The night of December 18, 2004, began as an ordinary evening for Blair Cobbs’s father, Eugene. At 33, the elder Cobbs was already a seasoned veteran of the drug trafficking trade. He was flying solo to his hometown of Philadelphia, having taken off from Compton Airport near Los Angeles. After a quick fuel-up in Missouri, it was somewhere over West Virginia that things began to go bad for the self-taught pilot. He was flying above a snowy, wooded landscape when mechanical problems compelled him to scramble for the nearest landing strip. He was forced to attempt an emergency touchdown at the Wheeling Ohio County Airport. It was going to be a tricky landing, as the tower was closed and lighting was limited. 

Eugene descended late, missed the runway, and skidded on the ramp, before regaining altitude and hurtling into a ravine in the woods surrounding the airport. Miraculously, he exited the aircraft basically uninjured, save a minor head wound. But he had little time to linger. It’s unknown whether he turned to consider the plane’s $24 million haul of cocaine, but what he did do was flee through the woods, leaving it all behind. 

When he came to a road near the airport entrance, he flagged down the first driver he saw. He waved a wad of $100 bills and asked for a ride. The driver said that Eugene, who asked where exactly he was, had a gash on his head.

Airport officials would not discover the wreckage until early the next morning, when a worker on a routine field check noticed that a section of the eight-foot perimeter fence near runway 21 was damaged. The plane was then spotted, and proper authorities and responders were dispatched. Airport manager Thomas Tominack’s initial reaction was that the pilot was lucky to have survived, as portions of the aircraft, including a detached wing, were strewn throughout the vicinity. “The survival rate at that particular crash scene would have been very, very, low,” Tominack says. “It was a bad crash.” He notes that the plane didn’t even land at the airport, but rather bounced off the ramp before hitting the top of the fence and landing in a ravine amid a patch of what locals call “tanglefoot.”

The second thought responders had was that there sure was a hell of a lot of cocaine on board. “I know one thing,” Sheriff Bernie Kazienko told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, “it was the most dope I’d ever seen.” Indeed, it was the largest drug seizure ever in West Virginia at the time, with 525 pounds inside the airplane. According to the Northern District of West Virginia’s District Attorney’s Office, investigators “uncovered numerous packages of cocaine wrapped in various forms, including duct tape, saran wrap, vacuum sealed bags, and even as Christmas presents.” Photographs were taken of the tall stacks of cocaine. Longtime West Virginia lawman Richard Ferguson recounts that “it was like after somebody killed a large bear or something,” with everyone wanting their turn to pose with the evidence. 

Eugene’s first order of business after the crash was to get the hell out of West Virginia. He checked in to a Holiday Inn Express outside of Weirton under the name of Marquis Munroe. He stayed for one night before making his way out of town. 

Meanwhile, investigators began piecing things together at the crash site. With no pilot present, they moved on to the plane itself. Records showed that the Aerostar had been purchased in Alabama for $290,000 in cash. The invoice was signed without a personal signature, only the name of a company, Pacific Designers Inc., out of Beverly Hills. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) had been keeping tabs on the plane, and by the time of the crash they were familiar with the identity of the pilot, according to United States Marshal Terry Moore. 

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had also been keeping an eye on Eugene, who was described as a notoriously bad pilot known to frequent small, quiet airports where he could fuel up and depart quickly. According to the Post-Gazette, the FAA had put his plane on a watch list, having cited him on four occasions since 2001, offenses including reckless flying, disregarding air traffic control signals, and lying about his medical status. The FAA had ordered him to retake his flying exam. Eugene had refused, and his pilot’s license had been revoked. He continued to fly, however, using his plane to deliver drugs all over the country. Prior to the crash, federal agents in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Chicago had all been looking into his cocaine distribution business.

“On December 20, 2004, the DEA was able to obtain a warrant for Mr. Cobbs’s arrest,” says Moore. Subsequently, “There were many attempts to locate him throughout the U.S. He had ties to Philadelphia and California, so pretty much the span of the United States. And nobody was able to find him at the time … Mr. Cobbs was a fugitive from justice.”

Eugene Cobbs went on the lam. Back in California, his son, Blair, was about to have his world changed forever.

At the time of the crash, Blair Cobbs was 15. He remembers vividly the day he learned that something was wrong. He had been living easy with his father and stepmother, along with a younger sister, in a grand, white Victorian mansion in the Hollywood Hills. (Documents would later reveal that Eugene Cobbs had a cover business under the name of Builders Plus Management, Inc. Blair’s stepmother owned a beauty salon.) Blair attended the Beverly Hills school that served as the inspiration for the high school in one of his favorite movies at the time, Clueless.

“I was pretty well off,” Blair tells me over coffee at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas. “You know, when you’re doing good it just sort of seems normal, especially when you’re a kid. It’s like, ‘You don’t have an airplane? I have an airplane. We all got a Bentley. No? Well you’re going to get one, surely.’”

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Blair’s life hadn’t always been so luxurious. His mother died when he was 11, and his grandmother, whom he was close with, died the same year. He and his stepmother never really bonded. She had a son Blair’s age from a previous relationship, and Blair never felt accepted. As a young teenager, Cobbs, who is mixed race, was picked on relentlessly. In middle school, he was perceived as the white kid in a predominately black school, with red hair to boot. “Even though I’m mixed, I don’t really have a race as far as my features,” he says. “I was called cracker. … Those were a really bad few years.”

But by 2004, after a change of schools, those days were behind him. “Everything was cool sailing for like a year in Beverly Hills.”

