Kota Youngblood’s Victims Speak Out About $12 Million Fraud

E
ric Perardi paced toward the terrace of Garbo’s seafood restaurant in north Austin with a Bible he hadn’t planned to buy. Perardi had arrived early for a meeting with a friend. He’d seen the Bible at the secondhand bookstore on his way over and bought it on a whim. Later, he’d reflect it was to bring him strength for what he was about to hear.

It was a mild morning in October 2022, and as Perardi approached the terrace, he saw that his friend, Kota Youngblood, sat at one of the tables, a Diet Coke perspiring beside him. Youngblood was tall and imposing, with a paunch and black hair that framed pale skin. He was dressed in black, with military tattoos on his arms, and the white athletic tape that always seemed to cover his fingers.

Perardi placed the Bible on the table. Youngblood picked it up, put his hand on the cover, and whispered a prayer in Latin.

They found Eventine, Youngblood said. He was dead. Information then poured from Youngblood’s mouth in sobs. Some of what Youngblood was saying Perardi already knew; some of it, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. But the gist of it was this: Youngblood’s oldest son, Eventine, had been found dead on a beach in Baja California, Mexico. The cartel had cut his throat and dismembered him. And what’s more, Youngblood said that they’d engraved Perardi’s and Perardi’s son’s initials onto one of Eventine’s arms.

In a shaky voice, Youngblood claimed that the cartel had only gone after Eventine because he’d been trying to save Perardi and his family. Youngblood had used all of his military and government contacts to stop Perardi from being killed, and now his own son was dead. Perardi’s family would be next, Youngblood warned, and the only thing that could save them was if Perardi mustered $70,000.

As his friend spoke, Perardi wondered, “When would this end?” Since Youngblood had told him the cartel had taken out a contract on his family, Perardi had lived in a perpetual state of emergency. When a car lingered too long outside of his home, every creak in the middle of the night, it all set him on edge. He’d even slept with a gun next to his bed.

Perardi had already written hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks so Youngblood could mobilize his contacts and stop this torture. But the problem wasn’t going away, and now Perardi was broke. Sometimes he wondered if he was living in some sort of fever dream. His life had been relatively ordinary six months before. Sure, he’d had his ups and downs, but now he was at a restaurant listening to how a man’s son had been dismembered, all because of him.

As Perardi looked into his friend’s eyes, he felt both gratitude and pain. Youngblood, a Delta Force veteran, Purple Heart winner, with connections at the highest reaches of government, whom he’d met at his son’s ice-hockey club, was now telling him that though he might have lost his own son, he’d do anything to protect Perardi and his family.

Perardi knew at that moment that Youngblood was the only man who could save him. He needed to find the money no matter what.

Gambling It All Away

Almost a year later, Special Agents Lindsey Wilkinson and Justin Noble were at their offices in Austin watching footage of Youngblood slumped for hours in front of a video-poker machine in Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, feeding in hundred-dollar bills.

For more than 200 days throughout 2022 and mid-2023, Youngblood sat at machines like this one at casinos across Las Vegas, his fingers — covered by black gloves — moved with practiced precision: feed in cash, tap the screen, pause, repeat ad nauseam. He usually arrived just after dawn, when the floor was empty except for cleaners and the first shift of bartenders — no one bothered him that way, he’d later say. Youngblood wasn’t the type of Vegas gambler who quickly lost money amid a haze of champagne and neon lights. He never went to clubs, called for bottle service, or sought companionship. He played alone, mainly at the poker slots, and when he spoke to staff, it was in a low, unremarkable monotone. He might mention his military past, though he’d never elaborate.

To the staff at these casinos, he seemed harmless but strange, because he did not conform to the high-roller stereotype. “There was just something about him that was so odd,” one employee tells me. When he hit his most significant win — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — he insisted on taking it in cash. “There’s an issue right there,” the employee says. The normal thing would be to get a wire transfer.

Youngblood later insisted he was a pro poker player backed by a syndicate of investors: “It’s not my money being gambled. I work for somebody, too.… I am good at my job,” he’d say. However, to Noble and Wilkinson, who’d reconstruct his gambling records, those early-morning sessions told another story. Youngblood was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars at these slots. And almost all of the bills he fed into the machines during those months came from friends and so-called business partners who’d acted in moments of panic and misplaced trust.

When FBI agents detained Youngblood at the Austin airport in mid-2023, the arrest ended a decades-old con that had drained roughly $12 million from more than 30 victims. While the sums were astonishing, the methods he used were plain sinister.

“I was [investing] because of my sense of honor,” says a victim, “helping  a friend, because that’s what i do.”

Noble had spent almost 16 years as an FBI agent, working mainly on violent crime and narcotics, and Wilkinson had spent most of her 10-year career in analytical and managerial roles across the U.S. Both had only recently started working in white-collar crime, and neither had seen a con like it. Youngblood’s was no ordinary online phishing or Nigerian-prince baiting scheme. It was a confidence game built on proximity — on family dinners, on the slow, yearslong conversion of friendship into obedience. Youngblood studied his victims’ personalities like a psychologist analyzing a patient, identifying the anxious father, the loyal friend, the keen investor. And he capitalized on their fears of an unknown other, something that existed outside of their aspirational lives, often the cartel just over the border.

