Nicholas Bryant Wiki – Nicholas Bryant Biography
By the time he turned 23, J. Nicholas Bryant was living a version of the cartoonishly opulent lifestyle he always wanted. Social media posts from that era show the bright-smiling Texan riding private planes brimming with vodka, enjoying steak dinners on yachts and lounging in five-star hotel rooms. Bryant was originally from a small town dependent on the oil industry, and friends of his told The Daily Beast that he was popular but he always seemed to be in trouble. But in early 2020, just before the pandemic hit, his posts changed their content to make it look like he struck gold.
“It seemed like he was living the high life,” said Hayden Eggemeyer, one of his childhood friends, in an interview with The Daily Beast. “And all of us from home were watching this unfold in amazement, wondering how he was doing it.” This month, federal prosecutors gave Eggemeyer and his friends a response: Bryant defrauded at least 50 people in an elaborate scheme that involved reserving goods and services and then sending bogus payments through online payment platforms.
Nicholas Bryant Age
Nicholas Bryant is 53 years old.
Nicholas Bryant Incident Detail
On November 9, Bryant pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in a scheme that prosecutors have described as reminiscent of some of the most infamous con artists in US history. He is now awaiting sentencing, where he faces up to 20 years in prison. If he expects leniency, he may still have work to do when it comes to demonstrating something like contrition. When he first opened up about his scam spree, Bryant told The Daily Beast via jailhouse text message and a Lubbock County Detention Center phone call that the allegations against him “are quite true. ”.
I took private jets and stayed at the most expensive Airbnbs and hotels. I went deep sea fishing and rode as far as I could go,” Bryant said this week, noting that he has a lot of remorse for his actions. “I bought and drove five different high-end cars.” “By far my favorite trip was to [Turks] and Caicos. I spent two weeks on the island from fishing to sailing yachts. I stayed in a $30,000 a night house. It was amazing,” he added. In all, prosecutors estimate that Bryant stole approximately $1.5 million in the fraud scheme.
But it wasn’t just businesses that were targeted by Bryant’s schemes, after some hometown acquaintances felt abandoned after the interactions. “I got him an Airbnb. I sent money through Venmo and Cash App,” the woman, who did not wish to be identified for her own personal safety, told The Daily Beast. “I helped because I know what it’s like to be in a difficult financial situation. But now I feel so disgusting that I got ripped off.”
The woman said that over about a year, she sent Bryant more than $500 after meeting him on Facebook. She said she began sending money after long conversations about his education, in which Bryant bemoaned his struggles as “the son of a wealthy oil businessman” and his eventual admission that he needed funds because it was isolated. The woman sent The Daily Beast a Venmo statement and several bank statements to show that she had sent Bryant money since at least July 2021. The last time she sent him $100 via Cashapp was on November 24, shortly before his arrest on December 11.
Bryant did not respond to the woman’s accusations, but said she “wanted her to go to her hometown and see her” and that she “said she would pay my bills.” She said that she “planned to see her, but ultimately couldn’t get a plane company [to take me]”, so she never met her. What Bryant, now 26, has admitted is that between 2020 and 2021, he would use online platforms like QuickBooks to send payment confirmations without intending to pay. However, it would be days before the vendors and companies knew that Bryant had canceled that transaction before the money was sent.
By then, Bryant told The Daily Beast that he had already enjoyed the jet ride or the lavish excursion and disappeared. To add an air of legitimacy, the feds say, Bryant assumed several false names and backgrounds. More often than not, Bryant told The Daily Beast that he claimed that he “was the son [of an] oil magnate.” Bryant also convinced at least one company that he had a “secretary” who handled his finances and wired the money. (Bryant has since admitted that he didn’t have a secretary.
“He knew how to play the part,” Bryant said in a phone call Wednesday with a smile. In the end, prosecutors say, Bryant took at least 17 private jet flights, stayed at numerous luxury hotels, spent half a day on a 90-foot yacht with friends where he demanded a steak and champagne dinner, and obtained five cars from luxury. worth $500,000. Bryant also convinced a developer to start building a $980,000 home with a pool and workshop, and never paid. “This defendant would be on his way to becoming either Anna Delvey [Sorokin] or Frank Abagnale of Lubbock,” US Attorney Chad E. Meacham said in a statement about Bryant’s guilty plea.
I am being compared to both ”Sorokin and Abagnale, he feels that he has the defeat of the notorious scammers. “My story could be wilder than theirs! I can almost guarantee it!” he added. In a statement to The Daily Beast, Sorokin criticized the Bryant comparison, saying that “it is bad faith and lack of judgment for a prosecutor to use my name to try to present their own cases.” “It shows that justice is not always judicial,” he added. A spokesperson for the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas declined to comment on the case, noting that Bryant’s sentencing was still pending.