Then one day he came home to a DEA raid. His stepmother was crying, and all he knew was that something really bad had happened. She didn’t have a lot of details. Maybe his dad was alive, maybe not. Cobbs couldn’t get a straight answer. “That’s when it really hit me,” he says. “You can feel it before it happens, that you lost it all.” 

In the ensuing months, Cobbs struggled in his father’s absence. He didn’t know about the crash, but he began to piece things together. “It kinda crept up on me that it must have been something illegal when I started noticing [unusual] things,” such as his phone being “obviously” tapped, full of echoes and strange noises every time he picked it up, and an unmarked white van parked in front of his house, around the clock, with men wearing headphones seated inside. The strange feeling of being under surveillance actually stirred some hope inside the young teen. “Maybe my dad’s not dead.”

Six months after the crash, it was summer in Beverly Hills, and his dad was still gone. Then Blair experienced another day in which everything changed. His stepmother instructed him to pack everything he could fit into one duffel bag. His sister did the same. They were given a couple of “horrible fake IDs” and ushered into a car. His stepmom drove south toward Mexico. When they got to the border, the children were dropped off by their stepmom, given minimal instructions, just a list of checkpoints about where to go — and with that, the kids walked into a foreign country alone. First a taxi, then a bus, deep into Mexico. That’s when Cobbs bottomed out: fear, dread and utter uncertainty. Would they live or die? Only the task of taking care of his younger sister drove him. “Just as long as my sister’s OK, that was propelling me to keep moving forward, because she was there with me.” 

Somewhere near Tepatitlán de Morelos, in the state of Jalisco, a full 1,623 miles into their journey, they finally saw their father. They could breath easier, but only a little bit. 

From Tepatitlán, the Cobbs family moved on to Guadalajara. There, using a fake name, Blair enrolled in a high school with an intense Spanish program, to try to get him up to speed on a language he did not speak. 

They lived with their father and his girlfriend, and though Eugene wasn’t around much, Blair’s sister was now safe, and with that knowledge Blair struck out on his own, wandering the city, getting to know the streets. “The whole city was all about circles; one highway circles the whole city, called Periférico. You can get almost anywhere through the Periférico.” He felt like a drifter. And though he was getting to know the city, he felt like he didn’t know himself. The fact that they were all using aliases triggered a deep sense of loss in Blair, a loss of self. “You start forgetting yourself completely,” he says.

No identity, no roots. Blair felt as if he didn’t belong to any group, that he had no culture to claim. “I’m not black, I’m not white, I’m not Mexican.” He was out of place yet again. The Americano in Mexico. Sticking out like a sore thumb. 

Eugene Cobbs had shaken U.S. law enforcement, but his problems had not eased. Looking back, Blair says he understands why his father tried to shield them from the reality of the situation, but, still, the kids knew it wasn’t good. “Things always happened,” Blair remembers. “It was a very hazardous place. … You’d get held up at gunpoint, or people would break into your crib with AKs,” he says with the nonchalance others might use to describe a noisy neighbor. If it wasn’t a gang, it was the cops, he says, and if not them then simply citizens, random people looking to get a piece: “Because you look like you have some money, because you look like you don’t belong there.” Each day he lived with a prevailing fear that the bad guys were closing in. It felt like they were just waiting “until someone knocks us off.” 

Blair doubted he would ever get out of Mexico. 

Then he met a friend. On a lonely Mexican basketball court, he ran into 15-year-old Rodney Pinz, who was from the States and spoke English. The two started hanging out, but the fugitive’s son remained guarded. “Even if I couldn’t tell him who I really was, it was cool to have at least one friend,” Cobbs says. “That friend probably saved my life.”

Pinz remembers a presence of fear engulfing Cobbs’s home. “He definitely seemed down,” Pinz says. “So I invited him into my world. I had him meet friends, meet girls, good stuff, teenage stuff. He would come to my house. My family made him food.”

A shared affinity for boxing led the pair across town, “to the ghetto,” Pinz says. “Like the ghetto ghetto” — where they found a gym known as El Lobo (the Wolf). 

Blair Cobbs had long revered the sport of boxing. But while he was eager to learn, he was short on skill. He had no idea how to block or defend. He took a shitload of punches. He remembers his first sessions at El Lobo: “I beat the first guy I ever sparred, and then I got beat up real bad by the next guy. I didn’t know the rounds lasted more than 30 seconds. I got tired.”

Black eyes were a constant companion as a result of his new hobby. It mattered not.

“I never stopped coming.” 

One Saturday, after about a week at the gym, Cobbs had an opportunity to box a real bout. “You think I should fight?” Pinz remembers him asking. “I was like, ‘Man we just got here.’ But he fought and he won!”

An old trainer at the gym started tutoring him, working to bend him into fighting shape. Cobbs began working out at the gym from sunrise to sundown, sparring and learning combinations. The trainer put him through 10- to 12-round full-body sparring sessions. Cobbs was still just a kid, but he was already fighting professionals. 

At nightfall, he would grab an agua fresca or something to eat at a taco stand and then return. Besides sparring, he’d swim and run. “I never stopped working,” he says. In reality, he simply had nowhere else to go, and nothing else he cared about. “So I would just train until I couldn’t train anymore. And then I’d show up again.” 

Since he’d left California, Cobbs’s hair had grown into a high, red-tinted Afro. When they asked him his name at the gym, “I used my middle name, Romero,” he says. “And a very conventional last name. At the time I really liked Roy Jones, so I just called myself Romero Jones.”