The agents discovered Youngblood created two worlds. In the first, he was an avuncular presence at the Chaparral Ice rink in north Austin. He introduced himself as just another hockey dad, with two sons and a doctor as a wife. Still, there was a significant whiff of intrigue. People from that world tell me Youngblood spoke in a low, confidential murmur, flashed military tattoos, and dropped hints about tours in Afghanistan and secret government work. But he was also an alpha-male dad who mostly kept to himself and always thanked the coaches for working with his son. To Eric Perardi, a successful businessman and part-time coach of the hockey team, who would later become one of the primary victims, Youngblood was fascinating. He seemed to fill the humdrum of the parents’ middle-class suburban lives with just enough mystery to be exciting, but never enough to be unbelievable or un­comfortable.

Across town, Youngblood presented himself differently. In 2018, Youngblood had befriended James “Jay” Holloway, a former-salesman turned clock repairman who’d converted his home in northeast Austin into a workshop strewn with oil, screwdrivers, lathes, and half-dismantled clocks. There, to steady ticks and chimes, Holloway’s friends, many of them wealthy pensioners, fiddled away their retirement, and it was there they first came into contact with Youngblood. They saw Youngblood as a worldly collector and a BMW-driving businessman with access to rare deals and private sales — a bat used by Lou Gehrig, a Civil War flag, and a Fabergé egg.

Some responded to the deals he offered, while others wanted to work with Youngblood because of his alleged past valor. “I was doing this out of my sense of honor, helping a friend, because that’s what I do. And because of [Youngblood’s] presentation of himself as having been in one of the elite organizations and trying to help other people,” one of his victims would later tell the court.

All of Youngblood’s victims, some wealthy, some middle-class, trusted him. After all, they thought he was a former Delta Force operative with connections inside the federal governments of many countries, that he’d won the Purple Heart, and that he had a master’s in quantum physics. He slithered his way into their lives, becoming indispensable. He concocted assassination and kidnapping plots backed by Mexican cartels. He invented lies about ex-wives trying to cash in on insurance policies.

In some cases, he was the only one who could save them. “He’d be a great cult leader,” Wilkinson later tells me.

When I write to Youngblood in prison, he says the case against him was a lie. He insists he is innocent. His letters are written in neat, looping handwriting, their tone conspiratorial: “There’s so much you do not know.… Write your hit piece. So be it. But you’d be wrong.” Youngblood uses the same cadence I’d hear in voice messages he sent to Perardi, the same urgency, the same latent threats, that had rushed so many into bad decisions. As I read his letters, I understood what Dan Guess, the federal prosecutor assigned to the Youngblood case, meant when he told me, “I’ve never seen cruelty like this in a fraud.”

The Clock Collectors

Since his retirement in 2009, James Holloway had dedicated his life to clocks. He’d served as president of Chapter 15 of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors and was widely regarded as one of the premier evaluators in central Texas. “The first thing my wife ever bought when we got married was a clock,” Holloway later testified. (Holloway tells me Youngblood was “very guilty of his crimes,” but didn’t want to comment further. He laid out the details of their relationship in Youngblood’s 2024 trial.)

Holloway first met Youngblood on a house call in Manor, a suburb of Austin, in 2018. Youngblood paid cash to get a four-glass mantel clock “in beat,” and then sent Holloway home with another family piece for restoration. Youngblood seemed well off, charming, the kind of man who spoke easily of connections and private deals and government contacts. Holloway was confident he was a serious man.

So, when Youngblood approached him with a favor — he said his sister had died in a car wreck, and he needed $20,000 to cover the funeral expenses — Holloway was confident he’d see his money back immediately. He still felt this way a week later, when Youngblood asked for more money — this time for his sister’s cemetery plot. In fact, the requests never stopped, but neither did Holloway’s belief in Youngblood. Between 2018 and 2019, the clock repairman wrote 55 checks worth nearly $250,000. And Youngblood didn’t even pay back these loans; instead, he offered Holloway a supposed business partnership in rare antiques — coins, furniture, Tiffany jewelry. One-of-a-kind deals that would ensure the Holloways recoup their money.

Before long, he’d insinuated himself into the Holloway family. “If he wasn’t working, he was there every day,” Holloway told the court. He brought flowers and invited the couple out to lunch. He even offered to manage their finances, persuading Holloway’s wife to roll over $200,000 from her IRA for another deal. “He wanted us to be a family, and he wanted to be like our son,” Holloway testified.

In 2019, one of Holloway’s actual sons, Seth, alarmed by what he was hearing, confronted his father about his new friend. He’d told Holloway that Youngblood was a fraud. But the clock repairman trusted Youngblood more than his youngest boy.

“We were just stupid, but you’re in so deep,” says a victim. “I wish we could have stopped at $235,000.”

