Transcription
I never expected I'd be part of a Ponzi. I never expected to lose money. You fantasize, you know, you fantasize about... Well, maybe I can buy a bigger house. Or maybe I can send my kids to private school and do things that, you know what I mean, you normally wouldn't do. But that made the pain more hard at the end.
He said, "Safe, safe, safe. We are going gangbusters." This is all fake. Like, everything is fictitious. This is a story about a series of crimes that could have easily been prevented. When I found out that Eli Weinstein had done this before and his sentence was commuted by President Trump, I was livid. Mr. Weinstein was given the ultimate second chance, and he squandered that opportunity and he squandered it quickly.
What we have seen around the Trump administration is this feverish pardon market. We're seeing white collar lawyers who charge huge amounts per hour. Weinstein was found guilty in 2025. Our reporting suggests that he is also trying to build a team to fight for a second commutation. They look to the elected officials to seek pardons and then potentially do it again. We're living in a crazy time that Trump is doing whatever he wants, and nobody seems to be able to stop him.
It was financially and emotionally the most difficult year of my life. When people lose it all, it's very damaging. The community here is a tight knit community really focusing on family values. A lot of the church members that I know today are families that I’ve seen my entire life, I grew up with them.
During Covid, one member of our community, one of my best friends at that point in time, Richard, approached me at the end of 2021, to discuss some potential business opportunities with masks, selling from Turkey to Israel. The church as a whole always talks about giving back and helping for the sake of others. Richard insisted that he has this contact and Mike Konig was the name that he eventually name dropped to me and this guy was a legend in this sphere. He's apparently knows people in the FDA, he knows people at NATO. The initial deal was for 25% in three months. When he gave me that interest payment he also talked about there's another opportunity, and he spoke with a lot of excitement and compassion. And he was like, "let's do this again." Richard was persistent on asking for more and more. He would even encourage people to borrow money and then invest it into him and Mike. It's like, wow, I mean, who is this Mike Konig? If he knows so many people and if he knows so many people, why does he need me with my money?
A slew of pardons, nearly 150 pardons and commutations for a host of powerful and famous people. Eli Weinstein is one of the people that Donald Trump granted clemency to in the final days of his first term. Weinstein was eight years into a 24 year prison sentence, having been convicted for running a Ponzi-like scheme. Pardon. Clemency. Commutation. They're often used interchangeably. A pardon is a kind of carte blanche forgiveness. You're forgiven of the crime. A commutation is you were freed from prison but you still face probation and restitution. Mr. Weinstein was released in January 2021 and at trial it came out that by July of 2021, he had spoken about starting a new scheme.
Eli Weinstein wouldn't have been able to perpetrate this Ponzi scheme were it not for him creating an alias that had none of his track record with the law. So to many people, including the co-conspirators, he was known by the name Mike Konig. At the time, we were still in the Covid era and it seemed like a lucrative opportunity. And through his network, he found Richard Curry and Chris Anderson. They said that Mike Konig was someone that had connections in the Middle East and Turkey and Israel, and knew a lot about medical supplies deals. Victims testified at trial that part of why they wanted to invest here was because not only were they getting a great return on their profit, but they were doing something good for the world.
I'm Deirdre Virvo, and I own and operate Just Like Home. They are residential memory care homes for seniors with dementia. I met Chris Anderson seven-ish years ago. He presented himself as a very ethical person. He had called and said he came across an amazing opportunity to buy masks. My fiancé and I both initially invested $200,000 and were to get back 12% after three months, and he asked us if we want to roll it into the next deal. So we just kept rolling it in and adding more money to it. Eli Weinstein was the puppet master, and he was really the one making it possible for this Ponzi scheme to continue.
There was loads and loads of photos and videos of boxes being packed, supply lines occurring in many parts of the world. What has become clear throughout the trial is much of that was entirely fabricated. It is so important that we get an assembly line sweatshop showing that we have this FAK product. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. It just needs to be showing there's an enormous amount of product. The goal of these emails was to keep us investing with him because he kept asking for more money. We couldn't have gotten here without you. The fund is designed so that you, our friends and families, can continue to participate in a more significant and long term way. It's crazy reading this back and seeing how many lies he made up.