Each weekend, the local gym held “smokers” — unregulated amateur boxing exhibitions. Fighters showed up looking to make an impression. Cobbs was an outsider, and the spectators were usually not on his side. But he learned how to work the crowd. How to win their favor. 

Blair kept boxing throughout his teenage years, while the darkness within him grew. He enjoyed the sport but hated life on the run. Outside of the gym, he struggled. But inside the ring, this mentality made him dangerous. He didn’t care what happened to him. “You can knock me down, knock me out,” he says. It didn’t matter: “You’ll have to kill me in that ring.” 

When he was 18, Cobbs had grown to around 130 or 140 pounds. He was tough to beat at that weight. So for one fight he was matched up against a guy in a heavier class, a Mexican fighter who weighed about 180 pounds. After winning nearly every recent match, now Blair was about to get his ass kicked, and to make matters worse, his dad was in the crowd to see it, one of the few times he attended. In the first round, Cobbs got hit hard, the punches too heavy to block. It was a small ring, and there was nowhere to run. He was getting destroyed. The bell rang for the second round. Things were just about to turn from bad to worse, and then Cobbs remembers thinking, “What would Mayweather do?”

At the time, Cobbs was watching all of the professional fights he could, and Floyd Mayweather Jr., the brash superstar with the flashy trunks and the nickname “Pretty Boy,” stood out. It was the effortlessness in Mayweather’s movements that really impressed the young boxer, the way he beat his opponent, the way he broke him down. “Pop, boop, pop, pop, boop. This motherfucker is making this shit look so easy,” Cobbs remembers. 

During the second round of his big fight, Cobbs recalled how Mayweather liked to use a shoulder roll to pick off shots and then get close, get inside and land short shots. By midway through the second round, he was doing it himself — shoulder roll, block, defend — and the tide was turning. That’s when his opponent reared back for a big right hand, a right hand “that had death written all over it.” If it landed it would have meant the end for Cobbs. But he saw it coming and pulled back and delivered his counterpunch, striking his opponent’s exposed chin, and boom, his adversary hit the canvas. The crowd started chanting, “Romero! Romero!” 

“I think that was the pivotal point where I was like, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and I just never stopped,” Cobbs says. “That moment lasted forever. I never stopped no matter how bad it got in my life.”

Indeed, things would get worse for young Blair before they got better. 

Blair and his sister returned to the States the same way they entered: on the sly. After spending roughly three years on the run, their father sent them to Edgewater, New Jersey, back to living with their stepmom. After an arduous bureaucratic process, they also regained their actual identities. 

The kids got out of Mexico just in time. Their father was kidnapped for ransom in late 2008. When the price was met and Eugene was released by his captors, he was almost immediately arrested. 

Blair Cobbs tells the story of his boxing exploits in a fever, but when it comes time to discuss his father, his cadence slows, and the discomfort he feels about those experiences is clear. 

Eugene Cobbs was taken into police custody at Valle Real, “a gated, exclusive community outside of Guadalajara,” according to Federal Marshal Terry Moore. After four years on the lam, Eugene was extradited to Houston and then transferred to Wheeling, West Virginia, where he pled guilty and was sentenced to more than 12 years — 151 months — for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and operating as an airman without a license. After his arrest, he was discovered to have at least five aliases, with matching IDs. 

Blair tried to push the news from his mind. He tried to keep boxing. From his stepmother’s house in New Jersey, he bounced around to different gyms in New York City. 

But it wasn’t long before the redheaded stepchild felt like he’d worn out his welcome in New Jersey. So he returned to the place of his birth, Philadelphia. While his sister stayed behind with their stepmom, Blair moved into the half-abandoned house on a corner lot that his grandmother had once lived in.

When asked about what he did for work in Philly, he answers, “Oh my God,” before contemplating and reeling off a résumé of dead-end jobs, the first one at Abercrombie & Fitch, which at $7.25 for a few hours a week turned out to be little more than enough to pay for the TransPass he needed to get there. 

Despite his vast life experience, none of what he had learned would help him deal with being alone in Philadelphia. He didn’t have much, but he was constantly getting robbed. “They would rob me going to work, or going to get a job. Because at that particular time getting a job was almost a full-time job, you know, going out applying at this place or that, I would be out all day if I needed to, for possibly one opportunity.”

His house didn’t contain much to begin with, but it was soon looted of nearly all of its possessions. Then the electricity was turned off. Followed by the heat and gas. Wintertime. Putting on every piece of clothing he owned just to survive the night. “I’ve been in plenty of those situations,” he pauses, thinking. “I was in one situation, where I was broke … I ran through everything I could find [of value]. I was panicking. Because I was really hungry. A couple days went by, and I hadn’t eaten. You know, I’m working and everything, but I haven’t eaten. I don’t have any food money. When I find a little gold ring. Possibly my grandfather’s engagement ring or something. It saved my life.” 

He took the little gold ring to a Cash For Gold joint at a nearby shopping center. He only secured around $30. “But it was the most important 30 bucks in my life. It kept me alive,” he shakes his head, the memory sparking a wry smile. “And, uh, yeah, so that was pretty tough.”

He worked at Chili’s as, he says, “probably the worst waiter in the history of waiters.” And then there was Sky Chefs, preparing flight meals near the airport. “I ended up getting put in the frozen food section. I was in the refrigerator,” he says incredulously. “Freezing my ass off. And they would be pushing you, making you work hard as fuck. And you had to get there at 6 o’clock. I didn’t have a car. I would get up at like 2:30 in the morning to try and catch the first bus I could possibly get.” But in the end it never mattered, because after a series of connections, buses and trains to get there, he still arrived late nearly every day. He made it three weeks and one paycheck, and he was out. After that, he finally found the one job that would hold him until he turned pro, at a coffee shop. There, a bit of stability allowed him to get back to training. 