By 2020, Holloway’s funds were running low. But Youngblood knew the people who volunteered and visited his shop were retirees with fat savings accounts. Maybe they’d be interested in investing, he suggested to Holloway. In court, Holloway denied that he had identified potential investors, but acknowledged setting up a meeting between Youngblood and Gary and Dale Snider in 2021. The Holloways and the Sniders, who were then nearing their seventies, had been friends for decades.

In April 2025, I sit in a chair on the Sniders’ back porch. Most of the Youngblood victims did not want to talk to me when I reached out for this story. Most of them, like the Sniders and Perardi, were middle-class professionals who had worked hard for years to maintain their reputations and enjoy the lives they’d built for themselves. The shame of pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into Youngblood’s scam was something they didn’t want to revisit. The Sniders explain to me they had also felt this way, but they also knew that nothing would change if they didn’t speak out.

The Sniders had moved to the Austin suburbs some two decades before, after Gary had landed a job at Dell. That’s roughly around the time the couple met the Holloways. “They welcomed us into their home, and we became very close,” the Sniders say.

When Holloway called one April afternoon in 2021 and said, “I’ve got something you need to see,” the Sniders went straight over. At the table sat Holloway, his wife, and Youngblood, who took out a 19th-century gold coin from a velvet pouch. It could sell for $10 million to $11 million, he said, split three ways. Youngblood just needed $190,000 to own the coin outright. If he got the money, he was sure he could sell it by November of that year.

The Sniders invested.

Winning Over the Rink

Around the same time, Youngblood was grooming hockey dad Eric Perardi, the coach and real-estate developer, who was quietly unraveling amid a bitter divorce.

I meet up with Perardi in April 2025 at The Crossover, a vast sports complex in north Austin that Perardi had helped build during the pandemic. While others might have described him as driven and successful, a walking American dream, Perardi tells me that for a long time he’d been too ambitious, frivolous, even, and constantly seeking validation for his achievements. “I used to have a tremendous anxiety that I wasn’t good enough and that I couldn’t accomplish enough,” he says.

By the time Youngblood started becoming friendly with Perardi, Perardi was in the midst of a contentious divorce. “Communication was strained, and many issues were being handled through attorneys, mediators, and the court rather than directly between us,” Rachel Herrera, Perardi’s ex-wife, tells me. Youngblood seemed to sense that tension. While Herrera says she barely spoke to Youngblood, his contact with Perardi was more constant. The pair spoke about life, about hockey — Youngblood seemed to say the right things at the right time, and Perardi felt he’d found someone who finally understood him.

Rebecca Kumar and her husband, Ricky, whose son also played hockey with Perardi’s and Youngblood’s sons, had once felt the same way about Youngblood. At first, he seemed like a polite dad, one of the good guys, who was always at his son’s games. After games and practices, Youngblood would often invite the parents to restaurants and once gifted a remote-controlled Zamboni-shaped drinks cooler worth nearly $400 on their doorstep with a line like, “I just love you guys … I was thinking of you.” But soon Youngblood began asking for loans, then offering up antiques as collateral. “At first, he needed $90,000,” Rebecca says, to cover the running costs of his company. Youngblood left a rare Star Wars manuscript as insurance.

Repayments trickled in small cash drops — “four grand … eight” — followed by immediate clawbacks: “I need $2,000 back to cover something,” Youngblood would plead. Rebecca’s suspicions hardened in the summer of 2020, when, with a quick Google search, she found out he’d had problems with the law in California; she’d even banned Youngblood from the house the following year. Looking back, Youngblood exploited their good nature, Rebecca tells me: “My husband felt he’d found someone who cared for him tremendously.”

By the time Rebecca talked at the FBI offices several years later, the couple had lost almost $200,000. “It almost ruined my marriage,” she says.

Perardi knew nothing of this in the summer of 2021. If he had, his life might have been very different. But what Perardi saw instead was a man who appeared exactly when he needed a friend, a man who, seemingly in exchange for nothing, wanted to lift him out of his black hole.

Perardi later tells me, “I didn’t know evil like that existed.”

Investments Turn Ominous

In the summer of 2021, word of the Sniders’ promised windfall became less and less frequent. In fact, when Youngblood and his friend Holloway, the clock dealer, showed up again that September, it wasn’t with news of the coin. It was with something else entirely.

Holloway stood on the Sniders’ porch. He was crying, his words eked amid tears. A cartel had marked Lane, Holloway’s son, and by extension, Lane’s wife and little girl. They needed help now. If they didn’t act, the cartel would kidnap Holloway’s granddaughter.

Youngblood turned up a few minutes later saying Holloway was telling the truth. He told the Sniders that Lane and his wife’s family had become involved with the Mexican cartels. The sum of $235,000 would put an immediate end to the threat, Youngblood insisted, according to the Sniders and court documents detailing the events of that summer.

“Oh, My God, he was my best friend,” Perardi says of Youngblood. “I was the most vulnerable I’d ever been.”