Bryant’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment. Childhood friends say that growing up in the Midland, Texas area, Bryant had a way out of any trouble. “She always seemed to have friends and would talk about how her father was in the oil business,” a high school friend who spoke on condition of anonymity for personal safety told The Daily Beast. “But he was always a piece of shit too. There was always something with him.” One example of Bryant’s “charismatic demeanor that always seemed to get him out of a jam,” Eggemeyer said, occurred when they were about 16 years old.
He said and a few others were in a car Bryant was driving, and a police officer pulled them over for speeding. The only downside, Eggemeyer said, was the case with the beers in the back of the truck. “When the cop came to the side of the truck and asked his name and without pause, Nick just gave him a fake name, he just gave him the name of someone we knew,” he added. “The whole time I was in the back of the truck freaking out, knowing we had beers in the car. But Nick didn’t flinch.” About a year later, in 2013, local news reports state that Bryant was arrested on one count of counterfeiting a financial instrument. It was not clear what happened to the case.
By 2019, it appears Bryant had been struggling with money. Lubbock Judge Jim Hansen, who is the Justice of the Peace for Precinct 1, told The Daily Beast this week that during that year his office received at least two Bryant-related cases: an eviction case and Texas Tech debt. Federal Credit Union. . That July, the bank filed a debt claim noting that Bryant had a “negative checking account” and was seeking damages of about $571.86. The case was ultimately dismissed. A few months later, on October 24, 2019, Bryant’s luxury apartment complex, Bella Villas, filed an eviction proceeding against him for “failing to pay the first month’s rent” and owing more than $1,400.
Hanson ruled in favor of the apartment on November 21, 2019, ordering Bryant to vacate the unit and pay “costs in the amount of $116.00, back rent in the amount of $1494.53, at an interest rate of 5.25 percent compound annual”. In late 2019, Eggemeyer said he returned home and was looking for a job during the offseason, and contacted Bryant about working with him in the oil industry. “Nick had already been posting Snapchats with all his money and I had nothing to do. He needed money and he told me I could work with him,” Eggemeyer said. Eggemeyer said that after completing what he believed to be legitimate incorporation paperwork to start working with a real company called GPS International, and even taking an oil rig safety course, he worked alongside Bryant.
He only monitored the [oil] wells. We worked nights,” he explained. Throughout that time, Eggemeyer said he repeatedly asked for payment, but was met with excuses and requests to pay other expenses that would “eventually be covered by the company.” Eggemeyer said that about a month after his tenure at GPS International, he called the company to ask for information about his paycheck and learned that he was not an actual employee of the oil company. (GPS International did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“I still don’t understand why he would do that. We were friends,” Eggemeyer said. “If he wasn’t a bastard, he could have been very successful. It’s so compelling.” For her part, Bryant told The Daily Beast that she feels “terrible about how things turned out” with Eggemeyer, whom she called “a good childhood friend,” admitting that “Hayden was a victim of my crimes”. However, he did not elaborate on the scam, saying only that Eggemeyer worked for him while “running an oil company” which is part of the “federal paperwork to which I plead guilty.”
The company, however, “was halted when numerous workers and service companies were not paid [sic] and investors failed to make a profit.” “I was saving all the winnings and using them to finance my lavish lifestyle,” Bryant said. “I was 23 years old and earned around 60 thousand a month.” Another woman, who only agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast that in the summer of 2020, Bryant gave her son a $5,000 check that she promptly cashed.
But because her son’s bank account was connected to hers, the woman said she was dragged down when Bryant’s check finally bounced and she ran out of thousands of dollars. Bryant told The Daily Beast that in the “spring of 2020,” the woman’s son asked him for a job and he offered to work building her house in Midland. “I told him he could run some equipment for me and I would pay him to get out of a bind he was in,” Bryant said, adding that his friend worked “for about two weeks and then we went on a two-week trip. via private jets to Trenton, NJ, Lexington KY, Nashville, TN and South Padre Island, TX”.
Bryant said that before the trip, he gave the woman’s son the $5,000 check “for payment” and that he cashed it himself. But due to the ongoing investigation into his oil company, his bank account was frozen and the check bounced. He admitted that he never repaid the $5,000. In Facebook messages between Bryant obtained by The Daily Beast, the woman asks him to send her at least half of the money “for the NSF check she wrote,” adding that she was the one who “had to cover this because it’s my bill”.
Bryant replies that he’s going to send over $2,500, but when the woman asks for it to be transferred via Venmo, he says he doesn’t have the money service. “Will I ever get back the $5,000 you owe me for a bad check that I had to cover?” the woman writes in an April 5 message to Bryant, more than two years after he said he was sending the money. . “Sure it would be appreciated.” “Extremely happy that he will get his due for what he has done,” she added. She said the scheme began in January 2020, when he and a friend were spending a Thursday night at Topgolf in Dallas, when they agreed that “playing a round of golf in Scottsdale” would be a lot more fun.