He trained at James Shuler Memorial Boxing Gym, the former stomping grounds of Bernard Hopkins and “Terrible” Tim Witherspoon, in West Philadelphia. On June 28, 2013, at age 24, he made his professional debut, flooring Martique Holland in the first round in Ruffin, North Carolina. 

He quickly got off to a 4-0 record. But then the fights stopped coming. He got a lesson in the politics of boxing. The most important thing to know about the fight game is that “you can’t do it by yourself,” he says. “The biggest problem with boxing in America is that you need funding to get to the elite level. You can be very good and it almost doesn’t matter because you need funding. You need support. A lot of backing.” He could best all of the killers in Philly and it wouldn’t be enough if he didn’t have the right team behind him and a promoter to get him on the right cards and the right fights. 

Around the time of his first professional fight, his father was also making a change. On April 10, 2013, Eugene Cobbs decided that prison life no longer suited him. He’d been serving time at Fort Dix in New Jersey before being transferred to a minimum-security facility, FCI Morgantown, in West Virginia, after earning marks for good behavior. 

It was the morning hours, before 10 a.m., and Eugene Cobbs had been assigned cleaning duty in the parking lot. But at 4 p.m., when the prison guards did their count, they discovered that prisoner Cobbs was unaccounted for.

“He walked away from FCI Morgantown,” Marshal Moore says. “Due to the security of the facility, it’s fairly easy to walk away from. It’s not an over-the-wall escape or anything like that; there was no hidden tunnel. He was cleaning a parking lot and just walked away.” A fence surrounded the facility, but it was only three feet high. Eugene’s prison garb was discovered nearby. Moore was tasked with tracking him down. 

By the time of Eugene’s second manhunt, Moore, who had entered the Marshal Service immediately following graduation from Fairmont State University in West Virginia, had expeditiously ascended the ladder to supervisory deputy. He was 29 years old, and despite a right arm marked in ink, he looked every bit of 16, with short blond hair and a baby face. He openly shares a penchant for vacations to Disney World. His ambition and enthusiasm for the job are evident, and they extended to the pursuit of Eugene Cobbs.

Moore says that at the time he’d seen his share of escapes. Nine out of 10 times, the guy would scramble, nervously, maybe call a girlfriend to rendezvous at the nearest hotel, or meet up with his drug dealer. “We get them relatively quickly,” and they usually don’t make it far, he says. But when Moore answered the phone this time and heard the name Eugene Cobbs, he stood on alert. He remembered the first chase. “I knew it would be a good hunt,” Moore says. “I was like, this is going to be something.” Not easy for sure, Moore knew, recounting that Eugene had previously eluded justice for four years. 

Moore explains that after escaping, Eugene walked to a nearby garage, Dinsmore Tire & Auto, where he called a cab. The driver took him to a Kroger grocery store in nearby Sabraton, West Virginia, where he waited while the escapee went inside and received a Western Union money order. The cabbie then drove Eugene an hour and a half to Pittsburgh and dropped him at a Greyhound station. 

“We had aired Mr. Cobbs’s picture on the news to see if anybody had seen him. And I got a call from a local cab company who advised that they had picked up Mr. Cobbs on April 10,” Moore recounts. “We immediately obtained warrants for Mr. Cobbs.”

A second international manhunt was now taking place for Blair’s father: “The Coke-Plane Fugitive,” as one newspaper dubbed him. Moore says Eugene Cobbs was a clever and experienced criminal, who “knew how to avoid detection.” Moore believed that he would follow a similar game plan as he had the last time. “After he made it onto that bus,” Moore says he knew: “He’s making his move. He’s going to Mexico.”

Moore started interviewing family members and acquaintances, and nobody knew a thing. “So we’re kind of stale on his trail at that time, and that’s when I really start to dig into the escape investigation.” Moore went to the tire shop, watched a surveillance video of the fugitive getting into the cab, then another of him entering the Western Union. Through subpoena requests, the investigative team got information from Western Union that indicated that Blair’s stepmother was the one who had wired Eugene the money. She was eventually arrested for assisting in the escape.

But the account of how Moore eventually got his man is much less cinematic. The marshal was seated at his desk, the phone rang, and he was given an anonymous tip. Simple as that. “In this case,” Moore says, “the tip was the golden ticket” that allowed him and coordinating authorities to ascertain Eugene’s exact location. On June 23, 2014, Mexican law enforcement arrested Eugene Cobbs in Tepatitlán. He did not put up a fight, although he did present false identification documents. But Moore saw the photos from the arrest scene and was given a description of the suspect’s tattoos. “I knew at that point, 100 percent, it was Cobbs,” he says. “It was a good grab.” 

Eugene was extradited from Mexico that very day and escorted to Los Angeles, where he was taken into custody by deputy marshals, then transported, once more, to West Virginia. 

Moore describes Eugene as a “gentle” guy, who never showed a penchant for violence; each time he was arrested, he surrendered peacefully. “He never tried to be that hardened criminal that gives you problems.” (Eugene Cobbs declined requests to be interviewed for this article.)

Back in Philadelphia, by the time Blair found out his dad had escaped, Eugene was soon back in custody. “It was very short-lived,” Blair says. 

