131. The Utopia (Galt's Gulch Chile)

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This episode of Swindled may contain graphic descriptions or audio recordings of disturbing events which may not be suitable for all audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

Hello, I am Maureen Long, founder of Camelot Cancer Care.

We are now suppliers of Formula M, which some are calling the forbidden hope for cancer.

The original version of this formula was driven underground in the early 1980s, back before the internet existed.

It has long been suppressed by the agency we all know as the enforcement arm of the mainstream cancer industry.

Investigative journalists dare not expose these issues since the mainstream media now derives huge advertising revenues from big pharma.

In 1998, Maureen Long's husband, Howard Turney, was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 67.

The cancer had already spread into his clavicle and spine.

Howard's doctor delivered the brutal truth.

Without chemotherapy and radiation, he had roughly 90 days to live.

Even if the treatments were successful, the outlook remained grim.

Howard Turney wasn't completely opposed to chemo, if it truly was the only option to prolong his life.

But before surrendering to the inevitable, he and Maureen wanted to explore alternatives.

Their search led them to the curious story of Mildred Trumbull, an Oklahoma woman who claimed a divine revelation had revealed a cancer cure hidden inside the Easter lily flower.

Trumbull concocted her own extract, christened it Lily Varum, and began peddling it to desperate patients through a web of multi-level marketers.

The operation thrived until a skeptical doctor raised the alarm and the Food and Drug Administration stepped in, dismissing Lily Varum as worthless and dangerous.

Mildred Trumbull was eventually prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license, and when she refused to stop selling her unapproved remedies, she was jailed for contempt.

Not long afterward, according to Maureen Long's research, Mildred died in federal custody under what she described as suspicious circumstances.

Mildred was cremated, Maureen claimed, before her family was even notified.

To Maureen, that was was all the proof she needed.

Mildred wasn't a fraud.

She was a threat.

She had discovered something real, something the pharmaceutical industry couldn't let out into the world.

Because, Maureen presumed, curing cancer was far less profitable than treating it.

But all hope was not lost for Howard.

Legend had it that the Lily Lady, as Mildred Trumbull had become known, had stashed files of the formula in her friends' freezers throughout Tulsa, the very city where Maureen and Howard also happened to live.

Maureen says they managed to track some down, and when they reverse-engineered the mixture, they discovered the so-called miracle had nothing to do with the Easter lily at all.

The secret ingredient was dimethyl sulfoxide, better known as DMSO, a byproduct from wood pulp in the production of paper and the chemical base of Trumbull's potion.

This is Howard Turney.

And we began looking for alternatives.

Found the DMSO.

And to be perfectly candid, I did not, I had no faith in it at all.

DMSO is dimethyl sulfate, whatever.

I am not

very well versed in how to

pronounce it, but I am very well versed in the effects.

After 21 days, we had another PET scan, and the cancer was completely gone, every place in my body.

The effects were truly astonishing.

Our attorney claims DMSO completely eradicated this cancer in 20 days with no hair loss, no loss of appetite, no nausea, no side effects at all, other than smelling delicious.

Patients undergoing treatment will smell like garlic and clams or oysters.

And just so we're clear, there's no scientific evidence that DMSO is an effective treatment for cancer.

This should not be considered an alternative to chemotherapy or radiation.

In fact, the FDA has approved the solvent for only one purpose, treating a rare bladder condition known as interstitial cystitis.

For decades, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, and countless medical experts have been unequivocal.

DMSO is not a treatment or cure for cancer.

Yeah, well, Maureen and Howard aren't medical experts, and they say it is.

They insist DMSO had a 60% success rate in stopping or eliminating most cancers.

and decided it would be irresponsible to keep the discovery to themselves.

So in 2005, Maureen opened Camelot Cancer Care in Tulsa, a clinic where desperate patients traveled across the country to be injected with Maureen's Formula M for $12,000, even though those patients could have easily purchased DMSO themselves over the counter at any health food store and died just the same.

And it wasn't just DMSO.

Maureen Long, not medically licensed in any way, was also pushing other so-called cancer cures.

Chief among them, Leotril, better known as amygdalin or vitamin B17, a compound extracted from apricot in peach pits, completely ineffective against cancer and was illegal to obtain and administer because it can release fatal doses of cyanide into the bloodstream.

Maureen Long may not have believed she was endangering anyone, but she knew she was breaking the law and she kept doing it for years.

She warned patients to stay quiet about the procedures, joking that the drug she used hadn't been approved by the, quote, federal death administration.

In April 2013, Maureen even told one man she hoped he wasn't recording their conversation because she could be arrested.

Turns out that man was recording because he was an undercover FDA agent.

Its front door is closed and locked.

Camelot Cancer Care was shut down yesterday by the FDA and FBI.

Sources tell us the investigation stems from the facility's use of leotril, a natural treatment developed in the 1950s.

The FDA has banned the shipment of the product as it can lead to cyanide poisoning.

What I want to say to my patients is there is plenty of hard evidence that we have saved many, many lives.

There was never any intentional wrongdoing on our part.

Never, never.

Camelot Cancer Care never reopened after the FDA raid.

But Maureen Long was never charged, so she kept practicing quietly.

No clinic, no paperwork, no oversight.

Just a bathtub in her house where she mixed the drugs herself, and a string of cheap motel rooms in South Tulsa where patients came looking for hope.

About 18 months later, Maureen Long was back on the federal radar.

The owner of Camelot, Maureen Long, is in trouble again after one of her patients died last Saturday.

In November 2014, 71-year-old Karen Klokener left Florida for Oklahoma, banking on a cure.

Her doctor estimated that she had six months to live after the liver cancer diagnosis.

Under the care of Maureen Long, Karen lasted just two weeks.

The medical examiner determined her death was the result of underlying health conditions aggravated by dimethyl sulfoxide, the very chemical Long had promised could save her life.

A month later, in an unrelated investigation, a federal grand jury in Kansas indicted 64-year-old Maureen Long on 13 counts of wire fraud.

Prosecutors alleged that Camelot Cancer Care had preyed on desperate cancer patients, charging charging them thousands for infusions of drugs that were misbranded, unapproved, and utterly ineffective.

Authorities seized three properties, two bank accounts, and other assets, totaling more than $1.7 million.

As for Maureen Long herself, she had vanished, at least for the time being.

Greetings, fellow cancer fighters.

This message is coming to you from an undisclosed location far south of the U.S.

border.

I am Maureen Long, a target of an FDA witch hunt.

Five years later, in 2019, Maureen resurfaced online.

She was now touting Holy Grail Health, her new and improved operation based somewhere near Cancun, Mexico, where she peddled human growth hormone treatments and of course DMSO as natural chemotherapy.

Free, she claimed, from the United States' onerous regulations and political persecution.

Maureen Long insisted she wasn't hiding from prosecution either.

She claimed the case against her had been dismissed years earlier, though she admitted she was reluctant to return to the States in case it was revived.

Still, she hinted, that could always change.

I am often asked if I will ever return to the United States.

The answer to that is I may indeed, now that the swamp is being drained of all the corruption.

If that's not divorced from reality enough for you, don't worry.

We're just getting started.

But there's a bizarre twist to long story.

She and her now deceased husband had plans to charter their own country in the Caribbean called the Principality of New Utopia.

In the warm blue Caribbean, a 30-minute flight from Honduras is one man's vision of paradise.

Where you see only water, he dreams of this.

He calls it New Utopia and has declared himself its ruler.

Howard Turney, a lifelong entrepreneur in Oklahoma, had tried his hand at everything.

Restaurants, cryogenics, shrimp farming.

At one point, he was selling naming rights to the stars in the sky.

It took me a few years to realize that I had more intelligence than the average person and more imagination, he once bragged, convinced that success was inevitable.

And he was right.

In the early 90s, Turney, who claimed to be a member of the high IQ society Mensa and never missed an opportunity to remind people, finally stumbled upon a promising venture.

At 59, overweight, fatigued, and aging, he came across a study in which World War II veterans had been injected with human growth hormone to treat similar issues.

At the time, HGH was only being used to treat dwarfism, but Howard Turney saw a fountain of youth.

He became more convinced after trying it for himself and reportedly losing 14% of his body fat.

From that point on, Howard Turney, a man with no medical training, became one of the loudest voices in the burgeoning anti-aging movement.

Soon the self-styled father of human growth hormone was pioneering and promoting the use of HGH far beyond the medical establishment's comfort zone.

But that didn't stop him from becoming a media fixture, appearing on television, radio, and traveling the world to promote the miracle drug and his recently established network of anti-aging clinics across the United States.

The government wasn't exactly thrilled about his approach.

So Howard Turney headed south to escape the judgmental eye of Uncle Sam.

