, or the “biggest” burger, no special culinary talent required. Small towns can claim fame by constructing comically oversized objects like the “World’s Largest” mailbox, cuckoo clock, or ball of twine. In fact, the “World’s Largest Ball of Twine” is so successful that America boasts at least three: in Darwin, Minnesota; Cawker City, Kansas; and Branson, Missouri.

But there can be serious downsides to being tagged with a superlative, and the inevitable influx of thrill-seeking masses that follows. Nowhere on Earth is this more obvious than on its highest peak, Mt. Everest.

Every spring, when climbing season begins in the Himalayas, there are stories about the “traffic jam” on Everest, as hundreds of visitors take a crack at the mountain. Some are seasoned climbers, but the vast majority are amateurs, driven by a desire for bragging rights and maybe some “likes” on social media. Their exploits are made possible by an extensive industry of sherpas, other local guides, supply providers, and trained medical and emergency personnel.

While the steady stream of inexperienced mountaineers (typically paying $10,000s to over $100,000 each) has helped support Nepal’s economy, it has also left a devastating mark on a natural wonder. Photos abound documenting the extensive piles of trash — discarded oxygen tanks, food wrappers, water bottles, and God knows what else — scarring the scenery. There are also frozen remains of some unlucky climbers themselves. They serve as a reminder that the danger in scaling Everest is actually real, not just hype invented for tourist brochures.

With only a few routes to the summit doable for non-experts, crowds directly compound the risk. The air is so thin above 26,000 feet, the so-called “Death Zone,” that people’s bodies start breaking down from oxygen starvation, the brain swells, and the heart and lungs grow strained. Having to wait too long in line can literally kill you.

Of course, a fair number of the amateurs don’t make it far enough up the mountain to be exposed to those risks. Estimates vary, but available data indicate that at least a third of would‑be summit-seekers turn back early, often before setting foot in the Death Zone. The reasons range from sudden storms and illnesses, which can derail even seasoned mountaineers, to problems concentrated among the least experienced: inadequate gear, exhaustion, and altitude sickness. That context creates a different kind of vulnerability, apart from the elements: Rookie climbers become easy pickings for con artists.

*****

One could argue that I have no business poking around in the dealings of Everest adventurers. Apart from casual day hikes, I do not climb mountains. I have zero desire to spend weeks dragging gear up treacherous paths and sleeping in a frigid tent in pursuit of a summit. But I do find stories of these rigorous journeys compelling, and creative fraud in exotic locales even more so. That’s probably why a recent headline about the Everest scam grabbed my attention. I might not need to scale the mountain, but I did need to get to the bottom of whatever deeds were being orchestrated on it.

I first glimpsed the story in one of my Google alert emails, an April 2, 2026, piece from the UK’s Independent: “Everest guides accused of poisoning foreign climbers to force fake rescues in $20m scam.” According to the article, Nepali authorities had criminally charged 32 people in a case claiming widespread fraud by tour operators, who had allegedly conspired across the climbing ecosystem to stage hundreds of unnecessary helicopter rescues for insurance money. In some cases, complicit climbers may have agreed to take part in exchange for cut-rate expeditions. However, the Independent focused on the more scandalous claims involving unknowing participants: those who were allegedly poisoned.

According to the article, some guides staged the need for rescues by "lacing food with large amounts of baking soda,” uncooked chicken, or rat droppings, or giving some climbers “medications with excessive amounts of water.” This apparently led to nausea, dizziness, body aches, and other symptoms that mimicked or worsened existing altitude sickness, which the guides allegedly contended must be handled through emergency evacuations via helicopter. (Experts generally say the cure is simply to walk down and rest, not to summon a chopper.)

