Using his phone, Reed googled the ii men'due south names together. Within seconds, he realized the duo was internet-famous. He scrolled downwards and read the stories about a disastrous journey T. R. and Fosdick had taken two years earlier, in September of 2012. In what seemed to exist a typical flying, the two left Baytown, well-nigh Houston, bound for Sarasota, Florida. Halfway there, 11,000 feet in the air, they noticed that their plane, a Beechcraft Businesswoman, had caught burn. They used textbook procedures to behave out an emergency landing in the Gulf of Mexico, ditching the plane 30 miles from shore. So they waited in the water, where sharks and Portuguese man-of-wars, which sting like jellyfish, have been spotted, to be rescued.

While they floated, T. R. documented their bobbing heads, and their subsequent rescue by the Declension Baby-sit, on an iPad in a waterproof case. Wearing aviator sunglasses and a lightweight dominicus hat, T. R. looked straight into the iPad'southward photographic camera. His partner, Fosdick, was shyer. He smiled in the groundwork with the obligation of a teen whose mom was asking him to pose nicely for a photo. "In that location's Raymond," T. R. said shortly later the ditching. "Nosotros seem to be okay, without injuries." T. R. seemed only slightly out of breath as he navigated the waves on a flotation device. "I believe we've been in the water for about an hour now," he said. "No sign of any rescue or emergency services withal." As daylight dwindled, the two men treaded water for three hours, until the Coast Guard spotted and rescued them.

Reed also constitute a prune of the two on NBC's Today show, ane of many media outlets that shared their story. He pressed play and studied T. R. and Fosdick as they narrated their misadventure to awestruck host David Gregory. T. R.—the improve-dressed of the two guests—had a lantern jaw, short-cropped hair, and rectangular glasses, and he sat on the set's beige couch with his left ankle crossed over his correct knee. He radiated confidence, intelligence, and ease as he told the tale. "People ask united states, 'Were you worried?' Well, nosotros weren't worried at all," T. R. said. Fosdick looked weary, with his left arm in a sling, notwithstanding he attempted the same bluster. Fearfulness did enter his mind, he admitted with a submissive smiling. "However, considering of feel—because we've both been in stressful situations—we remained calm."

Amanuensis Reed didn't know what to make of Fosdick and T. R.: First these two guys crash into the Gulf of Mexico together, then each flies into this tiny airport within days of each other, and 2 weeks afterwards, T. R.'southward jet bursts into flames. The more Reed dug, the more certain he became that the Citation burn down was just one piece of a 1000 scheme.

T.R., who is now 35, had e'er sought run a risk. When he was nine years old, he pushed a petty Sunfish sailboat into Lake Champlain in Upstate New York and tried to sail the ten miles to Burlington, Vermont (much to his parents' consternation). Simply equally an developed, he found it was business deals that gave him a rush. He liked the contest, the stakes, and the thrill of accomplishment. And he loved to stir up drama. "He was always looking for something that had a story," i of his associates told me. "And sometimes, he plant things that had a story, and sometimes . . . he kind of created the story himself."

He used to be just Ted Wright. Dorsum in Port Kent, New York, the fifteen-block village where he grew up, his neighbors would have bristled at calling him "Theodore." In a town where most people worked at the local prison or the nearby Bombardier railcar manufacturing facility, using a formal name like that would accept unsaid he felt like he was better than they were—though, he did. While other kids wore steel-toed boots and T-shirts advert automobile parts, he wore a adapt and carried a briefcase. ("I didn't own my first pair of jeans until I was like twenty years sometime," he said.) He was already dressing for the job he wanted: high-stakes histrion. Even equally a child he was eager to leave Port Kent. "I had to go out of at that place," T. R. told me. "Port Kent is an 60 minutes s of Montreal, ane of the greatest cities in Due north America, and information technology's five hours from New York Urban center, and no i in Port Kent has been to either of those places."

His parents endemic a junk shop and so a Tex-Mex restaurant ("which in [Upstate] New York might equally well be food from Mars," he said), securing his family a middle-class living, but during the mid to belatedly nineties, when he was in middle school, the area savage into a recession and his family slipped into poverty. The Wrights moved into a pocket-sized rental house.