In February 1993, he opened a longevity spa called the El Dorado Rejuvenation Clinic in Playa del Carmen.

But it wasn't long before the Mexican government also began meddling in his affairs.

The clinic was shuttered in 1994.

But Howard Turney would not be deterred.

As regulations mounted in the States and elsewhere, so did Turney's frustrations.

Bureaucrats were strangling his ability to make a living.

Endless rules in the name of safety, endless forms, endless taxes.

My God, the taxes.

What a colossal waste of money.

Turney foamed at the mouth at the thought of subsidizing a candy bar for a child whose mother hadn't worked hard enough.

How dare you experience even the slightest bit of undeserved joy on his dime?

Howard Turney had no obligation to society.

He was sick of the welfare state.

Sick of these fucking moochers filling their bellies on the brilliance of achievers like him.

So in 1997, Terney did what any reasonable man would do.

He decided to start his own country.

New Utopia is in this area here.

Here is Grand Cayman,

Cuba, Jamaica.

This is Honduras, Belize, the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.

So we're in the middle of everything in international waters.

The principality of New Utopia was to rise from a 285-square-mile reef on the Mysteriosa Bank, an uninhabited stretch of the northern Caribbean between the Cayman Islands and Honduras.

Howard Turney claimed he discovered the site while poring over maps for a never-realized submarine tour business.

From what he gathered, the area was in international waters and belonged to no one in particular.

So naturally, Turney decided to claim it for himself.

I looked all over the world for an island that wasn't claimed by any other country.

And there is no such animal every island is claimed by some country so i decided since i knew of this reef to build a venice of the caribbean and to do this we have to build the buildings with a foundation which are pilings that go down through the water to the rock

there was just one minor problem the reef was 50 feet underwater permanently submerged beneath the waves But Terney insisted that was no obstacle.

His solution was to build a series of massive concrete platforms on stilts.

No more complicated than building a freeway overpass, he surmised, as if he had ever done such a thing before.

On top of this artificial foundation, a glittering city would rise, styled after traditional South American and Caribbean architecture.

The plans included an airport, docking facilities for cargo and cruise ships, marinas for yachts, offices, shops, parks, recreational spaces, and family housing.

Layered onto that were hotels, casinos, and even a theater.

Cars would be banned to keep the air pure, replaced with canals, water taxis, and gondolas.

It would be the Venice of the Caribbean, floating atop an invisible reef.

All the streets will be waterways, just as they are in Venice.

They will have gondolas and water taxis instead of automobiles.

The tourism, insurance, and banking industries would drive the economy, Turney said.

He envisioned New Utopia as an ultra-modern, libertarian city-state based on the political and philosophical principles expounded by Ayn Rand, Napoleon Hill, and Robert Heinlein.

The world's first true experiment in full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism.

No income taxes, no corporate taxes, absolutely no welfare system, and only minimal regulation.

Probably not even a corral to return your shopping cart.

It will be the ultimate tax heaven, Turney proclaimed.

New Utopia will out-Cayman the Caymans, he promised.

There's no property tax, there's no income tax, there's no sales tax, there's no tax on cigarettes or liquor or automobiles or anything else.

Education, which would be funded somehow, was equally as ambitious.

The country would boast the best universities in the world, Howard announced, with programs dedicated to colonizing the oceans and eventually outer space.

Even the children of New Utopia would be steeped in free market dogma, shuffling through the halls of institutions like Alan Greenspan Middle School.

But at the heart of New Utopia would be its hospital, not just any hospital, but the finest in the world, which would include a state-of-the-art anti-aging center dedicated entirely to longevity treatments and age reversal, where any therapy was fair game, so long as patient and doctor agreed.

It won't be everyone's idea of utopia, but it's my idea of utopia, Howard Turney boasted.

I intend to live another hundred years.

Cool.

What about food?

Yeah, that'd probably have to be imported.

Water?

That's easy.

They would just desalinate the ocean.

Okay, and who's in charge of making these decisions?

The Prince, of course, and his 10-member appointed board of governors, which would consist of only experts in their chosen fields.

To me, it seems that politicians are directly responsible for the intrusiveness of government.

Every politician is elected on the platform of change.

The city, the county, the state, the federal, everyone is going to make change or he wouldn't be elected.

If it wasn't for that, you'd leave the fellow who's already there.

So, how do you do that?

You have to form a country, then you have to have a type of government that will work.

So, I thought that the ideal thing was a monarchy with a constitution to protect the people from abuse and to have stability.

A constitutional monarchy, huh?

Makes sense, I guess.

After all, it's not like there's any historical record of kings, queens, or princes abusing their subjects.

So who would wear the crown in New Utopia, anyway?

None other than a man named Lazarus Long, formerly known as Howard Tearney.

He legally named himself after the character in Robert Heinlein's science fiction novels, a rugged individualist, skilled in every survival art, suspicious of government and openly hostile to altruism.

Whenever either grew too intrusive, Heinlein's Lazarus Long would simply pack up and leave, whether it meant another city, another country, or another planet.

Oh, and he was at least 2,000 years old.

Is something funny?

His Highness Lazarus Long would assure you, this was no joke.

New Utopia had a sprawling hundred-page website, complete with artist renderings, a constitution, and obligatory quotes from Ayn Rand.

Passports were printed, currency was minted, and Prince Lazarus had even declared the birth of his nation in a letter to the United Nations.

He briefly considered joining that organization until he discovered they had a refugee policy.

Gross.

He also began negotiating a treaty with Honduras, which uh had already claimed the so-called Utopia reef years ago as part of its exclusive economic zone.

A minor setback to say the least.

Most of this paperwork was handled at New Utopia's embassy that shared an address with the Tulsa home where Lazarus Long lived with his wife, Mary Alice Valentine, and her other husband Steve.

It was some sort of thrupple arrangement or something for a while.

I don't know.

Don't ask.

Mary had a dark past.

In the 80s, she had served time in prison for the illegal distribution of controlled substances.

She jumped at the chance to reinvent herself as Princess Maureen Long, although she would later deny having any involvement.

If you want a brief statement on that, it was not my doing.

My husband was 81 years old and a bit of an eccentric character.

I don't know anything about websites or have any control over them.

I was basically along for the ride.

Maureen wasn't the only one along for the ride.

Building a new country is expensive, and Lazarus Long didn't have the $50 billion that an architect estimated it would take.

To fill the gap, Turney began selling founder shares in the project.

Investors were told they weren't just buying into a country, they were buying into nobility.

Early backers would be recognized as new utopia's aristocracy, complete with noble titles.

The scheme promised enormous returns once the micro-nation was established.

Investors were offered government-style five-year bonds at 9.5%

interest, and Turney claimed that currency investments in New Utopia could yield returns of up to 200%.

Citizenship, he said, would be reserved for like-minded libertarians or anyone willing to part with at least $1,500.

Among those who signed up were a British business consultant, a Tulsa attorney, and a Texarkana physician named Joseph Greenspan, who before taking his position as new Utopia's health minister killed himself after he was criminally charged for administering dinitrophenol, a poison, to cancer patients.

Tulsa attorney Mike Fairchild was tapped to be the country's attorney general.

I thought it was the craziest, the wildest idea I'd ever heard, but

once you hear it all, it really seems to make sense on every level.

It's a doable idea.

Oh, it was more than doable, Prince Lazarus declared.

It was happening.

The citizenry was growing fast, he said.

By 1998, more than 600 people had signed up, and the first phase of development was scheduled to be completed by September 1999, in time for the nation's first birthday celebration that December.

When this construction begins, there will be a mob of people, Lazarus said, acknowledging the growing skepticism.

I have thousands of people out there waiting, you see.

This guy is wacky.

Why should they trust you?

They shouldn't.

They should not.

They should not until they see it coming out of the water.

All right.

That skepticism was only fueled by Prince Lazarus's royal whims.

As the Tulsa World's David Arnett put it, quote, the underlying problem is that Prince Lazarus has little, if any, integrity or moral character.

He will promise anything to anyone to accomplish his goal, and yet, for some strange reason, he continues to insist that his dreams have credibility.

And credibility was in short supply.

Every few weeks, weeks, the names changed.

First the architect, then the attorney general.

The current crew was never the same as the week before.

The plans shifted constantly.

Every month, another supposed major investor was about to swoop in with funding.

None ever did.

What Lazarus Long excelled at wasn't construction, but manipulation, Arnett noted.

His entire focus narrowed to working the phones and faxes.

spinning the media like a professional.

He was, by most accounts, a great interview, whether it was the New York Times, the Independent of London, or even Howard Stern.

With each story, he expected the exposure would lure more people to send money, and some did.

The strategy was simple.

