A Federal Lien, Seized Bank Accounts, and No Charges

Alex: So let’s start at the beginning. When did you know that you had become a target in a federal investigation?

Ryan: We were talking about this on the way over, obviously, listening to all these podcasts. It wasn’t a single moment. We had been in a lawsuit with a billionaire in Detroit.

Alex: And you were the defendant, I assume. They were coming after you or you were suing them?

Ryan: We were the plaintiff.

Alex: Okay, so you had sued him.

Ryan: Oh, I sued him. And he didn’t like that.

Alex: People don’t like being sued.

Ryan: And I hired a firm in Detroit, the only firm in his 70-odd years where he’d been beaten before. He did not like that. And COVID happened, and we ended up getting what’s called Restaurant Revitalization Fund monies. We were like the third largest in Michigan. And a FOIA was filed, and the list of recipients was released to the public. So Stan saw our business on there receiving COVID funds. And it was January of 2022, he called me, and we had a long, hour-long conversation that started with him wanting to settle, and would I take a million dollars? And an hour later it was, “You pay me a million dollars, and my wife and I will stop talking to the government and doing what we do.”

Alex: So a threat.

Ryan: That’s what I took it as. He’s got money. But this is America.

Alex: So at this point you’re just having a civil dispute with the person. And for context, this is someone who you had been into the transaction to buy the restaurant from.

Ryan: We did. Everything got screwed up.

Alex: But a standard dispute that people have about buying and selling businesses, right?

Ryan: Absolutely.

Amy: Which happens every day.

Ryan: Yes, every day. And so I think I told her, and we kinda just, whatever. Stan’s being Stan, and now this is the threat. I didn’t take it seriously. Fast-forward to November of that year, obviously a six-year, five-year lawsuit is draining us. And so we have to now sell the farm that we bought, which was part of this business empire we were building. It was an apple cider donut-type farm, family thing. And so we had to sell it. But before we sold it, the best way to get our money back was going to be to auction off all of the equipment and then sell the land to a developer. Even though this farm’s been there for 146 years, not my problem anymore. And it was a week before we had the auctioneers out. Everybody was tagging things. And I got an email from our then accountant, Jeff Budai, who emailed me and said, “Hey Ryan, seriously strange. What’s going on? I got this today.” And attached was a federal grand jury subpoena.

Alex: Oh, that’s never good. And you’re like, “I have no idea.”

Ryan: I was like, “I don’t know, Jeff. I’ll ask Chris about it.” Chris Cataldo, our attorney who’s at Taft. And I forward it to Chris. He’s like, “What the hell is this?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” I told her. We’re all wondering what it is. He called up the AUSA, tried to get a meeting. Guy kept ghosting him, kept ghosting him. But then we end up selling the farm on December 22nd, right before Christmas.

Amy: So nothing happens this whole time.

Ryan: Nothing happens. I would tell you an aside, but I’ll tell you after. Remind me to come back to this. I call up my uncle, Mike Stevens. He was inspector general of HUD for a while. He was a Secret Service agent for Carter. He was the lead guy, all this stuff.

Alex: So he knows the feds.

Ryan: He knows the feds inside and out. His brother started the terrorism task force. All this stuff. And I’m like, “Uncle Mike, tell me what’s going on.” He’s like, “Oh, well, they’re probably just searching for something. Did you get a target letter?” I said, “No.” What’s that? I said, “What’s a target letter?” He’s like, “Oh, don’t worry about it. If you haven’t gotten a target letter, it likely is nothing, and somebody around you has done something.”

Alex: They’re not after you because if they were after you, they’d tell you, is the idea.

Ryan: That was the operating procedure.

Amy: At any point during this period of time, did you think, is Stan up to something?

Ryan: Not really.

Alex: Did you think, we should be worried?

Ryan: No. When the sale went through, ’cause I used to be a financial advisor for about 10 years. I have an MBA. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

Alex: The apple cider truck, perhaps.

Ryan: Apple cider truck, maybe. But we structured our business in every legal conceivable way you could to do everything we wanted to do.

Amy: Surrounded by lawyers. This is what I’m hearing, too. You have all the lawyers and the CPAs, all the professionals.

Ryan: After we did it. ’Cause I thought I know what I’m doing. And so we structured all this stuff. So fast-forward, December 22nd rolls around. We have money from the sale of the farm. December 26th, we bought a house in Asheville.

Amanda: ’Cause we wanted to move closer to my family down in Asheville, and so we bought a house down there.

Ryan: ’Cause we didn’t know anything was going on. We’re just gonna live our lives and move. So we bought a house to remodel.

Amanda: And then we go to sell our house in Michigan. We list it. We get an offer the day that it goes on the market. We start going through escrow, and all of a sudden the escrow company calls us and says, “There is a lien on your house from the federal government.”

Alex: The real estate agent is like, “What?”

Amanda: And also the escrow lady was like, “They definitely know about this because the government tells people.” I’m like, “No, no, no. They didn’t tell us.” So that’s when we really found out that something.

Alex: It was the first notice you get that the government sort of seized your property essentially in the middle of a sale.

Ryan: And to be fair, ’cause people don’t understand civil forfeiture. People don’t understand any of the tricks that AUSAs have. So this is now 2023, February, like 22nd, 21st. This son of a bitch, he didn’t actually seize our property.

Alex: Put a lis pendens.