In high schoolhouse, T. R. began skipping class and playing pranks, once covering a teacher'south automobile with AOL CD-ROMs, another time dumping out a instructor'due south Nutrition Coke and replacing it with regular Coke, but to mess with him. A friend whom T. R. met later on in life remembered discussing with T. R. a realization they'd both come to when they were immature, that the rules of business organization were man-made and thus, mayhap, fungible. "I mean, he has ever been an arrogant prick," a babyhood friend said with affection. "Nosotros felt we were smarter than most people . . . I wouldn't call that a negative thing. I would call that identifying the market."

T. R.'s confidence helped him build a lucrative career at a very early on historic period. According to T. R., it began like this: At sixteen, he worked at a kiosk in the local mall, selling cellphone accessories, simply around two years subsequently, when the kiosk's parent visitor went nether, his dominate told him that as his final payment he could accept all the remaining inventory, signs, and displays from two kiosks—the value of which he estimates at $80,000. He sold that inventory and some additional merchandise and invested the proceeds in setting upwards more than kiosks. By his nineteenth birthday, he said, he had $4.5 one thousand thousand, all of which he invested in a kiosk visitor he called Wright Marketing Group, spread over xl locations. He eventually broadened sales to novelties and games—"all kinds of stupid gifts, with a two-thousand-percent markup."

The venture escalated on a kiosk-buying trip to the Shenzhen International Toy and Education Fair, in China, where, T. R. claimed, he came upwardly with an idea for a console for pirated video games chosen Power Player that would plug into a TV and permit users to play classics like Space Invaders and Galaga. He decided to focus on selling Power Player wholesale. It was a huge striking, T. R. said, until the FBI began arresting the biggest Power Thespian retail operators. Panicking, he abased his business and left the The states with $8,000 to travel in Europe.

This rags-to-riches origin story contains all the elements of a typical T. R. Wright anecdote: big money in the balance, risks taken, and legal minefields skirted, laced with difficult-to-fact-check details. It was easy to believe, for case, that every bit a teenager he hooked upwardly with a daughter well-nigh his historic period while he was on vacation with her and her family. It wasn't equally like shooting fish in a barrel to believe that he then hooked up with the daughter's 35-year-old female parent ("the girl hated my guts; I mean, I'm sleeping with her mother") and that the girl'due south father caught T. R. and her female parent in the human activity and collection him to the drome in an excruciating two-60 minutes-long journeying. His associate said he wasn't always sure which stories were true and which were lies—merely they were ever entertaining.

Though a scattering of people were arrested for selling Power Player in 2005, T. R.'s name appears nowhere in news articles nigh the investigation. T. R.'south family and purported Power Player associates didn't return telephone calls for this commodity, and the man T. R. said was his lawyer in the Power Role player case has died. (A close high school friend who worked in the cellphone kiosk with T. R. remembers that his kiosk business did well—whether it made him a millionaire, he could not say—and said he does remember T. R. importing Ability Role player.)

"I'm out doing things that I find heady and that I'm passionate about and I want to practise, and the money only ebbs and flows, you know?"

T. R. said he did not face legal trouble and that after the Ability Player raids, he laid low in Europe for five months. When he returned home to the The states, he bought a junkyard in Upstate New York and began selling car parts on a website. "Online sales were unheard of in the junkyard business organization," he said. Next affair he knew, he was getting calls from all over the land for specific-model seat belts and other useful chip. T. R. said he isn't sure how much money he'd amassed by the time he hit the legal drinking age. "Coin, for me—it came and went. I never said, 'I've got this much coin.' I'm out doing things that I find exciting and that I'm passionate about and I want to do, and the money simply ebbs and flows, yous know?"

But information technology must have flowed a trivial more than than it ebbed, because by his late twenties, T. R. had enough coin to purchase a 110-foot yacht. He named it Never Enough. The boat slept twelve people, in a master cabin, a VIP cabin, a invitee cabin, and crew's quarters. He later extended the yacht's helipad. He docked the yacht in Kemah and rented a home attached to a hangar at the Baytown airport and a spartan guesthouse in Kemah. He connected spending his money on expensive toys: besides boats, at that place were watches, cars, and, eventually, planes.

The older oversupply at the hangars T. R. visited, in Baytown and Galveston, remember that he was a novice pilot when they starting time met him but that he quickly became proficient at flight small planes, big jets, helicopters, and experimental aircraft. In short order, he could even fly a gyrocopter and a hot air balloon. "He was a natural at flying," said pilot Barry Larsen. No ane, though, described T. R. as cautious. Pilot and aircraft mechanic George Gould, who has his ain hangar at Scholes International Airdrome, in Galveston, remembers T. R. every bit someone who liked to "boot the tires and low-cal the fires," sometimes ignoring preflight inspections when he was in a bustle. "You lot've gotta be real deliberate in what you lot're doing. Some people just—that don't soak in," Gould said with a laugh. "Erstwhile T. R. had an adventurous personality."