Draw just enough cash from would-be citizens to cover the rent, and hoped the attention would eventually attract the big money that could make it a reality and ultimately distract from what Lazarus Long's concrete utopia actually was.

A scam.

That's according to the U.S.

Securities and Exchange Commission, which investigated new utopia in April 1999.

The SEC found no legitimate development plans, no financing, and no construction, just a fantasy used in an attempt to sell $350 million worth of unregistered securities.

This is nothing more than a fantasy island fraud.

Fortunately, Lazarus was only able to raise $24,000 from New Utopia's bond sales before it was shut down.

A permanent injunction requiring the prince to pay back that amount was waived based on his inability to pay.

However, Lazarus was forced to remove all references to bonds and investments from the New Utopia website.

We had to then take down our whole website and change it.

It's a damn witch hunt, Lazarus told the Tulsa World.

They're trying to make a big-name case of this because we've had so much publicity.

We haven't done anything wrong.

It was the exact kind of heavy-handed government interference that had motivated him to create New Utopia in the first place.

Never backing down, Lazarus vowed to continue the project by soliciting pledges instead of investments.

And that's precisely what he did, until April 26, 2012, when after reportedly beating cancer, a stroke claimed Lazarus Long's life at the age of 81.

But New Utopia did not die with him.

According to the country's constitution, the throne was to be inherited by the descendants of the monarch.

And in the months following her husband's death, Princess Maureen posted tributes recalling his final emails and announcing plans for his ashes to be scattered in New Utopia's waters.

Together, Prince John, Lazarus' son, and myself, along with New Utopia's loyal principals, ministers, and members of the Board of Governors, will persevere until our dream of the new state becomes a reality.

In reality, the idea for the Principality of New Utopia was quietly discontinued and abandoned.

The website remains online, but hasn't been updated in years.

Princess Maureen Long, as we know, found freedom in Mexico.

So at this point, it's safe to assume new utopia is never going to happen.

It can take its rightful place on the scrap heap of failed libertarian fantasies and fraudulent micro-state paradises that include Operation Atlantis, the Republic of Minerva, the Kingdom of Enon Keo, Oceana, Glenbeck's Independence USA, and sitting right on top of that pile, Perhaps the most infamous of them all, is Galtz Galch Chile, a self-sustaining hyper-capitalist sanctuary founded by a group of shady characters who convinced themselves they would live and work together in perfect harmony.

Unsurprisingly, Galtz Gulch became exactly what its namesake novel, Atlas Shrugged, warned against.

A cautionary tale of greed, betrayal, and failed ideology.

On this episode of Swindled.

They bribed government officials to find accounting for violations of the things they law earlierly unethical.

They hated a plague against taxpayer dollars that were wasted.

Tens

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Have you noticed that as everything around you seems to decline, one thing still grows?

It is the power of your rulers.

None of their plans and directives have solved your problems or made your life better.

The only only result has been their increased control over you at the cost of your freedom.

Do you know why?

You gave them the power.

They said if you worked for yourself and your family, that you were selfish and uncaring.

And they made you feel ashamed.

They denounced the leaders of industry as greedy exploiters, and again, You agreed.

And then you ask, why did they and others like them disappear?

When they recognized the honor they deserved, they rebelled against the guilt you wanted them to feel for their success.

You counted on them to keep producing, to keep thinking, even as you denounced them as selfish.

I showed them they were being punished for their own virtues, and I showed them how evil that is.

They have joined me to freely produce, trade, cooperate, and compete in a place where the rights of all are protected.

Do not try to find us.

Do not try to bargain for our return.

Get out of our way.

This is John Galt speaking.

Picture this.

It's the day after tomorrow.

You wake to discover that the country's brightest minds, the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the visionaries, have begun to vanish one by one.

Hardly anyone notices at first, but as the years slip by, their absence hollows out the world around you.

The factories stall, the railroads rust, the lights lights flicker and die.

Within a decade, the slow unraveling has become a freefall and a catastrophe.

And now, as you peer out your window, the streets are filled with dystopian chaos.

For years, neither the general public nor the government understood why it happened until a figure emerges from the shadows.

He said his name is John Galt.

He claimed he had built a refuge for these so-called Men of the Mind, a hidden valley in the Rockies, free of regulation, taxes, wars, and beggars.

A utopia, he said, where every act of labor is voluntary, every exchange is honest, and every person farms their own food, patches their own roof, and answers to no one but themselves.

A world of competence, abundance, and freedom, sealed off from the decay outside.

They called it Galt's Gulch.

And you, dear parasite, are not invited.

And don't bother looking for it because you won't find it.

John Galt built a perpetual motion motor using static electricity from the atmosphere that powered some kind of refractor screen cloaking device that camouflaged paradise as nothing more than a barren mountainside.

So good luck out there.

Enjoy your gray stew and ration coupons.

Maybe now you'll understand just how much the world really needs an executive suite.

Spoiler alert.

That's the premise of Ayn Rand's 1200-page novel, Atlas Shrugged.

When it hit shelves in 1957, Los Angeles Times critic Robert R.

Kirsch didn't mince words.

It is probably the worst piece of large fiction written since Miss Rand's equally weighty, The Fountainhead.

Another reviewer, Helen Woodward at the Saturday Review, wrote about Rand in her book, She sets up one of the finest assortments of straw men ever demolished in print, and she cannot refrain from making her points over and over.

Atlas Shrugged truly is an exhausting read, primarily because the characters, including protagonist John Galt, launch into 60-page monologues that serve as a megaphone for Ayn Rand's personal philosophical ideology.

Objectivism, the term the author coined herself, basically boils down to facts don't care about your feelings, selfishness is moral, government is bad, capitalism is good when it's pure.

And while Atlas Shrugged might have been widely panned by critics, the book built a devoted fanbase in the decades that followed.

By the early 70s, the newly formed Libertarian Party had practically adopted the fairy tale as scripture.

Rand's epic was a dramatic, moralized defense of their worldview.

Individualism, free markets, and the sanctity of self-interest, paired with a dire warning about what they believed to be the greatest threat facing the world, government overreach masquerading as being in the best interest of the public good.

Rand opposed the very idea that people are morally obligated to live for others and advocated for dismantling every form of collectivism from public education to entitlement programs.

And yet, on her deathbed with lung cancer, she quietly enrolled in Medicare and Social Security under her married name, Ayn O'Connor.

Her defenders insisted she was simply reclaiming what the government had forced her to pay in, as if that isn't how the entire collectivist system is designed to work.

Hypocrite or not, Ayn Rand's influence outlived her.

The roster of libertarian and conservative politicians who pretend to have slogged through that book and swear allegiance to its author keeps getting longer, particularly among men with two first names.

Ron Paul built his career on libertarian ideals.

His son Rand Paul, formerly known as Randy, also admits to being a big fan but insists he didn't rename himself after Ayn Rand when it became politically convenient.

Yeah, okay.

Former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan once claimed without a hint of irony that Atlas Shrugged, a book warning about the dangers of an authoritarian government was, quote, the reason I got involved in public service, until his Christian handlers reminded him that Ayn Rand was an atheist whose magnum opus celebrates an adulterous affair, so he never mentioned her again.

More recently, current Vice President J.D.

Vance paraded a German shepherd named Atlas around on the 2024 campaign trail as an ode to small government before supporting the deployment of federal military forces for domestic policing.

And even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has made his admiration evident, reportedly requiring his clerks to read both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, novels he holds in nearly the same esteem as the collected works from his other favorite artist, Long Dong Silver.

Over the years, going galt has become a catchphrase among aggrieved taxpayers, especially during the Obama years when healthcare reform and modest tax hikes were treated as the first steps toward a communist takeover.

The fantasy has always remained the same, self-interest and unfettered capitalism, standing tall in some hidden mountain valley while the rest of society begs for scraps.

Just be aware, the self-anointed best and brightest among us are always standing at attention, ready to leave the rest of us behind, including this guy.

This is Jeff Berwick.

Long before he declared himself a freedom fighter, he claimed the title of Canada's second best rapper.

That's according to him.

After coming to his senses, the Edmonton-born Berwick reinvented himself as an entrepreneur.

In 1994, at just 24 years old, he launched Stockhouse.com from his living room.

Jeff says it grew into Canada's largest financial and investment news site before it all came crashing down during the dot-com bubble burst of 2000.

After limping along for a few more more years, Jeff finally sold off what remained of Stockhouse in 2002.

With the wreckage behind him, he spent the next few years traveling the globe, visiting over 100 countries, trying to understand the way the world works.

The tech crash had shattered every previously held belief he had about economics, free trade, and even government.

How does one build something so successful just to lose it all without the invisible hand knocking it over?