Ryan: He didn’t put a lis pendens on it. In Michigan, you can put an affidavit of lien, which is not a lien, which never has to be explored or entertained by a judge to hear any motion to remove it. If you’re using the MCR dot whatever the F it is, it never has to be explained to anybody.

Alex: And the federal government put that on the property.

Ryan: So we couldn’t fight it. We couldn’t say, “Tell us why,” because it’s nothing real. I could put an affidavit of lien on your house right now. Doesn’t mean shit.

Amanda: But it does cloud the title.

Ryan: Clouds the title.

Amanda: So you can’t sell your house. And so your buyer is like, “We wanna buy that house now.” Well, we were told we could go through with the sale, but then the U.S. Marshals would show up at closing and take the proceeds.

Ryan: We’re backing out. Nobody’s put any money down. There’s been no earnest money. There’s been nothing. So you know what? We’re taking it off the market.

Alex: But to be clear, what that means is you were about to sell a house. You didn’t know you’re under investigation, and the federal government just says, “No, you can’t.”

Ryan: No, no. They gave us an email that said, “The Moores may sell their house, but we’re gonna hold the money. The U.S. Marshals will show up, and they will take the proceeds.”

Alex: And at that point did they start telling you why?

Amanda: We had to retain federal criminal attorneys before they would tell us anything that was going on with the case. Our civil attorney tried to meet with them, and the government said, “We won’t talk to you.”

Alex: So talk about that process. Most people in your situation, no run-ins with the law, you have no idea how to find a federal criminal defense attorney like we are. So how did you go about doing that? Is it just first name in the phone book, first name a friend gave you? What happened?

Ryan: So this is 2023.

Amanda: And we did have quite a relationship with a civil attorney from the business transactions we had been through.

Ryan: And all the money we’ve paid him.

Amanda: So we went to him. We were like, “Who should we hire as a criminal attorney?” And they didn’t have anyone at their firm. He had just retired, and so they gave us the name of the two most well-known defense attorneys in Detroit that you want representing you. They’ve represented celebrities and all this.

Ryan: You can’t get better than Brian and Wally.

Amy: Like Eminem. And we’re talking about Detroit royalty here, right?

Amanda: So we met them, and that’s who we hired ’cause we wanted to find answers.

Ryan: It’s a strange process.

Amy: Isn’t it? I find it to be really interesting, and Alex and I have talked about this, because it’s so strange. If you were to be diagnosed with a serious illness, you would probably talk to a couple of different lawyers. But in this scenario, for some reason, it happened to my family, I think it happens to every family, you just ask somebody you know, hire very quickly whoever’s recommended to you, and move. Because it’s terrifying. You want answers quickly, and you can’t get them unless you hire someone. And you feel like if you wait one more day, then the FBI’s gonna show up at your house. Also, you have no context for knowing, is this person markedly different than this person. You just have no idea.

Ryan: There’s not a Yelp.

Amy: And if there were, would you trust it?

Ryan: Well, super lawyers.

Alex: Which is about as reliable as Yelp.

Ryan: So by this time, Jaffe, which was the firm in Detroit for 100 years, represented the Purple Gang. They represented outlaws when they started. Everybody knew Jaffe. You want Jaffe. So that’s who we went with with the civil stuff, and then they merged with Taft, so now they’re part of 1,500 lawyers, and every goddamn lawyer on the firm’s webpage is a super lawyer or top 500. They’re advertised 1,500 lawyers strong, but you go to everybody’s individual page, they’re all on super.

Alex: If you have 1,500 Supermen, you have no Supermen.

Ryan: Here’s how we decided on Chris. For the last five years, Chris has won the biggest civil lawsuits for 5, 15, $20 million, and it makes the paper. And when we were referred to him, I’m like, “Well, I don’t see anybody else talking about $15, $20 million wins.” So then if the guy who works with Chris says Brian and Wally, and the only thing you can find is these celebrity notices, there’s not people like us. Well, I hope someday we can make the paper and refute the horrible article written about me that was four pages long.

Amanda: But to get back to the attorneys, we should have done more due diligence, because we should have trusted our gut when we met them.

Ryan: Tell ’em about the first call.

Amanda: So we hire these two attorneys. They go in and meet with the government, and we’re on the edge of our seats waiting for a phone call.

Ryan: Wanting to know what in the world’s going on.

Amanda: And so finally one of them calls us back at the end of the day, and he was like, “Ryan, when I have something to tell you, I will call you. You do not need to call me.” And that should have been a red flag. A major red flag to us that they were not the right attorneys for us.

Alex: It’s not the approach you want.

Ryan: We were both in financial services, customer-centric. You pay me, I give you advice, but you don’t own me. So I don’t think I own somebody else for their professional services, but at 7:50 an hour, if I leave a message for you that I’d like you to call me back to tell me what happened at the 9:30 morning, and you call me back with my wife on the phone and it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and treat us like that, we should have bailed.

Amanda: We should have.

Amy: But it’s hard because you’re in process. And you feel like if you switch, it can disrupt everything.

Amanda: Absolutely.

Ryan: So we rode that horse.

Alex: And so did you learn that day, hey, they’re looking at you for federal crimes? And what was your first reaction to that?

Amanda: That they just don’t understand the situation.

Alex: They can’t possibly believe this.

Amanda: I was like, “We can send them some of our business paperwork.” And Ryan is incredible at documenting everything and keeping track and doing things the right way. I was like, “We just need to send them some of our documents, and this will clear it up. It’s a misunderstanding.”