T. R. in mid-2014. Raymond Fosdick/Courtesy of T. R. Wright

His acquaintances knew him as a hotshot in flip-flops and shorts who'd cruise effectually Kemah in Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches, pulling upwards to pocket-sized airports to check in on his latest acquisitions. "He had a different girl on his arm every fourth dimension, I'll tell you," some other airplane mechanic and pilot named Bill Brown said, impressed by T. R.'south company. "I might be onetime, but my eyes still work."

Also women, T. R. was usually accompanied by his friend Shane Gordon. Gordon was a lawyer, xiv years older than T. R.—"a normal dude with a normal wife with three kids," according to one acquaintance. By and then T. R. had likewise begun spending time with Raymond Fosdick, who was then in his mid-thirties. The 2 met when the captain of Never Enough hired Fosdick to assistance pump sewage out of the yacht. T. R. recalled that Fosdick concluded up spraying raw sewage all over himself. "He'southward like Kramer," T. R. said. "He is this endearing idiot that I don't desire to telephone call a friend—he'south just there. He'due south like that family unit member some people have. Y'all just can't get rid of him." (Fosdick declined to be interviewed.)

T. R. ready corporations with generic names similar Theodore R. Wright Enterprises and Government Auctions Online, as well equally companies with less discreet names like Sly International Holdings and Carissus—Latin for "cunning."

He was living the dream, but he was also restless. In 2012, a year after purchasing the yacht, he bought a training jet for fighter pilots that required MiG parts from overseas. He said he called up a former Soviet exam pilot, who plant the required parts on a former Common cold War base of operations in Hungary. (The pilot T. R. named, contacted in Los Angeles, said he doesn't remember this incident, suggested someone else assisted T.R., and added that the parts likely came from Republic of bulgaria.)

"At that place's a guy smoking a cigarette," said T. R. of the purchase overseas, "and he comes in real shady. You hand him your briefcase full of cash and you lot hope to God that vi weeks later your containers and MiG parts get in in California—which they did. Then now I have, by my math, two hundred years' worth of [parts] for my L-39. Well, what am I going to practice with that? I'm going to do the same thing that I did with my junkyard business concern in 2005: I start putting them online."

And that, T. R. said, is when his business organization took an unexpected turn.

The MiG parts gave T. R. the calling bill of fare he needed to gain a foothold in a high-stakes international game. He learned that countries, only like individuals, wait for deals when ownership the parts required to maintain their archaic fleets. "I became known as a guy who could deliver anything, anywhere in the globe," he said. If someone required aeroplane parts, he was their guy. Occasionally he sold entire aircraft. Sometimes the planes and helicopters he delivered were demilitarized, with their weapons removed, he said—other times they weren't.

"Before you realize it, yous've got a load of freshly overhauled attack helicopters getting snuck out of Marseille in the middle of the night."

He'd never planned to become an international arms dealer, he said. The sales simply snowballed. "The deals go bigger and the stakes get higher," he said, "and before you realize it, you've got a load of freshly overhauled assault helicopters getting snuck out of Marseille in the middle of the dark going to Chad."

Equally always, T. R. enjoyed relaying countenance-raising tales of his professional person exploits to select friends. Socially, he was elevating his game too. "I never had so much fun with anybody I barely knew," said one ex-girlfriend, a Swedish pilot whom I reached in Kingdom of belgium. "He could suggest something like: 'Can we go to Iceland?' Or 'Exercise you desire to join [me in] the Bahamas on Monday?' 'I take to wing this private jet; would you care to bring together?' . . . You know, he'due south then impulsive." He seemed incapable of banality. A adult female who once went out on a date with him to Houston said, "He picked me up in a limo on our date to the freakin' pianoforte bar."

Once, when T. R. suspected a minor celebrity he was seeing had intentionally given him food poisoning through a homemade brownie, he told a friend he was attempting to interruption out of her mansion'southward locked gates. "Why are you doing this?" the friend recalled asking him. "You lot know," T. R. responded, "worst case, information technology'll make a practiced chapter in my book."