After Stockhouse, what I realized was I needed to understand what happened because I started this company from so small, it grew up so big, and then it collapsed all within a matter of months.

Jeff Berwick immersed himself in libertarian thought and Austrian economics, eventually drifting to its most uncompromising edge, anarcho-capitalism.

Traditional libertarians agree on the need for a minimal state to handle courts, policing, and defense.

Anarcho-capitalists go further.

insisting the entire public sector should be dismantled, every function of government abolished or privatized.

Anyone who wants to see a very free world does not want government, Jeff preaches.

My name is Jeff Berwick, and I am an anarchist.

Anarchism is the only ethical and the most beautiful way to live.

Jeff Berwick found it difficult to reconcile being an anarchist while living in Canada.

After crashing a sailboat off the coast of El Salvador, and losing most of his material possessions, he decided to become a borderless citizen of the world.

I don't think of myself

Yeah, okay, bro.

Just say you don't want to pay taxes because that's really the gist of it.

Jeff griped about having to send half of his earnings to the great white north simply for the privilege of being born and residing there and being educated there and taking advantage of everything else it has to offer.

It just wasn't fair.

So enough was enough.

Jeff discovered that if he permanently resided somewhere like the Dominican Republic, for instance, he would pay zero taxes if his income was technically earned abroad.

This was useful information, valuable information that others with a similar individualistic view of the world might be interested in learning.

So Jeff Berwick packaged it, monetized it, and launched a financial newsletter and blog called The Dollar Vigilante.

What I really write about is about freedom.

It's about improving your life.

It's about

being free.

It's about international living, expatriating,

internationalizing your assets, and things of that nature to help people to get outside of the paradigm of what they're taught and what they're told to do in schools and by the media.

There's a much bigger world out there and that's what I try to help people to understand.

The Dollar Vigilante, or TDV, exists to cover every facet of the looming collapse of the global financial system.

equipping readers to prepare and navigate what lies ahead.

As the website explains, we shine light on the economic and moral implications of many government interventions in order to help you make the moves that best protect you from the theft of government intervention, both in the markets as well as with your own finances.

Founder Jeff Berwick left little room for doubt about his expectations.

A systemic unraveling was not just possible, but inevitable.

massive regulation, huge taxes.

The US dollar won't even exist 10 years from now.

I think Canada is going to have a major collapse in the next 12 to 24 months.

This is all going to happen in the next few years and no one could really predict how it's going to happen or what will happen when it happens, but it's going to be

world-changing event that we have to now just get as far away from the U.S.

and from the Western world because this collapse is going to be messy.

Holy shit.

What are we supposed to do?

Stock up on gold, buy Bitcoin, get a second passport?

Yes.

Unlucky for its followers, TDB claimed to have the expertise to guide them through every step.

From self-directed IRAs and offshore company formation to banking strategies and, of course, passports.

The group positioned itself as a one-stop shop for financial escape plans.

In fact, demand for TDV's passport services grew so intense that Jeff Berwick brought in this man for reinforcement.

I'm Ken Johnson.

I was born in Michigan, grew up in Minnesota, spent about, oh, geez, 15 years in California.

My background is in real estate, the environmental industry, and also the freedom industry.

Kenneth Dale Johnson, an expert in the freedom industry, joined forces with Jeff Berwick and the Dollar Vigilante in the spring of 2012.

The two first crossed paths at a conference in Palm Springs where Johnson confidently boasted that he could sell anything to anyone.

His resume, littered with questionable ventures, seemed to prove him correct.

Ken Johnson sold real estate in California until the 2008 collapse wiped that career off the map.

From there, he pivoted into alternative medicine, hawking debunked water ionizers and anti-aging gimmicks that apparently didn't work.

Because before long, according to TDV's website, a noticeably aged Ken Johnson went went on to, quote, educate the public on the importance of viable and effective environmental products while never preaching the facade that many refer to as global warming.

Translation.

Ken worked for a company called Enviro Energies, peddling residential wind turbines that turned out to be an outright scam.

Ask Jay Leno.

The scheme was so brazen that it could have landed the company's owner, Jim Rowan, behind bars on fraud charges.

if only he hadn't fled to Canada, where endless extradition delays kept him out of prison.

Ken Johnson, a recent convert to libertarianism, dodged criminal charges but found himself unemployed.

He met Jeff Berwick at an opportune time.

The dollar vigilante had virtually no marketing operation and desperately needed someone to staff the passport booth on the Freedom Conference circuit.

Apparently, that's a real thing and the perfect place to reel in more free spirits.

TDV was eager to sell them on the necessity of second citizenships, and Ken seemed like the type of guy who could close a deal.

The pending collapse which we see coming, the potential economic downfall of the states or the western states, it is imperative to have a second passport to retain your physical and financial freedoms.

It doesn't mean you have to

mean you have to renounce or do anything unpatriotic.

It's just a great way to ensure that your assets and your and your asses are covered.

At one of these Liberty conferences, the seeds were planted for something beautiful.

In July 2012 at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, Ken Johnson was operating the booth promoting passports and offshore bank accounts when he was connected to a man with a plan.

Anyway, I'm talking to this guy and he's like, hey, you looking for land and yada, yada, yada.

And I was in the real estate business in California.

I said, yeah.

And I had to talk to Berwick and I said, hey, I think it'd be cool to start a do a community with organic food and renewable energy and all that kind of stuff.

So I

and that, and so Coban calls me five minutes later.

The Coban Ken referenced was John Coban, an American ex-Pat who relocated his family to Chile in 1996, attributing the move to what he saw as increasing political correctness, declining family values, and high taxes in the United States.

Coben moved back to South Carolina in the early 2000s and ran for Congress as a libertarian in 2006.

He was defeated in a landslide when, just days before the election, he was arrested for choking some family values into his soon-to-be ex-wife.

The domestic violence charges were ultimately dropped, and John Coban soon resettled in Chile for good.

Some suggest to avoid paying child support to the mothers of his seven children.

In 2015, he formally renounced his American citizenship.

Over the years, Coban built a career as a professor of economics and public policy at several Chilean universities, publishing numerous books on those subjects.

filtered through his libertarian and Christian worldview.

He also became a familiar voice on Chilean radio, hosting a popular program where he championed white supremacist rhetoric and the supposed virtues of living in a country that, in his view, respected individual liberty.

If you're a libertarian, if you want to have a freer life,

you have several choices,

and none of them include basically staying in the northern hemisphere outside of being on certain islands.

But Chile is a place where you can go that is not free of problems, but at least you can go and live in Chile, and it's a freer, saner place than where you are right now.

It's a place where taxes are vastly lower.

It's a place where your personal and your individual liberty is much greater in most things.

You

also have

freer markets in Chile on things like Social Security, which is privatized, roadways between cities, which are private toll roads rather than run by the government, and many other things.

That's right.

For John Coban, true freedom came with toll booths.

True freedom meant low taxes.

True freedom meant traditional gender roles and strict drug laws.

Okay, Chile wasn't perfect, but it was freer than the states, in his opinion.

At least for now, Chile had just survived its first female president, who rolled out socialist-leaning reforms in healthcare, education, and gender equality.

To Coban, this was a warning shot, a glimpse of regimes yet to come.

So he set about preparing the practical steps he believed were necessary to survive them.

The centerpiece of the plan was to follow John Gaut's lead.

John Coban wanted to create a libertarian utopia in Chile, a place where like-minded individuals could escape the oppressive forces Ayn Rand wrote about.

A self-sustainable free market refuge from the inevitable economic, social, and political collapse of the Western world.

But, you know, still within reasonable proximity to a major city and international airport with high-speed internet, please.

John Coban had already found the perfect spot.

A vast stretch of land called El Peñon, 11,000 acres in central Chile, situated an hour west of Santiago and an hour east of the Pacific Ocean.

It was surrounded by natural beauty just waiting to be colonized.

Coban already had a name set in stone.

Galtz, Galtz, Chile.

A combination of words almost impossible for local Spanish speakers to pronounce.

Good.

They weren't invited anyway.

The land would be parceled out into 3,000 separate residential lots reserved for expatriates who were experts in their fields, hopefully.

Coben envisioned golf courses, artificial lakes, hotels, organic farms, and gardens, all of which would provide passive income for the community to the tune of millions of dollars per year.

Galtzkos Chile would practically pay for itself.

The only problem, John Coben would never be able to afford the $1.5 million price tag on his own.

He would have to entice investors and pre-sell the lots.

That's where Jeff Berwick comes in.

Coben had heard through the libertarian grapevine that Berwick had expressed interest in a similar concept.

And as a libertarian influencer, the dollar vigilante had access to a large audience of potential buyers.

So John Coban got in touch and presented his business plan.