Alex: It’ll clear it all up. Not a problem. And then how many years ago was that?

Ryan: That was February of 2023.

Alex: So three and a half years ago.

Amy: I both wanna laugh and cry at the same time, because my husband had the same reaction. He’s like, “I can clear this up. I don’t know what is going on over there, but if I just explain the facts to them we’ll be fine.”

Ryan: So to your point, what we’ve found out in this process now over the last seven months is, I’m gonna walk the line here, but someone, I’m not saying it was Stan Dickson, but someone in January of 2021 filed a report with the local FBI office. April 27th of 2021, the FBI opened its official investigation into us. The AUSA asked Chris after our reverse proffer. He’s like, “Well, why do you think this investigation’s happening?” And Chris was like, “We all know why it’s happening. Stan came to you.” He’s like, “Well, I’m not saying you’re wrong or you’re right.” What do you want me to leave with?

Amy: Well, let’s talk about that, the reverse proffer, because you know you’re under investigation. The lawyers talked to the FBI. In that first conversation they just spoke, or that was the reverse proffer?

Amanda: They just spoke.

Ryan: They laid it all out.

Amy: So how did you get to a reverse proffer? And share what that means for those lucky souls that haven’t been through that process.

Amanda: It was two years later that we got to a reverse proffer.

Amy: Two years?

Amanda: And before that, they used the civil forfeiture process to take our bank accounts.

Amy: Okay, so they have the house.

Alex: Got your bank accounts.

Amanda: And they were fishing around, sending out a lot of subpoenas to a lot of different people. And one of our criminal attorneys told us that’s what they do. They try to bankrupt you so that you accept a plea deal.

Ryan: Well, that’s what the AUSA told Wally and Brian. He’s like, “Your clients will be bankrupt in a matter of months, and then you’ll be ready to deal with me then.”

Alex: And I hope that prosecutor at some point comes to Jesus and whatever his religious beliefs may be, because that’s just the sort of shit that is so unethical and so ridiculously abusive.

Amanda: If you really have a good case, why would you need to bankrupt us in the process?

Amy: You need to bring the case.

Ryan: I have threatened every one of my attorneys. I was like, “Listen, motherf-. Pick a date. We’ve never FaceTimed, but if you FaceTime me, my office is in our basement, which is unfinished. It’s a rental home. My background is, I think it’s 32 boxes of Big Red Orchard, Konamisu, all of our business records. Every single goddamn receipt down to buying caramel for the caramel apples.” “And I have threatened every lawyer, pick a date. Tell Partika I’m driving up. I’m gonna be right across at Lafayette Coney Island, and I will walk those boxes up to his office and I will sit there for as long as he wants. I will spend days taking him through every single receipt.” I have 65 gigabytes of 20 years’ worth of emails and attachments.

Alex: I think it’s interesting that we talked in another episode about how important it is to understand what the other side is thinking, what the other side is doing, why they’re doing what they’re doing. Look, I worked at the U.S. Attorney’s office. I have a lot of friends, many of whom work here now at the firm, who are former prosecutors. They’re really good prosecutors. There are also some idiots who are assistant U.S. attorneys and who are in that office who aren’t that bright, who aren’t that nice. And if somebody gets to them and says, “Hey, this guy did a bad thing,” and they just have no ability or curiosity to actually care what the answer is. And I think the public doesn’t realize, if that’s who you’ve got looking at you, that’s about as bad a situation as you can get. ’Cause one, he’s gotta understand what those records say. He’s got to give enough of a damn to look through them and not just take the word of whichever person who he knows and trusts and says, “Hey, this is a bad guy.” And I think once they say Ryan’s a bad guy, then with some prosecutors you don’t get another shot. We don’t talk a lot about it. We don’t like to admit that there is a scale and a spectrum of good and bad prosecutors, but when you get the dumb, mean ones, that’s the worst. I’d much rather have a smart, noble-minded G-man who shows up and cares about his job and wants to do the right thing and’ll work really hard, ’cause if my client’s innocent, well then, he’ll work really hard to figure that out. What you’re describing is unfortunately what people don’t understand also happens, which is the dumb, mean folks.

Amanda: Well, and I think aside from the prosecutor, it was the FBI.

Alex: The FBI. 100%. Same goes for both, whether it’s the prosecutor or the FBI.

Ryan: You guys have talked about this a few times. And I’m reading this book now called Finite and Infinite Games, which is this philosophical book from 30 years ago written by a priest, and I’m blown away, ’cause I’m like, “This is my life.” The system is the problem. And it’s systemic. It’s been manipulated over time to encourage idiots and bad play.

Alex: The incentives are that way, for sure.

Ryan: Whether it’s cases cleared, assets seized. It doesn’t matter. And Saul on the road to Damascus, you saw the light. Great. The firm we hired with Jihan Williams, Flannery Georgalis, it’s made up entirely in 13 locations across the country of former AUSAs who have seen the light. I was attracted to Jihan. ’Cause I’ll take a convert, I don’t care. But I’m also of the mind that you can say ACAB, but that doesn’t mean they all are. It’s a system. It’s just the bad ones rise to the front.