While the Sniders knew Holloway’s relationship with his son had been rocky, what they didn’t realize was that Lane had cut off all contact with his father since July 2020 and just disappeared. He had left a note: “Dad, I am getting on a plane in 10 minutes with my family and not coming back. I am in grave danger.… Kota borrowed money to get me out.”

Youngblood had told Holloway the threats were coming from the cartels, and Holloway later testified that he believed him. In fact, Holloway stated in court that his daughter-in-law had made cryptic remarks about becoming “really rich” earlier that year, and then suddenly they reduced contact with Holloway: changing the locks on their house and stopping their once-weekly family visits. As contact dwindled to occasional phone calls and walks, Holloway interpreted the behavior as confirmation of Youngblood’s narrative.

Flabbergasted by all of this new information, Gary and Dale Snider didn’t hesitate to help. “Jay, you know we’ll get the money,” Dale said. “We will do whatever it takes.” There was no room to talk about the Sniders’ previous $190,000 investment in the gold coin. People they knew were in danger.

That evening, Gary transferred the cash from the couple’s retirement fund to his Wells Fargo account. He then went to the bank with Holloway to make the withdrawal. Gary’s heart pounded at the strangeness of it all, at the news of cartels, and at the wad of cash — too big to fit into a shoebox, he’d later say in court. But he took action that night because Holloway, his friend, looked like a grandfather watching his life fall apart.

“We were just stupid … but you’re in so deep,” Dale later tells me. “I wish we could have stopped at $190,000.… I wish we could have stopped at $235,000.…”

Youngblood would return several more times, sometimes asking for money for new investments, and sometimes because he said Lane was still in trouble. Eventually, the Sniders had to sell their home and rent it back from a new owner. They gave Youngblood more than $1 million. They, as well as several others from the clock circle, never saw any profit from Youngblood’s investments.

On a late-June morning in 2022, the dew lay thick on the neat lawns of a wealthy neighborhood in northwest Austin, amid sprawling million-dollar mansions, azure pools, and shimmering pickups and sleek sports cars.

At around 7:30 a.m., Youngblood appeared on Perardi’s doorstep. He’d called beforehand, insisting it was urgent. The men went out onto the back patio, which overlooked trees and rolling hills. Youngblood reeled off numbers that only Perardi — and maybe a few others — could know: accounts, life-insurance policies, balances. He even got into the details of Perardi’s divorce. “This was very detailed information about my personal life and finances,” Perardi later said in court.

Then came the warning uttered with a disconcerting calm: He claimed Perardi’s estranged wife, Rachel Herrera, was entangled with a Mexican cartel, the Zetas, to be specific; there was a price on Perardi’s head. They were going to kidnap his children and kill him. Youngblood had supposedly gotten this information from NSA contacts.

Since early 2022, Youngblood had been saying he’d heard things about Herrera. He hadn’t sounded accusatory, just cautious. And around this time, suspicious social media posts on Instagram and Yelp had started appearing, referencing the couple’s divorce, supposed affairs, and alleged drug activity connected to her. Youngblood told Perardi he would investigate.

That June morning, Youngblood was there to tell Perardi what he’d found. Herrera, he said, had taken a contract out on Perardi’s life to cash in on his life-insurance policy — all to cover, Youngblood said, a $6.1 million debt she’d incurred with the cartel. Herrera tells me she had no idea Youngblood was telling Perardi these outrageously false things, and though all of the accusations would later be disproved in court, the social media comments about her made her feel “frightened, vulnerable, targeted, and unsure how far the situation might escalate.”

If Perardi wanted to live — and if he wanted his children to live — Youngblood continued, he’d need money to mobilize his contacts and buy Perardi some time.

“How much?” Perardi asked.

“Seventy thousand,” Youngblood replied.

Perardi couldn’t do that. His divorce was becoming increasingly expensive. But Youngblood had an answer: “Why don’t you do it through your business with a line of credit?”

Perardi was hesitant, but panic made him agree. He wrote a check — the first of 17 — and a note to his mother. “It said, ‘If I die, my wife was responsible for trying to have me killed by the cartel,’” Perardi remembers. The letter spoke to the real-estate developer’s irrational paranoia at that moment.

Youngblood had exploited the couples’ susceptibility to suspicion. And he wasn’t about to stop.

In July, under Youngblood’s direction, Perardi and his new girlfriend left town to get off the radar. They drove through New Orleans, Nashville, and Miami, paying with her cards, a nervous glance over their shoulders in each new destination.

In New Orleans, Perardi’s phone rang with a three-way call. “Kota always rang me through someone else,” he says. “I could never get access to him directly.”

“They’re watching your boy,” Youngblood said. The proof, he claimed, was that they knew his son was with a friend at the running track and wearing a blue sweatshirt. Youngblood needed more money immediately.

Dread washed over Perardi. He called his then-15-year-old son as soon as he hung up. Perardi heard wind through the phone, laughter in the background, a cadence that could only be the sound of feet on a rubber track.