And within a month, Jeff Berwick and Ken Johnson were on a plane to Chile for a tour of the property.

Berwick recounted that visit on his blog.

Quote, we drove past some beautiful streams as horses and cows grazed along the way and rabbits skittered to and fro.

And a few minutes later, we were in the middle of what appeared to be a virtually untouched valley, completely enveloped by pristine mountains, rugged terrain, rolling hills, and endless vistas.

My God, this is Galtz Gulch, I said breathlessly.

It was settled.

Jeff Berwick and Ken Johnson struck a deal with John Coben and his business partner, Herman Isaguera, to acquire the land that would become Galtz-Galtz Chile.

Since Coban already lived in the area, the dollar-vigilante duo granted him power of attorney to establish a real estate holding company and open a bank account on their behalf.

For their trouble, Coban and Isaguera would pocket a $250,000 finder's fee and secure a 20% stake in the venture.

The remaining 80% would be split between Berwick and Johnson, who, armed with his real estate background, was named managing partner of the development.

Jeff Berwick would take on the task of reeling in investors, as discussed.

The group closed on the El Penyon property in September 2012 for just under $1.2 million.

By November, they had already raised $1.7 million from a private offering to a handful of early backers dubbed the Founders Club.

These investors were promised first pick of the largest slots, along with a 1% stake in GGC.

And to make the offer irresistible, the founders were guaranteed a full return of their investment within three years, meaning their land would effectively cost them nothing.

It was really happening.

Galtz Golch Chile was taking shape faster than anyone imagined.

The land, the plan, the investors.

Everything looked picture-perfect.

Glossy brochures were already headed to the printer, ready to sell the dream to the general public.

But by year's end, the past and stories of everyone involved would diverge, and the dream of Galtz Gulch would begin its spiral into betrayal, lawsuits, and ruin.

Galtz Gulch Chile is a farming community in central Chile, and it's billing itself as the world's first libertarian real estate project to accept bitcoins, that virtual currency that is soaring to new heights.

We have ever-increasing virtual currency being used to purchase ever-increasing in-value tracts of land.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Yeah, this evolved all organically.

We've been talking about what's going on.

There's a lot of people who understand what we're talking about.

Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged, which talked about Galtzkolch.

And what happened in Atlas Shrugged was

a lot of the world became socialist, communist, fascist, and all the productive people went to one place and they just tried to escape it all.

And we've actually created that vision vision of Ayn Rand in Chile.

Ayn Rand's vision of Galtz Gulch has become reality as of today.

That was the triumphant headline Jeff Berwick splashed across the dollar vigilante on May 27, 2013, the first public announcement of Galtz Gulch Chile and the official kickoff of the pre-sale.

Prospective buyers had three options, a one and a quarter acre lot for $48,500, a two and a half acre lot for $92,500, or a five-acre spread for $145,000.

And these were just the phase one prices, slashed by 40% as a limited time offer.

The message was clear.

Act fast or miss out.

According to Berwick, the demand was overwhelming.

Yeah, there must be lots and you can build a house on them.

And actually, just today, we just announced that we're just starting to sell locks now.

This is like buying a Napa Valley or Santa Barbara 50 years ago, but with all of today's modern amenities amenities and none of the modern-day headaches, Jeff exclaimed, which is exactly what every libertarian wants to hear, that their grand utopia is just like California.

That sounds a little like a commune, though.

You could call it a commune, but it won't be a communist commune.

It'll be a freedom commune.

I don't know, wrote the ideological diehards, discussing the developments recently revealed details on ronpaulforums.com.

They plan to share food and water.

Shouldn't everyone be free to dig their own wells and grow their own crops?

There's a maid service, hired farmers and laborers.

It'll remain under Chilean rule, and they're promoting it to the public.

Have any of the people behind this actually read?

Atlas shrugged.

Fortunately, not everyone who heard about GGC was fond of books.

Dozens of true believers lined up to put money down, eager to preserve their slice of utopia.

Some were so convinced they emptied their retirement accounts, betting their futures on the promise of freedom in the Chilean countryside.

And their futures were bright.

But no one's prospects looked brighter than the four men behind Galt Gold's Chile, Berwick, Johnson, Coban, and Isiguera.

Their projections promised $200 million in land sales alone, not counting the tens of millions in yearly operating profits that were supposed to follow.

Even after splitting it up according to their agreement, each stood to walk away with a fortune.

At least, that was the plan.

Unless something had changed.

Six months earlier, on November 14th, 2012, GGC held a shareholders meeting where, according to the minutes, the four partners agreed to dissolve both the corporation and the partnership.

A new organization was formed without John Coben and Armon Izagera.

Jeff Berwick and Ken Johnson, still 50-50 partners, now retained 100% control.

But John Coban told a different story.

He claimed the so-called meeting never happened at all, and that Berwick and Johnson still owed him the finder's fee they had no intention of paying.

Instead, he said, they conspired to cut him and his partner out of the project entirely, stealing his idea, business plan, and even the name Galch Gulch from him in the process.

Quote, they are despicable scoundrels.

Jeff Berwick, who remained hands-off primarily, aside from the marketing, was mainly in the dark.

He assumed that Ken Johnson, who already lived full-time on the property, was handling business as usual and continued to promote Galtzcoat's Chile with confidence.

That changed in June 2013, just a month after the public launch, when Jeff received a troubling email from an investor.

The message revealed that Ken Johnson had committed to purchasing a neighboring property for nearly $7 million.

This was news to Berwick.

and as an equal partner in the company, he was shocked that Ken would do such a thing without telling him.

Was it true?

Ken admitted it was.

But, he argued, it was necessary.

El Penyon sat inside an environmentally protected zone, meaning it could only be subdivided into a dozen large parcels instead of the 3,000 small lots they had promised investors.

Worse, the land didn't have nearly enough water to sustain the development, let alone the golf courses and artificial lakes.

And even if it did, no one had filed the paperwork to secure the rights.

Johnson blamed Coban for misleading them and vowed to even the score in court.

With GGC's original vision in jeopardy, Johnson claimed the project had no choice but to expand.

He first tried to cut deals with neighboring landowners, offering the share profits in exchange for use of their property, but found no takers.

Eventually, he set aside on a second tract called Lepe, agreeing to buy it for $6.8 million.

The good news was that Lepe's massive lemon and avocado orchards would generate income immediately through a farm share program, helping offset the purchase price, so it would be worth it in the end.

Maybe.

The bad news was that Ken Johnson paid more than double what the Lepe property was actually worth.

Why?

Because the seller informed him that two other men, John Coben and Hermann Isaguera, had already agreed to purchase it for $3 million to establish their own utopia called Freedom Orchard.

And let's face it, no one wants neighbors like those.

Jeff Berwick was willing to roll with the setbacks, but still.

Ken, come on, Berwick protested in this dramatic reenactment.

Can you at least give your boy a heads up next time you spend $7 million in the company's funds?

I'm 50% owner too, you know.

Actually, you're not, Ken Johnson revealed in a heated text exchange.

Berwick, he explained, wasn't an owner, a director, a manager, or even a shareholder.

His name did not appear anywhere in the new incorporation documents.

When the company had been restructured to push out Coben and Izagera, Johnson quietly assigned himself 100% of the shares, and with them, absolute control of Galtz Gold's Chile, without contributing a dime of his own money.

The former founders weren't the only ones frozen out.

Investors, both current and prospective, were never informed about Ken Johnson's sudden sole ownership.

and many of them were loyal readers of the Dollar Vigilante, which meant Jeff Berwick's credibility was now on the line without any skin in the game.

Ultimately, Jeff decided to go along with the new arrangement after Johnson assured him that the ownership paperwork would be sorted out.

So Berwick swallowed his doubts and kept promoting the project, and the money kept rolling in.

But so did the whispers.

Buyers began to notice cracks in the communication, founders who acted secretive and paranoid.

promises that no longer matched the pitch, and a creeping sense that life inside this so-called utopia might not be as advertised.

To calm growing doubts, Galtz Galtz Chile announced its first public showcase set for October 30th, 2013.

Prospective buyers were invited to tour the property, while those already invested would finally have the chance to choose their lots.

To sweeten the occasion, the organizers promised appearances from several libertarian celebrities, including singer-songwriter Tatiana Morose, who had even composed an official theme for the project.

Far

away

in the valleys of Chile.

By all accounts, the event was a success.

A sizable crowd made the trip and left impressed by the visible progress on the ground.

But there was one problem.

The zoning permits hadn't come through.

which meant the entire point of the gathering, dividing up the land, never actually happened.

By December 2013, even Jeff Berwick had lost faith.

His ownership stake still hadn't been restored, and he quietly voiced his concerns to the Founders Club investors.

They agreed.

It was time for him to step aside.