Before I let my mom invest or my kids, I said to him, "Are you absolutely certain? This is my mom. She's 86 years old. These are my kids." And he said, "Safe, safe, safe. We are going gangbusters." The essential part of a Ponzi scheme is a fund manager using money that they're getting in from new investors to pay old investors. And those old investors think the money that they're receiving is from investments. So Weinstein and his co-conspirators were having a fair old time partying with investor money, spending it on private jets, on gambling at casinos. They were even spending money on a very garish penthouse in Florida.
With any Ponzi scheme, it’s always kind of functioning on the brink of destruction. At some point, it was going to come tumbling down. They didn't know that Mike Konig was actually Eli Weinstein, but they started to get breadcrumbs of clues. They were having difficulty making the math add up. They then convened this kind of meeting with Weinstein and other co-conspirators, where they confront him and say, "Hey, you know, what's your real name?" and Weinstein confesses. Unbeknownst to Weinstein, they were secretly recording him.
"I lied about who I was. Everyday it ate me up. It doesn’t justify it. And I misled you and lied about transactions." Recordings are really crucial evidence of intent, of what Eli Weinstein was thinking. I finagled and ponzied and lied to people to cover us for our ideas. You know that, Richard. He admitted that he had been lying, that he had been pretending to be Mike Konig and he attempted to convince Curry and Anderson to continue raising money, to continue with the supposed deals in order to keep them at bay, to prevent them from going to the authorities. They all decided to kind of keep calm and carry on with the conspiracy.
However, running a scheme like this can affect your behavior, and what investors started to notice was a change in mood from Chris Anderson and Richard Curry. And for a lot of the investors, this was a sign that something may be going wrong. A year after we started investing, in January, our group went on a marketer's cruise. I liked Chris. Chris also had two kids that I knew and his wife, and we get on the cruise and he's acting very odd. We knew him for five years not to drink, smoke. Now he's drinking. He's like flirting with women. And he asks on the cruise his wife for a divorce in the middle of our cruise. And he was also regaling us with crazy stories. He's talking about people at gunpoint in taxi cabs, how he had to play catch with a dead horse's head. And I was like, so appalled. And then it turned out that he wasn't paying anybody back. And then it was shortly after that we found out that there was bad things going on with Eli Weinstein and him. And then he refused to talk to anybody.
As the Ponzi scheme starts to get more and more unwieldy, investors start threatening litigation. And then Curry and Anderson received a subpoena from the SEC. And it's at this point, they decide to go to US prosecutors and cut a plea deal. I found out that Mike Konig was Eli Weinstein when the media documented the arrest of Weinstein and that Mike was Weinstein the whole time. You figure that your best friend would tell you that this whole thing is a Ponzi, but it unfortunately came up through the media. The evidence in this case, for a white collar case, was strong and the jury thought that that intent was clearly to deceive investors of their money. In 2025, Weinstein was found guilty. But that isn't where the story ends. One person that I've spoken to from my reporting says that Weinstein has been reaching out to people, asking if they'd even consider working on his bid for a pardon.
This would be quite extraordinary. Trump's critics will argue that what he has done is discarded a deliberative, sometimes multi-year long process of pardoning in favor of a more ad hoc system of pay-to-play, one that overtly rewards allies and undermines the criminal justice system in favor of those with wealth and access, regardless of the seriousness of their crimes. The White House has denied such allegations. Though President Joe Biden was criticized by many Republicans for preemptively pardoning members of the military, of Congress and his own family, who Trump had pledged to target once in office, the bulk of Biden's clemency actions followed established norms.
Trump really set the tone on his first day in office, when he announced that he was granting mass clemency to more than 1500 defendants charged in connection with the January 6th riots. So this is January 6th. Approximately 1500 for a pardon. Full pardon. Two months after Trump took office, the pardon attorney for the Justice Department, Liz Oyer, was fired. And at the same time, Trump has installed someone he was very close to, a conservative lawyer named Ed Martin. The pardon power is now being totally and thoroughly politicized, that it will be used as a benefit to those who are supporters of the president and not for those who do not express political loyalty.