Alex: Well, because if you’re really good at your job and you eventually leave, that’s what a lot of folks do. The people who stay are really two categories: true believers or folks who don’t have any other options. And when that equation becomes a lot more of the folks who don’t have options than the true believers, that’s a problem. And the true believers can be problems too, because sometimes that true belief that they’re doing the right thing blinds them to some really obvious realities about the world. But I’d much rather have a true believer who’s sort of honest and willing to look at a situation than the folks who are just there because they might not think they can get a job somewhere else.

Amy: Well, and I think the other thing too, the AUSAs, the FBI agents, they are essentially tasked with becoming experts in these myriad businesses and industries. And they aren’t. And so they can’t possibly understand how the process works, what is going on. I also think, which we haven’t touched on, which is a separate issue though, is around motivation. If we think about the fact that most prosecutors leave the office and go into private practice, they will need to build a client roster. Say I was to go and refer someone for a crime, I don’t know that the FBI would listen to me or the prosecutors would listen to me, but I know that if I was a billionaire,

Alex: A billionaire with a lot of work to do.

Amy: Could be influential.

Ryan: Well, and it’s not even him being a billionaire, and you guys said it a few times. Money’s great. Lots of money, that’s also great. It’s not that, though. Stan owns a bank, sits on the board of construction companies that do all the roadwork in Michigan. We are talking about pure, unadulterated power. It’s not just money. What can he do for you that might not be bribery, that might not do something, but you do a favor for Stan, Stan’s gonna do a favor for you. That’s the world that Stan operates in. You need money? He can make that happen.

Alex: And I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with that idea. You do good things for people, they help you. But I do think people don’t understand the ways that can show up in negative circumstances like you guys faced.

Amy: And the system should not allow it to, and that is where the system is broken, because there should be protections within the system.

Alex: Well, the other piece, I don’t think maybe listeners would know this, but if you’re a district attorney in a state somewhere, and there’s a crime, somebody gets murdered, you have to investigate that crime, and if you catch somebody, you prosecute them. Assistant U.S. attorneys don’t have to take a single case. The federal government has supplemental authority to come over the top, and they see what’s interesting. And the abuse of that question, of what sort of sufficiently federal interest, I think people don’t realize that because they have nothing they have to do, the choice about what they should do becomes really political, or it becomes really sort of targeting or politicization, because it’s a system that is not just we’re just taking the cases that come in. It’s like, “Give me the next arrest off the sheet.” That’s not it at all.

Ryan: And that’s the thing that was scary for us. This took years. Not 12 like Rick Renzi, but we’re talking years, months in our life. And so our guys, whether it was Wally and Brian or Jihan and our investigator Carol, were meeting with these guys, I’m not gonna say every week, but a lot. I am turning over hundreds of spreadsheets and receipts and bank statements and putting together things, and every time it wasn’t enough, and the meeting would end with, “Well, if Ryan doesn’t make a decision or we don’t see something soon, we’re just gonna indict you.” And I’m like, how fast do I have to move? And that’s why I kept saying, “I will drive up there. You’re not telling me what you need to go away.”

Alex: Well, it’s the proving the negative problem. How do we prove that there aren’t aliens?

Amy: Or unicorns.

Alex: Or unicorns. That may be a better example, ’cause there may be aliens. We’ll stick with the unicorns. The prosecutor says, “I’m gonna indict you if you can’t prove that there aren’t unicorns.” You can only do so much, and if you have somebody on the other side who’s not reasonable, there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re gonna say, “Well, gosh, I think they’re unicorns, so we’re gonna indict you.”

Amy: So they have the lien on your house. They’ve seized your assets.

Ryan: You got fired by your attorneys.

Amy: Got fired by your attorneys. And the grand jury fishing, the subpoenas. That’s also something to note because it disrupts all of your relationships. And that’s the point of it.

Amanda: We were doing renovations on the house that we had bought in Asheville, and the financing company got a subpoena, and so they pulled that line of credit right away. And we had to sell that house when it was down to the studs.

Amy: And that’s your business too, Amanda, right? That’s what you do.

Amanda: And this was just an investigation.

Ryan: Had the blast zone, as I think you guys called it. So we moved to Asheville to be close to family. Her aunt and her uncle, he is a contractor who does all these historical, I mean, he’s amazing. So who did we hire to do our house? Her uncle.

Alex: Of course.

Ryan: What was the scope of the project? Not small. Our money gets seized. They’re not gonna give us any more of our draw.

Alex: He can’t get paid.

Amanda: His business takes a hit.

Ryan: ’Cause that was supposed to be a year job for him.

Alex: And he’s paid the contractors. He’s got subs. He’s doing the whole thing. So talk about, if you’re open to it, the lawyer firing part. The relationship between lawyer and client is, I think, depicted one way in the media and what we see on TV. It can often be contentious. It can often be the most important relationship as you go through this. So how did you get from the lawyers you had at the beginning to the lawyers you liked better at the end? How did that happen?

Amanda: So we had our first two attorneys for almost two years. And then once our bank accounts got seized and we had no cash, one of them fired us.

Ryan: I was driving back from Detroit.

Alex: Because of money.

Amanda: He was like, “I don’t know how you’re gonna pay this bill, so we have to fire you.” And the other one kept us as clients for a few more weeks, and then fired us. And so we were like, “Oh my gosh, what are we gonna do?” And that’s when we started reaching. I found your attorneys that you had used and called one of them, and we were like, “Can you help us refer to somebody that can help us?” And we ended up finding a criminal attorney that was wonderful, and such a different approach. And that was a fantastic relationship.

Alex: So it was a blessing.