Berwick was officially out, taking Galtz-Gulch Chile's marketing machine with him, and without his promotional push, the sales that once poured in slowed to a mere trickle.

In a bid to reignite interest, Ken Johnson scheduled another public event for Galtz Gulch, but what was supposed to be a triumphant showcase of progress only exposed how little had actually been achieved, throwing the entire project back into jeopardy.

acre lot in Galtzkoltz, Chile.

She was the opening keynote speaker at the developments harvest celebration in April 2014.

Not long after, Wendy also became one of the first investors to ask for a refund.

She and many of the other buyers who attended the event were dismayed with everything that had transpired since the initial announcement and the lack of progress that had been made, especially after seeing it with their own eyes.

The main house on the Lepe property, where Ken Johnson had taken up residence, appeared to be a rushed remodel that had been left half unfinished.

The so-called rental cabins were worse.

Windowless, insect-infested shacks that had set abandoned for a decade.

Locals said farmhands had most recently used them to butcher rabbits.

Hardly the vision of paradise Wendy or anyone else had been sold.

The lemon and avocado orchards, pitched as instant cash cows, turned out to be in even worse shape.

Both had been neglected for years before GGC bought the land.

Water starved, dried out, and barren.

The irrigation system was broken, the groves withered.

There were no riches to be harvested anytime soon.

To top it off, Wendy McElroy said she and her husband had been misled about the very plot of land they had chosen.

When she later confronted a former GGC salesman, asking if he had known all along that the lot couldn't legally be sold because of environmental restrictions, he answered bluntly, that is correct.

In reality, the McElroys were already uneasy about about Galtz-Goltz Chile before they ever set foot on the property.

Months earlier, they had received an anonymous letter warning that the project lacked the necessary water rights for development of such magnitude.

When Wendy pressed Ken Johnson and Jeff Berwick about it, both brushed it off as nothing more than the work of a bitter ex-employee out to sabotage the project.

On August 24th, 2014, Wendy McElroy and many other GGC investors received another email, this time signed Eddie Willers, borrowing the name of the honest, hard-working character from Atlas Shrugged.

The message claimed it was the culmination of months of investigation and thousands of dollars spent trying to uncover the truth about Gold School's Chile.

It revealed that Ken Johnson had never provided investors with so much as a budget, financial ledger, business plan, mission statement, or any kind of formal documentation.

He refused to disclose how much money had been raised, how much had been spent, where it went, how much remained, or even who legally owned the land or controlled the project.

There was no transparency, no legitimate board of directors, no accountability.

Secrecy begets tyranny, it read.

Quote, Here are a few unsolicited suggestions from someone who left a great life and job to move to Chile in the hopes of building this ambitious project.

First, you have to accept that you have been conned.

Most of you are probably not shocked by this news.

Some of you understand the nature of investments and know that there are not sure things.

For others, this may be more difficult.

But you must accept that your money is gone.

It was taken by a crook, a con artist without a conscience.

He is a tyrant whose only power has come from the money that he has received from trusting investors.

Needless to say, it is incumbent upon all of us to make sure that he receives no more.

To do so would be abetting a Ponzi scheme.

The next day, Witty McElroy went public, detailing her experience with Galtz Gold's Chile in an article for the Daily Bell.

Jeff Berbick reposted it on the Dollar Vigilante, adding that he would issue a statement of his own within days.

In the meantime, a steady stream of allegations against Ken Johnson began to surface, painting a picture of chaos, recklessness, and outright fraud.

He was said to carry backpacks stuffed with cash, make massive withdrawals from GGC accounts, and blow tens of thousands of investor dollars on lawyers, including 30,000, in a single month, first to explore suing John Coben over an unenforceable non-compete, then to drag him into court for libel.

He allegedly gambled at casinos, wrecked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to hardware stores and contractors, and stiffed nearly everyone he dealt with, local builders, suppliers, and even the woman who wrote the project's theme song.

By some estimates, nearly 100 people had worked for GGC in one capacity or another, have quit or were fired, all soured by Johnson's erratic leadership.

Meanwhile, the Lepe property deal was collapsing under the weight of late payments and crushing penalties, more than a million dollars in fines in the last four months of 2013 alone.

Rumors swirled that this was part of a kickback and laundering scheme Johnson had negotiated with the property's previous owner.

And while the local community watched unpaid bills pile up and even stray dogs left to starve on the property, Ken Johnson reportedly pampered his own 17-year-old mutt, Remy, with nightly salmon dinners.

He spent lavishly on restaurants and booze, but little on actual development.

And there was no recourse from any of it.

The contracts he sold to investors were found to be legally worthless.

Most of them reduced to promesis, or unenforceable promises to contract in the future.

In the end, only a single investor ever held a contract that carried any legal weight.

Everyone else was cheated.

And we started a place called Gulch Gulch.

Unfortunately, I sort of partnered with the devil,

and it's just been a semi-disaster so far.

Jeff Berwick eventually broke his silence to join the pylon.

In a statement on his website, he laid out his version of events, insisting that he had stopped promoting Doltz Gold's Chile more than a year earlier.

Once he realized just how shady Ken Johnson's behavior had become, Berwick said his hands were clean.

Well, let me first say we're not sure what's happened.

It's been so secretive, but we're trying to find out what's happened, and it is my fault for not

pushing this earlier.

His name is Ken Johnson and he's a sociopath and

if I told you some stories you wouldn't even believe them about him.

But as Facebook commenters were quick to point out, Jeff Berwick wasn't telling the truth.

Mr.

Dollar Vigilante had been touting Galtz Galtz Chile on Bloomberg, Coindesk, and even Mother Jones just months earlier.

John Coben also re-emerged to point the finger at both men.

Quote, Jeff Berwick is as guilty as Ken Johnson with respect to scamming us.

He made the agreement as much as Ken did.

He is not a righteous victim, despite what Wendy wants to say about him.

Jeff and Ken are scammers, plain and simple.

Soon after the fraud accusations were made public, the entire online existence of Galtzco's Chile was scrubbed.

73 investors had contributed over $10 million to the project.

Now their money, along with Ken Johnson, had seemingly disappeared.

Behind the scenes, though, Ken Johnson was scrambling.

In early 2014, GGC's bank accounts had been frozen over suspicious transfers that hadn't been adequately identified.

His solution, a backroom stock swap with a Chilean loan shark named Mario Del Real, which rerouted GGC investor dollars to the personal bank account of Del Real's 26-year-old daughter.

Predictably, the deal backfired.

Long story short, More than a million dollars in investor funds vanished, and in the process, Johnson accidentally signed over complete control of Galtzgoltz Chile to Mario Del Real and his family.

Upon realizing that he had been tricked, Ken Johnson wrote to Del Real in a panic, Hey, your attorney, this is what they represented to me.

I signed the contract, taking them on their word.

I don't know what the fuck I signed, because it's in Spanish.

Mario shrugged.

Ken Johnson now joined the list of people burned by the Galtz Gold's Chile fiasco, though few were likely to feel sorry for him.

A support group soon appeared on Facebook, providing victims with a platform to share their stories.

One unnamed investor admitted that he had poured his entire life savings into the project.

Now he, his wife, and their two young children were reduced to couch surfing and sleeping in their car.

Another man said the stress of the collapsing development had taken an even greater toll, claiming it contributed to his wife's death.

Building a libertarian community had been her dream, one that died with her.

Or was it too soon to write GGC's obituary?

A coalition of investors rallied to form the Galtz Gulch Chile recovery team, determined to salvage what was left.

Led by security consultant Tom Baker and marketing specialist Kathy Cuthbert, their mission was clear.

Resolve the Ken Johnson problem quickly and quietly through legal means.

They weren't looking to bury the Galtz Gulch brand.

only the man who had solely it.

The first step, set up a meeting with Ken Johnson and make him an offer he couldn't refuse.

However, Johnson wasn't answering his phone or emails, so someone would have to travel to Chile where he was presumably still living and confront him face to face.

On October 23, 2014, a team assembled by the GGC Recovery Group, which included Tom Baker and a man named E.J.

Lashley, the senior trustee for the GGC Rescue Trust, flew to Chile to execute their plan, which was simple.

Ask Ken Johnson to leave.

That night, the team made their way to the property, slipping past the gates with the help of an elderly caretaker, only to find the clubhouse abandoned and the grounds in disarray.

Johnson, who was apparently hiding in the bush, watching it all go down, sent a proxy to deliver messages while he stalled.

It took two days before EJ finally coaxed him into a meeting, offering $20,000 and the promise of no prosecution if he walked away quietly.

Johnson refused, but soon fled the property anyway, leaving the recovery team to assume control.

They posted a celebratory message on the internet.