On August 11, 2014, Eugene Cobbs pled guilty to the escape and was sentenced to 14 months, to be served consecutive to his prior sentence. 

Meanwhile, Blair’s boxing career was stuck in neutral, and he remained at his 4-0 mark, with no fights on the horizon. He wasn’t going anywhere if a promoter didn’t sign him. It stung even worse that nearly all of his rivals and competitors were getting inked to deals, while he had to “bleed for everything,” he says. Here he was, in his peak fighting years, 23 years old, and he couldn’t even get a fight. 

It was at that point that he decided to take a gamble on a flight to Las Vegas to try to get noticed, to try to get backing. It was a risky proposition. He had a steady job and a girlfriend, Melissa. And to top it off, he and Melissa had recently welcomed a son of their own into the world. He made the trip anyway.

Once in Vegas he was able to get a few sparring sessions in front of some prominent eyes. But in the end, his manager at the time made a mess of things, Cobbs says. 

The trip was an abject failure. 

To make matters worse, when he got back to Philly, he’d lost his job at the coffee shop. He soon lost his apartment. “Now I’m homeless,” he says. “And I don’t even care, not about boxing, like I’m finished with life.” 

His girlfriend and son stayed with one of her acquaintances, but Blair, unable to support himself, let alone a family, bounced around. 

Sometimes he slept in his car. 

Other times it was abandoned buildings. 

Things in Philly remained bleak. So futile that Blair remembers jokingly thinking, “I wish I could sell drugs,” he laughs, “but I couldn’t sell drugs. I didn’t have any fucking friends.”

It took him nearly a year to get back on his feet, both mentally and spiritually. To get up and take another shot. 

“I’m in this continuous state of being reborn. Constantly moving from one place to the next. But dying too. Going through the worst experience I could possibly go through and surviving that to move on, to another level. But did I really survive or did a piece of me just die in order to live on?” he ponders. “That’s a question I ask myself. There was a lot going on from a mental perspective.” 

Finally, Cobbs caught a break. He hooked up with Kenny Mason, a trainer who had worked with recent middleweight world champion Julian Williams. Cobbs began to find a rhythm with Mason. Mason also gave him a place to crash. Sort of. “I was living in Kenny’s closet,” he says. (It was literally a walk-in closet.) But it was in that closet that Cobbs found God. “I went through an experience of growth,” he says. “Learning how to think, how to manifest my dreams into reality.” He prayed and meditated. He put up a vision board. It wasn’t a great situation, but he says it’s what he needed. And it wasn’t all bad, if not for the dog he shared the closet with. “The dog wanted to evict me.”

He found a church, Casa de Gloria. And he got back to the gym. It was there, at Joe Hand’s Gym, that he met Bernard Hopkins, a boxing legend and one of the most successful fighters in history. Hopkins offered him some desperately needed encouragement, and Cobbs picked up his training even more. He started training other boxers as well, to earn some dough. 

He decided to give Vegas another shot. He couldn’t stay in Philly any longer. “Let’s just go,” he told his girlfriend. Through it all, he says Melissa stuck with him. “I think it’s just that we didn’t have anybody else,” he marvels. “We didn’t have anything else but each other.”

“We took those couple bucks I had from training and just took off,” Cobbs remembers. “We only stopped for gas, too afraid [the car would break down] — we gassed it while the car was still running, because I’ll be damned if we didn’t make it.”

There was no alternative. Cobbs saw only two options if he remained in the city: Death or jail. 

“As we left Philadelphia you could feel the weight being lifted. As the miles started passing, the freer we started to feel. We were as happy as hell. It didn’t matter what happened in Vegas. It was better than being there.”

The car was packed: father, mother, son. Everything they had.

“Straight to Vegas. Two days.”

Once in Vegas, Cobbs and his family were still homeless. They lived out of their car north of Vegas at a pit stop frequented by truckers. Sometimes they pitched a pop-up tent. It didn’t matter. He calls it one of the most peaceful times of his life. “We were happy there,” he says. “No responsibilities or obligations. It was just us living, day to day. And being appreciative of each moment that passed. Because each moment was a better moment.”

After all that he’d been through, somehow Cobbs now looked at the world with optimism. In Mexico he had felt low and therefore he was low. He’d hit rock bottom in Philadelphia. Now his new attitude led him out of the hole. He could feel the universe conspiring for his success. 

He hooked up with a distant relative who put him and his family up for a few weeks. He and Melissa got jobs, his at the Cromwell Hotel. Soon enough, they had a place of their own. And after his cousin put in a word with an ex-boxer, the former super-bantamweight titlist Bones Adams, Cobbs had himself a trainer. Adams had a gym behind his house in Las Vegas, right down the street from Cobbs’s new place. Just like the rhythm in the ring — pop, pop, pop — all of the things he needed in his life started to click into place. Next, he hooked up with a manager, Greg Hannley. Hannley staked him, with around two grand a month, so that Cobbs could train full time. 

Adams says that right from the start he saw the potential. “Phenomenal skills, strong, fast, and athletic as can be. He does things most people can’t.” Adams does admit, however, that at the time, “He was very wild … out of control, crazy [in the ring].” 

His first fight in three years was on May 18, 2017, in Tijuana, where he scored a second-round technical knockout. He was finally 5-0. Pop, pop, pop. By year’s end, he’d be 7-0. In 2018 he was named the Nevada Boxing Hall of Fame prospect of the year. 