Before you ask, yes, I looked it up — you can get sick from consuming huge amounts of baking soda or overhydrating in a physically demanding environment without maintaining an appropriate salt balance. But that said, this information still left me with questions. First of all, baking soda has a very off-putting bitter taste. Shouldn’t a substantial amount of it in food be noticeable, even if the altitude messes with your senses a bit? Also, how much water would the guides have to push on trekkers to mess up their body chemistry? Liters? Both situations seem like they should raise red flags in any reasonably aware and skeptical person. (We will assume the dangers and grossness of uncooked chicken and rat droppings are even more obvious.)

Plain as day, I could see a plausible, unspoken narrative operating in the background: These amateur climbers, who came by the dozens, may have had no mountain sense and put their full faith in these guides, eating whatever gross-tasting food was served to them and following even the most counterintuitive instructions, like, “Here, if you’re feeling queasy, drink this entire two-liter bottle of water right now.” They might not have even done basic homework before embarking on the trek up the world’s highest peak; a cursory Google search could tell you how to fix altitude sickness. Maybe they didn’t express skepticism because they didn’t know enough to have any.

So I was torn: Clearly, insurance fraud and, even more so, poisoning people were serious crimes and moral wrongs. But was I supposed to feel sympathy for these “victims,” who had apparently made themselves into such easy marks?

****

It turned out that this alleged scheme had existed in some form for several years, with stories dating back to 2018.

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A One-Way Ticket

Just hours after I hit “publish” on Part II of this series, the man at the center of an alleged $220 million cattle fraud who had gone on the run, leaving his wife to face a criminal indictment alone, was caught at Los Angeles International Airport.

According to federal authorities, he was apprehended by US Customs and Border Protection at 11:45 am on March 9, 2026. Public records don’t say where Link had been coming from or where he was headed. But they do make clear where he ended up: in federal custody. The following day, in Los Angeles federal court, a magistrate judge ordered him permanently detained, finding him a flight risk, with no possibility of bail.

I checked the US Bureau of Prisons database; he was listed as an inmate at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, a sleek fortress with slots for windows and a stack of cage-covered recreation decks. He would remain there until transferred to a facility in Northern Texas, where his criminal case was ongoing. From my experience as a journalist covering white-collar crime, I knew he was unlikely to emerge as a free man again for years — possibly many, if convicted and sentenced to a lengthy term.

Because BOP restrictions and court orders often limit contact between co-defendants, Link’s wife, Tia, was unlikely to receive permission to visit him. Their lawyers would almost certainly discourage them from writing, emailing, or speaking on the phone. Conversations would be recorded, scrutinized, and possibly used as evidence.

For the foreseeable future, the couple might only interact through looks exchanged across the courtroom, where he would sit, already judged in many eyes as, at minimum, a coward.

It was a humbling fate.

The “Ghost Herd”

Interestingly, records filed by investigators don’t paint Link as eager to head for the hills when his cattle investment company, Agridime, ran into trouble. They depict the opposite: Link stood his ground, seemingly committed to doing whatever he could to keep the business afloat. Unfortunately, as the documents allege, that included lying to investors.

After its founding in 2017, Agridime operated for several years, apparently doing as promised — allowing investors to purchase heads of cattle for $2,000 each, then delivering returns when the animals were eventually slaughtered and sold for meat. It’s possible some investors received the generous payouts the company advertised, of 15% to 32%, from honest practices.

But the wild swings in the cattle market during 2020 — resulting from drought, pandemic-related labor shortages, and the shuttering of the restaurant industry — proved too much for the small, young business to bear. Agridime would have been hemorrhaging cash as it struggled to both purchase cattle and sell meat at reasonable prices, while also paying investors on a promised schedule. Facing imminent failure, Link and his colleagues allegedly took a dangerous step in January 2021: they started selling contracts for cattle that didn't exist.

Federal investigators traced the shift to that same month, when Link and his colleagues continued meeting with investors, offering the usual pitch of guaranteed returns on cattle purchases. But when the funds flowed in, some as little as $10,000, some as much as $2.7 million, the money allegedly went elsewhere. According to prosecutors and securities regulators, it went into Agridime’s operations, to repay loans, into Link’s and other employees’ pockets, and — most critically for the “Ponzi scheme” label — to pay previous investors.