Galtz Gulch has been reclaimed by its rightful owners, and Ken Johnson's reign of terror has ended.

This is not the last you'll hear of Galtz Gulch Chile.

They were right about that, but their celebration would be short-lived.

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Hi there, this is Ken Johnson at Galtz Galts Chile.

I wanted to thank you for visiting our website.

Doing a short video for you here.

I'm not one to normally want to sit on in front of a camera, but there's some important things that I think we need to discuss here.

We've been putting a lot of hard work.

There's some good people that have been working on this project.

And unfortunately, in the last

year or so,

And more intensively in August of last year, there's been some negative things said about our project that are completely untrue.

After reclaiming the property in October 2014, the Galtskoats Chile recovery team spent the next six months trying to clean up the literal and figurative mess.

The legal battles quickly piled up.

Civil cases were filed to declare the Lebay purchase null and void, while investors also launched criminal cases against Ken Johnson in Chile.

The recovery team also submitted a 130-page forensic report to the FBI's White Collar Fraud Division and the IRS's Criminal Investigations Division, alleging affinity fraud and requesting additional action.

All this potential government intervention made some of the investors queasy.

As Jeff Berwick wrote, Being libertarians, many of GGC's investors were against the use of government courts to correct injustices and receive the property they paid for.

But what they found was that there was simply no other way to regain their stolen property without doing so.

Imagine that.

Another aspect of the recovery involved untangling GGC's affairs from those of Mario Del Real.

The investors offered him $30,000 cash to walk away, and he accepted.

However, a few months later, in January 2015, Del Real's associates returned in trucks and stripped Galtzko's Chile of anything they could haul off.

Farm equipment, tools, furniture, even trees, which they chopped down and sold for firewood.

On April 20th, 2015, The members of the recovery team who had been tasked with holding down the fort received another surprise visit from a different group of men.

And this time, these men had guns.

Open the gate, we are coming in, one way or another, they warned the watchman.

Inside, they confiscated everyone's phones and held them hostage.

A few hours later, in walked former developer Ken Johnson, ready to claim what he insisted was rightfully his.

The restoration of Galtzkoltz Chile has started, declared a statement posted on April 25th, 2015, to the project's newly resurrected Facebook page.

In an interview with the Pan Am Post, Ken Johnson announced he had launched criminal proceedings against those who had stolen GGC and occupied it illegally for six months, along with the Del Real family with whom the recovery team had been in cahoots.

What a twist.

That's right, Johnson said.

The public only knew half of the story, none of it accurate, and he was ready to reveal the truth.

I'm going to go over the history here and tell you what's gone on, why we're here, some of the characters,

discuss some of the false accusations made about me

and We're gonna be releasing documents.

I keep talking about doing this, but I don't haven't had time to sit down and do this.

It's quite time-consuming to go plow through thousands of past emails outlining everything I'm telling you, or about to tell you.

So

let's go back to the beginning.

Ken Johnson says he never cut John Coban and Aramon Isagera out of the deal.

They agreed to part ways after Johnson caught Coban trying to sell that El Penyon land out from under GGC to another libertarian dreamer named Simon Black, who wanted to start his own utopia.

We dissolved the corporation.

They signed a

non-disclosure agreement and notarized it John Coban and Herman Isagera.

So there's been some out there that Gulch Gulch, I stole Gulf Sculpt from John Coban.

It's just, that's a total lie.

Nor did he embezzle any money, Ken Johnson says.

Over 80% of our money has gone to land acquisition and improvements, renovations of buildings, topography work, architecture work, mining rights, legal work, you name it.

I haven't even taken my salary, Ken said.

Furthermore, Ken Johnson said he did not steal any equity.

It was true that 100% of GGC's shares were assigned to him, but it was only a temporary transitional move, and he had the emails to prove that he had offered the Founders Club their fair share, but no one ever got back to him.

So the crimes that Thomas Baker, Kathy Cuthbert, and everyone else on the recovery team were accusing him of simply weren't true.

But you know who did steal equity?

Mario Del Real.

Johnson claimed that Mario forged various documents with his signature, which led to GGC losing a million dollars in the rights to the land.

And you know who Mario Del Real was working with?

That's right.

Thomas Baker, Kathy Cuthbert, and everyone else on the recovery team.

At least according to Ken Johnson.

The Del Reales have committed forgeries.

They've falsified dates and contracts.

They've falsified contracts.

They've done a lot of things.

So I can't get into too many details about that, but we have a stack of evidence against the Del Reals, and it's all going to lead back, in my opinion, to Josh Curley, Kathy Cuthbert, Thomas Baker, Ken Carpenter, Jeff Berwick, you know, whatever.

Josh Curley, a former investor who is now working with the recovery team, Johnson says, was the person who authored the Eddie Willers letter.

They were all in on it together, trying to wrest the property away from him.

And if you want to hear something even shadier, Johnson noted, Edward Edward J.

Lashley, the recovery team's trustee, is a convicted fraudster.

Lashley pleaded guilty to his part in the $80 million Ponzi scheme called the Genesis Fund in 2003, Johnson accurately pointed out.

Just look at the company these people keep.

But they want people to think that I'm some kind of psychotic asshole on a map.

Well, Ken, what about that accusation that you let dogs starve to death on the property?

That seems kind of psychotic.

Not true, he assured.

Ken said he loved dogs.

He claimed he would even take in strays for needed surgeries and pay for them out of his pocket.

If anything, the recovery team was the one responsible for harming animals, Ken said.

He went for a hike one morning and found Flacco, the German shepherd, convulsing by the front gate.

Coincidentally, at a time when members of the recovery team had been spotted on location.

It's my belief that possibly Catherine Cuthbert or Thomas Baker may have poisoned Flacco.

I don't know if they did that.

I have no proof of it, but I definitely wouldn't put it past them.

All right, well, what about the most scandalous charge of all?

And it pains me to even repeat this.

The allegation that Ken Johnson isn't even a real libertarian.

That one's probably true, he admitted.

I'm not a political person.

I don't believe in political labels.

There's been some of that involved with our project, unfortunately, due to the name Galtz Gulch.

I wasn't actually a big fan of the name, to be honest with you.

Ken Johnson came clean about having never even read Atlas Shrugged and thought the name Galtz Gulch was not only embarrassingly cheesy, but also a magnet for the worst kind of people, the kind of people who read and run the Dollar Vigilante.

Speaking of which, Ken also admitted he had deliberately distanced both himself and the project from Jeff Berwick.

The reason, Berwick was scaring off investors.

According to Ken, Jeff had been a drunken liability since day one, so hungover on their first trip to Chile that they couldn't even inspect the million-dollar property they were about to purchase.

I knocked on his door the morning we were supposed to go.

John Coben came to pick me up, wake him up so he can take a shower and get ready to go.

And he had a prostitute in his room.

And he said, nah, he didn't want to go.

And he ended up, you know, hanging out with her.

And then he flew home to his wife a few hours later that day.

Things didn't get much better for Berwick after that.

He was soon exposed as the co-founder and pitch man of a Bitcoin ATM venture that never actually existed.

At the same time, his passport business was under fire from disgruntled customers who claimed they had been scammed.

One of them even sent Ken Johnson a recording of a video call with Berwick, where Jeff himself admitted that his practice of bribing corrupt government officials to expedite the process hadn't exactly gone according to plan.

I just want to tell you, I'm not

like uh

scamming you at all.

Like, I've never scammed anyone.

It's been so hard on me.

Yeah, and uh, I know we've got a lot of problems.

So yeah, Ken Johnson decided the smartest move was to push forward without Jeff Berwick.

Still, it was hard not to feel a little sorry for the guy.

Getting back to where we August now, we closed on the land.

Berwick came and apologized to me and he said, oh, woe is me.

I'm suicidal.

And,

you know, my wife was raped in Argentina and yada, yada, yada.

Excuse me?

You can't just yada yacht over something like that.

Oh, I see.

That's why.

The local police in Argentina actually determined that Jeff's wife, Kina Marino Lopez-Berwick, had falsely accused a man of sexual assault and pressed charges against her.

She and Jeff decided to flee the country and play the victim.

The whole Galtz-Gulch thing has to be one of the most insane things I've read about in quite a while.

So I'm very happy to have Ken on the line.

Ken, welcome to the Radical Agenda.

As 2015 came to an end, Ken Johnson continued to amplify his side of the story on libertarian radio shows and podcasts of which there is no shortage.

But everyone who was following the story still had no idea what was true.

And like I said at the beginning of this thing, I don't believe that there are clean hands on anybody here.

You're telling me a story where you're completely above board and you're dealing with all of these shady things.

And frankly, Ken, I don't buy it.

There's a situation where,

hang on a second.