T. R. ofttimes posted selfies on social media, showing him in exotic or daring situations, squinting into the altitude with a giant gun in his hands. In the pictures, he looks relaxed and aristocratic, like a model for upscale watches. To burnish his image every bit a James Bond–blazon character, he in one case posted a photo of himself flying a jet while wearing a tuxedo. In i photo, he appeared to be flight with the rapper Waka Flocka Flame. T. R. paraded the life he'd achieved. "He hated beingness called lucky," said the woman who went on one engagement with T. R. He would say, "This has naught to do with luck."

T.R. flying to Living Legends Aviation in Los Angeles between 2013 and 2015.
T.R. flying to Living Legends Aviation in Los Angeles betwixt 2013 and 2015. Courtesy of T. R. Wright

In 2014, afterward returning from the arson investigation visit in Athens, Jim Reed sat in his fluorescent-lit government function cubicle in Tyler and started building a file with a typewritten tab: "Athens jet fire." The case became nigh like a hobby—something Reed would pursue when he wasn't chasing downwardly the Aryan Alliance or street-gang members. He began calling the Texas Department of Insurance and the National Insurance Crime Bureau and studying T. R.'due south fiscal records.

A year later, a motion picture had emerged. Reed believed he had constitute ii clear cases of fraud. In March 2012, T. R. bought a 1966 Beechcraft Businesswoman—the plane that later concluded up in the Gulf of Mexico—for $46,000, so insured it for $85,000. (It is not unusual for companies to insure shipping for greater sums than they are bought for; values vary profoundly by make and model.) Subsequently attending training that included water-landing educational activity, T. R. departed the Baytown airport with Fosdick. Then the alleged mechanical failure occurred, and the pair ditched the airplane in the Gulf of United mexican states. T. R. got the insurance coin, only that wasn't all: Reed found that the ii also conspired in a personal injury lawsuit. Fosdick sued T. R. and received a $100,000 settlement from T. R.'south insurance company, and then turned around and transferred $42,000 to T. R.'southward visitor Carissus.

And so, in March 2014, T. R. bought the doomed Citation for $190,000. One of his companies, Plaisir en Vol (Fun in Flight), co-owned with a Frenchman named Philippe Ardouin, had secured insurance on the plane for $440,000. That autumn, after the fire, Plaisir en Vol filed the insurance claims and T. R. received the proceeds. Reed noted that T. R. used the money to buy a Learjet previously endemic by tabloid talk show host Jerry Springer.

Equally records from banking and phone companies arrived, Reed uncovered even more than instances of what he believed to exist criminal action. He learned that in March 2014, T. R. had crashed his Lamborghini, which he'd bought for $76,000, into a water-filled ditch. His insurance company gave him $169,554. In October 2014, T. R. bought a 1998 Hunter Passage sailboat in Hawaii for $50,150. He "sold" it a month later to a human being in Honolulu named Edward Delima for $193,500—money T. R. had "loaned" Delima through a mortgage company he and his business partners created. The boat sank in a marina under mysterious circumstances. In 2015 Delima, who had insured the Hunter Passage for an increased value, handed over the $180,023.80 insurance payout to his mortgage visitor, held in the name of T. R. Wright.

By April 2016, Reed had followed the paper trail as far as he could. It was time to start interviewing co-conspirators. In deciding whom to arroyo first, he knew he had to choose someone who knew enough to give credible, useful information, merely who didn't have such loyalty to T. R. that he'd plough around and scare all the other co-conspirators out of the country.

He decided to showtime with Edward Delima, having surmised that he and T. R. were non close friends. Reed flew to Honolulu and, along with a local agent, visited Delima, a 225-pound registered sex activity offender with a gray beard that grew down to his collar bone, at his workplace. After Reed invited him into the agents' car, Delima listened to him for a while, taking in the information, sweating a little. Reed mentioned the insurance deposits to T. R. and brought upwards Delima's thin history with boats. Delima eventually told Reed everything: how T. R. had asked him to pretend to own the boat, how T. R. had promised him big bucks but ultimately gave him a few 1000 dollars. It was useful information, and it was plenty to write an indictment, but it wasn't plenty for Reed to indict T. R. for what he felt certain was a much larger tangle of scams.

