Sunday with a Source. And My Mom.
A year in pursuit of CryptoZoo's Eddie Ibanez.
Today’s story goes behind the scenes of my latest investigation, published last week with Billy Penn and WHYY public radio in Philadelphia. Eddie Ibanez, the grifter husband of Fox News anchor Jackie Ibanez, charmed billionaire investors while pretending to be an orphan, ex-CIA spy, and math genius. He even claimed to help the Philadelphia Eagles win the 2018 Super Bowl. He was only exposed after Purple PR invited me on a press trip to Miami last June, in support of Ibanez’s newest project, CryotoZoo, fronted by Logan Paul. After Ibanez lied to me about the project I knew I had a story and spent the rest of last year collecting the stories of victims whose lives he destroyed.
1.
I love my mom. She woke up early one Sunday morning last August and dragged me out of bed because that’s exactly what I asked her to do. I stayed over with her in New Jersey the night before so we could hit the open road, crossing the city to Connecticut with minimal traffic and distraction, because that’s the least I can offer a 73-year old driving me to meet a stranger some 100 miles away with no guarantee they’re going to show up.
I also promised her breakfast. So when we got to Connecticut, after we got proper coffee at Dunkin Donuts, I navigated her toward Coffee An’ Donut in Westport. But I was so tired, hyper, and distracted, I couldn’t absorb the gravity of where we were. We were idling in the heart of my story. I could have shown my mom everywhere Ibanez’s victims, friends, lovers, and conspirators lived, worked, slept, scammed, fucked, got fucked, and got fucked up, like the stage manager in a dystopian Our Town.
I didn’t even absorb my donut. My mom loved hers. The blueberries in hers reminded her of the blueberries we picked up the sides of mountains in Maine when I was a kid. But I only stared at my phone, still waiting for this source to message me back.
I texted them again.
I’d been staring at my phone since I woke up.
My mom didn’t mind. She preferred me safe close to home, or off writing about fancy hotels and restaurants for Travel + Leisure or Food & Wine. But she also wanted me happy. And the exhaustive endless tension of hunting bad people made me happiest. She worried about me, but she never complained, and she helped me on stakeouts and tails in the past more than once. Now that she was getting older I really wanted this trip, each trip with her, to count for something.
Years ago, back home, across from our apartment, my mom watched in horror as I jumped out of her moving car when I spotted a Bayonne mayoral candidate knocking on doors. He’d been avoiding an interview with me for weeks. I got my interview but she wasn’t pleased and didn’t circle back for me.
My mom and I sat there in the silence for a while, me feeling badly she may have driven all this way for nothing. I’m sure I appeared moody or distracted but I was just quietly praying that this morning wasn’t a waste of her time.
Then my phone pinged so loud.
I read my texts, clicked the pin drop, and my mom started the car. We took a back road out of town, and she drove us somewhere far off, somewhere neither of us had ever been before. After a while we were in a parking lot. In the distance was a river walk.
I met the source at a park bench at the tail end of a scenic trail along the water. My mom couldn’t see them. She stayed back in the parking lot with the car and waited for me. She got out and stood up, to stretch her legs and felt the sun on her face. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt the sun on her face somewhere new since the start of Covid. She just stayed standing there, next to the car door, for close to an hour, watching from a distance to make sure nothing happened to her son.
I could see her see me waiting until another car pulled up behind the bench.
2.
I spent weeks establishing trust with this source, about who I was and why I was writing this story. I was a stranger to them too, a lifestyle freelancer without a committed outlet at the time. I was worried I’d scare them off if I held my cards too close. My only currency was oversharing.
Finally it was paying off. The source was pulling up, ready to deliver on their promise like Uber for evidence. They weren’t handing over secret government files because Ibanez was never a secret agent like he claimed. They just delivered a lot of hard truths no one ever learned because no one ever questioned Ibanez’s lies.
I expected a quick exchange. I pictured them passing me papers through a slim gap above a tinted window, peeling off and leaving me in the dust, which would have felt cinematic enough to share at a hundred dinner parties. But they got out of their car and it was like a dream come true. They paced back and forth, stomping out cigarettes, having an existential crisis right in front of me. How many moments would I have like that as a journalist? How many journalists have a moment like that? It felt like my mom was in the back of the auditorium watching me graduate from journalism school.
One line I’ve spoken a hundred times this past year whenever a source had been wavering, I told them journalists offer greater absolution than a priest but less protection than a lawyer.
And let me tell you, it’s true, and it works.
This source suffered some awfulness over the past few years, and now they could let it all out. I repressed a smile because I already knew some of the things they thought might shock me. I was smiling because I knew in that moment they were being fully honest. I stood there and did my best not to interrupt, a lesson I’ve had a hundred opportunities to practice in reporting this story.
Then a driver pulled out toward us, absentminded, and began to turn up the road with her iced coffee still on the roof of her car. The source ran into the street to stop her and hand her back her cup, which seemed like a good time for us to break. I got what I came for.
I watched them drive up the road and drank in the moment before I turned and walked back toward my mom. As I approached her, I could see her reading my expression. She was happy because I was happy.
It was a good day. I felt momentum.
Then six months went by.
3.
Before I accepted Purple PR’s invitation to profile Ibanez in Miami, I pitched his story out–and I mean his story–the genius spy with a Super Bowl ring, to countless outlets, taking Purple at their word about the undiscovered genius they represented. I’d never been so embarrassed once I met Ibanez and realized he was a fraud.
I sat in my hotel room the night after our first interview, the night we were supposed to sit ringside to watch the Logan Paul - Floyd Mayweather fight. Ibanez claimed he was sponsoring the fight and Purple assured me I could interview Paul, but nothing materialized. I sat there naked in bed, in the dark for hours as the sun set and the truth dawned on me. I tried to piece together how this story and weekend could have gone so wrong. I finally broke out of my stupor when friends began to text me asking how I was enjoying the fight.