Amanda: Yes. I wish we had fired them earlier.

Alex: So many people come to us at Litson after their first or second attorney. This one’s gone bad, that one’s gone bad. They get to us finally. So I see a lot of how relationships can go bad between attorneys and clients, and I think that defendants and targets don’t recognize the amount of agency they actually do have. I think you feel like, “This guy, I’m trusting with my life.” I use the medical analogy all the time. You’re in surgery, you don’t wanna tell the surgeon to maybe get somebody new. ’Cause you’re half open and vulnerable. But if you don’t, you got this really bad surgeon in the room. And I think that it’s so hard for people, especially in that time of crisis, to be like, “Hey, I need to advocate for myself, and what you’re doing, I really don’t like.” But it’s so important because once you got a good counselor, it’s a total breath of fresh air. Totally different.

Ryan: Well, it’s not perfect.

Alex: It’s never gonna be perfect ’cause the situation’s not perfect. But having a different person standing beside you who you trust is just a different ballgame.

Amanda: But it is so difficult to make that choice because you feel like you’ve spent so much money on it already. Invested in getting this attorney up to speed, and it’s like, “Gosh, I can’t do that all over again.” But then it didn’t cost nearly as much to get the right person up to speed as it did.

Amy: When you were going in, at this moment in time, they’ve seized your money. The blast radius widens. Did you ever feel as if there wasn’t any hope?

Ryan: Oh, no. No. I’m unbeatable. You can do whatever you want.

Amanda: We planned on getting indicted, going to trial. We would win this.

Ryan: And listen, back in the November, I started looking up stuff on the internet, I’m like, “98%? Ah, fuck it. We’ll be in the 2%.”

Alex: We know that story.

Amy: He laughs because when my husband got a target letter, I called Alex, and I was like, “Well, what are the chances he isn’t indicted,” after he got this target letter, and Alex goes, “3%.” And I was like, “All right, there’s a chance.”

Alex: And you know what? We made that 3% happen.

Ryan: We told that to Wally and Brian, we told that to Chris, we told that to Jihan. And God love attorneys. We live in a world of ish. Chris jokes with us all the time. He’s been a 38-year partner at Taft. Every answer, and I’m sure you live with this, is it depends. It depends. So we live in a world of it depends. But I tell them, “I don’t care what it depends, we’re not losing. We just won a $5 million COVID relief award, which is, like, one in what? A billion? We’re not losing. You wanna take our shit? You wanna threaten me? Keep coming, keep coming.”

Alex: And I think some people hear that and like, “Oh, that’s just so crazy of you.” But having seen people who succeed in navigating through this sort of maze, you have to have that sort of approach that like, “Look, we are undeterred. We are undaunted.” If you don’t, it’s gonna beat you down.

Amy: Well, in hearing both of you, I’m an entrepreneur, my husband’s an entrepreneur, and Alex is an entrepreneur too, which is, I think, one of the reasons his lawyering is different and creative. Because to be an entrepreneur, you have to be delusional.

Amanda: A little crazy.

Amy: A little bit crazy, a little bit delusional in the belief in what you can do, or you wouldn’t begin.

Alex: You have to be optimistic. And this is a whole process that is meant to kill your optimism. And again, to bring the listeners into this, you’re years into this. You don’t know when it’s going to end. You don’t know if the next day they’re gonna say, “We’re gonna charge you.” And they’ve done everything they can to deprive you of your resources and your community. Did it strengthen or make the relationship between the two of you harder? ’Cause I’ve seen it go both ways for couples.

Amanda: Oh, I think it strengthened our relationship.

Ryan: Oh, absolutely.

Alex: Same lifeboat.

Ryan: Same lifeboat.

Amanda: I have absolute trust in whatever business things he did leading up to this.

Ryan: And I have listened to her counsel since before this all started. When she put me through a psychological exam at Northwestern, and like, “This is who you are. Why aren’t you doing it?” So then I started doing it, and things started.

Amanda: I was his business coach.

Alex: If there were a study, I would venture a guess that the support, either spousal or familial, is a deciding factor in people who navigate this successfully. And Amy’s a gold star example of that. But it’s so important to have that support. P.G. Sittenfeld said when he told his wife he was getting indicted, all she said was, “For better or for worse.” Just no question, no hesitation. No, like, “What do you mean?” Or, “How this is gonna affect me.” And that’s a lot harder to do than it is to say. So massive kudos to the two of you for pulling that off.

Ryan: I spent hours in the basement reading U.S. codes. I spent a whole weekend reading 400 pages of the DOJ manual.

Alex: I’m sorry.

Ryan: And I’m like, “Well, it says right here you’re not supposed to proceed with a case if you don’t believe,” and I’m telling her this, and I’m writing position papers to our attorney who I’m paying to read them. And she’d get mad, “Why are you paying Jihan to read this? It’s 49 pages of bullshit. It’s you talking to ChatGPT or Claude.” I’m like, but I’m going to their website at the DOJ and I’m reading this. I know it’s not a layman’s reading. But she’s like, “Okay. Well, send it off. Let’s see what Jihan says.” And then Jihan says, “Well, it all depends.” And then I say, “Well, that’s what she.”

Amy: This is not all for nothing. I think people who go through this process and don’t dive in and get very involved, they can’t make it.

Ryan: You got to.

Alex: And to be clear, at the beginning did they say, “Ryan, we are coming after you”? And at what point did they say, “Oh, by the way, Amanda, we’re gonna indict you, too”? How did that dynamic work?