So, every bit Reed was combing through Raymond Fosdick's Facebook contour, he noticed photographs of Fosdick with a firearm—something Fosdick, who was a convicted felon, wasn't allowed to take in his possession. Using that every bit leverage, Reed visited Fosdick at his loftier-end flat complex in Uptown Houston. To Reed's surprise, Fosdick, like Delima, told him everything. He fifty-fifty handed over emails and iMessages between him and T. R. In the iMessages, the men discussed the Athens fire scheme in play-by-play item. "[Expletive] have your story straight and don't [expletive] around," T. R. messaged Fosdick.

The instance had come to remind Reed of the saying "perception becomes reality."

As prove mounted, Reed began chatting with a few pilots in the Kemah area under the guise of completing a standard insurance inquiry after the Citation fire. He plant that even locals who liked T. R. suspected he was upwardly to something fishy. Many said they'd been wondering when someone was going to come up poking around. A few loyally told Reed they didn't know anything. "Hey," ane former-timer told T. R. later, "there were some insurance guys coming around asking well-nigh you." T. R. just laughed it off.

The case had come to remind Reed of the maxim "perception becomes reality." It seemed to him that Ted Wright had well-nigh willed this character of "T. R. Wright" into being. From the time he was a schoolkid wearing a suit, he was determined to become a larger-than-life persona, projecting the confident James Bond epitome in the stories he told his friends and, later, in his social media feeds, fifty-fifty when he might have been struggling financially. By the terminate of the menses under investigation, Reed said, T. R. was "pretty close to everything he was representing himself to be."

T. R. and Ashley Polston in a helicopter in 2015. Raymond Fosdick/Courtesy of T. R. Wright

T.R. might have continued his available lifestyle indefinitely if not for a California attorney named Ashley Polston, whom he met over electronic mail while making a speculative existent estate bargain in 2014. (Polston did not return calls requesting an interview.) Curious to see what she looked like, he constitute her on Instagram. "I simply saw her and thought 'Wow,'" he said. "I couldn't imagine a more beautiful woman." He emailed her and wrote that he would beloved to pick her upwards and fly her to Las Vegas for the weekend.

Soon, they were rarely apart. "It was a fairy-tale relationship," T. R. said. "We never had an argument." One 24-hour interval, when he was in the midst of negotiating a stressful transaction, T. R. flew Polston out to a barrier island in the Mediterranean at sunset and proposed to her. "I definitely became a i-woman man," he said. "That was a big change. It was life-changing. I suppose I matured overnight." They originally planned to marry at the renowned Icehotel in Sweden, but because of an unusually warm wintertime, they held a modest, unofficial ceremony in the South of France.

T. R. said they didn't want to wait to outset a family, and in August 2015, they had a baby girl. The family unit bounced betwixt Las Vegas and Canada, between Europe and the yacht. T. R. decided to rename the Never Enough after his daughter.

T. R. pared down his Facebook and Instagram usage, but the few posts he shared showed far-flung surroundings: the trio posing in front of the Dead Ocean, wandering the streets of Aix-en-Provence, in southern France, flying en route to some other destination.

Sometimes they almost seemed similar a normal family—albeit one prone to excess. One time, T. R. flew Barbara Carlton, who had been his married woman'due south nativity doula, in a Czech 50-39 jet, and turned the plane upside down. "Nosotros went four or five Gs, which was plenty," Carlton said. Aaron Pierce, who was captain of T. R.'south yacht, remembers T. R. telling him, "You lot're captain, indicate us in a direction." Pierce would take the family unit along the coastline, from Tampa, Florida, to Lake Charles, Louisiana, cruising at a leisurely ten knots. When they'd pull up to an island, Polston would take their daughter out to play. "They went upwardly to the beach, spent the solar day, came back sunburned," Pierce said. "It was but a good family."

These were some of the best years of T. R.'s life. Certain, he still thought fondly of his early pursuits of women and aerial stunts. But he was finally offset to feel a more lasting sense of satisfaction.

Which isn't to say that he abased thrill-seeking completely. At one point, T. R. flew a 737 he'd bought, a "mobile command center," into a desert base of operations in Israel where civilian planes rarely get. "I land, and I've got with me my married woman and daughter, who is in a Babybjörn under my accommodate jacket, and I get out of the airplane into the Israeli desert and I start walking the F-16s to choice out which blocks I'm going to buy," he said. The Israelis, he added, looked at him, with his wife and daughter in tow, in disbelief. Though photography was forbidden at the base, Polston snapped pictures of their daughter playing with rocks equally rows of surplus F-16s and Mirages sat in the groundwork.