When investors expressed concerns and demanded proof of their purchases, Link and others at Agridime allegedly supplied electronic tag information for real, living cattle. But the same tag information for the same animals was allegedly provided to multiple investors simultaneously, essentially using a relatively small number of actual cattle to fabricate an entire “ghost herd.”

Based on the amount of money owed to investors in 2024, Agridime should have owned somewhere between 28,000 and 58,000 head of cattle. However, a receiver appointed by a federal judge found only 6,500.

Walls Close In

In the abstract, treating cattle as an investment probably makes sense. Sitting down in a restaurant, about to bite into a juicy hamburger, the average city dweller rarely spares a thought for how it got there. Similarly, driving along a rural highway, passing a herd of cattle grazing in a field, you might see them as interchangeable, sleepy-looking sources of more hamburgers.

But raising animals, especially huge ones of 1,000 pounds or more, and getting them slaughtered and sold is a complicated venture. Unlike piles of metal, agricultural products like grain or vats of petroleum, animals don’t sit still. They must be fed and cared for. They may be shifted between multiple lots and pastures throughout their short lives. Sometimes they get sick and die, or escape entirely.

For an investor, taking Agridime’s deal even under the best circumstances was far riskier than the company let on. Due diligence was virtually impossible for a third party located hundreds or thousands of miles from a herd, especially without any knowledge of the cattle industry.

Because of these blind spots, securities and commodities regulations are often found to apply when companies solicit passive investments, even in something as tangible as a cow or a steer. By 2023, state regulators in Arizona and North Dakota had identified this fatal flaw in Agridime’s model: the company wasn’t registered, anywhere, as a securities broker, despite selling what the regulators viewed as unregistered securities. Both agencies issued cease-and-desist orders.

Doubling Down

Link and his colleagues didn't let adverse orders from state regulators slow them down. As alleged by federal authorities, they kept selling mostly fictional head of cattle, with Link meeting personally with numerous investors while his wife, Tia, allegedly helped make assurances in person and over the phone.

By August 2023, months after both Arizona and North Dakota had ordered the company to stop, Tia was still allegedly working phones and email chains, telling one prospective investor that Agridime had just sailed through a USDA audit and was in regulatory compliance. When another investor wrote to ask whether it was truly "guaranteed that one year from now you will pay me $5,500," her reply, according to the indictment, was three words: "Yes, that is correct."

The group allegedly falsified dates on purchase records for cattle, making it appear that animals had been purchased promptly with investor funds when the money had already gone elsewhere — including to cover company costs and personal expenses, among them a $528,000 property for the Links in rural Missouri, what was probably a home, and more than $11 million paid to Link and others involved in the business as salaries and commissions.

Amid continuing problems securing enough inventory, Agridime allegedly persuaded a handful of local ranchers to “consign” their animals to the company, giving Agridime access to live cattle. Agridime allegedly promised the ranchers it would pay to feed the animals and have them slaughtered, returning a share of the profits. According to court documents, including filings submitted by the ranchers themselves, they never received any funds from the company.

Following the state's cease-and-desist order, Arizona’s security regulator brought an additional enforcement proceeding against Agridime over claims it continued to operate in the state. The US Securities and Exchange Commission filed an enforcement case against Agridime in December 2023, with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission following suit in May 2024. Corporate assets were frozen, and the company was forced into receivership.

Link’s Last Stand

Through much of the escalating crisis, Link stood his ground. He defended the company to securities regulators. He testified in a deposition, explaining his role in the founding and management of Agridime and asserting that the “buck” stopped with him and his co-founder, a Texas businessman named Jed Wood.

