Carpoff’s machine—a solar generator on wheels—was a sun-fueled alternative. He called it the Solar Eclipse. The design was so simple that it was a wonder no one seemed to have thought of it before. Enjoying a sense of what an associate called “respectability” for the first time in his life, Karmann obligingly produced fictitious reports of who was leasing the units and for how much. (“This guy gets his shit done” was how Carpoff toasted him at one holiday party.) Karmann’s newfound social status was “probably the biggest reason … I was so willing to go along with stuff I should have walked away from,” he told me this past September, by phone from federal prison. Yeah, we know. Food’s expensive. Gas is expensive. You can’t even remember when you last had a wage rise. The job market is dire. But Planet Ponzi is all about taking positive action to help yourself, no matter what conditions are like.

Planet Ponzi: How Politicians and Bankers Stole Your Future Planet Ponzi: How Politicians and Bankers Stole Your Future

The Federal Reserve is charged with preserving the value of the currency, but it has printed trillions of dollars in new money. When inflation is galloping away. And the Fed doesn’t even know where those trillions have disappeared to. That’s insane. We are now partners of the United States,” Dan Briggs, an executive with DC Solar’s charitable arm, who’d once run for a Nevada-state-assembly seat, boasted in an interview for a company holiday video. “We are recognized by the top people in government as being a go-to operator to help them get things done. NFTs are one of the signature fads of this deeply odd late-pandemic moment. At the centre of all the buzz surrounding them is something exceedingly curious: a digital token, generated using a cryptographic protocol of the same sort that underwrites currencies such as bitcoin, certifying the uniqueness of some image or other digital file. Again, what’s being bought and sold on the NFT market isn’t the artwork itself, just a kind of pointer to it, with the buyer’s name inscribed upon it. One reason was that the Solar Eclipse was prone to malfunction. Carpoff had no training in solar engineering. After sketching his idea on a napkin, he’d asked Paulette’s younger brother, Bobby Amato, a former Ford auto mechanic, to build it. “I had no idea how solar worked,” Amato told me. “Good thing they got Google and all that.” A DC Solar lawyer—who court documents indicate is Ari Lauer—deflected by claiming that most lease information was confidential. But Howard refused to be put off. So Ronald Roach, the DC Solar accountant, leaned on a colleague named Rob Karmann.The agent thought at once of a former client named Heidi Gliboff, a well-connected businesswoman in New York. When Gliboff saw schematics for Carpoff’s generators, “fireworks were going out of my head,” Gliboff told me. The idea of making solar mobile was “so unbelievably intriguing” that Gliboff soon offered to market the devices on commission. Again, Carpoff tried selling drugs. He pitched his weed to a medical-marijuana dispensary in Santa Cruz, but was turned away after lab tests found his cannabis to be extremely low-grade—“full of chemicals and shit,” the dispensary’s founder told me. Anderson, Bruce (22 June 2013). "When an economist turns into a winemaker". The Spectator . Retrieved 28 January 2014.

I was born in New York, and I’ve never seen the city so

But they spent much more on themselves: cars; couture; homes in Cabo San Lucas and Las Vegas; a luxury box at the Raiders’ new NFL stadium; extravagant Christmas parties at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, where DC Solar’s workers—just 100 or so at the company’s peak—were treated to private performances by the pop band Sugar Ray, the rapper Pitbull, and the country duo Big & Rich.

When Carpoff got to the lectern, he assessed himself differently. “I’m kind of entrepreneur,” he joked. “More manure than entre.” As workers prepared for the inspection, a DC Solar sales executive named Brian Caffrey noticed that only the first, most visible rows of generators were fully assembled. The generators in the rows behind—some two-thirds of the total—were in various states of incompletion, though you might not notice if you didn’t know what to look for. Caffrey angrily quit, but Carpoff had bigger problems: Almost no one, it turned out, had any real use for his generators.

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Whether the Polish man was a true thug or a wannabe is unclear. But Carpoff was an illusionist: It mattered less whether people were in actual danger—or on the brink of great wealth—than that they believed themselves to be.It’s all insane. And not just insane – it’s wrong. Ethically, financially, and socially wrong. Much of it is also, in my opinion, illegal and should be punished by long terms in jail. Then he told the judge that in 2018—the year of the FBI raid—he’d been on the cusp of finally setting things right. DC Solar had an offer for 30 leases from a sports-marketing company. It had a signed contract to provide 10,000 car chargers to the U.S. Department of Transportation for parking lots and schools across the country. (A DOT spokesperson told me there was never any such contract.) Money didn’t so much change Jeff Carpoff as give him the means to more fully be himself. He credited the American dream. “We are the land of the free,” he told his employees. “We can do anything.”

Planet Ponzi: How the World Got Into This Mess, What Happens Planet Ponzi: How the World Got Into This Mess, What Happens

Power would sometimes suddenly cut out—plunging makeup trailers for Disney’s Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day into darkness, and apparently leaving Pink’s trailer without air-conditioning at an MTV concert. A group of Northern California entrepreneurs who thought the early models might aid disaster relief thought again when plugging in a single hair dryer tripped the breaker. Which of the four it will be depends on choices that are being made right now, not always wisely, by politicians, technocrats and bankers.Things are exploding here at DC Solar,” Carpoff started to say at company-wide meetings. “We’re going through the stratosphere.” Carpoff had lived almost his whole life in the small city of Martinez, on Northern California’s industrial Carquinez Strait—“the place,” he liked to joke, “where the sewer meets the sea.” His childhood home, about a mile from the city’s Shell Oil refinery, overlooked a biker bar, which Carpoff described as a hangout for marauding Hell’s Angels. “We seen things as a kid that a kid just shouldn’t see,” he recalled in footage that DC Solar’s videographer, Steve Beal, played for me. “Fights, stabbings, shootings, prostitution—all kinds of just really crazy stuff.” Jeff’s mother, Rosalie, remembered the bar as at worst a little noisy. But her son was always a storyteller, she told me, prone to embellishment “to make people feel sorry for him or laugh.”