"I got to the point where I was probably too arrogant and cocky for my own proficient," T. R. said. "I thought that I would never be arrested, or that I could buy my way out of it. That's how things work in the rest of the world."

T. R. Wright checking out a fighter jet in France. Courtesy of T. R. Wright

By the summertime of 2017, Jim Reed had been piecing together information about T. R. for three years. He'd practically memorized the web chart he'd taped to the wall to map out T. R.'s schemes. Reed felt a potent sense of urgency. Here, he thought, is a guy who can drive or fly just about whatsoever vehicle, with ties to strange governments, who is known to use satellite phones and pay in greenbacks, and who deals with foreign corporations that would give him funding outside U.Due south. jurisdiction. He wanted to get T. R. into custody before he fled the country, never to be seen again.

The trouble was finding him. He couldn't connect T. R.'s name to whatsoever U.S. backdrop.

Then, late in June, Reed was checking email on his phone when he got a location alert. A cellphone tape showed T. R. in Las Vegas.

Reed chosen the U.S. Marshals Service in Nevada and boarded a plane the next twenty-four hours, expecting to spend a twenty-four hours or two preparing a plan for the abort. Instead, when he walked into the Las Vegas ATF office, local agents and marshals were waiting for him, and 1 asked if he was gear up to pick upward T. R. right and so. "We're gonna go become this guy," one said. No 1, not Reed or whatsoever of the marshals and agents, was going to have whatsoever chances that T. R. would get away.

They drove directly to Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, where Reed knew T. R. stayed from fourth dimension to time, and convened with other marshals and agents who'd arrived earlier in the vestibule. The group had set upwardly a sting beyond anything Reed had ever seen in person, similar a scene out of a seventies action movie: almost a dozen agents, dressed to alloy in, were stationed inside and exterior the hotel. (While Reed does non remember every disguise, T. R. swears they included a janitor with a push broom, a gardener, a tourist with a camera, a man dressed in a full cowboy outfit, and 1 guy "dressed like the Indian from Village People.") Reed waited in the humming hotel lobby, with its giant crystal chandeliers, trying to decide whether he should stay put or ask management to tell him which room T. R. was in.

Fifty-nine floors up, T. R. was about to close a deal based in Israel on which he'd staked 95 percentage of his net worth. "We were in the eleventh hour, nearly to get paid," T. R. said. He was also juggling unrelated business organisation: he had to deliver a bribe for an official of a strange government. He placed $lxx,000 in cash into a Louis Vuitton briefcase, along with the title for a Ferrari, two pistols (he oft carried at least one firearm), and two cellphones, one of them disposable, and took the gold lift downwards.

Reed, still waiting in the lobby, recognized T. R. from the photos he'd been collecting over the years, and his adrenaline shot upwards. T. R. strode beyond the white marble floor and out the door. Reed followed him outside as T. R. took his keys from the valet and stepped toward his auto, a Ferrari.

In an instant, it seemed similar the entire hotel—from the janitor to the gardener—turned toward T. R.

In an instant, it seemed like the entire hotel—from the janitor to the gardener—turned toward T. R. "T. R. Wright!" Reed said. "Nosotros have a federal abort warrant."

T. R. turned and froze, shocked. "What'due south going on?" he asked as agents surrounded him. When Reed took T. R's briefcase and opened information technology, the contents were about laughably cliché, like a Jason Bourne starter kit. T. R. claimed that he was just going out to run some errands—an answer that didn't satisfy anybody.

As T. R. saturday in a temporary holding cell that nighttime, Reed idea that the evidence of insurance fraud was overwhelming enough that T. R. would exist held without bond. "This guy met every standard for federal detention," he said.

The next solar day, in federal court in Las Vegas, Reed took his seat and watched as T. R. marched into court with his high-paid lawyer, Gabriel Grasso, who was one of the lawyers who represented O. J. Simpson in Simpson's infamous 2007 sports memorabilia robbery attempt. He listened as Grasso argued that T. R. Wright was a law-abiding man of affairs who deserved some fourth dimension to go his affairs in order. The judge refused to hear whatever argument to the contrary. Reed never even took the stand. As the judge granted T. R. a conditional release—he would have to pay $150,000, hand over his pilot's license and passport, and clothing an ankle monitor—Reed sat in despair: he was sure he'd never see T. R. over again.