Ryan: So the company is set up as a C corp. Amanda has 51%. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter that we were protected through a C corp, even though I was the manager and signing the thing. They decided to say, “We don’t believe the corporate records you have supplied that shows Ryan selling Amanda an extra 1% of his to be 51/49. We think that’s a lie.”

Amanda: Just because.

Alex: Just because.

Amanda: Just ’cause it works for their narrative.

Alex: We don’t have any documents that suggest that, but that’s how I woke up feeling.

Ryan: So after that meeting where we provided that, they said, “Well, Amanda’s a 51% majority owner if we believe that, so we’ll just go after her, too.” And I looked at her and I said, “What do you wanna do?”

Alex: And what was your answer to that?

Amanda: Well, that was when we were talking about what we would offer the government. And so we were like, we would pay back a certain amount of money. But there is under no circumstances are we doing anything where we have to say that we committed fraud. Because we absolutely did not.

Amy: And I think it’s important to know that fraud requires intent. And intent to deceive.

Alex: You can’t tumble your way into fraud.

Amanda: And we checked with our attorney before we made the decisions. We checked with an accountant on the numbers that we used. Doesn’t matter.

Ryan: Doesn’t matter.

Amy: And I think everybody thinks they’ll be protected. “Oh, I talked to my CPA. I talked to my attorney.” But sometimes if the government wants to build a case against you, they’re kind of like, “We’ll just forget about that,” or put it off to the side, or it didn’t really matter. You didn’t give them enough information. They’ll just tear it all down.

Ryan: I think if we had a stronger AUSA, still is dumb, but stronger constitutionally, I would’ve been indicted. But I sat across from this guy for an hour and 43 minutes, and the FBI agent, while they went through their little bullshit PowerPoint.

Amanda: That happened in February of this year.

Alex: Go back. You’ve been under investigation now for over two years. The government is basically holding all your money, has said you can’t sell your home. You’ve got no access to the bank accounts. We think you’ve done something, but we’re not confident enough to charge you. We’re just hoping at some point you just wave the white flag. And so at this point, to give context to listeners, you are asked to come in to sit down and watch a PowerPoint where the prosecutors are going to go through their greatest hits of all the strong evidence they think they have to prove that you are a felon.

Amy: Just pause for a minute, though, because people who have not gone through this system, if you sit there and you’re like, “So they wanna put you in prison, so they give you a PowerPoint.” It’s true, and it is as insane as it sounds.

Alex: I think that could be a really good skit. “Hey, you’re going to prison. Here is a picture of the prison.”

Ryan: But it’s not even a good PowerPoint. It’s a government PowerPoint.

Amy: There’s no animation. It’s not great images.

Ryan: It’s awful. Listen, I’m not the best public speaker, but I think I’m pretty good. She’s trained people. I’ve trained people.

Alex: Would you have rather had a really sexy, good presenter be like, “And now on the next slide.”

Ryan: Give me a slick, give me a little more pizzazz.

Amy: Some background music. A little fade in, fade out.

Alex: “And you’re subject to 20 years in prison.”

Ryan: Shush that thing up and we might have a conversation. But here’s the problem. Early on, they sent Wally and Brian, the first lawyers, a 12-page where they are in the investigation. I’m trying not to use bad words here.

Amy: Use bad words. Use all of them.

Ryan: Because the FBI agent, I learned in the ’80s growing up that if you wanna work for the FBI, you have to have a JD or an accounting degree.

Amy: That’s clearly not the case anymore.

Ryan: It’s not the case anymore. The FBI agent who was assigned to us, or came after us or whatever, was a former Macomb County sheriff who got into a training program with the FBI, and then now is pretending he works for goddamn JG Wentworth or Ernst & Young, and he commingled the accounts to make his case. He commingled corporate. He commingled an LLC. He commingled personal. He commingled Amanda’s accounts.

Amy: Things that if we had done as people, they would’ve been illegal.

Ryan: So out of the $5 million, just as an aside, ’cause this just pisses me off so bad, out of the $5 million that they tracked through all these accounts saying, “You misspent this and misspent that,” Brent Nayda, Special Agent Brent Nayda’s big getcha, his big gotcha to me. The last item on the spreadsheet was $66 at a Macomb County adult store. Well, clearly that’s fraud. And I was like, “Get the fuck outta here.”

Alex: You’re like, “Sir, you’re right, that is fraud. That was not me.” Never been there. Don’t know the place.

Ryan: So now I know what he’s capable of. So then when we go to the reverse proffer, we had also in the meantime gotten a tracing of the money. Which again, you can use all the icons from Windows you want. You can use little buildings, little banks, little houses, little people. They’ve had my kids on there. They had their Roths. They had their IRAs, everything. But it was arrow this, arrow that, going back. No numbers, because it was drawn by a child. I think my daughter would’ve drawn better by crayon. So now we have a second thing that we know this idiot AUSA is relying on, which is this 12-page report, which counters itself all throughout the thing. It’s just so stupid. Then we get this crayon drawing of money moving around. And so going into that reverse proffer, this is my level of expectation, and he went even lower. So it’s on a bigger screen than this. It’s on their 85-inch roll cart thing, and he’s done it so on the left side is their affidavits for all their seizing stuff, all these court transcripts from the trials that we’ve gone through. And on the right is supposed to be the proof. For 94 minutes, and I think it was 64 or 54 slides, everything on the left that they were using as evidence, there was no proof, but what he did was he highlighted what was there and pulled it out and put it over here. Reading it twice was supposed to instill fear.