The next day I wasted no time confirming my suspicions. Everything in Purple’s release was a lie, but I refused to let the trip be a waste, and I began to pitch my grifter story. Who wouldn’t want to buy an investigation into the grifter husband of a Fox News anchor who was in business with the world’s most notorious social media influencer?
Turns out it’s a hard sell for a freelancer who accepts press trips! Since the action happened in Miami, I nearly sold the story to the Miami New Times but the editor quit to join the Washington Post before she could offer me a contract. I sold the story to the sports news site Defector, but once my editor took a look at the single-spaced 35-page first draft he realized it was easier to pay me a kill fee than spend a month trimming the fat. He suggested a tech outlet, but the features editor at Wired said they don’t publish investigations. New York said no. So did Rolling Stone, which wasn’t about to investigate a crypto grifter as it partnered with Bored Ape Yacht Club.
Ten years ago, I was the Philadelphia city editor at Thrillist so I refocused on how Ibanez claimed to be an orphan from Philly who went on to help the Eagles win the Super Bowl. I reached out to an editor down there I only met once or twice in passing a decade before. She had no time, she had no budget, but she said yes.
I’m a firm believer if an editor can’t take the time to speak to you on the phone about a story like this, not even once, they aren’t worth the time. Only two editors called me. The editor at Miami New Times and my editor at Billy Penn. For that alone, she’s been exceptional.
4.
Last December, after I spoke to a source who claimed they were feeling pressure to cooperate with an FBI investigation into Ibanez, my editor finally prioritized my story. She asked me to email her once a day, to nudge her to send me back the latest edits so we could finally clean up the last draft and publish.
At first those emails just read Nudge! or Another one! Then right before Christmas I read this book, The Disappearance of Rituals by Byung-Chul Han.
The book came up in this interview with the art writer Dean Kissick, and I thought, wait a minute, I live for rituals! Catholicism! BDSM! Long baths!
So I ordered the book and while reading it I began reflecting the rituals in my life that went by the wayside during Covid. I finished the book eager to attract ritual and play back into my life.
The author argues that ritual and play are becoming lost in today’s society, and how there’s a need to reclaim these practices and break from endlessly performative work.
Reading it didn’t just help me in coping with my story, but also in caring for my mom.
Right after Christmas, when my editor promised me we were close to publishing, my mom fell and fractured her shoulder. I was there. I called 911. But she went to the emergency room without me because of Covid restrictions. When she was released from the hospital I stayed in New Jersey to take care of her. To help pass the time while she healed, and find some peace in the process, I made rituals of every little chore around the house from making her bed or her morning coffee, doing the dishes or the laundry. I even started waking up early, drive to Connecticut early.
I focused on each task for its own sake instead of getting overwhelmed by the unknowns surrounding her recovery. Why should I worry about what I can’t control, when I can take pleasure in the familiar comforts of these repeated chores that help end each day with a sense of accomplishment? I think that was the point of the book.
Then I started applying ritual to my daily emails to my editor. For the past two months that was all I could do, the only role I could play in my own story until we had a final draft. Write a kind note, press Enter, then put the ball back in her court for another 24 hours. It’s kept me calm until the next day’s nudge. I even started writing her nudge poems. I finally had to stop because they turned dark real fast as I moved on from haikus to villanelles. Good for poetry, bad for bonding with the one person in the world who invested in my story.
Now I just needed to reintroduce play into my life. I still do. Because nothing has come close to the pleasure I felt last summer while playing detective.
5.
Last July, I learned Ibanez had moved a short walk away from my new apartment. He had left Westport for SoHo, and returned to run CryptoZoo from the same apartment he used for a previous grift.
I couldn’t believe it. He had been lying for years, claiming to have this preternatural gift for recognizing and evading patterns, a gift that made him a prime candidate for intelligence agencies. Now he was repeating himself, doing the one thing that always gets you caught–returning to the scene of a crime.
I began to believe some people really are doomed to repeat themselves. Wasn’t that what the finale of Twin Peaks was all about? How Agent Cooper ended up rescuing Laura Palmer only to return her to her fate, to the same cursed house? Not only had Ibanez returned to the scene of a crime, he moved next door to one Purple PR client, and across the street from another one. If he had any self awareness, he would pull a Laura Palmer and scream in horror.
Of course I didn’t notice his retail neighbors right away either. I was so caught up in my new morning routine, walking down Greene Street to Felix for my morning iced latte, then claiming a seat on one of the catwalk stoops that line his block, blending in with the tourists and influencers who go unnoticed posing and preening for pictures. I staked out that apartment for weeks and nobody noticed me.
Until.
One morning a publicist walked up on me as she escorted guests into the boutique next door to Ibanez’s apartment. It turns out Greene Street is lined for blocks with Purple PR clients.
What are you doing here?!
I was flustered and sweating, pale and blushing all at once. But he had no idea. She was just happy to see a familiar unmasked face after a year spent working from home, and before waving goodbye she promised to invite me to some of Purple’s New York Fashion Week parties.
Some, but not all of them.
Back in June, Purple pitched me on covering a new nightclub opening in midtown, but when the club finally opened last September, hosting an afterparty for designer Christian Cowan, I wasn’t invited. I couldn’t imagine why until I saw Ibanez was in attendance. He was backstage partying with his billionaire investor, Chris Burch.
I never would have known, but the genius spy couldn’t help telling on himself. Ibanez posted a selfie.
You can read the original investigation with Billy Penn by clicking here.