Fighting the cease-and-desist order, Link argued to the Arizona Corporation Commission in June 2023 that regulators had fundamentally misunderstood his business. Agridime, he contended, was “a registered and bonded livestock broker and market agency” operating squarely within the USDA’s existing regulatory framework — not a securities dealer subject to Arizona’s securities laws. He accused the state of attempting to improperly “transmute cattle brokers into securities brokers,” and denied that Agridime’s customers were investors at all. Link demanded the order be vacated and all charges dismissed. The order stood.

In an August 4, 2024, filing to the federal judge overseeing the SEC’s case, Link objected strenuously to the agency’s determination that Agridime was a Ponzi scheme, while pledging to help ensure anyone owed money by the company was paid back. The one-page document states:

Defendant Joshua Link files this Response to Receiver’s Motion for Ponzi Determination. To Mr. Link’s knowledge, Agridime conducted legitimate cattle business and was not a Ponzi scheme. Accordingly, he writes to state his strong opposition to Receiver’s Motion for Ponzi Determination. Nevertheless, Mr. Link does not oppose the relief requested in Receiver’s Motion with the understanding that obtaining this designation will assist Receiver in maximizing the value of the Receivership Estate and, in turn, work towards ensuring that Receiver will be able to pay back the purchasers of cattle contracts and any outstanding bills owed by Agridime.

The court rejected his position. Agridime was declared a Ponzi scheme by the judge on August 13, 2024.

Sifting Through Remains

In business collapses, insolvencies, and fraud cases, courts can appoint receivers to act as neutral fiduciaries, charging them with sifting through the wreckage and figuring out who is owed what — and whether any money remains to pay them. In Ponzi schemes, receivers also take on the unenviable task of clawing back payments to the lucky investors who were paid with other investors' funds.

A receiver appointed to oversee the aftermath of Agridime provided a sobering financial picture:

As of 2024, the company was found to have raised $191 million from roughly 2,100 people, a figure the Justice Department later revised upward to $220 million. At least $58 million of those funds were used to make Ponzi payments to prior investors.

A quarterly update covering the final months of 2025 was starker still. The estate had $2.8 million in cash on hand, nine properties scattered across Kansas valued at roughly $1.1 million on Agridime’s books, and approximately 12,000 pounds of frozen meat sitting in a Kansas warehouse. Investors who were “net winners” — those who received payments funded by later investors — owed a combined $15 million back to the estate. But recovering it would be a long and fraught process. A similar effort involving Bernie Madoff’s investors, for example, took 16 years.

All told, investors had lost an estimated $115 million, with uncertain prospects of ever seeing more than pennies on the dollar returned.

A Broken Trust

Having picked my way through multiple federal and state court dockets and read whatever coverage I could find, I still don’t know when Link decided to run, or what specific event pushed him to it. That bothers me. What bothers me even more is this: growing up outside of Kansas City, I probably met many people like Link, hardworking, sincere Midwesterners just trying to get ahead.

From watching videos of Link, including one of his and Tia’s 2018 wedding at a Sedalia, Missouri farmstead, I didn’t get the vibe of a high-pressure, fast-and-loose hustler. He looked kind, warm, and dependable. His alleged scheme wasn’t a siren song to the greedy at heart, but an appeal to fundamentally decent values: offering an alternative to factory farming, supporting sustainable food sources, and treating animals raised for meat with as much dignity as they could hope for.

Link’s literal indictment felt, to me, like an indictment of my own biases. Whether the business fell off the rails through bad luck or bad faith, whether Link and his colleagues made desperate decisions or cynical ones, I would have expected people who resonate with my own sense of identity to take what comes and face the music, support their loved ones, and do whatever they could to help fix what they broke.

But Link didn’t do that.

A Steer’s Last Day

One summer morning, while I was visiting my aunt’s farm, I helped her load King Richard III into a trailer to meet his end. He was a Dexter steer, the oldest in her small collection of cattle, and she had decided his day had come. He was headed to a Mennonite-run slaughterhouse, a humane alternative to large assembly-line processing plants. My aunt had carefully scheduled the trip to minimize how long King Richard III would have to wait before the Big Event. He had bad hooves, and she didn’t want him stuck for hours on concrete.