In 2019 he was signed by Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions and won the North American Boxing Federation welterweight title (an achievement, but not the heralded World Boxing Council or World Boxing Association titles he and other boxers are mainly chasing). Golden Boy Promotions touts his three 2019 fights as “the most prominent fights of the year in boxing.” Ringtv.com (“The Bible of Boxing”) said of his November 2019 win over Carlos Ortiz: “The Blair Cobbs show continues to be a thrill a minute,” while noting that his lively post-fight interview “was just as entertaining as his fight.” 

In the summer of 2019, Blair’s father was released early from Fort Dix. Eugene is now living with Blair and his family in Vegas, and just like his son, the father is looking for a fresh start. 

Blair, the rich kid from Beverly Hills, the American in Mexico, the poor kid in Philly, they’re all part of him now. But he has evolved. He’s even earned himself a new moniker: He’s now Blair “The Flair” Cobbs, a nickname given to him by an onlooker during one of his sparring sessions. But Blair has taken the handle and run with it.

What does “The Flair” mean? “It encapsulates everything that everyone would ever want to be,” Cobbs says. “People want to be a rock star. People want to have charisma. They want to be great, greater than they are. They want to believe, to have the passion and drive that they can do anything. … Someone who’s genuinely one of a kind. That’s what ‘The Flair’ is.”

Fight insiders still describe Blair Cobbs, a southpaw, as a wild man in the ring, and spectators love the passion he brings. He’s brash and has a swagger — and to top it off, when he enters the ring he even lets out a “Woo!” in the style of legendary pro wrestling star Ric Flair. 

But he’s also quick to point out: “[It’s] ‘The Flair’ who has that confidence. Blair Cobbs doesn’t.”

“That’s a real person within me,” he says. “Living through all kinds of crazy shit, I kept dying and reinventing myself. I kind of just developed these multiple character personalities and [The Flair] just comes out whenever the cameras are on me.” 

Some people will say that, at 30, he’s too old to be a prospect. But Cobbs will tell you the time off just means he’s fresh. That he hasn’t taken the punches, and that his boxing age is young. 

He still likes to put on a show, but Adams, who recently stepped aside as Cobbs’s head trainer, says he’s done a good job of cleaning up the recklessness in the ring. And his biggest asset is the most important: “He doesn’t want to lose,” Adams says. “He has the will to win.”

On Valentine’s Day, 2020, at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California, “The Flair” scored a split decision victory over Samuel Kotey, who had sported an impressive 23-2 record going into the bout. He hopes it’s the stepping-stone he needs for a title shot later this year.

Blair Cobbs remains undefeated. And he believes that his best chapter is yet to be written.

As a kid growing up in northern Utah, Chet Olsen would often take his older brother’s shotgun shells, empty out the pellets, and spread them across a flat surface. He would then guide the pellets around, pretending that each one was a sheep he had to tend to. Olsen, now 62, has a salt-and-pepper mustache that accents his serious demeanor, and his boots display telltale signs of a lifetime of hard, hands-on work. After graduating high school and taking a string of construction jobs, Olsen jumped at the opportunity to launch his own business. It was nothing glamorous — his company, R&C Supply, manufactured chemical fertilizer — but it was his own. Olsen eventually expanded his customer base to include hundreds of farmers and cattle ranchers across Utah County, which allowed him to fulfill his childhood dream of purchasing a herd of sheep.

People tend to know their neighbors in the part of Utah County where Olsen lives, a region south of the cities of Orem and Provo, where clusters of modest homes are grouped together between acres of open farmland. So Olsen frequently saw Al McKee, an unassuming-looking middle-aged entrepreneur who had moved, with his family, to Utah County in the late 1990s from a town outside of Salt Lake City. McKee wore his gray facial hair in a goatee and would often boast, in passing, about his business connections. He owned and operated a company, the Ophir Minerals and Aggregate Group, that mined industrial materials like silica and calcium carbonate. Like approximately 85 percent of Utah County’s population, Olsen and McKee were both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). Their families were in the same ward — a term used to represent a local church congregation of Mormons, which is presided over by a bishop.

In 2000, McKee heard that Olsen was beginning to raise a herd of sheep, and he made him a proposition. He brought Olsen to a seven-mile stretch of land on the edges of the county. Dotted with cedar trees, the area, known as the Tintic Mining District, had bustled with industry in its 19th-century heyday. McKee told Olsen that he had bought the land and envisioned multiple mines yielding tremendous profits, like it had when settlers first staked claims in the area. The work McKee planned to do would primarily be underground, leaving an opportunity for Olsen to use the land above for his herd. After a contract was written and signed, Olsen began clearing some of the cedar trees to make the area easier to navigate. He rebuilt fences and reseeded grass so that the sheep would have plenty to eat come spring.

A deeper friendship between Olsen and McKee began to blossom as a result of the deal. Meanwhile, their wives bonded through their participation in a Mormon mentorship program that offered guidance to young women. The couples’ shared love of music took them on vacations to Las Vegas, where they saw Rod Stewart perform, and to St. Louis for a Paul McCartney concert.

Almost 15 years later, McKee offered to sell Olsen some farming equipment at a substantial discount — a lucrative opportunity, given that Olsen could use the equipment for both his fertilizer company and his sheep-herding business. Convinced that the investment was worth the risk, Olsen took out a loan for $755,740 and began to make plans to propel his two businesses toward further prosperity.

“Then someone I thought was my friend came and took it all away,” Olsen says.

