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. Caffrey angrily quit, but Carpoff had bigger problems: Almost no one, it turned out, had any real use for his generators. 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.” On Tuesday, December 18, 2018 , some 175 federal agents, supervised by the FBI’s Sacramento office, began streaming in unmarked cars toward Benicia and Martinez. Joining the bureau were agents with IRS Criminal Investigation and the U.S. Marshals Service.

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Valley National Bank and Progressive Insurance did not respond to requests for comment. A U.S. Bank spokesperson told me, “While we conduct due diligence and review the business plans of companies we invest in, it’s not possible to know how individuals operating these companies will act in future periods.” Messages left for Gary Knapp, the financial modeler—and his son Nicholas Knapp, who would become one of DC Solar’s most prolific outside brokers—were not returned.)verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ One of the professionals in the room, a financial modeler named Gary Knapp, helped introduce Carpoff to the law firm Nixon Peabody, which had a well-known tax-credits practice. It was an arcane legal specialty centered on the special tax perks for industries, such as renewable power, whose growth served broader national interests. The title of his first patent application just about summed it up: “Trailer With Solar Panels.” Not even Carpoff was sure it made any sense. 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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Three decades later, the story still resonated enough for him to want to share it with a banquet hall full of investors and employees. During that glorious ride, in that exhilarating stretch before anyone realized how many laws he was breaking, “I said, ‘Man, I got away with this,’ ” he reminisced. “I’m like, ‘Man, look at me.’ ” Feierstein was born in New York City, and educated at Hamden Hall Country Day School in Hamden, Connecticut. [1] Feierstein studied economics at Vassar College and was on the Vassar College President's International Advisory Committee 2009 until it was disbanded in 2018. [2] [ bettersourceneeded] Feierstein served on the Council from Jan 9, 2009 to June 30, 2018. [3] Career [ edit ] Of the more than 17,000 generators sold from 2011 to 2018, only about 6,000 would be found to exist. Things are exploding here at DC Solar,” Carpoff started to say at company-wide meetings. “We’re going through the stratosphere.”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.

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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.” From the November 2015 issue: James Fallows on Al Gore’s green-technology investment strategy and the fight against climate changeCarpoff, Miranda learned, was in fact a collector of vintage gas-guzzlers. His showpieces included a Dodge Charger painted like The Dukes of Hazzard ’s General Lee and a 1978 Trans Am once owned by Burt Reynolds, a replica of the one the actor had driven in Smokey and the Bandit.

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Berger, Hugo (16 March 2012). "Planet Ponzi: Gloomy economic predictions". The National . Retrieved 28 January 2014. Anderson, Bruce (22 June 2013). "When an economist turns into a winemaker". The Spectator . Retrieved 28 January 2014. The Carpoffs had options, even if they weren’t ideal. They could close DC Solar. Or they could file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, hoping that creditors would see enough worth saving to let the company reorganize. Feierstein stood as a Brexit Party candidate in the 2019 UK General Election for the Reading East constituency. They came 5th with 1.5% of the vote. [ citation needed] Early life and education [ edit ] Chancellor builds his policies on a Ponzi homes plan". Independent. 6 September 2013. Archived from the original on 2022-05-15 . Retrieved 24 November 2014.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.