You're talking about a situation where you're 99% owner of a property

when other people have paid for that property.

No, right now, no, I'm not 99% owner.

You were 99% owner, and then you got swindled by the Del Reales.

But you were

at some point, right?

And now you've been swindled, okay?

And so you've got this situation where you're in chord with the Del Reales, and you're trying to regain control of this property.

But you're describing a situation where Jeff Berwick, through the Dollar Vigilante, through his newsletter, through his audience, is raising capital to buy some property.

You end up being 99% owner of that property.

That doesn't make any sense at all, and you know it.

The entire thing here is everybody's pointing fingers at everybody else, and that tells me that everybody's completely full of shit, okay?

I'm certain that everybody involved in this thing is a fucking crook, and

it's so difficult

to fucking weed through all of this crap.

Yeah, that about covers it.

And just to really drive home that everyone in this story sucks, the man in that clip, host of Radical Agenda, is none other than Christopher Cantwell.

You might know him by his more infamous nickname, the crying Nazi, thanks to his tearful meltdown after being charged for pepper spraying counter-protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

We have done everything in our power to keep this peaceful, you know?

I know we talk a lot of shit on the internet, right?

But like literally,

we've been coordinating with law enforcement the entire time.

Every step of the way, we've tried to do the right thing.

Anyway, Ken Johnson's attempts to resurrect GGC dragged on through 2016.

He even turned to a cultural exchange website, luring in volunteers to work on the project for free.

That scheme ended when the recovery team caught wind of it and threatened the referral company with a lawsuit, cutting off his pipeline of unpaid labor.

By year's end, a hearing was scheduled in Chilean court regarding the felony case against Ken Johnson brought by the recovery team for allegedly defrauding 73 families out of $10.45 million.

The hearing was set for December 12th, but Johnson never showed.

His lawyer claimed he had rushed to the U.S.

to care for his ailing parents, though the only evidence submitted was a boarding pass to Argentina, where Johnson conveniently held citizenship.

He never returned to Chile.

That same day, Galtz-Galtz, Chile, was violently raided and seized by Mario Mario del Real's men.

Workers reported being shot at, beaten, and driven off the property as the buildings were ransacked yet again.

Litigation and arbitration dragged on for years.

From what's known, the properties of Galtz Goltz Chile are slated to be auctioned off if they haven't been already, with the proceeds earmarked to repay investors, thus marking the official end.

of what one local observer described to the National Post as, quote, another dumb green ghost story.

But don't worry, this never-ending story gets even dumber.

Good afternoon, everybody.

John Coben here, the voice libertarian.

I'm just making a quick recording here, and some people may be missing it.

Basically, I just want to let you know what happened, that I was in fear for my life today when I went down to the gun range to shoot the gun I legally hold with a transporting license that I legally have in Chile.

And when I was going into downtown Ranyaca, I swung by the beach, And as I did so, my car was surrounded by a mob of people.

In late October 2019, outrage over a four-cent subway fare hike in Santiago ignited a wave of protests that soon engulfed the entire country of Chile.

What began as a small act of defiance swelled into weeks of nationwide demonstrations against decades of neoliberal reforms, such as the privatization of water, highways, pensions, and more.

The very policies that had once made Chile such an attractive place for free market purists like one of the original partners of GGC, John Coban.

On November 10th, 2019, 56-year-old John Coban says he was driving along the beach in Renaca, Chile, minding his own business when he encountered a group of violent protesters who quickly surrounded his truck.

John said he navigated his vehicle carefully through the crowd.

Even if he disagreed with them, there was no reason to hurt anyone.

And when I did that, they began banging it and attacking it.

And so, in order to defend myself, I rolled, you know, I took a took my gun out and loaded it.

It was not loaded before, and I had to load it and prepare myself for being assaulted.

And there were many of them at the beach.

I don't remember all of the circumstances exactly, but I had to

actually fire two shots at first before they all started coming running around me after me, in which I had to stop again and shoot twice again.

Copen says he shot his gun a few times to scare them away, but only in self-defense, of course.

He was in fear for his life.

In the end, no one was killed, but one man was wounded in the leg.

Koban regretted that, but they had left him with no other choice.

For some reason, Coban hadn't anticipated that the entire incident had been caught on camera, and the video told a much different story.

In the footage, he could be seen wearing a yellow vest associated with a local vigilante group.

His truck isn't surrounded.

There's no threatening crowd, just a calm, almost ordinary scene.

That is, until Coban steps out, pulls his gun, and starts firing.

Using the video as evidence, a Chilean court rejected Coban's plea of self-defense.

He was convicted on three counts, including attempted murder, and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Copen was free again after only six.

Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away in Mexico, Jeff Berwick was clawing his way out of a deep post-GGC depression.

He was brimming with new ideas and even dusting off a few old passions.

Ultimately, Jeff Berwick turned his attention to Acapulco, where he lived full-time, and launched an anarcho-capitalist festival called Anarcho-Pulco.

Marketed as a celebration of cryptocurrency, alternative health, and post-government living, the event was an instant hit, attracting true believers, many of them loyal dollar vigilante readers from across the globe.

Some were so taken with the vision that, like Jeff, they relocated to Acapulco permanently.

Others, like Shane Kress and Miranda Webb, had no other choice.

The young couple met met at Kent State in 2012 when Miranda broke the ice with the compliment of Shane's Ron Paul baseball cap.

They bonded over Anarchist politics and traumatic childhoods.

Shane's father had taken his own life while Miranda's mother, a lifelong addict, walked into a busy highway during a bad trip.

It started from birth for me.

You know, my mom was a drug dealer and a gardener, and my dad is an autobody technician who liked to work under the table a lot.

The taxation was theft.

Big part of my childhood.

They were

very much like, fuck the government, fuck the police, fuck taxes.

Fuck college, too.

Shane and Miranda dropped out, went off the grid, grew dreadlocks, and started making and selling hash oil.

Back in 2016, an untimely traffic stop uncovered drug paraphernalia, and their destinies changed forever.

Both were charged with manufacturing a controlled substance, crimes that carried a potential prison sentence of up to 25 years.

So they ran, convinced they could make it to Mexico in time for Anarco Polco 2016, the festival their idol Jeff Berwick never stopped promoting.

Along the way they shed their old identities.

Miranda became Lily Forrester.

Shane rebranded himself as John Galton.

Then, under their new names, they crossed the border.

John and Lily rented a house, adopted a dog and a cat, and made a life for themselves in Mexico.

At no point did they ever feel unsafe.

If anything, they felt free from the oppressive American government.

Finally.

You gotta have common sense about it, but I'd say it's safer than any big city I've lived in in the U.S.

Like, way safer than Chicago or something like that.

There's so much that is more free about where we live here than where we came from.

Like, you could never do what we've done where we came from.

And in terms of Acapulco, it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than anything I've experienced in the States.

The first thing Lily remembers hearing on the day John was killed was the dogs barking outside.

They just finished eating lunch with the friend Jason and peered out the window to see a group of teenage boys throwing rocks at their house.

John and Jason walked outside to confront them.

Lily, delayed by looking for her machete, followed several steps behind.

She heard the pops and ran to the gate to find her boyfriend John Galton bleeding from the mouth.

He'd been shot in the ankle so he couldn't get away, and then again, point blank in the abdomen.

There was no sign of life.

Their friend, Jason Henza, had been shot three times as well.

He was in serious condition, but ultimately survived.

Both of them retreated back into the house.

True anarchists don't call the cops.

Plus, they would deport Lily as soon as they found out who she was.

So instead, she recorded a video and posted it to Facebook, asking for help from her fellow ex-pats.

Uh, if somebody's listening, please, I just somebody showed up right after we finished eating and they shot John and Edza and I was in the house and John's died at the gate.

And Ed's is in the other room dying and I really need help.

Somebody, please come.

Most assume John's killers had ties to a drug cartel since he was growing marijuana at home.

Others say the cartel doesn't care about weed.

Lily tends to agree.

She blames a former anarchist roommate named Paul Propert, whom they kicked out for dealing cocaine.

Lily is convinced that Paul was in trouble with the cartel and shifted the blame to John.

Apparently, he couldn't handle the guilt.

A few months later, after John Galton, aka Shane Cress, was murdered, 36-year-old Paul Propert killed himself.

Lily Forrester, once again Miranda Webb, now in her early 30s, still lives in Mexico.

She says she found love again.

got sober, and is working on resolving her legal issues in the quote, right way.

When asked if she has any advice about fleeing the country, don't, she advises.

It's not worth it.

Find a way to solve your issues without running.

Miranda, like everyone else in this story, learned the hard way that absolute freedom is nothing more than an illusion.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka Deformer, aka Long Dong Silver.

You knew that was coming.

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