Perardi mustered some calm. “He spoke in a serious matter-of-fact tone,” his son Arys recalls. “But when he told me what my friend and I were wearing, this freaked me out.… He couldn’t have known what I was wearing.”

Perardi told his son to go to his mom’s house, explaining Youngblood had advised him not to be at the track. He should also turn on GPS sharing and answer every call.

After he hung up, Perardi and his then-girlfriend went to a FedEx office to mail another check. They always sent it to the same address and to the same person. It wasn’t Youngblood, but Holloway. Perardi didn’t know Holloway, but Youngblood had told Perardi that Holloway was a friend who could quickly access cash. Cash mattered, Youngblood had explained — paper trails could get people hurt. In reality, Youngblood had switched from treating Holloway as a cash cow to using him and his business “as an attempt to conceal the nature, location, source, or ownership” of his victims’ money, the FBI later wrote in its complaint. (Holloway wasn’t charged with any crimes and testified as a victim at Youngblood’s trial.)

A Murdered Son

It had been Youngblood who had first set up a meeting between Perardi and Holloway. According to Perardi, the two first met at a Wells Fargo lot in south Austin. They’d sat in Perardi’s car, and Holloway had confirmed everything — that the cartel threats were real, that his family was in danger, that Youngblood was legit. Later, Holloway would admit in court that back then he thought Youngblood was a “savior” and was deeply grateful to him.

In the months that followed, the pair spoke often, mostly by phone or text. Between talk of wires and deposits, Perardi tells me, Holloway veered into his own personal stories: that his son, Lane, was in trouble. The cartel was after his family, like it was after Perardi’s, and he knew Youngblood was doing all he could to help.

He said Youngblood had even managed to get Lane out of Austin and to an undisclosed destination. But now, Holloway didn’t know where his son and grandchildren were.

In October 2022, when Perardi was told that the cartel had killed Youngblood’s oldest son, Eventine, it was Holloway who called to confirm the boy’s death.

After Youngblood told Perardi about Eventine’s death, he asked Perardi for another favor. Youngblood wanted his friend to check on his wife. He was just in too much pain and couldn’t face her himself, he said.

When Perardi arrived, the house looked abandoned. Though he knew Youngblood’s wife and children, he’d never been to their family home. The lawn had grown wild, and the front-door windowpane was cracked. He knocked. Waited. Knocked again.

The latch turned.

According to Perardi’s court testimony, Youngblood’s wife stood in the doorway with a gun, thin, distraught. “She looks like she [hadn’t] eaten in days,” Perardi testified.

Youngblood’s wife pointed the gun at Perardi’s forehead, cocking the trigger. She trembled and started shouting that Perardi and Herrera were to blame for her son’s death: “If my husband hadn’t been helping you — if our money hadn’t gone to this — he’d still be alive,” she said, according to Perardi.

Perardi raised his hands. Behind her, the house looked just as Youngblood had described it to him: the huge fish tank, the Native American headdress mounted on a wall, and the Christmas tree that was never taken down. Perardi told her to lower the gun. She did — and then collapsed into his arms, sobbing. Perardi tried to stay rational. When would the body be returned? What would happen next? “She broke down again,” he remembers. “I left more convinced than ever that the danger was real.” (Youngblood’s wife did not respond to interview requests, and has not been charged with any crimes.)

Later, Perardi would admit he never knew whether Youngblood’s wife had been part of the con or another casualty of it. All he knew was that her grief seemed genuine. After that, Perardi and Youngblood’s relationship slipped into a state of delirium. What had begun as a friendship was now closer to devotion. Toward the end of 2022 and into 2023, Perardi and Youngblood spoke constantly, looping through the same horror, the same consolations. Youngblood’s son was dead; Perardi’s might be next. They had to stick together. “Oh, my God,” Perardi tells me. “He was my best friend. I was the most vulnerable I’d ever been.”

But while Perardi fell apart, Youngblood was running another operation entirely: a digital smear campaign meant to squeeze Perardi even more. And he was doing it with the unwitting help of Holloway’s son, Lane — the man everyone believed had disappeared.

The Clock and Hockey Worlds Collide

Lane Holloway had been trapped in Youngblood’s world since 2018. Youngblood impressed him with tales of his exploits and connections after meeting him through his father. Youngblood used this initial foothold to entice Lane into investing in rare antiquities and other deals, as he had with Lane’s father. He then began integrating himself into Lane’s daily life by sidelining Lane’s family.

For years, Lane and his father, James, had been close. They lived only three doors apart, and Lane phoned his father every night on his drive home. But once Youngblood entered their lives, that intimacy became his lever. He began, Dale Snider puts it, “to take Lane and separate him from his father.” Youngblood began drip-feeding each of them tailored fictions, or as prosecutor Dan Guess later tells me, “He poisoned the well on both sides.” To James, he spun stories that Lane was mixed up with dangerous people, that the cartels were watching the family. To Lane, he insisted that his father was a bad guy who was buying guns for the cartels.