My aunt and her late husband had named him King Richard III because, like the British monarch immortalized by Shakespeare, he had congenital deformities. He was also born in winter, prompting them to think of the famous line from the play: “Now is the winter of our discontent.” It was a peculiar habit, naming animals you intended to kill for meat. But I also sensed a quiet bravery in confronting the moral consequences. A name conferred respect. Not everyone had the strength to show respect to an animal they intended to eat.​

Dexter cattle are typically smaller and more compact than standard meat breeds, like Angus or Hereford. But King Richard III had grown into a giant among his peers, the size of several refrigerators. Standing in the mud that morning, trying to corral him away from the other steers, I felt both the practical danger and my City Slicker vulnerability. When he was finally in the trailer, with the door shut behind him, I was overwhelmed with a mix of pride and sorrow. That pang, I realized, was a hidden cost of raising livestock ethically.

Now, years later, looking at Agridime’s website, I think of that day. The framework, wrapped in an emotional attachment to how things should be, was exactly what the company was allegedly built to exploit. Agridime pitched itself as a way for ordinary people to invest in beef raised on local ranches, a way to make money and feel virtuous at the same time. As I explained in Part I of this story, the feel-good venture allegedly morphed into a $220 million Ponzi scheme, leaving investors empty-handed and triggering federal indictments. One of the key figures, Joshua Link, is now a fugitive; here, I trace how Agridime started and how it allegedly went off the rails.

Mysterious Beginnings

Despite multiple government investigations and extensive court records about the company, there is surprisingly little public information about Joshua Link’s life before Agridime. This opacity is striking given his role. Documents identify him as the co-founder and Executive Director, and in a prior regulatory probe, he described himself as effectively the company’s CEO, saying that he and the other co-founder, Jed Wood, were “where the buck stops” for all major decisions.​

Court filings in the federal criminal case and related civil actions still shed no light on where Link came from or how he met Wood. What they do show is that Link and Wood organized Agridime LLC in Texas on April 13, 2017. Link, then in his mid‑20s, had clear ties to Missouri; in September 2018, he married his future co‑defendant, Tia, in Sedalia, where she had gone to high school. Over the years, he also had addresses in Gilbert, Arizona, and Hope, Kansas. Wood, by contrast, was a man in his 50s from Fort Worth, Texas, described in legal documents as Agridime’s President and Operations Director. He allegedly oversaw finances while Link drove sales.​

While the records don’t explain how the two men became business partners, their concept, on paper, sounded plausible: a way for investors to profit from cattle without doing the physical labor, while ostensibly supporting local agriculture. On its website, Agridime proclaimed “PRODUCING THE BEST MEAT FOR THE BEST PRICE. RAISED BY AMERICAN FARMERS,” with the text appearing over an image of a woman on horseback, in a cowboy hat, carrying a large American flag.

Agencies that later scrutinized the company, including the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, do not allege any fraud before 2021. Perhaps when Link and Wood launched Agridime, they believed in the model. But once the company gained a foothold, something — or someone — took a wrong turn.

The Pitch: “Everybody Wins”

Agridime started with no deep industry connections, no celebrity endorsements, and no massive initial outlay of funding. But it did have the benefit of the right cultural backdrop. The rise in “farm-to-table” dining, interest in high-quality grass-fed beef, and the idea of “using the whole animal” had flourished in the 2010s. Agridime’s pitch slotted neatly into that landscape, sounding persuasive to both investors and meat customers.

Using social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube as its primary marketing vehicles, the company successfully attracted the right attention. In 2022, a local television station ran a paid promotional interview with Link at a Gilbert, Arizona warehouse, where the co-founder claimed the company offered “the most nutrient dense protein on the planet.” Along with packages of meat, Link showcased the company’s offerings of tallow-based candles and cosmetics, which he described as a way to use “the whole carcass” and “respect” the animal.