Alex: I think it’s interesting ’cause the FBI often feels like if you earn money and then you spend it, you’ve committed a crime. We represent Todd and Julie Chrisley, and we did a podcast with them, our first episode. But I remember so distinctly being blown away at how idiotic the idea was. At their trial, they introduced the fact that they had, through their business, purchased Chick-fil-A. Because clearly that meant that the business wasn’t real. And I was like, “Guys, we pay for everybody’s lunch every Friday.” That’s not me eating that $300 of Uber Eats on the Friday. But the government just, “Oh, hey, look, that’s a personal expense. That’s a corporate account. That’s fraud.” And you’re just like, “Do you get out of the office?”

Ryan: They don’t know how it works.

Alex: So what happened at this point is you sit here, you go through this. Do you remember how many slides it was? Was it an hour?

Ryan: It was an hour and a half, and it was 54, 64 slides, and Brent Nayda is the one who gave the presentation.

Alex: And the way this is supposed to work is the prosecutor, if I were doing this, I’m saying to the other side, “Listen, if we go to trial, there’s no way you win. We’re going to win. The evidence here is overwhelming. I’m giving this as an opportunity to tell you, let’s work out a deal. Save me some time. Save you some potential jail time.

Ryan: So Amanda didn’t drive up with me ’cause she was taking care of our two youngest children, who at the time were eight and six.

Amanda: Well, that was just this year.

Ryan: But it was before birthdays. It was February. So she wasn’t with me, and I will say this, Amanda stated very early on, I am now on every phone call with any attorney you have.

Alex: Smart, smart.

Ryan: ’Cause I’d be going off, and she’d be like, “You’re not yelling at them. You have to just slow down. Speak clearly.” And Jihan told me on the phone before I drove up, with Amanda on the phone, “Okay, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna go in, and if you say a word,”

Alex: We’re getting you out of here. We’re leaving. I’m stopping this car. I’m pulling over.

Ryan: We’re leaving. And so I sat there quietly for 89 minutes.

Amy: Was that really hard to sit quietly?

Alex: Brutal.

Ryan: Brutal. Because we have proven lies in the affidavit. It’s not true. These things never happened, all this stuff, but I’m listening to it again for like the millionth time, reading it on PowerPoint both sides. I’m biting the inside of my cheek. I told Carol, our investigator, “I’m just gonna sit there and eye-fuck this guy because fuck him.”

Alex: Not in a good way. Two ways that can go.

Ryan: So I just looked at Brent. I didn’t move for 90 minutes. I didn’t sip water. I didn’t sip coffee. I just stared at him for 90 minutes, and at the end of that, Partika goes, “So Mr. Moore,” and puts up a slide, and takes me through all their charges, what it could mean, and, “You’re a first-time offender, so we can give you a discount, and here’s what we’re looking at, 27 months and a $5 million payback.” But then here’s the crazy thing. It was a month later that Jihan was talking to Partika, and they came back with…

Amanda: So our attorney was talking to the AUSA.

Ryan: And came back with 1.5 and like 14 months.

Amy: And where’s the 1.5 number from?

Ryan: It was pulled out of nowhere.

Amy: It sounds good.

Ryan: I call Cataldo up, and I tell him this before I even go in the house to tell Amanda, because Chris has been with us for seven, eight years. We’ve gone through negotiation after negotiation, sitting down with judges, mediation, all this stuff. So I get 1.5 in 14 months. I call Chris up and I’m like, “Listen, I’m not a poker player. But if I’m the flop, you just pulled back over half your pot?”

Alex: Tells me something.

Ryan: Fuck ’em. We’re going forward. I go in and I tell her, and I go, “This is a sign of a wimp. This ain’t for real.” That’s why I said you can’t beat me, ’cause you don’t have anything. And no matter what you try to manufacture. Listen, I’ve had judges exclude all sorts of things. But at some point, the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. I must have said that every goddamn day.

Alex: So how long after that reverse proffer, they tried to convince you falsely that they were going to indict you, did they finally give up?

Amanda: So the reverse proffer was in February. And then the statute of limitations ended in May.

Alex: So they’re just holding out for three more months, maybe they’ll get you to the table. And then push comes to shove, they folded.

Ryan: They folded on the criminal.

Alex: As they should have.

Amy: And where were you the moment that you found out?

Ryan: I was in the office in my basement, and I set it up so I can have speakerphone through my computer while I’m typing. I saw it was Jihan. And I just said, “Hold on.” I took it off and I’m walking upstairs, and she’s like, “Do you want the bad news or the good news?”

Amanda: Well, that was when it was done completely.

Ryan: That’s what they asked. And so I’m walking upstairs to get her ’cause I want her to hear what’s happening, and I can’t find her. I’m like, “Well, give me the bad news.” And so then I yelled at her, and Jihan’s on speaker. I sit in our pink chair in our dining room and I’m like, “All right.” And then she gets to the good news part and I’m like, “Amanda, get over here.” And she’s like, “What?” You were shocked.

Amanda: Oh, yeah. ’Cause I had envisioned that moment where they just stop investigating and say they’re gonna return everything. Every single day. And then it finally happened and it was like, “Oh my God.”