On a whim, he said he started calling charter companies and was surprised when they were able to fly to Arizona soon after. “We did the trip no problem and when I asked how I am going to pay for it, [the sales representative] said I could wire the money,” he said, noting he “just Googled third-party wire transfers” and learned that these systems would send over confirmation payments that he later learned could cancel. The delayed payment confirmations, he said, was how he was able to “get away with it for so long.” But, he noted, he was constantly hounded by private jet companies when they realized that he did not pay.
“I would just stop taking their calls,” he said. “I just went crazy.” Noting that it was extremely stressful to dodge calls, he said that he reached a point where he “didn’t really care” and used each lavish trip to escape the realities of his mounting problems. He even got arrested in March 2020 on similar state charges in Texas and was eventually released on bail on a $150,000 bond But that did not stop him from continuing the scheme.“I was living life,” he said. “I was spending 50, 70, $100,000 dollars a day at the peak. I was so far deep into it it didn’t really matter.”
The schemes included convincing the owner of an oil and gas company to front “approximately $150,000 to reopen a fictitious oil well.” In one trip to Miami, after spending half a day on a yacht, Bryant was even able to fool a driver into paying for his hotel room. Eventually, however, prosecutors say Bryant’s scheme came crashing down after one private jet trip to Miami on Nov. 18, 2021. “Bryant represented that he was interested in buying an airplane of the type the company chartered, and wanted a ‘demo flight’ to make the final determination,” a Nov. 1 factual resume states.
The flight was scheduled from Lubbock to Houston and on to Miami—before eventually doing the same route back. The base cost for the private flight leaving Lubbock was $33,000, but an extra $5,000 was added to the bill “to cover alcoholic beverages inflight and limousine transportation with whatever remained to be retained as a ‘tip’ per Bryant,” prosecutors say. “The invoice for the return flights mirrored the initiating flight’s invoice for a grand total of $76,000,” the court document states.
After agreeing the payment would go through QuickBooks, prosecutors say, Bryant texted the sales representative of a private charter flight company saying, “Send me that email so I can have my secretary pay ya buddy.” Minutes later he sent a follow-up text saying, “She’s paying it now.” Bryant and his friends enjoyed their Miami vacation for about three days before the private jet company contacted him after receiving a notification from QuickBooks about the failed invoice. Promising to “pay both invoices with bank wire transfers,” prosecutors say Bryant boarded the return flight back to Texas—but ceased all communications when he touched down in Texas on Nov. 23, 2021.
The private jet company, however, continued to message and attempt to contact Bryant about the missing $76,000. While prosecutors did not go into detail in court papers about how they eventually nabbed Bryant, the only charge against the 26-year-old are connected to a November 2021 private jet trip.In a Wednesday phone call with The Daily Beast, Bryant noted that his biggest mistake on the November 2021 trip was using the same private charter company for his return flight back to Texas. After landing in Texas, he said he went to the Houston Rockets game and was surprised when he learned that the plane company stayed close by to receive payment.
To avoid them, he said he “went to a Porsche dealership… and I bought a Porsche SUV and I went to Nashville.” Bryant was arrested the next month—when he said he was at a car dealership attempting to buy an Audi and a Maserati. “In that moment, I kind of felt some relief because I knew it was over,” he added. “Towards the end of it, it was all looking over my shoulder.” He has remained in custody since his December 2021 arrest, a time that Bryant said has given him time to “think about how fast everything happened and how big everything got.”
“It was fun, but I definitely do regret it. A lot of these companies are good, hard-working people. They built these companies up and it’s hard to take a $100,000 loss. And I did that to 50 people,” Bryant said in a Wednesday phone call, his thick southern accent choking up. “It’s definitely weird to look at pictures and think wow I was just living in the moment.”A teenage girl in California was “catfished” by a man who then murdered her mother and grandparents on Friday, police said.
The Riverside Police Department was first alerted to the crimes when it received reports of a “distressed-appearing young woman” getting into a car with a man. When officers responded, a fire was reported a few houses away from where the girl had been seen. Firefighters who tackled the blaze found three bodies lying on the ground inside. “Their bodies were taken outside where it was determined they were victims of an apparent homicide,” police said in a news release Sunday. The victims were identified as Mark Winek, 69, his wife, Sharie Winek, 65, and their 38-year-old daughter, Brooke Winek. Preliminary investigations determined that the distraught young woman was the teenage daughter of Brooke Winek, who also lived on the property where the fire started. Authorities said it appeared the fire had been “intentionally ignited.”