T. R.'south mug shot, following his abort in Las Vegas. Gregg Canton Jail

Though Reed had heard that the U.South. Chaser'south function in Tyler was working around the clock filing motions to ready a hearing equally presently every bit possible, he was nonetheless shocked when T. R. walked into the federal courthouse in Beaumont with his family unit x days afterward. Typically, detention hearings are a simple matter, running twenty minutes or and then. This ane was hours long, filled with bombshell details.

When Reed took the stand, he argued that T. R. was dangerous. He was, Reed said, a person who had worked with the Zetas, a notoriously trigger-happy Mexican cartel. This was an overblown allegation, T. R. told me, since all he did was sell two helicopters, through a law firm in San Antonio, to a customer who just happened to exist in the Zetas, and then, after, purchase one of the helicopters and its logbook back. Reed added that T. R. had one time fired a blank circular at a business partner's head to threaten him. ("Couldn't accept happened that way, as I ever go along a round in the chamber," T. R. countered later.)

And, of course, T. R. was a skilled pilot.

"He'south the nigh farthermost flight risk I've ever seen," Reed concluded.

T. R. pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit arson and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and was sentenced to 65 months in a low-security federal prison in Big Spring. He was also ordered to forfeit his Learjet and to pay $988,554.83 in restitution to various insurance companies (the $70,000 confiscated from him in Las Vegas was applied to that restitution). His associates, including Fosdick, Gordon, and Delima, pleaded guilty presently thereafter. Ardouin was somewhen deported.

Today, in his cell, T. R. is counting down the days until his release, set up for February 2022. He hopes for an early on release for practiced behavior, and he fantasizes about his first weekend out, when he hopes to dine at Ferraro'due south Italian restaurant in Las Vegas. To pass the time, he began helping other inmates pursue their GEDs, and he is taking higher correspondence courses, "the path of to the lowest degree resistance" toward a business administration PhD. "I simply idea, if someone is going to call me a con man or [say] 'you're an asshole,' well—information technology volition be doctor asshole," he said.

T. R. reflects occasionally on his crimes, only he doesn't blame Gordon, Delima, or even Ardouin for giving investigators information. He reserves most of his resentment for Fosdick, who, he says, "sang similar a canary" and ruined him. Not only did he lose his assets, but his family. A few years into T. R.'s sentence, Polston sent a note asking him not to contact her anymore. T. R. was devastated. "I miss her terribly," he said.

Simply what seems to irk him the most is the narrative behind his indictment: he rejects the government's portrayal of him equally a fraudster focused on petty crime. International artillery dealing had become his identity; trashing a few vehicles barely gave him intermission. The boat in Hawaii was an insurance scam he carried out for money, he admits, merely he had culling explanations for the other incidents: the Gulf ditching was a way to promote the waterproof case that protected his iPad in the water, made by a visitor where a friend worked. (T. R.'s friend denied this and said he didn't know T. R. at the time.) The Athens fire was a favor for some other friend. And the Lamborghini, he said, was an honest crash. "Yes, I had around $35 million in fraudulent insurance claims around the earth," he wrote me, slipping into characteristic grandiosity, "only I never did that for the money. It was most always for another reason—but the excitement of ditching a plane or parachuting out of one at night along a beach to let information technology crash on its own in the center of the Atlantic."

Just that was the indicate: to volition into existence something that sounds so outrageous that people would draw it as "unbelievable."

Perhaps, he added, it was a little scrap about the coin.

His stunts may audio implausible to some, he acknowledges. Simply that was the point: to volition into beingness something that sounds so outrageous that people would describe information technology every bit "unbelievable." That was the fun of it the whole fourth dimension, the joy of being able to tell stories that demanded his audience's attention, making them wonder if their lives were peradventure a piddling gray in comparison.

Some days, when he'due south reminiscing in his cell, he tries to look on the vivid side. If he hadn't gotten caught when he did, his business organization only would have escalated toward riskier, more than-dangerous illegal dealings. "I probably would have had a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations] indictment; I probably would've been offered 20 years, gone to trial, and gotten life," he said. "So role of me says, 'Aye, I got screwed in getting five years for footling little insurance fraud.' But at the aforementioned fourth dimension, you lot know, possibly it'southward the best thing that could have happened to me."

Worst example, information technology would make a adept chapter in his book.

This article originally appeared in the September 2020 issue of Texas Monthlywith the headline "Flying Run a risk." Subscribe today .