Welcome to Black Sheep, a spin‑off of my serialized memoir, SMIRK. If you’re looking for SMIRK, here’s the link to the complete book. Black Sheep is where I now follow similar themes of fraud and folly in other companies, industries, and individuals.
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:
