Bad Egg

Written by Adam Robb

Logan Paul has an announcement to make. He’s recording the latest episode of his wildly popular podcast, ImPaulsive, from his new recording studio in Dorado, Puerto Rico. He made the move from California six months earlier, in pursuit of a lower tax rate, and today he’s debuting a new stripped-down setup for the show. Two months after getting into the ring to face the prodigious retired boxing champion Floyd Mayweather Jr., it’s clear Logan is still in the best shape of his life – his strong jaw aligned with the windscreen of his microphone as he leans into clue in his millions of listeners, to the latest dramatic development in his life. 

Logan is no stranger to fomenting and reeling from drama of his own making for clicks and profit. A familiar face on big and small screens since 2013, he cultivated his bad boy persona first on Vine, then YouTube, enduring an endless reel of senseless and self-flagellating stunts. From slingshotting LoveSac cushions at highflying stuntman Travis Pastrana – a move that showcased Paul as a natural, if unorthodox, salesman – to filming a hanging corpse on a ghastly walk through Japan’s Suicide Forest, which became an enduring testament to bad judgment, Logan has endured and diversified.

He’s won Teen Choice Awards for his comedy, guest starred on Law & Order SVU and the Masked Singer, and weeks before his eight-round standoff in the ring at Hard Rock Stadium, he made his debut on WWE Smackdown where he grew into a villain audiences love to hate, a role he sells as well as anything. Today, on August 21, 2021, he is selling something called CryptoZoo.

It’s the peak of NFT mania and the height of COVID-19. Logan has a loyal online audience flush with pandemic unemployment checks to burn. The Rust Belt himbo with bleach blonde curls, sits snugly sporting his own Maverick brand sweatshirt, on a plush sofa beneath a plywood board with the primitively scrawled podcast title: ImPaulsive. 

Logan Paul is the Don Draper of his generation. And CryptoZoo is a dream pitch: “A really fun game that makes you money.”

Logan conceived the game just six months earlier and claimed to invest a million dollars into its development, hyping “a team of wizards” working behind the scenes to make it all possible. Its development was the bane of a six-month-old group chat that included an ever-fluctuating group of interested parties. Every marketer, developer, assistant and hanger-on dipping in and out of the founders' chat had their own ideas about how and when to build the game and make their fortunes from the finished product.

The game would require investors to use crypto to purchase digital eggs that could be hatched to reveal virtual animals. Buy two eggs, hatch a bear, hatch a shark, click a button, and you now own a bearshark. Or at least your very own Photoshopped stock photo of one. The images are called NFTs, digital trading cards built for trading. For investors, the game is to sell them for profit before the hype dies down. If the concept proves popular, Logan and his wizards own valuable intellectual property, characters they can merchandise like Pokémon. If not, he can move on.

“Kids are addicted to it,” Logan tells his longtime friend, and ImPaulsive co-host, Mike Majlak, describing CryptoZoo as a fantastic bonding experience for families. “Our developer’s kids, all of them, cannot stop playing the game.”

Mike starts rattling off names of people involved in the project, including Logan’s manager, Jeff Levin, then stops himself.

If he kept speaking, he might have identified every defendant currently being sued by CryptoZoo investors in class action litigation playing out in court today. Three of the defendants, Jeff, Logan, and his assistant Dani Strobel are identified in this episode. Jake “CryptoKing” Greenbaum, and Ophir Bentov, have long since been publicly disavowed by Logan. The sixth man was nearly on Logan’s and Mike’s lips, and certainly on their mind.

Today, that man is hiding in plain sight. He’s still welcome in the bucolic enclaves of southern Connecticut where his estranged family resides, still visible in the tech community where his opaque ambitions continue to find new investors that keep long suffering colleagues in the fold, but invisible to justice and journalists who might force him to face the consequences of a lifetime of lies.

He’s benefited from being a man his victims prefer to forget they ever met, otherwise his misdeeds would be the stuff of salacious dinner party banter. That has become his greatest strength. To fall victim to his deception is, beyond all injury, a social embarrassment.

That’s the lesson Logan Paul learned the hard way.

Eddie Ibanez with Logan Paul. On March 12, 2021, Logan Paul shared this photo to the CryptoZoo founders chat. Paul submitted the group chat as part of a recent court filing.

Logan introduced CryptoZoo to the scrutiny of the world that day, but he withheld the identity of this man — the wizard behind the game’s development. The only people who might be able to identify Eddie Ibanez, from that story, were those who had already heard Eddie tell the same story in his own words, at a rooftop party at the 1 Hotel in Miami Beach on the eve of the Paul-Mayweather bout. People like me.

My partner Stephanie swore Eddie Ibanez was a fraud before I ever laid eyes on him, before I witnessed how the shape of him, his face, eyes, teeth, jaw, chin, his cartoon abdomen–his hair pieces–changed appearance as frequently as his biography. But I wasn’t listening. I was packing. Like everybody who surrounded Eddie, I wanted to believe in him.

This wasn’t blind faith. One week before the party, I received an email from Eddie's publicist. Kimberley wanted to gauge my interest in a free first-class trip to Miami Beach for the Paul-Mayweather fight, so I could flesh out a potential profile that highlighted Eddie’s life story and his new partnership with Logan Paul. I heard free, and I rushed to do my homework.

I spent all afternoon learning everything I could about my most generous mystery host. I scanned the website of his secretive tech firm, Zenabi. I read legitimate-sounding news stories and professional-looking press releases, and scrolled down his LinkedIn profile and social media accounts. How could I doubt a photo of him boarding a private jet with Superstar DJ Steve Aoki? Or standing on the sideline at Dolphins training camp? Or, with a perfect line of sight to catch Donald Trump’s eye, seated at the Pentagon for the launch of Space Command? I listened to his podcast appearances on Spotify and watched his college lectures on YouTube. For someone who kept such a low profile, his story was compelling.

Eddie presented himself as a Mormon tech bro with a hint of defense contractor. All biceps, bulging veins, and bright whites – a hipster Clark Kent behind bold frames and vacuum-sealed in a snug black tee. He’s the picture of good karma, discipline, and a godly lifestyle. Before I touched down in Miami, I did my best to make sense of his assorted biographies: He was an orphan rescued by poverty from Donald Trump, who awarded him a scholarship to his high school alma mater, New York Military Academy. While there, he earned the respect of his peers and commandant as a cyber prodigy, hacking AOL under the name RappinBunny – a nod to Space Jam, one of countless movies that informed his persona. The FBI tracked him down and were so impressed by his skills, they pulled him out of the barracks and put him to work out of a nearby hotel where he worked for the government until graduation. During his first semester, he was recruited by the CIA, and after 9/11 and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, he was parachuting behind enemy lines, a heroic jumpcut from Hackers to Zero Dark Thirty before his 21st birthday.

It wasn’t long before Eddie traded government work for the private sector, and settled down in the Connecticut suburbs to start a family with his new wife, a blond bombshell Fox News anchor.

Jackie Clark worked the network’s overnight shift while covering breaking news. Each night she leaned into her new married name, presenting as a diversity hire who looked no different than Megyn Kelly or Gretchen Carlson. By day, she raised the couple’s three young children, while Eddie led a team of top data scientists, which he advertised as being recruited from the government’s three-letter agencies, many of them sharing the couple’s Mormon faith.

Zenabi allegedly had its first major success when the company developed an algorithm that improved the hotel booking website Priceline.com. Eddie claimed that Zenabi beat out heavyweights including IBM and Palantir for the contract, and that for a time he served as Priceline’s Chief Scientist. His Zenabi scientists put their skills and security clearances to use in an unremarkable Westport, Connecticut office building on behalf of a roster of diverse and enviable A-list clients, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the U.S. Space Force, the Philadelphia Eagles, and later, the Miami Dolphins.

God, country, football: They were all writing Eddie checks. He was living the American dream.

Everybody close to Eddie appeared to believe in him: Billionaire inventors like Chris Burch, and former Guggenheim Partners executives Todd Morley and Barry Klarburg; Eddie’s 90s teenage idols, skateboard and X-games legends like Rodney Mullen, Danny Way, and Mat Hoffman; his favorite alt rockers Everclear and Sponge; the world’s most famous Mormon DJ, Kaskade; and now Logan Paul.

As I finished packing my suitcase, I told Stephanie she was crazy to doubt his biography. No one could live that many lives, fool that many people for so long.

For the next 48 hours, I declared, I would shadow Eddie across Miami Beach and prove her wrong. And I was ready for all of it. After a year spent confined by the pandemic to our cramped Manhattan apartment – where Stephanie and I work from home, on the phone, feet apart hours every day – the weekend trip was a dream come true for this waylaid travel writer whose invitations to exotic destinations and luxury hotels had dried up. 

After a year of working to pivot my career into investigations, I had just published my first for The Intercept, digging into a corrupt Congressional candidate and her ties to the Trump administration. I had a habit of eliciting confessions in unconventional ways, usually while eating my subject’s caviar and drinking their champagne. Stephanie joined me once in Washington for that story, drinking herself sick on the President’s Krug, amid a swarm of red hats in the lobby of the Trump Hotel. She loves my work, but from afar. Charming bad men is not her scene and she swore this was very recent history repeating itself. 

And sure, I was surprised Eddie had asked me to come profile him. But, I thought, surely a man like him, so immersed in government intelligence and awash in political connections, had done his due diligence on me. If a man who traveled aboard Air Force One with the same casualness as jetting between DJ sets and bowl games wanted me, he had to have known what he was doing. That was all the more reason to believe Eddie had nothing to hide. This was going to be easy.

So easy, in fact, I decided to make it interesting. I made a bet with Stephanie.

Not only was Eddie not a fraud, I wagered that I could do more than charm him, I would win him over and convince him to offer me a job at Zenabi. I was a monster researcher, and I was sure I could prove to him that I uncovered so much about his top-secret past that I deserved a spot on his team.

Either way, I was coming out ahead. Eddie’s publicist offered me a weekend at Faena, a glamorous resort in Miami Beach, on the busiest, most expensive weekend of the year – plus a ringside seat to Logan Paul’s highly anticipated Sunday night fight with Floyd Mayweather at Hard Rock Stadium. All I had to do was show up and show an interest in their new crypto app: MKTSQ. That’s shorthand for Market Square, and it was their new invite-only travel booking app, like Priceline for influencers.

MKTSQ was revolutionary; Approved members could book a trip, buy a new wardrobe, score concert tickets, book dinner reservations, hire a personal trainer. They could do it all from multiple retailers, like Saks Fifth Avenue and Equinox, then pay for everything at once through a single shopping cart. In the future, celebrities and influencers could curate the offerings, and the sales would be announced as “destination drops” like this weekend’s fight.

I was still waiting for my approval, but their press release touted Logan Paul, Katy Perry and Kaskade as early adopters. And with so many celebrities in town for the fight, I couldn’t wait to see who else I’d meet in Eddie’s and Logan’s circle.

How dare Stephanie think so little of my judgment, I thought to myself, as I checked my email again. And there it was. As if serendipitously placed for maximum embarrassment – a punishment for my overconfidence – a new email awaited me from Eddie’s publicist. How would I feel, she asked, about moving to a dilapidated chain hotel on the other side of town? The MKTSQ party, she advised, was now preempted for the launch of some new video game called CryptoZoo. The invite sported a crude drawing of a bearshark proclaiming “I’m a BearShark” in a speech bubble.

I was so fucked.

Mercifully, I didn’t lose the bet right away. For one thing, I was late to dinner.

But my odds of winning decreased every time Eddie opened his mouth that Saturday night, each new lie emboldened by the tequila shot that preceded it.

COVID-19 was receding from the headlines, crypto was trending, and the sun was setting over Miami Beach faster than traffic was moving. I arrived at the restaurant in the dark. The Bitcoin conference gave way to sprawling nighttime parties. Tens of thousands of unmasked but anonymous online investors, keyed to a fever pitch by NFT mania, suddenly found themselves freezing in air conditioning as countless identical SUVs crawled up and down the main drag of Collins Avenue now aglow in neon and brake lights. I died a little each time the driver of my black Uber Escalade let another black Uber Escalade cut in front of us. Thirty minutes and two miles later, I arrived embarrassed at our meeting place, a Tulum-inspired lounge called Gitano, littered with overgrown house plants and overpriced mojitos. I turned a corner and glimpsed our table. Eddie and Kimberley eyed entrees and another round of drinks, while his feet rested on my chair. I stretched out my hand but he didn’t stand up to greet me, so I claimed the empty seat opposite him instead.

I settled in, ordered a mezcal margarita and dipped a chip into the stone molcajete between us as I tried to size him up from the side. It wasn’t the guacamole but something was off. I thought he looked angry, not at me, but at life. He told me his life was in flux. Jackie was out of the picture; their three-year divorce was finalized last month. That suited him fine, he was in love with a new woman who he said supported him, encouraged his move into the spotlight and this interview. However, the Biden administration had killed his defense contracts to build “space weapons” so now he was starting over, pinning all his hopes on selling crypto with Logan. If his lover was ever going to leave her husband, CryptoZoo had to succeed.

“I wanted to live below the radar, but then I got divorced, bro,” Eddie told me. “All my money went away. Half my friends. My kids. My sanity went away. Then a woman told me, ‘if this is going to work out, you need to figure out your shit and tell people who you are. People love you.’ ”

For the next hour, he confirmed and built upon the biography I had hastily pieced together. At times, he spoke in broad strokes. For security reasons, he claimed. But after I showed off how deep I’d gone, he did more than acquiesce. He improvised.

I already know how in 2019, Ibanez appeared on an episode of the James Altucher Show, a podcast recorded in the basement of an Upper West Side comedy club that had featured improbable but unimpeachable guests like Richard Branson and Mark Cuban in the past. In introducing Eddie, James called him a good friend and “probably the biggest cybersecurity expert-slash-hacker I know.” Over the next hour, Eddie shared how he tracked meth labs by hacking utility companies, was a Sabermetrics savant, and earned a Super Bowl ring with the Philadelphia Eagles before being recruited by the Miami Dolphins.

He expanded on that narrative a year later during a virtual roundtable on sports technology hosted by Barry Klarberg as part of the University of Michigan’s Sports Management Summer Series. Barry – a celebrity money manager for Justin Timberlake and Nicki Minaj, dealmaker for Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, and co-owner of the New York Yankees – invited Eddie to lecture his students more than once, describing him as a man “once contracted by the U.S. government at the age of 18 years old to help identify various terrorist threats,” and is “now the President of Zenabi Data, whose clients include Priceline, the Philadelphia Eagles, [Miami Dolphins owner] Stephen Ross, and Chris and Tory Burch.” 

During the pandemic, Eddie dialed into one of Barry’s seminars from a sailboat to talk up his work under the Terrorist Surveillance Program. He shared how he developed software that allowed coaches to see Eagles players like characters from the classic arcade game Street Fighter, their power bars going down in real time, and helped predict soft tissue injuries with 98% confidence.

Now it was my turn to be fooled.

I asked Eddie if he’d ever seen combat overseas while working for the CIA. He took a big sip and let spill, eager to impress, to give my story the same color that made all those videos so rewatchable for me.

“We trained at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, 101st Airborne,” Eddie recalled. His mood darkened as his finger traced the empty margarita glass, while a montage of war movies played in my head. 

Fort Campbell was home to the U.S. Army Air Assault School and home to the Screamin’ Eagles, the most powerful, most dangerous division of the U.S. military. They have been first on the ground, jumping out of planes since D-Day. Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, Black Hawk Down, those are all about the 101st. And now Eddie was going to steal their valor to help Logan Paul sell images of gorillas with butterfly wings.

“I’m hanging out, sitting there on my computer, and a man says here are your papers, “Eddie tells me. One week later, Eddie says he reported to a base in Germany before dropping into Kirkuk, Iraq, where the 101st was leading a counterinsurgency operation. “We wanted to copy an eSIM card on a high-level asset we didn’t want to kill. In two weeks, I had taught a guy how to execute the swap, but they said, ‘you have 33 jumps under your belt, how about you swap the eSIM yourself?’ ”

Kimberley and I raised our glasses honoring him for not being another star on the wall at CIA headquarters. If it was Eddie’s intention to spend all night lying to me, it was his prerogative as my host, and I would play along, at least until I was sitting ringside tomorrow night. Eddie ordered shots. We drank them.

His anecdote wasn’t a perfect crib of The Rock or Armageddon, but it was close. FBI analyst Nic Cage suddenly called to action to disarm chemical weapons on Alcatraz Island; Bruce Willis training astronauts to drill into an asteroid one minute, putting on spacesuits the next. This was somehow funnier. Hacker-parachuter Eddie Ibanez spent two weeks teaching a member of the 101st how to change an eSIM card in a cell phone before the Army decided he was the only man for the job.

Soon enough, I’d learn how Eddie won friends and influenced people was by drawing from the plots of a lot more movies. Hackers, Zero Dark Thirty, The Social Network, The Wolf of Wall Street, Good Will Hunting.

I couldn’t help but wonder, did no one in his inner circle have a Letterboxd account?

“Billionaires would ask me for favors,” Eddie rambled on, explaining his transition from government work into the private sector. He recalled a party where Mets owner Steve Cohen followed him around a buffet table begging for his help with Sabermetrics. 

Oh God, I thought. Not Moneyball too.

By the time I walked into the moment I had manifested back home, that I wagered my dignity upon, I felt sick. I told Eddie that I had read the resumés of his data scientists and that I was impressed by the quality of his recruits.

“I can tell a bad hire in two seconds,” he said. “There’s a question I ask in every interview. You have 24 cups you have to divide evenly across two shelves. Six cups contain oil, three contain water, and the rest are empty. How do you arrange the cups evenly across two shelves?”

I suggested he put twelve cups on one shelf and twelve on the other, that it didn’t matter what was inside them.

“Harvard guys don’t get this! You passed, you got it,” he told me. “I want you on my side. I’m not thorough. I train computers to be thorough but I am not thorough.”

Fuck me, I thought. None of this is real. No one at his company could possibly be doing any of this stuff. Why is his publicist smiling and nodding? Why isn’t she lunging for my tape recorder, shutting him up, and shuffling him out of here while begging me to forget this ever happened?

Just then he stood up and excused himself to walk to the bar and settle our check. Double-0 Oppenheimer had misplaced his wallet. He flashed the waitress a smile, recited a credit card that I hoped was his own, and we were out the door. I asked Kimberely how exactly Eddie found her, and she told me it was just last month he was partying with her colleague, Andrew, and another one of their clients, Maria Bucellati, the CEO and founder of the fashion label Faith Connexion.

We outpaced the Escalades on foot as we weaved in and out of traffic on our way to the 1 Hotel. At least the party wasn't another fiction.

In the hotel lobby, we were joined by Todd Morley, one of the founders of Guggenheim Partners, a powerhouse global investment firm that became a trusted brand name, in part by acquiring the rights to the name of the family behind the iconic 5th Avenue museum, and went on to control hundreds of billions of dollars in consumer assets. Morley co-founded Guggenheim Partners, Chris Burch served as a past board member, and Barry Klarberg was a senior wealth manager back in the day. But over time the three men found new ventures elsewhere. Burch hit it big launching Tory Burch, his ex-wife’s fashion empire, prior to their divorce; Klarberg founded Monarch, his celebrity wealth management firm. But Todd, who The New York Times once described as “a model in a Ralph Lauren advertisement” and “the most unassuming master of the universe,” now found himself rumpled and adrift, a futurist always looking for the next big thing, keeping one eye on crypto and the other on Eddie.

Each one, in their own way, eventually found themselves in the Eddie Ibanez business. Barry would call on Eddie to do favors for celebrity clients, asking him to use his tech savvy to bury negative stories. Chris helped to bankroll Zenabi and sought its algorithmic alchemy to help improve sales for fashion brands like Jack Rogers, Senlis, and Fleur & Sonnet. Todd had bigger plans.

On March 8, 2018, Eddie hosted the first of two public conferences, Brains & Bands, an amateur hour Ted Talk at the Hall of Christ & Holy Trinity Church in Westport. He pulled together a lineup of speakers that included James Altucher, Todd Morley, and childhood heroes, including the legendary skateboarder Rodney Mullen, and the lead singers of his favorite 90s grunge bands, Vin Dombrowski of Sponge, and Art Alexakis of Everclear.

Eddie wasn’t just a poseur as a hacker and coder, he was a poseur in every facet of his life. He so desperately wanted to absorb the talent of the people he idolized that he faked it rather than ever make the effort. For years, Eddie had falsely claimed to be connected to the family behind the Ibanez Guitars empire despite two problems. 1. The company is Japanese, and 2. Ibanez is not the name of the family behind the company. But that didn’t matter. Brains & Bands was his chance to show off, to his employees, investors, his wife and kids, even his mistress, and it was his chance to party with rock stars.

Todd Morley had his own reason for appearing at the first Brains & Bands event. He announced the formation of a new merchant bank, Y2X. A press release recognized Eddie as a “global leader” involved in its formation. Internally, he was identified as the new company’s Managing Partner and Head of Technology.

As we arrive at the 1 Hotel, we collect Todd on the street outside. He is looking pink from the heat, his brassy hair matted down, sleeves rolled up. As much as I am doubting Eddie’s ever-expanding biography, Todd’s endorsement is a vote of confidence. Two weeks earlier, on May 24, Todd appeared on Bloomberg Television to announce his plans to open the world’s largest NFT Museum atop the world’s skinniest skyscraper. The 84-story ultra-luxury highrise at 111 West 57th Street sits down the block from Todd’s office, on Billionaire’s Row, a string of next-generation supertall buildings looming over Central Park. He revealed the building would also operate as a towering ham radio for wireless crypto trading all across New York City. More than 20 years after Guggenheim Partners established itself as an investment firm named after a museum, Todd was constructing a museum dedicated to investments. 

Todd appeared uncomfortable making the announcement on television that morning, offering vague responses to the anchors’ questions about how the project would make money. It should have been nothing more than a blip in the frenzied pace of the financial news network but the story had legs, making national headlines from the New York Post to Architectural Digest, even catapulting him onto art world power lists. His presence and insight would have been welcomed behind any closed door in Miami this weekend but he is here with us, posing for photos with his family beside him. 

Todd Morley at the CryptoZoo launch party at the 1 Hotel Miami Beach. Credit: Tiffany Sage/BFA.com.

“Very successful people think anything is possible,” Eddie told me. “That’s why they love me. I would say I think I can do that, this is what it’s going to take, but I’m not going to charge you. I do obvious favors.”

That eccentric generosity might have explained why, even in their good graces, he had amassed significant debts.

Weeks before the fight, Eddie commenced a second group chat kept secret from his new business partners. Here, he hastily planned an invitation-only launch party to undermine Logan’s August CryptoZoo reveal while promoting his own self-interests. He had a flock of seasoned public relations professionals – thick-skinned women unfazed by the outlandish whims of top fashion designers and luxury hoteliers – and one day, he told them he had a new idea for them to execute. He wanted everyone dressed in yellow, holding iPads showcasing demos of the game, while speakers hidden among the manicured trees of the rooftop's tropical garden blasted Chris Cornell's cover of Sinead O'Connor's Nothing Compares 2 U. 

His vision couldn’t have been more different than Logan’s official reveal in spare surroundings – black microphone stands set against beige carpet and white walls – that did nothing to distract from his sales pitch. The only bursts of yellow in the studio were the grinning happy face slides on Mike Majlak’s feet, and his color commentary – he really had to pee.

The PR women that Eddie hired to promote the launch had been playing with the CryptoZoo demo, Logan Paul’s best-kept secret, since May. Logan had declined to show the game on the August podcast, preferring to talk up the team of artists he employed than reveal his NFTs were nothing more than Photoshopped stock photography. Meanwhile, the women freely populated the group chat with their digital newborns.

“I got an orca today! Still have seven more hours to go for my eggs to hatch,” Sophia Schrager chimed in. Sophia was a junior member of the PR team promoting CryptoZoo, breeding virtual cryptids like Elephantilla while fielding Eddie’s mad whims. Eddie loved to brag that Sophia, the daughter of nightlife legend and Studio 54 founder Ian Schrager, now worked for him.

Rachel Joelson, Kimberley Brown, Nastassja Isabelle, and Sophia Schrager, members of the publicity team for the CryptoZoo party, strike a pose on the roof of the 1 Hotel Miami Beach. Credit: Tiffany Sage/BFA.com.

Eddie built out the guest list for his launch party from a sunny picnic table in Nantucket, texting photos of BearShark Vodka, produced by a local distillery on the old money island off Cape Cod. Eddie assured the distillery team that Logan would endorse the vodka after the CryptoZoo launch, a product tie-in once the intellectual property had been established.

In the meantime, he told his publicists that the distillery was sitting on more than 2.5 million bottles, with a share of them destined for the Miami Beach party.

Eddie was eager to celebrate with the people who made his work with Logan possible, even as he kept the party a secret from Logan himself. He insisted on sending invitations to Shawn Nelson, the Mormon founder of LoveSac furniture, who first met Eddie in 2006 through their local church. It was Shawn who introduced Eddie to Mike Majlak, a former LoveSac marketing manager who gave up his career to join Logan’s entourage after their viral collaboration propelled LoveSac to success. Eddie claimed Mike promised to deliver a crew of influencers to promote CryptoZoo in exchange for free hotel rooms that weekend and asked his team to make the arrangements.

The guest list also included Donald Trump Jr.'s then-fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the serial investor Gary Vaynerchuk, Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, billionaire businessman Chris Burch, Google CEO Larry Page, with some top models and NFL executives in the mix for good measure. Not one of them actually showed up to the party.

The only men worth noting were Eddie and his Nantucket crew, taking shots with Bearshark Vodka bottles in hand, mugging for the camera in matching boxing robes for a party photographer that cost Eddie thousands of dollars he didn’t have.

I was the only one at the event who seemed to anticipate the big unveiling, who witnessed and recorded the stories Eddie shared that night as he pregamed for the rampant fraud and spectacular collapse of CryptoZoo that would follow. I was the only one who took notes on what was brewing, all because Eddie couldn’t help himself. He was driven to impress people as quickly as possible, willing to tell any lie – and spend the rest of his life living the sum of those lies – if it helped him achieve that goal.

As I waited all night for the exclusive interview with Logan Paul that Eddie had promised me, I realized this was going to be just like CryptoZoo. It was one more piece of vaporware Eddie never delivered.

Eddie and I arrived at the party hours late, so he did his best to salvage the energy of the dwindling crowd. He worked the floor, moving from one attractive stranger to another, drawn in by a sheer black top, a blue bra, a purple halter, each woman half-listening half-nursing a fast-melting Bearshark vodka soda. It wasn’t the first time tonight I had heard his pitch: “I have an ex-wife, and she calls me, ‘Eddie, what the hell are you doing in your office?’ I have a 9, 5, and 3-year-old, and my 9-year-old daughter told her class that my job is taking bears and sharks and making bearsharks, so her science teacher called her mom concerned, and I tell her it’s a game.”

The reality of the party was very different from his grand designs in the group chat. There were no iPad demonstrations of the game on display, no musical cues, no big announcement. Eddie looked lost roaming among the filler partygoers wrangled by his publicists. Every conversation, a cold pitch. He would open and close the demo on his phone, then open his contacts and try to take the numbers of the more attractive guests. When one woman asked how she could buy in, and where she could download the game, he quickly brushed her off. Eddie made clear that access was invitation-only and she wasn’t invited.

Suddenly the sky opened up and I realized if Logan wasn’t here yet he wasn’t coming now. I don’t know how seriously he was taking the fight, or how seriously anyone was taking the matchup of a retired light middleweight champion of the world and a YouTuber, but I was sure he was asleep by now. Kimberley told me not to worry, that I would get what I needed for my story the next day. So I headed back to my cheap hotel, while Eddie and his boys beat the rain by donning green robes advertising High Poon, a CBD sex lubricant side hustle Eddie claimed he had going with one of his Nantucket crew.

Eddie Ibanez, center, and Charles Morris, in a pink polo behind him, pose in High Poon boxing robes at the CryptoZoo party on the roof of the 1 Hotel in Miami Beach. Credit: Tiffany Sage/BFA.com.

Eddie spent the next two months repeating variations of his children’s love for the game, until Logan Paul was so convinced by Eddie’s anecdote he repeated the story to his podcast audience. But he shouldn’t have been. Anyone who had met Eddie Ibanez should have known better than to believe a word he spoke. It’s hard to believe that just hours earlier, I had actually wanted this man to give me a job.

Eddie and Logan had other plans the next day and they did not involve me. Kimberley took me out day-drinking in Wynwood, by way of an apology for what happened and what was to come. Then she broke the news. There were no ringside tickets to the fight, no one-on-one with Logan forthcoming. She showed me a screenshot of an email Eddie just forwarded her. Eddie’s friend Chuck, one of the marketing gurus in Logan’s CryptoZoo group chat, who was mugging for the camera with Eddie in a green robe last night, offered to purchase us seats in the last row of the highest section of the stadium, putting as much distance as possible between us. At the same time, many members of the CryptoZoo team began posting to Instagram from their ringside seats. 

Logan’s “personal Pokemon advisor” turned CryptoZoo strategist, Jake “CryptoKing” Greenbaum showed up next. He drove into Miami from nearby West Palm Beach where earlier in the week he prepped the CryptoZoo group chat on next steps for the launch, explaining how anyone who buys into CryptoZoo in the first three weeks – more than a month before Logan’s official public announcement – could expect the most “insane” returns on their investment. Now he was taking selfies on the floor of the stadium, looking slim and scruffy in low-slung skinny jeans held up by a Louis Vuitton belt. He posed, drink in hand, smiling beside Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Eddie dressed up for the occasion in a hooded blazer and struck a pose with Jacquees, a singer on Cash Money Records. I was taking a shower and going to bed.

Logan never struck me as a great man, but he hadn’t fully developed his public villain persona yet, and it was unbelievable his new company would hire one of the world’s top PR firms to fly me down here one day and blow me off the next. CryptoZoo didn’t need a luxury publicist, it needed crisis PR. I laid there, catatonic, through the undercard.

I wasn’t just embarrassed that Eddie and Logan were playing me. I was ashamed every time my phone rang. My friends and family knew where I was supposed to be, but I had gone silent on social media. They wanted to see the craziness for themselves. Of course they did. It’s normal to ask for proof when you hear such a wild story. I could ignore almost everyone, but I couldn’t ignore Stephanie. She didn’t gloat, but she knew she won.

The next morning I flew home to make sense of what happened. Kimberley promised me another interview with Eddie as soon as possible to make things right. Sure there was some chaos, but she assured me the launches of MKTSQ and CryptoZoo were still forthcoming, and I still had the exclusive. This time, I told myself, I would be better prepared. This time I wouldn’t ask Eddie a single question without already knowing the answer.

For the next month, Eddie and I got to work.

Five days after the launch party, on Thursday, June 10th, CryptoZoo went live. 

Eddie broke the news on Instagram, sharing a photo of his team huddled around a laptop amid a grove of palm trees in the lobby of the Casa del Mar hotel in Santa Monica. “This is the second company I launched from this table,” Eddie recalled at the time. He made my job easier by tagging his crew: CryptoKing was there wearing the same shirt he wore to the fight, Logan’s longtime assistant, Dani Strobel was seated beside him, while a new face, Tyler Thurmond, a holdover from the MKTSQ team – who turned to tech futurism after failing to make it big in a Teddy Riley boy band back in the day – peered at the screen from behind them. The next day, Zoo Coin, Logan’s own proprietary digital currency which investors would need to purchase the CryptoZoo eggs,  also launched; two trillion digital coins reached a market cap of $100 million in just three hours.

How else to celebrate such success: Three days later Eddie was in the studio “dropping beats” with Kaskade. Had I misread the Miami trip? Was I a victim of chaos and not outright lies? I reached out to Kaskade, and his manager Jodi told me it was true. Kaskade wasn’t just on board with MKTSQ, she confirmed he “was an early adopter” even though the app still hadn’t launched and was a “big fan of Eddie’s” too. It was an unexpected new level of gaslighting.

I later found out Kaskade was on board with CryptoZoo too; on May 27th, he texted Eddie that he “needed to get his digital wallet sorted so I can buy some pets from you.” It turns out it really is possible to be an early adopter to something that didn’t yet exist.

Eddie shared this enthusiasm with the CryptoZoo group chat. “Kaskade and Ian Schrager’s daughter is our play.”

On June 29, I received a text from Kimberley’s colleague, Andrew. Eddie was ready to speak to me, again. This time to clarify everything over drinks in New York. A wave of relief washed over me right until Eddie canceled at the last minute to attend a funeral in L.A. Of course, that happens. I just kept my head down and powered on. In three weeks, I had located and interviewed Eddie’s fellow military school cadets, scores of former Zenabi interns and ex-employees and their families, his past lovers, even some distant relatives. I opened up Instagram to look for some kind of clue. Who did I miss that died? Whose funeral was so urgent that he jetted across the country? Eddie spent the night playing darts at The Surly Goat, a bar in West Hollywood, with Ophir Bentov. Ophir did double duty working as a travel concierge by day for MKTSQ while also manning the CryptoZoo Discord under an alias. He was very much alive.

The next day, I got my answer. Eddie was in a luxury box at the Staples Center. The Suns beat the Clippers 130-107. Phoenix won the series in six games. It was the Clippers playoff hopes that had died.

One week later we tried again for breakfast at Soho House, a trendy members club in New York’s Meatpacking District, but again there was a problem. Eddie had woken up in Nantucket. Andrew assured he’d be there by evening and he was. When I arrived, I pulled Andrew aside and warned him not to interrupt Eddie’s responses to my questions. While Eddie was living his best life, I had put mine on hold day after day to find out the truth about him. I didn’t want Andrew draining my power bar running Eddie’s defense.

Right away I showed my cards and made clear what was preventing me from writing a glowing profile of Eddie on the cusp of launching MKTSQ and/or CryptoZoo with Logan Paul. I didn’t trust him. I had more questions than answers. Not just for him, but Logan too. I wanted to pick up where we left off in Miami, but after spending a month digging into Eddie’s life story, I was still stuck on the day he was born. I told him something I was sure he already knew. I told him he was no orphan.

Eduardo Victor Ibanez was born in Philadelphia on December 17, 1984 to Teresa Lucero and Eduardo DeJesus Ibanez. After his father left them behind, Teresa raised him as a single mother. She supported her son as best she could by working as a nurse until one day she married a U.S. Army veteran, Joseph Dirac, and relocated to upstate New York, about 20 miles from New York Military Academy. Donald Trump had no role in any of this.

“But I felt like an orphan,” Eddie doubled down, claiming he was so alone as a child he only discovered Mormonism through inviting in the missionary workers who roamed his north Philadelphia neighborhood just so he had someone to play with after school.

While he lacked friends early on, he made lifelong bonds with two fellow cadets. Jason Fernandez and Jorge Romero, both upperclassmen, went on to join Eddie at Zenabi. 

“I found Jason working as a teller at Bank of America and when he saw how much money was in my account, he said ‘let’s go,’ ” Eddie told me. But wasn’t this from a scene in The Wolf of Wall Street? “You show me a pay stub for $72,000 on it, I quit my job right now and work for you, Joan Hill tells Leonardo DiCaprio.” Eddie couldn’t help himself.

He also continued to insist he hacked America Online from the barracks in the 8th grade. I assured him I had spoken to his classmates and they had no memory of this.

Fellow cadet Mike Calvi recalled plenty of Eddie’s antics, not only trying to pass off his connection to Ibanez guitars but to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Paul Dirac, who shares  his stepfather’s surname. “I’ve done more than Eddie,” Mike told me. “I was able to gain control of the entire camera system of the school and use it to my benefit for senior pranks, and he was living at home as a day student.”

“After AOL, I returned as a day student,” Eddie explained.

Slowly he made more concessions to his backstory. Before I could tell him MIT confirmed he was never enrolled there, he told me he joined the CIA the summer after graduating from military school. “It was summer, and I moved to Alexandria, Virginia, a mom-and-pop town where there was nothing to drink but strawberry daiquiris.” His response was so out of the box that later that night I went home to do the unthinkable and watch the 2003 Al Pacino-Colin Farrell CIA bartender movie The Recruit. - But all they drink are martinis.

As he continued to speak, I considered all the wealthy and well-connected individuals who took him at his word and advanced his career with their endorsement, despite them all having more time and resources than me to vet his story. Not just the billionaires, but men like James Altucher who had hosted Eddie on his podcast and at his family dinner table.

I told Eddie I found his first appearance on the podcast, not in 2019, but two years earlier, when he was identified only as Mr. X and spoke through an ineffective voice modulator. In this episode, he not only shared the AOL story, but claimed he was recruited by multiple U.S. intelligence agencies after graduating from military school, and that he went on to capture serial killers and terrorists. He even shared a conspiracy theory about Osama Bin Laden’s capture.

“I know you personally saved a lot of lives,” James said at the close of the show. But how did he know? I began to think I was the only one who knew the real Eddie Ibanez.

By now I had his birth certificate, his social security number, his early resumés, love letters with a young and frustrated Jackie, even the family plan he made in an effort to stay in her life, promises to turn off the television, make his own lunches, and get in shape. He was struggling to find any low-level work on Wall Street. While Jackie worked her way up the ranks of TV news –  starting as an intern at NBC Sports before climbing her way out of local northeastern TV news and landing at Fox News – Eddie eventually landed as an analyst at Mets owner Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital in 2009 – years before it was raided by the FBI.

It wasn’t faith in God that transformed Eddie Ibanez, it was the men with whom he networked at the Mormon temple in the wealthy enclave of New Canaan, Connecticut.

That’s really how I met Eddie – through the church,” Shawn Nelson told me. He believed “a lot of Eddie’s clients, the NFL, Priceline, came through his association with the church.”

Shawn recalled a fateful ski trip that set Logan and Eddie on a crash course.

“Mike Majlak came to LoveSac shortly after rehab and got a second start with us,” Nelson recalled. “He was doing my social media, tying us to a lot of celebrities, and that winter, 2016 going into 2017, I hosted some finance guys and influencers in Park City, Logan and his friends.” He remembers Eddie had happened to be at Sundance and dropped by the house. “Eddie, just sort of being a friend, came out and hung out with us.”

Shawn says he has no ill will against Eddie, who had previously claimed he played a role in saving LoveSac from bankruptcy early in the company’s evolution. Eddie claimed he accomplished this through his work at SAC Capital, while LoveSac was rescued by SAC Acquisition Group. There was no relation.

Shawn rationalizes Eddie as a certain type of entrepreneur prone to exaggeration. He’d heard stories about Eddie’s work for NSA but just smiled and took them with “a grain of salt because in this world you never know what’s what.”

Eddie’s work for Priceline appeared to be the most irrefutable truth. The travel booking site’s parent company, Booking Holdings, confirmed Eddie had been offered a job at Priceline. They wouldn’t say more, saying they are prevented from sharing employee data. Whatever job he held there, his successful employment laid the foundation for him to grow Zenabi Data, and ultimately connect with Burch, Morley, and Klarberg, who moved on from Guggenheim Partners following the 2008 economic collapse.

Eddie’s Priceline credentials and entrepreneurial spirit to set up his own data firm, enhanced with his secret agent narrative, also attracted Miami Dolphins owner Stephen M. Ross, who hired Zenabi for data analytics, around the same time Eddie hired the smartest people he could find. He recruited heavily from the Mormon community, which led to the firm’s biggest client, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But Eddie resented people who could do what he only pretended to do. On one occasion, Eddie posted a photo of his monitor. An open tab showed the mock-up for a new retail platform, a precursor to MKSTQ. The next tab was for the website Hacker Typer, where users can type gibberish which appears on the screen as code. 

Eddie also resented the powerful men who believed in him, so he punished everyone, himself included, by self-sabotaging projects and wildly misspending the company’s money. He went on benders perfectly timed to do the most damage while maintaining a lavish lifestyle to hold his own among his billionaire friends.

Perhaps the most insightful fact I gathered was that as soon as a former employee would hang up the phone after speaking to me, they’d remove Zenabi from their resumé.

After dozens of such calls, I landed an unlikely source who cracked everything wide open for me. They knew Eddie was no American hero, only a bully, but they still feared retaliation.

Stephanie works 9 to 5, but she works hard, and on Sunday morning, there is no getting her out of bed before the trumpet sounds on CBS Sunday Morning. And Eddie Ibanez is no Jane Pauley. She didn’t need proof to know Eddie is a liar, and when I told her I needed to go up to Connecticut to meet an anonymous source who will send me a pin drop on a Google Map once we get close, she smiled, yawned, and giggled herself back to sleep.

I don’t drive, but my mom does. And she was used to this by now. When I was covering the production of Snooki & JWoww, MTV’s Jersey Shore spinoff, for New York Magazine, she joined me to tail the cast to prove they were not sleeping on set in a Jersey City firehouse but a nearby hotel. And when I investigated a heated mayoral race in my New Jersey hometown, she was behind the wheel when I jumped out of a moving car after spotting a councilman on the street who had been avoiding my questions. Now we ate breakfast in the parking lot of Coffee an’ Donut in Westport, and we waited for the ping. Another hour’s drive and she stood outside her car, clocking me from a nearby parking lot while I made my way to a lone riverside bench in a far-off park.

For the rest of the morning, my source smoked and paced the length of their own idling car, weighing what their contribution would mean and how I could protect their anonymity before turning over the documents that laid out Eddie’s real-life story. I had gotten to them just in time, just before the FBI came knocking on their door.

I broke the news to Eddie that I’d spoken with the Philadelphia Eagles and Miami Dolphins and both teams confirmed that Eddie and Zenabi had never worked for either organization, no matter how many selfies he posted from locker rooms and sidelines. Both teams even insisted they were introduced to Eddie by the other. The Eagles assured me that the Super Bowl ring Eddie kept on display in his office, but never wore in public, did not come from them. It was a fake. Not only was he a liar, he was a bad liar. It was only a month after the Eagles defeated the Patriots in Super Bowl LII to claim their first national championship that Eddie first pitched the team on his idea for a Street Fighter algorithm. The coaches that Eddie did meet thought he was a joke.

“That whole thing is bureaucracy,” Eddie shot back without breaking a sweat. “Steve [Ross] and Jeffrey [Lurie] have to fight their underlings – it’s tough. That’s why I stopped consulting,” he insisted. Despite official and absolute confirmation from the team, he still swore he received a Super Bowl ring directly from Lurie, and told me to track down the Eagles’ former Director of Performance, Shaun Huls, to confirm his contributions.

Shaun was a model version of the man Eddie pretended to be. Today, he’s the director of performance for the Cleveland Browns, but prior to the NFL he really did get his start in government service. Before joining the Eagles, he was the head strength and conditioning coach for Naval Special Warfare and coordinated training and injury prevention programs for Navy SEAL teams. He didn’t suffer fools easily and could spot a fraud 100 yards downfield.

Shaun confirmed he had meetings and calls with Eddie. “We gave him data to work with to see what the output would be,” he recalled. “We didn’t pay anything, and I think he signed an NDA with us; we wouldn’t have given him anything if he didn’t sign an NDA.” The information the Eagles supplied Zenabi was “de-identified” meaning the data scientists would never know what athletes they were studying. Nonetheless, Eddie broke the NDA and exaggerated stories got back to the team.

“My friend called me from the Dolphins and said Ibanez somehow knows the owner and literally lied to the owner about who he was and what he'd done,” Shaun told me. It was the fall of 2017, when the Eagles made their Super Bowl run. “That was the year Carson Wentz had torn his ACL and Eddie said his algorithm predicted that stuff. We didn’t know that. I was standing on the sidelines of that game and I didn’t know he was going to tear his ACL. If [Eddie] predicted it that would have been nice, but there’s no way he could have.”

Shaun claimed Eddie “was a superfan,” and described a room of the Ibanezes’ home which Eddie said was dedicated to the team. “That was an alarm for me right away because when people are like that it's about them and getting inside access.”

It was true. In the run-up to the Super Bowl, Jackie was cheering on Wentz’s backup, Nick Foles, on Twitter when one of her followers inquired about her Eagles fandom. In reply, she posted photos of their spare bathroom which Eddie had turned into a makeshift man cave: Eagles curtains, a logo trash can and bathmat, a solitary autograph on the back door, action snapshots of players lining the wall, a mini helmet next to a Phillies soap dispenser. At best he was manifesting; at worst it fed the delusion he brought to work each day.

While Jason Fernandez was the only other Zenabi employee who posted photos from Eagles facilities, I counted seven former employees who had included client work for either the Miami Dolphins or an NFL team in their LinkedIn profiles, and zero with security clearances or past government experience. An archived snapshot of the Zenabi website even featured Eagles and Dolphins logos. For more than a year, Eddie tasked his employees with made-up busy work to do for phantom clients, like a scene out of the Seinfeld episode where George’s delusional boss demanded a report on the New York Yankees so insane that George was institutionalized by the closing credits.

Shaun also remembered how Eddie tried to convince him he was a former CIA agent.

I told Shaun about the stories I heard from Eddie’s fellow New York Military Academy classmates and how that portrayal didn’t seem to meet the standards by which the CIA – even movie CIA agent Al Pacino – recruits candidates. “The entire selection process is psychologically based,” he noted. “And if you're not conscientious about who you are and what you do, how can I trust you to be an agent in the field and not have an international incident?”

One former Zenabi employee was in disbelief when I confronted him about his work for the NFL. He couldn’t believe Zenabi would assign work without a paying contract, but admitted he was unaware of Eddie’s personal policy of free favors for billionaires. After Miami Dolphins head coach Adam Gase had been fired on New Year’s Eve in 2018, following a 42-18 loss to the Buffalo Bills, “there were comments made about us helping pick the next head coach,” he recalled. “Do I think we picked the Dolphins head coach?” He hesitated until denial gave way to acceptance.  “I think it would be a stretch to have our company pick a coach.”

Andrew had been patient, quietly nursing a glass of wine for two hours while I questioned Eddie at Soho House without interruption. He was ready to leave, and he earned his freedom. Before we stood up and parted ways, Eddie texted his friend Rodney Mullen and arranged for him to speak with me later in the week. 

Rodney Mullen has been a skateboarding icon since the 1970s. A champion since the age of fourteen, his commitment to experimentation led to the development of essential tricks like the flat-ground ollie and kickflip. By the 2000s his legend reached a new generation when he made the first of a dozen appearances in Tony Hawk’s video game series, which dubbed him “the Godfather of modern street skating,” and by the 2010s he was on the lecture circuit, speaking at MIT and TED, but also smaller affairs like Eddie’s Brains & Bands conference.

Rodney called me from London eager to sing Eddie’s praises. He was the first.

“You probably know his background is rough and crazy, like it’s cooler than Good Will Hunting – truly, he’s cooler than Will,'' Rodney told me. He shared how he was sold on participating as a paid speaker at Brains & Bands because Eddie brought in Mullen’s own hero, Mat Hoffman. “I was doubly looking forward to that because I love the dude, he has a heart of gold, and we got there, and the excitement to me was just meeting Eddie.”

Rodney spent that night in Westport, where he recalled Eddie treated him like a movie star. “We took his car to go skating, and there’s a Misfits air freshener, and seeing the Misfits was this gentle reminder that Eddie’s from that punk rock ethos of skating; even though he didn’t skate, that’s who he is, and it’s part of the magic that separates him from other geniuses.”

He didn’t skate?!

My heart hurt. Rodney had a love for Eddie like no one else I had encountered. No one I met bothered to hold Eddie accountable either because they pitied him or didn’t care enough, but this was unadulterated admiration unworthy of a malignant poseur. I told Rodney that I was a fan of his, and that the beauty of skateboarding is how there’s no hiding one's successes and failures, that skaters don’t just want to show their work, they must document their successes and failures to improve, educate, and make an impact. I asked if he’d ever seen Eddie show his work. And then I heard him shatter.

“I thank you for your candor, and that whole wind-up you did was beautiful,” Rodney said. The more he tried to pace his speech, the more unsettled he sounded. ”I just want to say that. And now my heart is broken, somewhat. Fractured, cracked.”

He paused. I listened to his breathwork. “Let me look to make sure I’m on solid ground.” His voice cracked. “I cannot verify that he ever worked for the CIA, I cannot verify he hacked into AOL. I cannot verify that he was at MIT, I cannot verify…”

Who else needed to hear the truth?

I was still perplexed as to why Eddie had Kimberley woo me to Miami to write about MKTSQ, then pivot to CryptoZoo.

The bearshark was Logan’s idea. “I was showing him MKTSQ and he said, ‘I want to do these hybrid animals,’ ” Eddie explained. “He picked and named every animal. I would say CryptoZoo was his brainchild. He’s investing in it; he’s an advisor and cofounder.”

When I asked Eddie to clarify his own role in the project, he opened the CryptoZoo website on his iPhone and pulled up the biographies for ten team members, four more than are named in the current class action suit. Each headshot was paired with dummy text. “The egos,” he said. “The hardest thing to get from these people is what they want their bio to be, so it’s all lorem ipsum.”

Their final biographies were online by the end of the week, albeit briefly, and they couldn’t have been more vague.

Eddie gave himself the title of “scientist,” and a new biography that claimed he “worked with many professional sports teams on injury prevention, and is the recipient of multiple distinguished service medals,” which are only awarded by the U.S. military. He was coming dangerously close to profiting off stolen valor. He also claimed to hold a Top Secret security clearance and multiple degrees while noting he’s “currently a visiting associate professor for the Stern School of Business at New York University.”

NYU confirmed no such thing, only that he enrolled at the university in 2008, and in 2012 received a Bachelor's degree in social sciences with a concentration in economics.

Eddie urged me to hear Jeff Levin – in charge of strategy – explain in his own words his and Logan’s role in CryptoZoo and set us up to speak before the end of July, one month before Logan’s big reveal.

Jeff confirmed CryptoZoo was Logan’s own unique idea.

When I asked Jeff to elaborate on how the business is structured, he described CryptoZoo as a collective, with the zoo concept and its hybrid animals as Logan’s ideation, while the crypto side of the business involved Eddie, Todd Morley, and himself. I asked Jeff whether he had ever vetted Eddie. I feared this was as close as I would get to Logan, and my only chance to warn Eddie’s CryptoZoo partners ahead of the launch. I told Jeff how Eddie misstated his work with the NFL, that the Eagles and Dolphins confirmed my suspicions. But Jeff said he didn’t know the football world, only the business world, and he trusted Eddie because Chris Burch and Todd had employed him in the past.

After Eddie walked me through the team, he explained how the Zoo Coin he launched in June would be more widely available for trade by the end of the week via third-party apps. Before we departed, he showed me how much crypto was in his own wallet. It was worth around $11,000 at the time. Two months later, following the CryptoZoo launch, he would post his balance to his Instagram stories. His holdings had grown to $1.59 million.

Despite Eddie’s newfound wealth, his ex-wife Jackie continued to pursue child support from Eddie in Connecticut courtrooms. Their divorce proceedings lasted for nearly three years and were only finalized weeks before the CryptoZoo party.

On Wednesday, July 21st, 2018, Jackie Ibanez was arrested at Zenabi’s Westport offices, and charged with disorderly conduct and first-degree criminal trespassing. The headline in the Westport News, which published Ibanez’s teary-eyed mugshot, labeled the incident a “domestic dispute.” She had filed for divorce just four days earlier on June 17th.

“She wouldn’t leave, and I was like Jackie, you’re yelling, irate – if you don’t leave, I’ll call the cops,” Eddie told Andrew and me. Eddie regretted pressing charges because the police took her to jail. “She didn’t deserve that.”

She really didn’t.

Former Zenabi employees at work that afternoon recalled that the incident occurred late in the day, an office manager directed employees to file out of the building and head home before the police arrived. No one I spoke with witnessed what actually transpired between the couple behind closed doors.

Soon after, Eddie said he tried to win his wife back. “I said, why don’t we work on business together?”

On November 9, 2018, Jackie posted a video to Instagram announcing she was “taking some time off from Fox News to enjoy motherhood.” Ten days later, the couple filed financial affidavits in court before pausing their divorce proceedings. Jackie then rebranded as a social media influencer and began posting paid travel content for one of Eddie’s side hustles, a Priceline knockoff called Hotelafly. Two weeks later, on November 23, she posted a photo of herself on the beach in St Petersburg, Florida, and tagged the company.

Five days later, the couple appeared back together. Jackie posted a series of cute stories showing the couple through the lens of the black-and-white red lipstick filter as they were chauffeured from Hong Kong International Airport to the Mandarin Oriental hotel.

“Why exactly am I doing a 24-hour turnaround trip to Hong Kong? Here’s a hint: It’s for Forbes magazine,” she told her audience. Hours later she was seated at an elegant dinner between Todd Morley, and her estranged husband, who sported a Miami Dolphins tie for the occasion. 

Jackie played with her food, handing off her phone so she could be recorded sampling fish cheek for her nascent social media following, before taking aim herself at the businessmen opposite her who appeared displeased to find their dinner was being recorded.

The next morning, Jackie filmed Eddie explaining his Street Fighter algorithm to his Chinese tablemates at breakfast, but his audience looked unimpressed.

When I asked Eddie the purpose of the trip, he explained Forbes Media is owned by a Chinese investment group and he "convinced Todd it was worth a billion dollars as a data company."

There was some truth to Eddie’s statement. Todd Morley spent years looking at multiple opportunities for Y2X to partner with Forbes Media on the creation of a Forbes-branded finance app offering users the ability to execute trades and access wealth management services; Morley sought access to Forbes.com’s coveted database of active users. The website is visited by more than 75 million users monthly and publishes the work of more than 2,800 contributors in 110 countries. At the same time, he and Eddie were pushing to launch  Forbes Travel, a travel booking interface that would be fully integrated with Forbes’ media properties and serviced by a team of Zenabi executives. Neither project ever came to fruition.

So Eddie pursued a guerilla approach to reaching Forbes readers by embedding MKTSQ affiliate links in contributor articles published to Forbes.com. Jackie had served her purpose but now Eddie was ready to move on again. When they returned from Hong Kong, he hired a new assistant at Zenabi, Grace, a pseudonym I’ll use to protect her identity. 

On February 15, 2019, Zenabi received a legal complaint sent from the New York law firm Moore & Keuhn, which stated Grace was hired as an executive assistant on December 10, 2018.The below details are found in the complaint which have not been proven true or false in court. They are recounted here solely for additional background. In her second week of employment, she claimed to have attended the Zenabi office holiday party at Bowlmor In Norwalk, Connecticut, a late round of White Elephant at Zenabi’s office, then trips to two subsequent taverns where she “consumed copious amounts of alcohol with some of her bosses, managers, coworkers and supervisors to the point of extreme intoxication.”

“I remember Eddie repurposed some gifts that Grace had bought for his kids and used them for White Elephant since there were more people than gifts,” one former Zenabi employee recalls. “I remember feeling weird about that because I’m pretty sure Jackie and the kids were there when he did it.”

According to the complaint, Eddie drove two male employees and Grace to his Westport home. Grace entered Eddie’s house without any means to go elsewhere, and proceeded to have sex with one of the men. The next morning, she “felt ashamed and embarrassed” because she had just taken a new job with the company. Eddie supplied the condoms the man used.

Another Zenabi employee recalled the man slept with Grace and that Eddie held the incident over his head for weeks after attempting to seduce her himself. What Eddie attempted, according to the complaint, was clearly nonconsensual. Two days later, the complaint alleges Grace encountered a drunk Eddie at work. He asked her how long it would take “to sober, so that he can blow into his SoberLink to hide his drunkenness from his wife,” then praised her performance at the party.

Over her next three weeks of employment at Zenabi, Eddie allegedly repeatedly sexually assaulted Grace, physically and emotionally abusing her, then blamed her for seducing him. On one occasion, she claimed she repeatedly fended off Eddie’s advances after delivering him a laptop he left behind at a Manhattan hotel. Before the night was through, he masturbated and ejaculated on her without her consent, and the next day accused her of getting him drunk.

On other occasions, she alleges Eddie hid his phone so his wife could not track his location, and moved Grace’s car so his wife wouldn’t see it. He also encouraged Grace to lie to Jackie about their whereabouts when she called for him. 

During her last week of employment, Grace joined Eddie and another male coworker on a trip to Los Angeles where she served as a chauffeur. Eddie instructed her to rent a Rolls Royce, which she rented on her parents’ credit card. One night during the trip, Grace drove the two men and their female companions to several bars after midnight, and at one point Eddie called her a “bitch” for making a wrong turn. The party eventually broke up, and only Grace and Eddie remained, she informed Eddie that she was going to quit after the trip. Eddie then told her he would kill himself if she did, then attempted suicide by unbuckling his seatbelt and opening the Rolls Royce’s clamshell “suicide” doors, which allow passengers to easily roll out from the back seat.

Grace ensured Eddie’s safe return to their hotel and remained with him until he sobered up. When he awoke during the night, he again proceeded to masturbate in front of her and engage her in forced oral sex. She responded that she was only there because “he threatened suicide and has three young children, but he declared ‘I still want to fuck you.’ ” She finally retreated to her colleague’s hotel room, telling the man she needed time away from the company, and asking him to care for Eddie in the morning.

On January 21, Grace returned to Zenabi to pick up an expense check and was told by the office manager that she could take off as much time as she saw fit. The manager apologized that she didn’t know about the sexual harassment at first, but said she would keep it between herself, Eddie, and the two men. However, the following day, Grace says her employment was terminated without explanation.

One of the two men left the company in June 2019, the other remained until December.

Grace’s complaint requested a settlement in lieu of pursuing criminal and civil complaints, as well as $2 million for pain, suffering, and emotional trauma. She also asked for a positive employment recommendation, for Eddie to seek psychotherapy and substance abuse treatment, and she sought to make sure he could not hire any more female assistants.

The events of Grace’s employment and settlement played out while Jackie was kept busy continuing to travel abroad as a social media influencer. On January 1, 2019, the same day as  Grace’s hotel laptop incident, Jackie officially announced her partnership with Hotelafly on her Instagram account, promising to explore “some of the world’s most luxurious hotels, exotic vacation spots, and posh restaurants.” Throughout February and March, she posted eleven photos from her Hotelafly travels, but on April 8, the Ibanezes’ divorce proceedings resumed and Jackie returned to Fox News.

As Jackie’s Hotelafly campaign wound down, Eddie began ramping up social media work for his other Zenabi clients like the womenswear brand Fleur & Sonnet which he promoted at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival that spring. 

Leah Lawson, a former American Idol contestant and Miss South Carolina, produced the Fleur & Sonnet campaign and remained in Eddie’s orbit for years, eventually landing the gig as CryptoZoo’s social media administrator.

One former Zenabi employee recalled that “Eddie paid for Logan Paul, and a few pornstars and models by providing them with admission to Coachella and a place to stay, in exchange for wearing and promoting the clothes.” Logan even posed for a selfie with Jason Fernandez.

The Coachella promotion was poorly timed. Fleur & Sonnet, which existed in the Burch Creative Capital brand portfolio, was about to be rebranded as Senlis, named for a village outside of Paris. On April 18th, Burch’s Senlis estate was featured in Architectural Digest – a tie-in with the upcoming relaunch, and the following month, Zenabi hired more than a dozen college-aged female social media influencers intended to serve as summer marketing interns tasked with promoting the new label’s peasant dress aesthetics.

At the same time, Eddie had a second assignment for these young women. He tasked them with creating counterfeit social media accounts promoting Forbes Media. He still had hopes of winning their business.

“Everything that Eddie seemed to want to accomplish seemed exaggerated,” one intern told me. “He had these far-fetched ideas and they would tell us – for example – Forbes. They would tell us we were all writers for Forbes - we were just told that one day.”

A second intern recalled, “Obviously, I knew we weren't working with them. All our instructions were vague. I started one account called @ForbesFeminine. and I would post girls traveling, and someone else had @ForbesFoodie, and we all made our own specialized accounts and posted for a few days on them.”

Many of the accounts still exist on Instagram today – the @ForbesFeminine account is followed by ten other unofficial Forbes accounts, like @ForbesInAsia and @Forbes.downunder that started and stopped posting that same summer.

The women were told they would receive bonuses for growing the accounts, but that never happened. “Eddie said I’m going to fly you out on a private plane to Bermuda, and I’ll give you $200 too. We all know he wasn’t going to do that, even when he promised. It never happened.”

Later that summer, Eddie invited two female interns on a weekend trip to the Hamptons, according to four interns I spoke with. “It was a Friday, and they woke up super early, drove all the way out to Long Island, and Eddie never showed up. They’re calling him, they’re texting him, and he completely blew them off. They were stuck out there. The following week, Eddie never acknowledged it, and they were too scared to address it with him because he was such a suspicious person. It was almost too scary to confront him about all the things he was doing.”

He did take his interns on one trip, however. He took them shopping to help buy a present for Parker, which is not her real name. Parker was a married Senlis executive who Eddie claimed was his girlfriend, and unlike so many stories Eddie inclined to exaggerate, this time there were receipts, the couple posed for cameras at a society event in New York City that spring, Eddie under the guise of an absurd alias. It was this same woman that Eddie claimed later encouraged him to share his story with me and promote his role in CryptoZoo in the press.

By the end of 2019, Zenabi had begun work on the Forbes travel app. However, with the onset of COVID-19, and Eddie’s failure to pay his developers for their work, the product withered.

That December, one year after hiring Grace as his executive assistant, Eddie was introduced to a pouty blonde Amazon model-influencer, Kelsey Elliott. She was flying to Tulum with friends, including Leah Lawson, when she was introduced to Eddie at 30,000 feet. It was a tale as old as time. “The people on the trip were trying to use him for money and he was trying to use them to hang out with girls.”

On February 7th, 2020, Eddie offered Kelsey a job offer she couldn’t refuse as COVID-19 shut down the region. He teased the title assistant vice president of operations and administration, but in the end, she worked as his live-in executive assistant and nanny, devoted to the futile task of keeping him sober and presentable for visitations with his children. She regretted her decision the instant she moved into the same dilapidated rented house where Eddie allegedly sexually assaulted Grace.

“He didn’t have a door knob, just an open hole,” she recalled. “He had a broken window, the house was full of disgusting stains – I don’t even want to know what it was – and I said you can’t live like this or you’re going to get your children taken away from you.” Every time he traveled to pick up his children, she had to remind him he was required to breathe into a breathalyzer first. 

“One time we had a work lunch and he had two margaritas before he had to get his kids in literally an hour and I said, ‘what are you doing?’ ” 

Kelsey came from a broken home herself and every visitation hurt her heart.

“There were so many times when I knew what they needed and he did not. It broke my heart because I remembered what it was like when my parents were getting divorced, and it got to the point where I was giving all of myself away and was completely drained in every which way. I just saw these children who really wanted to have a dad,” she said.

“His daughter was crying once because her sister was getting attention and he didn't order her food because he said she was being a brat.” Kelsey had to explain to Eddie that his daughter was crying for attention, but he “didn’t have any empathy and was a narcissist and very selfish; he just mirrored what other people needed, whether it was a business or personal relationship, or friendship, and then never actually followed through with any of those actions.”

Eddie cried too. “I saw his hair flipped up a couple of times, and I’m a very direct person so I said, what the fuck is that? What’s going on with your hair?” He explained he wore the hair pieces ever since a military operation went awry – the impact of an improvised explosive device scarred him so badly he couldn’t regrow his hair. “He was very drunk and sobbed to the point where I could barely see a man.” She was sure there was no way any person in such a state could still commit to a lie. But then he showed her a Purple Heart in his possession and passed off the medal as his own.

That wasn’t even her most painful discovery. From the start, he had told her that same tired origin story: orphan, abandoned, raised in a military school, connected to Donald Trump. He bragged to her about his relationship with the President almost as much as he bragged about his work for the U.S. Space Force. “He asked me to go to the White House with him when Trump was in office and said that he sponsored his high school education. There was a picture of him next to Donald Trump when he was a kid, but that didn’t mean anything.”

The day she met Eddie’s mother meant something. Kelsey was shocked when they spoke for the first time. “She even said to me, ‘I’ve been trying to have a relationship with him for years, but he feeds everybody lies.’ ”

In February, Kelsey accompanied Eddie on a business trip to Los Angeles. The city was abuzz with Oscars energy, and she and Eddie were invited to a private dinner with Ryan Kavanaugh, the film producer of box office hits like The Social Network and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and financier behind Triller Fight Club, a social media and boxing promotions company. In 2019, Kavanaugh’s Proxima Media raised $100 million to launch its own crypto project, ProxiCoin, which would allow investors to finance and profit from film productions through a crypto stock exchange in Asia. Before its collapse, Eddie served as ProxiCoin’s advisor for technology and Artificial Intelligence.

“They had closed down a restaurant at the Bel Air hotel for this dinner, but Eddie was only talking to Ryan about [Parker] and at one point Ryan looked at me, and I wondered, why is Eddie doing this all for someone who’s married? You have to focus on your business. But he spent half the dinner talking about how much he loves this woman.”

After dinner, he was back to business as usual. She recalled how he’d leave every meeting saying, “I’m going to fuck this guy over, he has no idea.” She couldn’t understand why. “Who does that?”

She also recalled the time the same Zenabi employee who harassed Grace tried “to come onto me and buy me flowers. It was getting weird and it got to the point where I had to lock my door. I slept in the guest room downstairs and there was a sliding glass door and a door out to the hallway, and I had to lock them because he would try to get into my room at 2 a.m. I told Eddie ‘you need to get control of your friend because it’s so creepy.’ ” 

Soon after, Eddie was being sued by his landlord for property damage and back rent. The two of them hustled to a $5,000,000 luxury residence at 20 Greene Street in SoHo, where the Winklevoss Twins were his upstairs neighbors. It would become the future headquarters of CryptoZoo. 

“I’ll never forget this. His air conditioning broke in the middle of July and it was a million degrees,” Kelsey recalled. She had been making constant repairs around a house with a broken washer and shattered windows, but this fix was beyond her. “It was a complete shit show, and he told me he was going to help me with the move but I literally packed the entire U-Haul myself dripping in sweat. At the last moment, he said, ‘oh, do you need help?’ And I just looked at him like he should never speak to me again.”

By then, Eddie had also been evicted from Zenabi’s offices so they also had to move the remaining office furniture packed in his garage. When they arrived in New York later that afternoon, Kelsey threw her keys to the new apartment in the dumpster outside.

She blocked his number and hoped to never hear from Eddie and his friends again. But come August, he texted her one more time, in the middle of the night, from a number she didn’t recognize. The phone belonged to Ophir.

Zenabi’s eviction followed a string of alleged frauds against the company’s most prominent clients.

Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross’s Relevant Sports Group had hired Zenabi to improve ticket sales to its International Champions Cup soccer tournament. What followed would cost Zenabi what former employees believe was the company’s most lucrative account.

On April 30, 2019, Eddie sought to misappropriate data from another major Zenabi client, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and used that proprietary information in an attempt to improve the tournament’s ticket sales by spamming the Church’s email list without the Church’s permission or Relevent’s knowledge. As word of Eddie’s intention spread around the office, he closed ranks. The next morning, Eddie directed a new employee to access the data despite his direct superior’s warning, then instructed him to create a false paper trail that would show the new hire acted on his own instincts. Concerned he was being implicated in criminal activity and being used as a scapegoat, the new employee recorded his conversations with Eddie. In the fallout, the relationship between Zenabi and the Church soured, and employees recall the company lost a multiyear contract worth millions of dollars.

Less than a year later, in March 2020, Eddie held a meeting with senior Zenabi staff advising them the Church had been reduced to hourly billing. That meeting was the beginning of the end for the company. Employees present learned for the first time that Chris Burch would no longer be contributing to the company’s payroll and expenses. Few Zenabi employees knew that he was an investor at all.

“Chris pulled out due to Coronavirus,” Eddie told the room. The company was winding down even as a new cash infusion was inbound.  Zenabi received over $1.5 million in federal stimulus between April 2020 and April 2021. At the same time, former employees and contractors had filed suit for wrongful termination and back pay, and Ibanez lost a string of civil judgments against him, owing tens of thousands of dollars to American Express, a Connecticut law firm, and the company’s former payroll service.

In every case, Eddie failed to be served and failed to appear. Few people knew he relocated to SoHo, though he didn’t do a good job hiding it. He had an assistant make him company letterhead with the new address which he falsely claimed was a Forbes satellite office. Eddie still believed a new Forbes deal was imminent, and in a recorded March 2020 meeting – by now, few people who knew Eddie well met with him without a tape recorder running – he assured his team that Todd would smooth over any issues with Forbes.

That same month, a Connecticut state marshal evicted Zenabi from its Westport offices. Zenabi stopped paying many of its employees before applying for the PPP loans.

In early 2021, Eddie focused his attention on launching MKTSQ, while at the same time working to realize Logan’s vision for CryptoZoo.

There was only one problem. Eddie needed retailers to sign up for his retail platform. Instead of approaching Saks Fifth Avenue, he approached Nile Niami, an ostentatious Los Angeles real estate developer best known for designing and selling outsized ultra-luxury mansions that appealed to celebrities, including Floyd Mayweather Jr. and the Winklevoss Twins. And he approached the rapper Ja Rule.

That April, Tyler Thurmond left a voicemail with Flipkick of New York, an agency that specializes in minting and auctioning NFTs. The small firm, run by three partners – a WASPy Cornell alum, James Cropcho, Ja Rule, and his old friend Robert Testagrossa – made national headlines, including a story on Good Morning America, after announcing they would auction an NFT of a viral photo of a cheese sandwich that was offered to stranded attendees waiting to return home from the Fyre Festival.

Tyler recorded an irresistible message. He inquired about selling an NFT of “the most expensive private residence in the United States,” he said. 

Ja Rule had hyped the Fyre Festival up until its epic failure, but it didn’t mean he was an easy mark. Unlike his partner, Billy McFarland, Ja Rule didn’t face the consequences of expensive lawsuits or prison time. And this time around he surrounded himself with Flipkick’s savvy braintrust equipped with book and street smarts. 

Tyler intended to sell “The One,” a $500 million 105,000 square foot residence in Bel Air, conceived by Nile Niami, who had seen his business crater as he finished the project. The property was estimated to be the most expensive private home in the United States. It was teetering on the brink of foreclosure.

In 2019, Nile had begun hosting raunchy parties meant to “attract buzz and buyers” to offload several super mansions, according to the Hollywood Reporter. By the end of 2020, he had only racked up one-third of the house party citations in the city of Los Angeles for his effort, and time was running out. Late at night on March 3rd, Eddie shared a video in the CryptoZoo founders' chat. The video featured a sex dungeon at the Nile Niami-developed residence. An accompanying photo showing the same room, featured two women, one wrapped in a white robe, the other seated on a bed.

“This is where I’m breeding animals,” Eddie told the group. That same month, Eddie filmed another video for “The One.”