So maybe it’s not so surprising that when Youngblood lied to Lane, telling him his father-in-law, who worked as a customs official at the Mexican border, had been helping smuggle drugs for the cartel, Lane believed him. According to Lane’s court testimony, Youngblood said Lane’s father-in-law incurred a debt that he couldn’t pay, and now Lane and his family’s name appeared on a cartel death list. Youngblood claimed he had heard this from a man called Elvis, whom he supposedly shared a prison cell with in Mexico, and who was related to the notorious leader of the Sinaloa cartel, El Chapo.

Youngblood told Lane to lie low — quit his six-figure job at Amazon, change his name, and break up his routines. When Lane’s father-in-law died, Youngblood told him not to attend the funeral: “We would be surrounded by every horrible, you know, cartel person, and every single government agency would be there. There was a chance we’d be killed,” Lane testified.

Lane obeyed. He quit his job at Amazon and went to court to legally change his name to Will Elessedil (a reference to the fantasy trilogy The Sword of Shannara, which Youngblood loved). Lane even tattooed that name onto the top part of a hand. “Things were happening to us; we had the cars showing up and watching our house. We would see them park, you know, a few houses away. There would be someone in there watching our house,” Lane told the court. By 2021, he was completely isolated from his family and had given Youngblood more than half a million dollars.

In early 2022, under Youngblood’s orders, Lane and his family left Texas, moving from one anonymous hotel room to another, ending up near Jacksonville, Florida. The kids stayed out of school. Money arrived in dribs and drabs — Walmart vouchers for a few hundred dollars at a time, sent by Youngblood. The instructions never changed: Wait for Youngblood’s next call.

Those calls brought tasks. Most involved creating aggressive, false social media posts about people Lane had never met: Perardi, Herrera, and even his father. Youngblood told Lane the cartel would come for his family if he didn’t comply. He also told him that by exposing these people, Lane was protecting himself. While Lane did not want to participate in this article, he tells me the main reason he believed Youngblood for so long was that he was a “master manipulator, a meticulous individual … [who] targets what is precious to his victims in order to get what he wants. In the case of my wife and myself, he targeted our family.”

Early on, when Youngblood was beginning to work his con on Perardi, Lane was ordered to post manufactured claims about Herrera, accusing her of affairs and drug use. “[Youngblood] told me I had to make them because they needed to … discredit his ex-wife so Eric could have custody of his child,” Lane told the court. Later, as the scheme escalated, Youngblood turned Lane’s fire on Perardi himself. “[Youngblood] had told us that Eric Perardi was now working with the cartels to help him get some money so he could expand what he was doing,” Lane told the court. “He asked me to look into everybody that [Perardi] had been dealing with, and then tell them that he was a bad person.”

Back in Austin, Perardi watched anonymous accounts publish a barrage of false allegations: sex parties, meth, drug trafficking. “The kind of stuff that makes you radioactive in your own town,” he tells me. Some posts were written as if in his own voice — fake confessions to groping teenage players at hockey practice, or tutorials that began, “When laundering money, one of the most important tasks is finding a willing bank.”

Perardi had reached his limit. His reputation was collapsing, investors were withdrawing from his real-estate businesses, and the money he’d given to Youngblood wasn’t coming back.

Youngblood’s Story Crumbles

By March 2023, Perardi was out $900,000. For months, the object that was supposed to make it all make sense sat in his home: a Civil War-era flag Youngblood had given him as collateral — it was supposedly worth millions. But Perardi could never nail down its provenance. That month, a friend gave him the name of a leading dealer in early American flags. Perardi emailed a photo explaining that it had been given to him as collateral. The store owner replied with something Perardi didn’t expect: The flag belonged to him.

The flag dealer walked him through the paper trail. The piece — a Confederate First National — had been transferred to Youngblood in April 2022 under an extended payment arrangement of $85,000, with partial payments routed through an intermediary rather than directly from Youngblood. Before that, the shop owner had acquired it at an auction for $13,500, and then restored it. The flag was visually impressive, yes, but it lacked any specific historical significance — no battlefield provenance to increase its value. In his opinion, the maximum he “might be able to price it” was $125,000.

After that call, shame rose first (How could I not have seen this?), then anger (How far does this go?), and finally a sense of purpose. Perardi gathered documents he’d been saving — screenshots, dates, odd receipts — and decided it was time to put an end to all of it.

Right then, Perardi rang his eldest son, 15-year-old Arys, whose girlfriend’s father was Austin criminal-defense lawyer Steve Toland. When Perardi spoke to Toland, he said the sentence he’d been afraid to form: “I think I’m being extorted by someone I trusted.” “Immediately, I was like, ‘A very dangerous person is conning you, and we need to jump on this quickly. You’re in danger,’” Toland tells me. The lawyer took Perardi to the FBI’s Austin office.

Special Agents Lindsey Wilkinson and Justin Noble conducted the interview. In that antiseptic room, under white hospital-like lighting, they listened to Perardi in astonishment. “By the end of him telling us the story, we both are like, ‘I don’t really understand — there’s [the] cartel, he’s lost a lot of money. His ex-wife’s trying to kill him. There’s a car dealership involved. There’s clocks involved, there’s antiques involved.’ It’s just a wild story,” Noble says.