Ryan: I mean, tears. You were so happy. It was a relief for you. I’ll be honest, I don’t think I’m relieved yet.

Amy: Why not?

Ryan: Because we can go make more money. It sucks that they took it all and it got spent paying attorneys and all this. We’re grateful for the time. I’ve gotten to go to school, drop off my girls every day for four years, and pick ’em up when we can. And we’ve still gone on trips and we’ve made things happen. I don’t think I’ve gotten over it because it’s not a game.

Alex: It’s your life.

Ryan: It’s my life.

Amy: Of course you are.

Amanda: This all just ended in August.

Alex: It’s all PTSD too, right? You’re in this moment of transition.

Ryan: And so I’m not done. What do I wanna do? I wanna go in and I wanna clear out the idiots. I wanna clean up the DOJ. I wanna get rid of the Jeromes who are taking over, and they’re just goddamn fools, who don’t have the wherewithal to look at a case and say, “You spent money on this.”

Amy: And it’s taxpayer money, right? We are funding the system.

Ryan: Huge waste of taxpayer f-. Huge.

Amanda: Ridiculous. Completely.

Alex: Was your reaction different? Was it just relief and feeling like, okay, now we can turn the corner?

Amanda: Yes. ’Cause now we’re able to sell our house in Michigan, and it just feels like we can move forward in a way that we haven’t been able to for the last four years.

Amy: Do you ever worry? Someone told me once, once the government puts you in their crosshairs, they’re just gonna keep you there, and we have seen people that probably have lived that out. But do you ever worry that they’ll come back?

Alex: ’Cause you got away this time?

Amanda: I’m a little bit terrified to be a business owner.

Ryan: She doesn’t want me to say names. Every time I’ve said a name, I can feel her cringe. I’m a baby. I was born and raised a documentary filmmaker, a journalist. Listen, anybody can sue anybody, so if you wanna come after me for slander, libel, bring it. Do not threaten me with a good time.

Amy: You know that I’m a believer in naming all the names.

Ryan: But are they really gonna come after us for something like that? The statute of limitations has passed. Every day that goes by, chances of them finding something new lessen, but it also makes us think, well, what’s our next move? What’s our next business? What are we gonna do?

Alex: Once you’ve been falsely accused, you realize that it doesn’t actually matter whether you’ve done something wrong. It’s just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the wrong person wants you in trouble. And that’s a scary thing to realize.

Ryan: Amanda’s done a great job. Probably better than me. And I thank God every day for Amanda building our home, doing her thing. And I think for the most part, feel free to disagree, but our children have been blissfully unaware or unaffected by this.

Alex: That’s huge. It’s so important. Were there times during the middle of this where you’re like, “I know this decision’s going to affect the entire family, especially my children”? What did you want them, when they’re older, to know about you in the process?

Amanda: I think I just wanted them to know that we went through this incredibly difficult thing that changed our life dramatically, but they never felt it. They never knew it was going on, because we were able to absorb it all.

Alex: Well, bigger than that, what would you want them to know when they’re old enough to understand about how you did it?

Amanda: I think I want them to know that this really ugly thing was happening to us, but we chose to find the beauty in all of it, and to really sink into our life with them, as opposed to getting angry. I mean, we certainly had to fight.

Alex: You didn’t give into despair, though, is the idea.

Amy: That’s a really hard thing to not give into.

Amanda: It’s so hard.

Amy: And your kids are really lucky that you didn’t, and I think you should give yourself a lot of credit for it.

Amanda: I think that will always be my biggest flex in life, is just that they didn’t ever feel any of that. At least I don’t think they did.

Amy: They’ll tell you when they’re older.

Ryan: I want them to know it. I’m trying to write this book. It’s proving very difficult. But I want them to know that you can be unbeatable. You can bend reality to your will. You just have to believe it. And I try to instill that in them all the time. When they say, “Oh, I can’t do this.” “Yeah, you can. You can do this. Try it.” And if they can take that, they’re gonna be fine.

Alex: And you’ve showed them, look, I was a 3% who was told I was a target and didn’t get indicted. You can win against those odds. If you had the chance to go back to yourselves when you found out about that lien, you were selling the house, when you got that grand jury subpoena, what would this version of you tell that earlier version of you? What advice would you give her or him?

Amanda: Well, number one, I would tell them to take some cash out of the bank and keep it in a safe.

Amy: That’s helpful.

Amanda: ’Cause you don’t know when they’re gonna seize your accounts. But they probably will. But I think also just to trust your intuition, and if something feels off, whether it’s with your attorney or somebody else, figure out what that is and try to fix it sooner rather than later.

Alex: Don’t ignore the red flags. Ryan, what about you?

Ryan: We talked about this earlier too. It’s kind of funny because I started telling her, and she looked at me. I grew up in Detroit, and in the wall of my bedroom for 10 years was a little picture of Winston Churchill that my dad had given me. Must’ve been 9 or 10. But it was, “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, never give up.” I think that’s why I don’t have a fight or flight response. I only have fight, ’cause I grew up looking at that every morning. And I would just tell myself, “Keep remembering that.” You are the man in the arena. Nothing can beat you but yourself.

Alex: That’s beautiful. Well, I’m so grateful you guys decided to share your story. A lovely time talking to you. And I’m very excited that you can now turn to the rest of your life, put this behind you.

Ryan: We’re excited. Thank you very much.

Amanda: Us too. Thank you.

Alex: Absolutely. Thank you.