Olsen never received any of the equipment McKee had promised him. Instead, McKee kept the money for himself. As Olsen and his wife would later learn, the bogus equipment sale was one of many fraudulent deals McKee had been pitching to investors all over Utah County. Before the schemes were finally exposed, his plot had ensnared a national corporation and a prominent Utah County politician. In the meantime, McKee netted and spent close to $1.2 million.

Sadly, the story of Al McKee and his schemes is not an anomaly in Utah. According to the FBI, the state is a hotbed for white-collar crime, with billions of dollars lost annually by individuals who fall victim to con men. Utah’s large Mormon population is particularly vulnerable to what’s known among prosecutors as “affinity fraud.” Perpetrators of these schemes use affinity — a shared identity formed through membership in the same close-knit group — as a way to gain the trust of their victims. That deep trust is then used to persuade victims to invest money into legitimate-sounding business ventures. Although LDS Church officials declined interview requests on the topic for this article, prominent members have been privately warning fellow Mormons of the practice for decades.

In a 1986 article for the official LDS magazine, Ensign, a prominent Mormon named Dallin Oaks called perpetrators of affinity fraud “scheming promoters with glib tongues and ingratiating manners.” Oaks, who had a leadership role in the church and also served as a Utah Supreme Court justice, went on in the article to write that “though their method of thievery may be immune from correction in this life, sophisticated thieves in white shirts and ties will ultimately be seen and punished for what they are.”

Prosecutors throughout Utah have made combating affinity fraud a priority as well. But even when perpetrators are successfully convicted of their crimes, victims rarely receive even a fraction of their investments back. The payments Olsen has received from a court-ordered restitution don’t even cover the monthly interest accumulating on the $755,740 loan. He and his family are struggling to make ends meet.

“It gets tough at times,” Olsen says. “You’ve got to try to save your credit and you’ve got to try to save your soul.” Gary Anderson’s life changed forever when McKee entered his world in 2009. Born and raised a Mormon in California’s Central Valley, Anderson has always taken great joy in helping others, particularly those otherwise overlooked by society. Anderson, now 72, took his mission trip to Germany after high school, where the friends he met and served with were all planning to attend Brigham Young University in Provo. They encouraged Anderson to do the same, and after writing to the famous Mormon university, he was granted admission and a scholarship. He met his future wife, Molly, while attending the school. It was partially because of Molly’s Utah County roots that, after attending law school in his home state of California, Anderson moved back to Utah and took a job as a prosecutor. He eventually transitioned to defense work, solidifying a long-held belief that working as a trial lawyer was a good way to make a living while also helping a lot of people. In his mid-30s, Anderson served as a Utah County commissioner; then he went back to practicing law, until people in the community encouraged him to run for public office again nearly two decades later. He won the election and retook office as a Utah County commissioner in 2006.

In June of 2009, Anderson was at the Marriott Hotel in Provo for a meeting of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah. The nonprofit organization serves as a bridge between the public and private sectors to promote economic growth. Along with the county’s two other commissioners, Anderson listened to a presentation given by Al McKee. Every mineral known to man has been found in abundance in Utah, McKee told the group. All of these minerals, he added, would make Utah County in particular attractive to Fortune 500 companies like 3M and Ford.

The presentation did not go over well.

“We thought he was a blowhard,” Anderson says. “We thought he was full of boloney because he is. He’s just one of those guys.”

Despite this initial impression, Anderson would soon end up working closely with McKee. Utah County had embarked on a project to resurface and rehabilitate Interstate 15, a freeway that runs through the entirety of the county. Ames Construction, a national company with a long history of work in Utah, won the project bid and tapped McKee’s company, Ophir, to provide Ames with road base — a mixture of clay and gravel commonly used in road construction because of its ability to handle heavy loads. When McKee ran into some logistical issues, Anderson, in his role as county commissioner, was called upon to help sort things out.

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The eventual success of the interstate project gave Anderson a newfound sense of respect for McKee, and his initial skepticism about the man soon faded entirely. McKee introduced him to people who said that they worked with 3M and mentioned that McKee had saved the company billions. McKee frequently lectured at local universities on the promising future of the mineral industry in Utah County. In many of these presentations, McKee would note that his knowledge of the minerals in the region came from studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

On multiple occasions, McKee worked closely with the county government on economic development, and the commission even named Ophir as the Utah County Business of the Year in 2011.

“We thought he was wonderful,” Anderson says. “Everybody trusted Al.”

When Anderson was up for reelection in 2010, he won handily with 81 percent of the vote. According to campaign donation disclosures, McKee gave a total of $6,500 to Anderson’s campaign through two individual gifts and one donation from Ophir.

In what Anderson estimates was 2013, McKee informed him that he had cancer of the esophagus and was dying. Anderson heard secondhand stories about McKee traveling internationally to receive cancer treatments that were not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Mutual acquaintances told him that McKee was preparing to hand over control of the Ophir Minerals and Aggregate Group to his son. With the exception of a brief phone call in the run-up to Anderson’s reelection campaign, Anderson says he didn’t hear much from the terminally ill entrepreneur for more than a year. Just east of the Tintic Mining District, at the junction of two state highways, is Elberta, Utah, population 275. It was once the sight of a major railroad, but for years only tumbleweed has run across the overgrown tracks.

Plans to renovate the area had developed and stalled multiple times. But, in 2013, while Anderson thought McKee was focused solely on his cancer treatment, the entrepreneur reached out to Ames Construction, the company he had worked with on the Interstate 15 project, with a promising offer in hand. He said he was working alongside leaders of the LDS Church, who wanted to construct a six-building industrial park to serve as the focal point of a newly refurbished railroad, both of which would attract new businesses to the area. If Ames Construction agreed to work with McKee on the development project, the company stood to make millions.