But, as improbable as it seemed, the agents quickly had reason to take it very seriously. In their databases, they quickly found a match: Youngblood had been the subject of a previous fraud complaint in California a few years back. A California dentist had accused him of swindling him out of more than $5 million between 2010 and 2017. The case followed the same MO: Youngblood started as a patient, became a friend, then started asking for money. Like all of his other scams, it was slow and cruel. “[Youngblood] can convince people to do things they don’t want to do, and they don’t realize what’s happening until the total becomes so much,” the dentist later told the court. Local law enforcement had referred the matter to the FBI’s L.A. office in 2019, which never resulted in charges. It seemed Youngblood had simply moved states and started anew.

Now, agents Noble and Wilkinson had a chance to succeed where their California counterparts hadn’t. They devised a plan to take down Youngblood before he slipped away again. Within days of Perardi’s tip, the FBI approved an undercover sting operation, and Perardi took part. The businessman felt relief for the first time in more than a year. “I was like, ‘Fuck this, I got the FBI’ … and what choice did I have?” he says.

The Sting

They began on the terrace of Carrabba’s, a chain Italian restaurant in north Austin, on a mild, dry morning on May 1. Inside, Wilkinson got a table close enough to watch through the glass. Outside, in an unmarked car, Noble listened in. Beside Perardi sat “Joe,” a supposed friend and potential investor, but actually an undercover officer with a recorder hidden in his phone case. Joe fit the role perfectly: a large, tattooed man with anti-government energy — precisely the type of person Youngblood would likely trust.

Youngblood never vetted the newcomer. No questions, no precautions — he simply began with his usual false claims about Rachel Herrera, who he said had taken out a contract on her husband’s life. Why? Because, in his narrative, she was connected to the cartels and had incurred a debt of $6.1 million. Perardi’s life-insurance policy was worth $6.5 million. The math was straightforward; get rid of Perardi, pay off the debt. (All lies.)

“It does not matter if he knew about it.…” Youngblood told Joe. “Shit flows downhill, and you’re tied to it. Commingling is what will be [Perardi’s] undoing.”

In the recording, almost every word is Youngblood’s. “He would keep talking,” Noble later tells me. “It’s the whole scheme.” Herrera’s response to these allegations, on the other hand, is one of horror: “These narratives caused enormous harm to me and my family.… My life, my family, my work, and my ability to parent safely were disrupted for years by allegations that were not true,” she says.

After the sting, the FBI investigation accelerated. Around 50 subpoenas were issued to banks, casinos, airlines, and military offices. The findings dismantled Youngblood’s story. There was no record of Delta Force service, nor of any military service at all. There were no degrees, and no government work. His only job had been selling used cars. His real name wasn’t Youngblood — it was Dennis Schuler Jr., from Ohio.

His father told the agents that his son had shown a gift for deceit from a young age; he was always stealing and lying. He’d even stolen his father’s identity to open credit cards.

By mid-July, agents executed twin search warrants — one at Youngblood’s house and another at James Holloway’s. At Youngblood’s, they expected to find valuable antiques; in­stead, appraisers sifted through rugs and frames and reached a blunt verdict: “It’s all fake,” Noble says.

Since their first interview with Perardi, the FBI treated Holloway as a possible co-conspirator, but they soon realized Holloway and his wife had really believed their son, Lane, was as good as dead, and that only Youngblood could protect the rest of the family. In his living room, agents put Lane on a speakerphone. Holloway heard his son’s voice.

“He thinks his son’s dead,” Noble says. “We call him on speaker … he hears his voice, and it just hits him.”

Almost immediately, Holloway named other victims — the people from the clock circle who Youngblood had persuaded to invest. He finally understood what had been happening.

Unraveling the Cons

Gary and Dale Snider were in the living room when the knock came. Two agents stood on the front porch, badges out. “Do you know Kota Youngblood?” one agent asked.

They sat down at the dining-room table, while the Sniders prepared themselves for bad news. How much had they given Youngblood? For how long? The Sniders said more than a million. The agents told them gently that they’d likely never see it again.

When Wilkinson and Noble left that day, both were stunned by the scale of it. Youngblood wasn’t just another grifter chasing quick cash. In a country where Americans lost more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023, his scheme stood apart, not in size but in intimacy. Youngblood didn’t hide behind screens or crypto wallets. He looked people in the eye.

“There are three kinds of people in Youngblood’s life,” Noble tells me. “People he’s scammed, people he’s going to scam, and people he’s grooming to scam.”

To the FBI, it felt like watching a play with a hundred actors, each convinced they were the lead. When one victim appeared in another’s story, it was only to reinforce the fiction. “He was moving his chess pieces around … playing everybody against each other,” Noble says. He turned victims into victimizers, and victimizers into victims; even agents struggled to see who was complicit and who was trapped.

“I’ve never seen anything like that, and I hope to never see anything like that again,” says Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Guess. Youngblood did something different, he believes: He made smart people feel stupid. “The cruelty was the point of some of this stuff rather than getting money,” he says. Youngblood wanted to see how far he could push them before they broke.

By late-July 2023, Noble, Wilkinson, and Guess had seen enough. When they learned that Youngblood had booked another trip to Vegas — presumably to gamble away his latest haul — they decided it would be his last. A federal judge signed the warrant, and Youngblood was arrested at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport en route to Las Vegas.

At Youngblood’s bail hearing in August, in the courthouse lobby, Perardi saw Youngblood’s wife and two sons. Eventine, the eldest, was alive. The boy he thought had been dismembered was right in front of him. Perardi recalls, “My heart just dropped.”

The Trial

In April 2024, Youngblood went to trial on four counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. He never accepted responsibility for his actions. Youngblood instead remade himself for the jury. He said he had been “born Dennis J. Schuler Jr.,” then legally reborn as Saint Jovite Kota Jadenne Youngblood. It was a Roman Catholic name, he said, and Youngblood, well, that was the nickname his uncle had for him. He told the court he hadn’t spoken to his father in 37 years, and claimed that after his uncle’s death from AIDS, he’d been left without a role model. “I grew up with my uncle.… Pretty much everything I learned about life, how to deal with people, and how to handle things, I learned from my uncle.”

Youngblood played down the Special Forces persona he’d sold for years. “I never said I was an agent. I’ve never represented to be law enforcement,” he testified.

Youngblood said he never served in the military; a bid to join the Marines in 1990 had ended in a medical disqualification.

Youngblood also pushed back hard on the cartel storyline. “To paint me in the light with the cartel is a joke,” he said, adding, “I did not steal; I do not need to steal,” and that others were “lying” and had dragged his wife and children into it. He later implied that Perardi had only reported him to the FBI to hide money from his ex-wife, and that he’d barely done business with Gary Snider: “I’ve never taken a penny from [him].” Everyone was lying except him. “It’s disgusting,” he said. “And if I don’t stop it — who’s going to?”

The jury believed none of it; they found Youngblood guilty on all five counts. Later, Judge Robert Pitman set the term at 40 years. He called the case “particularly disturbing,” a scheme that fed a “sick psychological need … to see other people suffer.”

In July 2025, I received a letter from Youngblood, who was incarcerated at FCI Victorville Medium II in California. I’d been trying to contact him for months. Written in his curly handwriting, he opened clearly: “I did not do this. The animosity with me and the bureau dates back almost 23 years.” He claimed he’d passed “7 polygraphs,” and that the FBI tried “to destroy my chance to defend myself.” He asked me to find his wife and sons and tell them that he loved them, “no matter what they did.”

Youngblood then forwarded me correspondence he had with his lawyers, in which he tried to pin everything on Perardi and Holloway: “I am innocent on all five charges, and this is bullshit. 235k with snider … how?????? 235k cash given to Holloway, who deposits it in his account. Wtf does that have to do with me?????” Youngblood claimed no checks were written out to him, so how could he be accused of wire fraud? The email to his lawyer ends on an ominous note. “I’m either innocent on all five [counts] and get another shot at these people or rot in here and burn in hell. I did nothing wrong.”

I sent Youngblood a list of allegations through the prison email system. Though he promised answers, he instead flooded my inbox with frantic messages about running out of time or money, as if officers were dragging him from the tablet. There was plenty of theater but no substance, and if I didn’t reply immediately, another message arrived — “I’ve tried,” he’d say.

Eventually, the system notified me that he’d removed me from his contact list. I mailed him a series of letters, the final one in January 2026, asking to hear his side of the story. He never responded.

Life After Youngblood

When I mentioned my Youngblood conversations with Perardi and the Sniders this summer, they all shared the same bemused, knowing look. What did you expect?

More than a year had passed since Youngblood had been convicted, and the damage was almost impossible to undo. For the Sniders, it was hard to come to terms with what they’d been through. “It’s as if we’re living parallel lives, one in which everything is normal and as it was, and the other where we’re suffering behind the lie,” Gary tells me.

“Emotionally and socially, the toll was enormous,” says Herrera. “With distance, I can see that period as one of profound hardship, but also one of profound growth. What began as an effort to destabilize my life ultimately strengthened my resolve and clarified what, and who, truly matters to me.”

For Perardi, there are still credit-card debts, personal loans to repay, and money to recover that will likely never return, along with the snide looks on people’s faces he sees every day. “I’ve recently had to take a job at a bar,” he tells me, embarrassed.

Still, Perardi tries to measure his life differently. His children come first, not the ideal of a successful businessman he spent much of his life chasing. He seemed in search of forgiveness — not for the man who conned him, but for the version of himself who’d fallen for all of this. He tells me, “As for Youngblood, I pray I can find mercy for him one day.”

Journalist and filmmaker MATTHEW BREMNER reported on Lesotho’s gang wars and famo music for Rolling Stone’s January 2025 issue.