The man seen with the teen was later identified as Austin Lee Edwards, 28, of North Chesterfield, Virginia. When Riverside authorities alerted other agencies to the triple homicide, Edwards was found driving with the girl in Kelso. Edwards opened fire on San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department deputies before being killed in the shootout. The teen was uninjured and has been taken into protective custody by the Riverside County Department of Public Utilities.
Detectives eventually discovered that Edwards met the girl “through the common form of online deception known as ‘catfishing,’ where someone pretends to be a different person than they really are,” police said. The couple is believed to have started an online relationship during which Edwards obtained the girl’s personal information. He then drove from Virginia to Riverside and parked his vehicle in a neighbor’s driveway before walking to the teen’s home. “At some point, he murdered the adolescent’s grandfather, grandmother, and mother before returning to his vehicle with the adolescent and driving away,” police added.
Detectives also discovered that Edwards had previously worked for the Virginia State Police before most recently being employed by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia. “Our hearts go out to the Winek family and their loved ones during this time of tremendous grief as it is a tragedy for all Riversiders,” Riverside Police Chief Larry Gonzalez said in a statement. This is yet another horrifying reminder of the predators that exist online that are preying on our children. If you’ve already had a conversation with your kids about being safe online and on social media, do it again. If not, start it now to better protect them.”
The troubled New York City mother accused of stabbing her two young sons to death and then hiding their bodies under a pile of clothes in a bathtub filled with water, may have done so because she believed they were possessed by demons, her lawyer revealed. heartbroken family on sunday. . The bodies of the boys, Daishawn Fleming, 3, and Octavius ??Canada, 11 months, were found by Canada’s father Saturday night at a family shelter in the Bronx, police told the New York Post. . The shocking discovery came nearly an hour after cops took her mother, Dimone “Brenda” Fleming, to the hospital.
“Despite the officers’ best efforts, both children succumbed to their injuries,” NYPD Deputy Chief Louis De Ceglie said at a news conference. “Octavius ??would never cry, and you know, babies cry about everything…he was a happy-go-lucky, happy-go-lucky baby,” Casey Canada, Octavius’ great-aunt, told the New York Daily News. “Daishawn just wanted to play with toys. When he came, he just wanted to play with blocks. Canada explained that while Fleming “definitely loved” her children, she had been obsessed with demonic entities prior to her death. “She thought the children were demons. She said that she was afraid of them,” Canada said.
Officers had responded to a 911 call related to carbon monoxide around 7:20 p.m. only to find Fleming, 22, naked and acting erratically, police said. According to the Daily News, Fleming had tried to burn “stones” in the furnace, possibly coal, which was likely what set off the alarms. While in the third-floor apartment, they turned off the water in the bathtub full of clothes, unaware that the children were there. Fleming was taken to a local hospital and officers were told the children were with Columbus Canada, Octavius’s father, who was on the fourth floor of the building at the time of the first call.
“There was nothing obvious to suggest there were dead children in there,” an NYPD source told the Post. “There was no blood.” Once he returned to the apartment, Columbus Canada discovered the bodies of the children, with stab wounds to the torso and neck, and frantically called for help, according to the Post. He and building staff quickly called the police again, who arrived just before 8 p.m. to find the father trying to perform CPR on them. The children were taken to another local hospital, where they were pronounced dead.
“I think the responding police officers did a great job,” De Ceglie said. “It’s something they’re going to have to live with and think about, probably for the rest of their lives.” Police believe that Fleming stabbed the children to death. She had been in custody and under psychiatric care since Sunday night, with no charges filed against her. Police have yet to release a motive, and Casey Canada declined to speculate with the Daily News. “I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is my grandkids are fucking dead,” she said. Columbus Canada has cooperated with police, according to the Post, telling investigators that he had left the apartment after a fight with Fleming the day before and that he had slept in his car.
Witnesses told the newspaper they saw Fleming walking in circles and acting irrationally, muttering to herself outside the building. “She was walking and stopping, and turning, and walking and stopping, with both hands on the back of her head! Saying, ‘What did I do?! What did I do?!” said Francis Pimentel, who was waiting for a taxi outside the building. “I walked up to her and said, ‘Miss, are you okay?’ and she stopped and looked at me, her face was crazy and then she kept pacing back and forth, stopping and saying, ‘What I did ?! What I did?!'”
While police responded to a previous domestic incident involving Fleming, she had no history of mental health issues, according to the Daily News. Neighbor Charlotte Obiri told The New York Times that the image of the children being taken from the building remained etched in her brain and left her “throwing up.” “They took the baby out and they were working on it, and then the little boy, they took him out on a stretcher and he seemed lifeless,” she said Obiri. “He was naked and seemed lifeless. I still see the image in my head.”
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