In 2025, Trump has granted pardons to a catalog of high profile figures. They include the Republican politician George Santos, crypto entrepreneur Changpeng Zhao, and there are reports of other people in the public eye exploring whether clemency is a viable option for them. They include Sam Bankman-Fried and Ghislaine Maxwell. She was convicted of child sex trafficking. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to have to take a look at it. I’d have to ask DOJ. There is concern the ordinary person, the average, everyday person who might be serving a lengthy prison sentence doesn't have the same means, resources or influence to vie for a pardon and that the playing field isn't even any more.
I read about the Weinstein case, and of course that's that's the outcome we want to avoid. It does make my work harder, because then people don't believe in the whole the way that I do. And I want everybody to believe in clemency is something that can be a positive force. That's a fundamental American ideal that people can change. I mean, we are a nation of people seeking redemption in one way or another. I usually get, 3 to 4 pieces of mail a week that'll be about clemency. This is a letter from a woman in prison. She's been in over ten years. And she says, “Sir, I am far from the person I was when I entered the federal system." I mean, what we're going to look for in a case is a story of redemption. It offers that promise.
As early as there was criminal law, there was clemency. One thing about clemency is that because it's an unchecked power of the president, that's going to reflect the values of that president. There are some incredibly selfless uses. Outside Blair House, the president's temporary Washington home, extreme fanatics of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party tried to force their way in, guns blazing, to assassinate the President of the United States. Puerto Rican nationalist named Oscar Collazo tried to assassinate President Truman and Truman commuted his death sentence.
President Trump, we all knew before he was elected, things are important to him include loyalty and celebrity and so it should not surprise us that clemency has been used for celebrities and for those who have been loyal to him. A system where people with money get clemency and people without money don't get clemency is not justice and it's not really mercy either. There is a danger here of the pardons system looking like a pay-to-play system that without paying huge amounts of fees to well-connected and high powered lawyers and lobbyists, you are not going to have a chance at clemency.
If Weinstein is seeking another commutation. There's an increasing number of lawyers across America who can point to successful track records with the Trump administration. So these are printouts of the presidential proclamation for two of our clients. This is generally the form that all of the pardons are going to take in terms of this administration and the president actually signs those. I can't imagine that in any of these cases, he's spending more than 10, 15, 30 minutes max on an issue for an individual pardon. So generally, you've got to find the people who are in places to actually work on this on a day-to-day basis make sure they have the information they need and let them do their work for the president.
First thing you open up is here's the reason this person deserves a pardon. A lot of times we'll put the underlying case documents like the judgment, the things that would go in there, letters of support. You have to tell a story that hits on the issues that this president cares about. Here you have an administration that clearly has been motivated by things that have happened in the criminal justice system that they have seen to be incredibly unfair. The president had a conviction, but he also was subject to multiple different investigations. So you have a president who's been under that sort of scrutiny, who understands the impact of that on individuals. This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial. And I think that has to change your view as to, you know, what is fair and unfair.
I do strongly believe that almost everyone can be rehabilitated. I think, unfortunately, Mr. Weinstein has proven time and again that the more chances he's given, doesn't mean that he's going to use them to do good, to get redemption, to pay back his victims, and perhaps at this point, he's out of chances. This was a third residential memory care home I purchased for my expanding business, and I have beautiful architectural plans designed to expand it. Unfortunately, I had to sell it because of everything that happened. So, there went my business expansion.
Unfortunately, I lost a little over a million over the course of five deals. So it impacts relationships and there have been some members in the community where it ultimately led to divorce. I was just angry at myself. Angry that I could trust someone. And that anger and that depression spilled out over into my personal lives. My kids would even ask me, "Dad, why, why do you... Dad, why do you hate me?" It's hard to answer that question to my son. You know, you just think about, could they be better off without you, you know? The victims are just lost in history, whereas the fraudsters get out of jail for free and then potentially do it again.