Eddie shared photos from the sex dungeon at the Nile Niami-developed residence. The responses in blue are from Logan Paul. Paul submitted the group chat as part of a recent court filing.

After an initial exchange with Flipkick, Tyler shared a private YouTube video that showed Nile hosting Eddie on a property tour that March. The video description read, “Nile Niami having a discussion with technology pioneer Eddie Ibanez about NFTs and saving his ass.” In real-time, Eddie gave Nile a crash course in the NFT business, which Eddie explains can be sold “on the market square.” It’s immediately clear Nile is in over his head when he introduces the video, “So NFT, get ready, because one person in this world is going to be able to buy the digital rights.”

Nile recalls filming the video with Eddie; Eddie had been living with Nile at his West Hollywood residence, but their relationship eventually soured. “All I knew is what he told me; he filmed at the house, made promises and disappeared,” Nile told me last week, breaking his silence after four years away from the Los Angeles scene.

“I met Eddie and these guys who were supposed to put on boxing events at the house,” Nile said. “And keep in mind every single person around me was a scammer, and I had no idea, because I was so engulfed in trying to save the house, and anything that would save the house was the only thing I cared about.” Nile is still shaken by the public embarrassment of the bankruptcy. “I had the idea to get some cash flow by selling the art I created, and the giraffe was my artwork. I didn't know anything about NFTs. Eddie said he put the giraffe up for sale, but it didn’t sell and then he started talking about the house, so we did this video, but we had no deal in place.”

If anything, Eddie’s night in the Red Room made Nile question Eddie’s legitimacy as a potential partner.

“I remember that night, and I remember Logan was there. Afterward, I thought, I want to be partnered with this guy? Because Eddie was drunk off his ass falling to the floor and I was embarrassed. Nothing came of anything but a waste of my time and money,” Nile said.

When I confronted Eddie about the failed deal with Nile at Soho House, he was sounding his most delusional, claiming the NFT sale could still be salvaged despite The One having already fallen into receivership. But what was he thinking in the first place? He claimed the house had been under consideration to host the Paul-Mayweather fight, and had someone purchased the digital rights to the location, they could have profit-shared in the fight, but instead of seating ticket holders on the lawn, Logan went with Hard Rock Stadium, capacity 65,326, instead.

Throughout April, Flipkick and MKTSQ negotiated a tentative agreement to mint and auction a test case NFT, not of the whole property but a single artwork conceived by Nile. But Flipkick expressed their concerns. On April 26th, Eddie returned a signed contract, on behalf of Zenatrip, a Zenabi subsidiary that controlled both Hotelafly and MKTSQ. However, by May 12th, Eddie had still failed to pay a $5,000 due diligence fee, and Flipkick questioned why Nile remained noticeably absent from all of their communications. The biggest red flag: When James inquired how to credit the artist who created the original giraffe, Eddie sought the credit for himself.

That was his last correspondence with Flipkick. As the tentative auction date approached, Eddie’s divorce was finalized and he quickly moved on. It was one of the smartest decisions he’s ever made.

Unlike billionaire investors who could buy their way out of trouble, Ja Rule and his partners had known hard times and had no desire to face negative consequences for their actions ever again. They were only interested in creating NFTs rooted, not in hype or opaque digital currencies like Zoo Coin, but in physical assets like artwork that retained real-world value. 

Truthfully, I couldn’t believe Ja Rule could sniff out Eddie as a hustler when Chris, Todd, and Barry could not, and I took him out to dinner in New York to inquire how he did it. I appreciated Ja Rule’s candor and cooperation so much that I didn’t mind that he arrived at dinner three hours late. Ja knew when someone was too good to be true. He shared how he and Robert had been trying to work together on the right app project for nearly a decade before partnering on Flipkick.

Discussing CryptoZoo with Ja Rule at Torrisi in New York City. Credit: Adam Robb.

Ja and James were very candid with me. They shared every communication they had with Eddie and Tyler, so I never thought too much about Robert’s role in the project until right before our dinner. I was still sore for misreading Eddie early on, so I did my due diligence this time around. There was only one problem, Robert had the worst SEO.

Robert had the same name as the son of a tarnished Queens assistant district attorney who was arrested for impersonating a police officer and kidnapping his girlfriend's lover before torturing and branding him with an initial. The crime was so uniquely violent, an episode of Law & Order SVU found inspiration in it. Sucks to share a name with that guy, I thought, as I dug deeper. And then it clicked, the Law & Order dun-dun rang out in my head. He was that guy. They bonded behind bars.

“It’s not hard to figure out who's smart, and in protective custody, you get a play-by-play of who this guy and that guy is, and [Robert] was smart,” Ja Rule told me. “He would sit in the day room reading the dictionary, we’d watch Jeopardy and he’d know all the answers.”

I couldn't believe it. Eddie tried to defraud Ja Rule, and the rehabilitated violent offender he befriended in protective custody, out of $500 million in an NFT scam that could send both men back to prison. Eddie must have done as little due diligence on them as he had on me.

Despite no businesses or celebrities being on board with MKSTQ, and a functional shoppable app that still doesn’t exist to this day, Eddie continued to hype its success at every opportunity. He paid a Forbes contributor to embed MKTSQ links in her story. When Eddie told me this, the story had less than 1,000 views, but he claimed the story “grossed like $200,000 in revenue.” A few minutes later he repeated himself, but this time rounded up to $270,000 because when you’re lying you can do that.

Once again, Eddie had convinced a team of employees they were working for Forbes. After settling up the phony Forbes satellite office, he asked the Forbes contributor to assemble an MKTSQ company newsletter that said her Forbes story was “the first of hopefully many travel guides'' which “will continue to be published on Forbes.” Of course Eddie never published another article with Forbes, and he was forced to vacate the apartment that fall.

But not before listing the address as the legal home of CryptoZoo.

With his divorce finalized that week, he and Tyler flew down to Miami, partied with Andrew, and the rest was history. Eddie and his new hires hastily built out the MKTSQ website by scraping content from the websites of major retailers including Saks. In a rush to build out a social media presence with a strong following, they changed the name of the Hotelafly Instagram account to MKTSQ but never deleted old posts. On Pinterest, a defunct Senlis account still featured peasant dresses, but their descriptions had been replaced with MKTSQ marketing copy. Eddie even uploaded mock-ups of Flipkick’s aborted Nile Niami NFTs to the new platform and teased a limited drop with Rodney Mullen.

In 2016, Rodney Mullen released a high-art skate video on YouTube in collaboration with the photographer Steven Sebring, with an accompanying interview published in Vogue. Eddie uploaded the skate video to the MKTSQ app, altered Rodney’s quotes to Vogue to suggest the old interview was teasing new merchandise in collaboration with MKTSQ, and forged Rodney’s name to the text. When you're a poseur, nothing is sacred.

The day Logan introduced CryptoZoo on his podcast, two celebrity athletes hyped the project to their fan bases, driving investment. New England Patriots Defensive End Chase Winovich, and Danny Way, another legendary skateboarder on par with Rodney, best known for stunts like jumping the Great Wall of China on his board. As CryptoZoo collapsed, Eddie and Danny continued to spend more and more time together before going into business together. Ten days after Logan’s announcement, CryptoZoo had blown its September 1 launch date. Distracted developers toiled away day and night inside the SoHo apartment. Of course, the project’s collapse was foreseeable to anyone who was hanging around.

I was sure I spent more time on Greene Street than Logan ever did. After learning the address was blocks from my apartment, I changed up my routine, taking my morning coffee on the stoop outside. I had to laugh, whether or not Andrew and Kimberley and Sophia knew it, the block was lined with their PR agency’s clients. Years ago, they had arranged for me to travel the country with the furniture designer Tom Dixon for Architectural Digest. His storefront faced Eddie’s front door.

Over time, I clocked the moving trucks and the coming and going of partygoers who I recognized from the team’s Instagram stories. Upstairs, white columns turned into white boards marked up with the algorithms of developers. In the center of the room, a beaten brown leather sectional was a holdover from Zenabi’s offices where employees often spent hours playing Halo in the middle of the day. A local art collective was given carte blanche to produce a mural the length of the living room, resulting in a nightmare-inducing cartoon of a sickly-eyed green dinosaur licking the head of the toupeed man hugging it. It was a sharp contrast to an original 1982 Keith Haring wood panel painting Eddie borrowed but never purchased from local art dealer Irving Ortega, who took matters into his own hands to ensure the safe return of the work for his clients. “My clients are not people you can hide from,” Irving told me. The more Eddie posted through it, the larger the window I had into the scene upstairs.

Even if CryptoZoo had launched on time, some of its biggest investors were already locked out from the platform. The group chat for the launch party had ended months ago, but the founders’ chat was overcrowded and heated.

Just after midnight on September 1, Jake “CryptoKing” Greenbaum texted Eddie and Logan. He accused Logan of stealing $40 million in Zoo Coin from him and depleting 248 accounts, including those of fellow MKTSQ and CryptoZoo employees.

“You are a scam artist, you are a liar, and you betrayed your own community,” CryptoKing wrote, warning that word of the theft would haunt them all.

“I am that guy,” Logan responded, while Eddie warned that his accusation was “immature and deserves no respect.”

“How is it that a founder was rugged on his own project?” CryptoKing asked. The term “rug pull” refers to a crypto founder who promotes a new project, then steals from his investors once it’s funded. “Even if the eggs sell out, social media is going to eat alive this story of fucking the whole community with a chain of evidence that is insane.”

Logan suspected Cryptoking secretly possessed the Zoo Coin held in the frozen wallets and that he manipulated the value of Zoo Coin for his own benefit, an accusation Logan has now repeated in an ongoing civil lawsuit he filed against Cryptoking in January 2024. Logan has also since filed suit against Eddie, but on the eve of the CryptoZoo launch, Eddie stood by Logan who still hadn’t suspected him of any wrongdoing. Fast forward to 2024, both Eddie and CryptoKing chose not to defend themselves in separate civil suits filed by Logan in the aftermath of the launch. In both cases, the court entered default judgments against them.

When CryptoZoo needed a public relations professional the most, Eddie had no Andrew or Kimberley or Sophia available to handle damage control. But he seemed to be doing okay. Eight hours later, Eddie posted a screenshot of his crypto wallet. CryptoZoo had reached a market cap of $2 billion; Eddie’s assets on display showed a value of $1,592,043. He was far from a billionaire who could buy his way out of trouble, but he was a millionaire with means.

In the weeks that followed, Logan Paul gave an hour-long sit-down interview to a marketing executive named Josh Youshaei. Even as the accusations of a rug pull spread across social media, Logan continued to promote CryptoZoo, unchallenged in the interview. Neither he nor Josh raised any of the issues surrounding the launch. It was no small irony that the interview was published in the Forbes Contributor Network.

Eddie vacated the SoHo apartment, but he didn’t flee the city.

After visiting Logan Paul in Puerto Rico a few days after the launch, he returned to Manhattan for more insane partying. He snapped a selfie with Chris Burch and the president of FC Bayern at a New York Fashion Week party, sat courtside at the U.S. Open, dined at 4 Charles Prime Rib, partied in the DJ booth at Marquee, and satisfied his 90s inner child, rocking out to Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins in Asbury Park. Finally, he left SoHo behind and hit the road, returning to the Casa Del Mar in Santa Monica, where it all began, before tearing it up the West Coast with Danny Way. By Halloween, he returned to Connecticut looking like a new man and reconnecting with his children through the fall and winter. 

Logan withheld Eddie’s name on his ImPaulsive podcast and ended up owning the project’s public failure by himself. I had wished it never got to that point. By the time I put the pieces together in the weeks before the launch, I had pitched one publication after another to take up the CryptoZoo story, not the one Eddie’s publicists wanted me to tell, but the one they gave me, how an unchecked fraud was going to blow up Logan’s project before it ever launched. But by the summer of 2021, so many crypto and NFT projects were in the news for defrauding investors, and Eddie wasn’t a known entity, despite a decade spent quietly disappointing the rich and powerful.

That changed in February 2022. I found an unlikely editor who would listen, a former beer writer I knew from back when I covered the Philadelphia food scene for Thrillist. She now ran a local news site, BillyPenn, and was drawn in by the hook of Eddie betraying his hometown heroes. I had to keep the story small, the angle local, and it never made waves. It didn’t even disrupt Eddie’s Super Bowl Weekend.

Nearly a year after the CryptoZoo launch, in August 2022, Eddie was rested and ready to move on to his next project. He traveled abroad after the Super Bowl, to Paris for dinner at Le Train Bleu, a beach in Ibiza. He partied with models in London, then joined Danny Way, racing the Pembrey Circuit in Wales and watching Arsenal play at Emirates Stadium. He also began to fall into old patterns. A Sponge concert, a wander around The One Bel Air, a trip with his children to a spy museum. 

Come March, he resurfaced in a Beverly Hills boardroom, joined by the two people who still believed in him enough to take the meeting: Tyler Thurmond, and John McGrath, a CryptoZoo developer who moonlights in local rock bands back home in southern Connecticut.

James Altucher once asked Eddie about the strangest pattern he’d ever seen.

“I always try to break patterns. I go to this place every Tuesday and I need to stop, I need to go somewhere else. But you know what I found out? I found out I’m changing that pattern every third Thursday. Oh, no. It’s another pattern. I’m a patterned individual,” Eddie concluded.

He was telling the truth. Now that Eddie had run out of new worlds to explore, he returned to his old stomping grounds. In August 2022, he once again posted through it. He dropped into Todd Morley’s $10 million 10-bedroom Southampton estate. Eddie was back in the fold and he wasn’t shy about letting everyone know. He filmed his day on the grounds, showing off a leggy blonde sitting curled on a plush rug jamming on her guitar while a Yankees game played on the TV. Later, the two of them racked up a game with Todd in the billiard room. Two months later, he was back in business. 

Todd’s vision for an NFT museum high above Manhattan never materialized. The building was completed that April, nearly a year after he appeared on Bloomberg, but the day after the story broke, the project went nowhere. Just like Eddie, back where he started. And if there is any doubt he learned nothing, once again he was showing a losing hand just as his new game got underway, carelessly signaling his partners and position not caring who was watching so long as he was feeling seen.

That August,  Eddie and his new partner, Y2X co-founder and president David Shuler, began courting a $5 million investment in a new travel app not dissimilar to Hotelafly or MKTSQ or the Forbes Concierge app, which David described in emails to potential investors as “Priceline meets StubHub” and similar to “Zenabi Travel - which was a potential deal with Forbes.”

Two press releases, one in August, another in October formally announced the new company, called Life Rewards; a hasty pitch deck reveals Life Rewards is nothing more than a licensed white label of Priceline’s sister company Booking.com, just like Hotelafly before it. And the new company was registered to the same Westport, Connecticut address as High Poon, MKTSQ, and Zenabi’s PPP loans; a licensing agreement showed Eddie’s intention to license Zenabi’s proprietary services to himself at Life Rewards.

David was the face of Life Rewards in the wake of the CryptoZoo scandal, and unlike Eddie he had a legitimate record of government service. On LinkedIn, he claims to have served 14 years working overseas as a foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department before going to work for Goldman Sachs. Internal documents show team members included Jason Fernandez as a Director Designate and John McGrath as Director of Data Science; the two recently jammed together on stage at a local bar.

Life Rewards sold hotel rooms while selling itself as a pastiche of every tech trend out there today. A pitch deck for the company, branded with the Y2X logo, claims customers can pay for hotel reservations with crypto and trade their bookings like NFTs. One press release claims the booking engine is powered by artificial intelligence, and the coders work remotely from war-torn Ukraine. I had to laugh. I’ve spent the past two years reporting on the war, on the ground in Ukraine, for New York, Thrillist, and Conde Nast Traveler, but no matter how dedicated I am to holding Eddie accountable, I couldn’t bring myself to search Odesa for coders I feared did not exist.

Eddie and his most loyal friends and colleagues were out of original ideas, but they couldn’t quit each other. 

One of Life Rewards’ first Instagram posts promised a $1,000 giveaway if the Eagles made the Super Bowl that year. Eddie had long since abandoned his respect for God and country, but he couldn’t give up the gridiron.

Unlike the amateur CryptoZoo launch at the 1 Hotel 18 months earlier, there was nothing subtle about the rollout of Life Rewards. On November 30th, 2022, the eve of Art Basel Miami Beach, the company unveiled itself as the title sponsor of an NFT party at Hyde Beach at the SLS Hotel. Hundreds of beautiful people flocked after dark to the popular day club to engage a carnival of dancers undulating on light-up platforms dressed in gold lions’ heads and mirrored jock straps, while street artists spray-paint nudes on canvases and sneakerheads gawk at the latest collaboration between Skechers and Bored Ape Yacht Club. Life Rewards’ branding glowed overhead in blue neon. Guests who scanned the website’s QR code on video screens were greeted by models dressed as uniformed flight attendants.

I wasn’t surprised to see photos of Eddie striking poses for a party photographer. He stood dressed in all black, a sharp contrast to the woman in white flashing smiles beside him throughout the night. His traumatized former babysitter Kelsey Elliott was there to keep him on his toes; he stood on the balls of his feet to meet her gaze for the camera.

The media rollout continued throughout the winter and spring. That March, Eddie was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article on the future of booking travel with the help of artificial intelligence. More local to southern Connecticut, Bedford & New Canaan Magazine published a glossy five-page spread on Life Rewards, featuring a staged photo shoot with its co-founders, describing them as “straight out of central casting” for Entourage. Eddie and David Shuler posed for glamour shots alongside  Life Rewards’ brand ambassador Danny Way, and John McGrath.

Damon Way, Danny’s older brother, and the co-founder of the groundbreaking 90s skateboard apparel company DC Shoes, wasn’t surprised to learn of Danny’s continued allegiance to Eddie. “I did a little research and came across what you wrote and was pretty shocked,” Damon told me. “I then warned my brother about what I learned, and he said it was all a fabrication, and continued to stay involved with Eddie.”

Damon was even more shocked to find his name in an April 2022 draft capitalization table of Life Rewards’ ownership structure that suggested he would receive shares in the company. “This is the first time I have ever seen my name in a cap table for a company I don’t know anything about. Very ironic given my overly cautious view of the guy,” Damon said.

On June 8, 2023, Eddie hosted a second Life Rewards’ launch party, a smaller affair close to home. He brought the energy of Hyde Beach to Hinoki.

Per the invitation, the company had now rebranded as a “concierge luxury travel experience.” VIP wristbands offered guests access to a six-hour open bar at a serviceable sushi restaurant in Greenwich, Connecticut. Flatscreen televisions and branded cocktail napkins shared a QR code linking to the site. Regulars occupied the main dining room while corner nooks featured burlesque acts. Three DJs kept the energy up while pole dancers and contortionists dripping in rhinestones and pearls spun upside down in steel rings pouring Whispering Angel for confused suburban moms eating spicy tuna rolls.

He even brought his children to show off his latest accomplishment.

Jackie spent her post-divorce years becoming a psychotherapist while continuing to work the late shift at Fox News. She has a new partner and she takes pride in showing him off as the man of the house, posting photos of the kids gathered around him. On more than one Christmas, she’s captured him shirtless, seated at the head of the kitchen table showing off the physique and all-American good looks Eddie’s spent years trying to artificially construct. The kids still dress in Eagles jerseys.

Eddie tried to compete. He launched a new girl-powered skateboard and chewing gum company, “run by two sisters under the age of 12” according to its website. With Slay, Eddie used photos of his daughters to push merchandise which he packaged with Life Rewards NFTs. He hijacked his latest launch party to push the side hustle, a misguided effort to connect with his daughters. I doubt they cared about any of that, only wanting to spend quality time with her father, but this was what he knew.

I followed along with the videos from the party. A source had tipped me off weeks in advance, but I knew better than to ask Stephanie if she wanted to go for a drive to Connecticut after work that night. I pitied Eddie as I spied the scene from my phone.

That evening, I was reminded of the Sunday night I spent in bed in Miami Beach, streaming the Paul-Mayweather fight on my laptop, wishing I was there. If Eddie had kept his word that night, I’m sure I would have woken up the next morning half-remembering a blurry good time. I would have flown home and felt guilty about the effort Eddie made to fly me down, how he negotiated face time for me with Logan when he should have been resting on the eve of his fight. I would have made myself crazy trying to place some positive mention somewhere worthwhile, to make good on my word. Instead, I still feel guilty that I failed to stop CryptoZoo in its tracks that summer, that I ever believed Eddie was anything he claimed. The stain of that egg on my face, not physical, not digital, but ever present, will stay on me for a long time.

I don’t know if it was too little too late, but I did accomplish one thing. Ahead of the Life Rewards party, I tipped off the lawyers representing the CryptoZoo victims who are now suing to recover their savings. I don’t know what it will take to make them whole, but that night I got a little closer.

Less than a year later, Life Rewards rebranded as JetSetLife. David Shuler was now the face of this new company, with Eddie behind the scenes. One Life Rewards insider, who had been looped into the project from the start as a potential investor, explained that Eddie’s name had become toxic between my original investigation and Logan’s lawsuit.

A February 2024 press release announced the JetSetLife partnership with Jet Set Sports, a legitimate longtime luxury concierge travel service known for booking packages to global sporting events, but six months later, the Life Rewards team had moved on.

By June 2024, two months after Eddie defaulted on Logan’s lawsuit, John McGrath and David Shuler formed a new entity, Threeo.ai, an AI-based data company with the same mission statement as Zenabi and then some.

Zenabi once helped “companies find signals”; Threeo “finds signals.” Threeo also boasts the same clientele as Zenabi. According to its website, which extensively quotes from Eddie’s personal website, the year-old company’s past clients already include Priceline and LoveSac. However, LoveSac founder Shawn Nelson denies his company ever did business with Threeo, and so has a third listed client,  Capital One, which said they would request Threeo remove their logo from its website; it was Zenabi and the Philadelphia Eagles all over again.

The new company, headquartered in a Norwalk, Connecticut apartment complex, includes Jason as CEO, David as Managing Partner, John McGrath as Chief Technology Officer, and fellow CryptoZoo developer and former Zenabi senior engineer Vallard Benincosa as Chief Innovation Officer. Eddie’s most visible presence is an expired job listing he posted on Threeo’s Linkedin page. He was hiring for a data scientist, the title he’s claimed for the past decade.

Sure there’s appeal in taking on an executive role at a start-up, but some of these guys also maintain respectable day jobs. Jason remains a senior product manager for a major electronics company. David is the president and co-founder of Varro, formerly known as Y2X Life Sciences.

Last October, his company received $20 million in new funding from the creator of Ethereum. One might wonder if there isn’t more to lose than gain by sticking with Eddie.

I emailed David, Jason, Vallard, John, and Eddie prior to publication to ask how it was possible Threeo acquired and lost so many former Zenabi clients so fast. No one answered, but within hours, all employee photos, names, and titles were removed from the Threeo website. So if you’re looking to get in touch to contract their services, good luck. The only option is to click the Book Demo button which opens a dead link to call “Eduardo.”

I doubt Eddie was unnerved by my inquiry. If there’s any question how Eddie finds the resolve to keep going, he answered it three years ago, on September 3, 2022. CryptoZoo went live that morning. Eddie was a millionaire. And that evening, he took a victory lap, giving an interview to The Edge of NFT podcast from his Mercer Street loft. He went a half hour without telegraphing any of the turmoil behind the scenes, and the hosts wound down with a softball. “If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would that be?” 

Eddie chose that moment for introspection — not a confession, not why he does what he does, but how he does it.

“I live in one little space in the mind; and it’s between pain and sadness. I live right in between. And what’s cool about that, in between that, there’s power, bro. If you can turn your tears into energy, you can go three nights straight.

Adam Robb is an investigative reporter living in New York. His work has been published by The Intercept, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and Hell Gate. He enjoys free meals and hunting bad men.