YouTubers running investment-related channels also noticed the company’s frequent social media posts promising significant returns, which some commented on favorably. Reviewing information posted on Agridime’s website, one YouTuber posting in April 2022 offered mostly positive impressions to his audience of about 1,760 subscribers.

Although he refrained from explicitly recommending the investment, he noted the “guaranteed” return was higher than the S&P 500’s growth, adding that the company’s business model had “led them to grow rapidly since launch” and that it had established a “fully transparency and sustainable supply chain where everybody wins.” The YouTuber also repeated the company’s claims of being USDA licensed, saying that “the entire process of investment in Agridime is legally done,” that “all cattle are insured” against death loss, and that “this really gives a peace of mind for investors.”

Court documents included excerpts of the company’s marketing materials, providing a simple financial summary:

The cost per steer or heifer was $2,000, an amount that was purportedly supposed to include its feeding and care, plus meat processing costs. The cattle were supposed to yield an average of 500 pounds of beef each, sold at $6 per pound, for a total of $3,000. Of the profit, $600 was intended to go to Agridime and $300 to $400 to the investor, for a 15–20% return.

In the materials, the company states: “Respectively, we feel if we were giving much less than 15-20% return that we wouldn’t be doing right by our customers. Our aim to is to create a sustainable supply chain that we can have 100% transparency with start to finish and everybody still wins.”​

For people who wanted to feel like the kind of person who supports sustainable farming, Agridime offered a shortcut, with interest.

Rapid Rise

All told, about 2,200 investors were lured by Agridime’s promises, according to documents submitted by prosecutors. While some were agricultural professionals, most were individuals scattered across at least 14 states, including Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. Investors typically bought dozens of cattle each, sinking $100,000 or more into Agridime, which was likely a substantial portion of their savings. According to prosecutors, the entire operation brought in $220 million from January 2021 through December 2023.​

Through it all, Link was involved in nearly everything, including face-to-face meetings with investors, training sales staff, overseeing digital marketing, and negotiating contract terms, according to the court filings. His wife, Tia, worked closely with him as Agridime’s Marketing Director. As Agridime’s flow of investments grew, so did its operations. A LinkedIn page for Agridime lists a headquarters address in Fort Worth, Texas, and 12 employees. Its staff came to encompass a variety of administrative roles, including a financial controller, operations managers, and logistics personnel. In 2021, the company hired a North Dakota cattle broker, Taylor Bang, the owner of Taylor Bang Cattle Sales LLC. Some staff received generous compensation, particularly Bang. Regulators claimed Bang raked in almost $7 million in commissions from Agridime. Meanwhile, Link and his wife allegedly drew payments of more than $2.7 million.

Unstable Market

Most of us living in big cities don’t have to think too often about how wild swings in weather and other uncontrollable factors affect our food supply. But for small farmers and ranchers, these issues can be matters of economic life and death.​

Just as Agridime was ramping up, conditions in the cattle market were shifting against it. Drought plagued much of the Western and Midwestern U.S. in 2021 and 2022, causing the price of animal feed to soar. Hay “was like gold,” my aunt told me, noting that it often had to be transported long distances at “a hideous profit.” Inflation also pushed up prices of various farming necessities, like diesel fuel. As a result, farmers liquidated their herds. Inventory levels dropped to their lowest levels in decades, while demand for beef continued unabated, causing prices to shoot up. For anyone trying to buy thousands of animals, as Agridime claimed to be doing on investors’ behalf, that meant paying more for each head, or not getting them at all.​

Yet the company continued to tout a “guaranteed” return that supposedly covered “feeding that animal to finish,” as if these costs were static.

