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The Carpoffs were cornered. Stripped of wealth—and of their lieutenants’ loyalty— they pleaded guilty on January 24, 2020: Carpoff to money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Paulette to money laundering and conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States. (The Carpoffs declined multiple interview requests for this story.) 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.)

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DC Solar’s headquarters were already a paranoid place. But after Jano’s departure, workers noticed more paper-shredding and more closed-door meetings, and were no longer allowed to open mail.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. That’s when a former Roverland customer called with a fateful job offer: How would Jeff like to sell solar panels? From the November 2015 issue: James Fallows on Al Gore’s green-technology investment strategy and the fight against climate change

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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. 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.Of the more than 17,000 generators sold from 2011 to 2018, only about 6,000 would be found to exist. Toughest to manipulate were the people who needed neither money nor approval: the professional dealmakers and investors who’d learned things about DC Solar that could destroy the company. On at least three such people, sources told me, Carpoff tried intimidation—summoning a burly Polish émigré, a reputed loan shark whom Carpoff alternately described as an experienced killer, a prison-camp survivor, and a mafioso. At DC Solar’s 2017 holiday party, an executive named Mark Hughes lionized Carpoff as an epoch-making inventor. “The Thomas Edison of the West Coast,” Hughes said from the ballroom stage. Mitchell B. Feierstein is a British-American investor, banker and writer. He has worked as a columnist for the Daily Mail and works as a columnist for The Independent and the Huffington Post. Feierstein appears regularly as a financial commentator on SKY, BBC and RT’s Keiser Report. In 2012 he published his first book, Planet Ponzi, which gives his perspective of the global credit crisis. 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.”

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This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. When … the bankers come in,” Carpoff explained to a visitor, in a conversation captured by Steve Beal, DC Solar’s videographer, “they see this, and it’s automatically a great first impression.” The “T-Mobile” and ISC leases came together as DC Solar courted a whale. The insurance company Geico was owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate was a seasoned user of tax credits and the fourth-largest company on the Fortune 500. Berger, Hugo (16 March 2012). "Planet Ponzi: Gloomy economic predictions". The National . Retrieved 28 January 2014.verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Inspired by the shop floors at Chip Ganassi Racing, a prestigious racing organization whose NASCAR drivers DC Solar sponsored, Carpoff bought a Zamboni to keep his factory floor gleaming. The lawyer for Milder and Nixon Peabody wrote to me that neither Milder nor the firm were aware of or complicit in any criminal fraud. Nixon Peabody, the lawyer said, served solely as tax counsel, providing opinions based on “an assumed set of facts” that were only later exposed as false or fraudulent. The lawyer added that the investors had access to at least as much information about the company’s performance. Though they deny any wrongdoing, Milder and Nixon Peabody agreed last year to pay the plaintiffs what court filings describe as a “substantial” undisclosed sum, a settlement larger than those paid, to date, by any of DC Solar’s other advisers. After graduation, state officials rapped him for mishandling hazardous materials at a garage he’d opened, his father said. Jeff had a meth addiction, which made things worse, and soon he was selling the drug to pay debts to dealers, he told people. “I was getting phone calls threatening me because he owed money,” Rosalie said. 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.