Problematic Math

And that brings us to Agridime’s simple return formula, which arguably should have been a big red flag for investors. Look harder at the costs involved, the probable revenue from selling meat, and most importantly the wide range of uncertainties, and the numbers start to look unrealistic.​

Graze, a trade magazine for small ranchers, gives a hypothetical cost of just buying a 700‑pound calf at $1,600+, without even accounting for feeding, transport, and processing costs. With that in mind, a flat investment of $2,000 was unlikely to go far enough. Meanwhile, an expectation of 500 pounds of meat, selling at $6 per pound, for each animal was also highly optimistic. Agriculture researchers provide examples of 1,200‑pound steers typically yielding only 470 to 490 pounds of packaged beef. (As huge as he was, my aunt told me King Richard III netted just 530 pounds.)

But how were investors to know to question the data they were shown by Link and others at Agridime? After all, most were probably just City Slickers like me.

This concludes Part II. Click here for Part III.

Far From The City Lights

Every once in a while, you stumble across a fraud story that hits close to home. In this instance, I mean that very literally.

For almost 20 years, I’ve been a New Yorker. The city’s jarring cacophony of noises, smells, and humanity resonates with my nervous system in a way that most Americans will never understand. And that’s OK. New Yorkers don’t need or want everyone to come here.

But I didn’t start out surfing urban chaos. I grew up outside of Kansas City, Missouri, a stone’s throw from pastoral-looking scenes of cows and soybean fields. Like so many Hallmark movie protagonists, I had to escape all of that for bright city lights. Yet, it’s still embedded in my soul — the sense of being in the country, with a big sky overhead and undeveloped land unfurling as far as the eye can see. It’s part of what makes me me.

As a Big City reporter, I’ve covered Wall Street schemes and corporate scandals and brushed elbows with famous journalists, celebrities, and power brokers in Manhattan courthouses. So I couldn’t help but smile a little when I saw news of a major financial crime near my hometown. It involved a Missouri man who allegedly ran a $220 million cattle scam.

Most-Wanted Cattle Man

The indictment was unsealed on Feb. 12, 2026, in Fort Worth, Texas, federal court. It charged five individuals with assorted crimes over their alleged roles in a scheme to fleece cattle investors. The group was involved in a business called Agridime, which allegedly promised to channel funds into purchasing steers on local ranchers’ farms, and provide returns of 15% to 32% when the animals were eventually slaughtered for meat.

Instead, according to prosecutors, Agridime operated as a Ponzi scheme, purchasing very few actual animals and simply repaying old investors with newer investors’ funds. The scheme, spanning multiple states including Texas, Missouri, and North Dakota, totaled $220 million from 2021 through 2023, with defendants extracting millions of dollars for themselves, according to the indictment. More than 2,000 investors ended up losing at least $115 million, prosecutors alleged.

Curiously, while four of the defendants were arrested, one remained at large. The holdout was a 30-something Missouri man, Agridime co-owner Joshua Link. News sources highlighted how he was a fugitive, providing links to his FBI wanted poster:

Nothing evokes the historic Wild West quite like a guy being on the lam, wanted for cattle fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s release, the charges, and the poster captivated me and jarred me out of my preoccupation with big-city hustlers. There was something oddly affirming, given my own background, about recognizing equally complex swindles in America’s Heartland.

At first glance, the pattern of what Link and his compatriots were accused of looked standard: overpromising, wildly under-delivering, and pocketing some of the ample cash flowing through the scheme based on these deceptions. But the documents couldn’t tell me how, exactly, Agridime had grown from nothing into an operation siphoning in hundreds of millions of dollars in just a few years. That question hooked me.

Anyone who’s ever tried to raise money for anything, be it a hedge fund, a tech startup, or virtually any other endeavor, knows it’s no easy feat getting outsiders to sink ample quantities of money into a venture with no proven track record. Winning trust often relies on shorthand signals of legitimacy, such as the founder coming from a top Ivy League school, having famous friends, being named to a “30 under 30” list, or otherwise generating media attention. Old-fashioned nepotism can work, too.

The folks at Agridime had none of those special qualities, and yet, according to prosecutors, they somehow sweet-talked $220 million out of people. This didn’t sound like the work of a country rube. Someone with the finesse of a Jordan Belfort or a Bernie Madoff had to be involved, acting as a rainmaker. Based on everything I read in the court documents, his sudden disappearance, and the cool, even stare captured in his wanted poster, I sensed the lynchpin of the alleged scheme was Link.

Tia & Josh

While there was a flurry of local news reports on the indictment and on Agridime, no journalist had taken a close look at Link. So I did. When I started poking at the threads, a dark and intriguing tangle emerged.

The indictment named five individuals, hailing from locations sprawled across the midsection of the country:

• Jed Wood of Fort Worth, Texas; charged with three counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Taylor Bang of Kildeer, North Dakota; charged with eight counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Royana Thomas of Arlington, Texas; charged with six counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

• Joshua Link, of Strafford, Missouri; charged with 10 counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and two counts of money laundering.

• Tia Link of Smithton, Missouri; charged with three counts of wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of money laundering.

While Josh and Tia had the same last name, neither the indictment nor an earlier filed criminal complaint specified their relationship, whether spouses, siblings, or otherwise. Tia Link was also known as “Tia Makenzie Shane,” according to the indictment, though it did not note whether either “Shane” or “Link” was a married name. It was a small detail that hinted at a deeper backstory.

I noted their alleged residences, in Smithton and Strafford, were about two hours apart, mostly a straight shot from each other along I-65, and theoretically doable for a couple that didn’t mind commuting.

I had driven that very stretch of interstate myself many times while attending college at Mizzou, in the early 2000s. My parents were living in Ozark at the time, not far from Strafford. Brightly lit with numerous billboards for Jesus, smut shops, and anti-abortion campaigns, it was, from what I recall, a relatively easy trek.

Obviously, Item 1 for me was determining if Josh and Tia were, indeed, married. Fortunately, the answer took only one two-second Google search for “Tia Shane” and “Josh Link.” The star-crossed pair had left up their Zola wedding website.

A Labor Of Love?

The website is scant on details. It provides the basics for the Big Day — Sept. 18, 2018, in Sedalia, Missouri — links to Amazon and Target gift registries, an RSVP link, and an assortment of photos. At the time, Link was nearing 25. Tia was a couple of years younger, a former high school volleyball player for a small Christian school in Sedalia.

The website for Heritage Ranch, where the event was held, included a video of the Links’ wedding. It shows a charming but modest affair; three bridesmaids in dusty pink, three groomsmen in shirtsleeves, Tia beaming in a spaghetti-strap gown with a plunging neckline, and Josh smiling back at her lovingly in a straightforward suit and tie. Their ceremony was held amid lush greenery, and the reception in a barn strung with fairy lights.

Now, professional wedding videos typically show an idealized version of the day. A videographer who made a wedding seem unpleasant or highlighted points of tension probably wouldn’t stay in business. Even with those caveats, I noticed no obvious red flags. Guests appeared relaxed. Expressions of joy and surprise seemed sincere. Children danced. People hugged. Nothing seemed over-the-top, “too perfect” or forced.

Looking at the video, I doubt that anyone present at the scene — maybe even that happy couple — had any sense of what disastrous path this was leading toward. It seems unlikely, for instance, that any gossipy relatives were lurking in corners, taking bets on how long the marriage would last. Surely, no one guessed that the bride would end up in handcuffs and the groom a fugitive.

But judging by the timeline captured in court documents, the wheels were already in motion by the time the pair said their “I do’s.” Just a year and a half earlier, in April 2017, Josh Link had co-founded Agridime, the venture that would ultimately make him a wanted man.

This concludes Part I of “A Ponzi Scheme On The Prairie.” Click here for Part II.

CORRECTION: I accidentally misgendered the cattle pictured in the main image. Actual comment from my aunt: “Them are steers, not cows. Jeez, city people.”
The error has been corrected.