McKee provided Ames Construction with copies of letters, addressed to McKee, that were written on letterhead used by the Suburban Land Reserve, a land management corporation owned by the LDS Church. He also provided Ames with letters purportedly written and signed by Bishop Gary Stevenson, at the time the Presiding Bishop responsible for overseeing all of the worldly business conducted by the LDS Church. The letters showed support for McKee’s role in the industrial project and stated that the church was prepared to invest more than $200 million in the endeavor.

Leadership at Ames agreed to work with McKee on the industrial park, and the company began spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare for construction. In addition to allocating funds for equipment and engineering work, Ames Construction also paid McKee for expenses that the entrepreneur was supposedly incurring while preparing the site.

Meanwhile, Anderson lost his bid at another term as county commissioner in 2014, falling to an opponent from the Tea Party who ran on a platform further to the right than Anderson’s, promising that lessening the county’s bond obligations would bring about economic prosperity. Fortunately, Anderson’s time in office and credentials as an attorney made finding new employment easy: He worked in the public defender’s office, served as the city attorney for the town of Eureka, and did legal consulting. The multiple job titles, coupled with the revenue from his wife’s thriving business selling imported vanilla, yielded some of the best financial times of the Andersons’ lives.

Then, in April of 2015, McKee called, out of the blue. He told Anderson that his business had become a mess while he’d been recovering from cancer, but he now had plans for a promising future. According to Anderson, McKee told him about contracts he had with 3M for calcium carbonate and for the work he was doing to revitalize the Tintic Mining District. McKee needed assistance with getting his business in order, and he offered Anderson a six-figure salary if he would help. Anderson agreed to look at how Ophir was doing before committing.

The two men took trips up to the mining district, where McKee showed Anderson some of the test holes they’d dug and the ore that was being analyzed. McKee provided Anderson with contracts from companies wanting to purchase calcium carbonate, which he said were worth $15 million.

“Let me help you,” Anderson told McKee before officially joining Ophir as a legal consultant.

Early 2015 was also when McKee proposed the big equipment deal to Chet Olsen. McKee said that, through a friendship he had developed while going to school with Jon Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor, he could buy repossessed government equipment at a discount through a company called Associated Land Brokers. When Olsen saw the detailed lists of equipment, each piece seemed to be something that would benefit both his expanding fertilizer business and the growing sheep herd. The list included large spreaders that are used to spray chemical fertilizer onto soil, trailers Olsen could use to haul his sheep, as well as hay bailers, tractors and more. Olsen says that he gave the deal a lot of thought before he began the process of obtaining a $755,740 loan from Western AgCredit, which provides financial services for agricultural purchases.

Around the same time, Anderson says, McKee asked him if he knew anyone who would be interested in investing in a silica mine he was trying to get up and running in the Tintic Mining District.

Eventually, Anderson told McKee that he would invest some of his own money in the project. Over a period of three months, Anderson invested $170,000 — about half of the total value of his retirement account — into Ophir. Knowing that his daughter Sarah and her husband, Nate Schultz, were having financial problems after losing a considerable amount of money during the recession, Anderson also approached them with the investment opportunity.

It was a huge commitment after losing so much, but the couple said that they were trying to develop a positive outlook when it came to their finances. Friends warned them that they shouldn’t invest anything they weren’t prepared to lose, and they had that in mind when a $20,000 investment deal was drawn up and signed with McKee.

“My dad, who is super protective of me as his little girl, would have never put us in a position that would cause us financial hurt, knowing what we’ve been through,” Sarah Schultz says, before acknowledging that her father did not truly know McKee at the time — or about the disaster that awaited them. While that disaster had yet to unfold, some of McKee’s business partners were starting to grow impatient. Ames Construction had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the development project, yet there weren’t any signs that ground would be broken in the immediate future. Meanwhile, Olsen had been providing McKee with funds from the loan he had taken out to purchase the discounted farm equipment, but he hadn’t received anything in return.

When McKee was unable to provide any proof that a return on their investments would materialize, Olsen and Ames Construction began putting pressure on the entrepreneur to make good on his promises. Anderson noticed the increased scrutiny, and he says he pushed McKee to let him help with legal matters. However, McKee would always offer a reason why he should be the one to handle things.

The supposedly terminal cancer that McKee had previously overcome was also back with a vengeance. Anderson says that there were multiple times when a planned business trip to California was canceled at the last minute because McKee said he was in the hospital receiving treatment. On other occasions, McKee said he was unable to deliver paperwork Anderson had requested because he was having tests done. The $10,000 checks that Anderson was receiving as a monthly salary began bouncing, but Anderson says that McKee was quick to provide cash or a certified check instead.

Olsen had similar experiences with McKee as he continued to put pressure on his friend about the equipment he had paid for. It got to a point where every time Olsen called he would hear McKee’s faint voice on the other end of the line saying that he could hardly talk because of the illness. Olsen’s wife, Karen, would often bring prepared meals to McKee’s house to lift the burden on his family.

“That’s what we do out here when someone is sick and dying of cancer,” Karen says.

As McKee’s condition seemed to worsen, Anderson began taking more of a hands-on role in the business. He met with Olsen in person multiple times, attempting to serve as a buffer between Olsen and McKee, whose friendship had become strained. When the pressure continued to build, Anderson says that McKee’s wife, Cynthia, pulled him aside and said that the demands on McKee were killing him. Something needed to be done to calm the worried parties.

Although, to this day, he can’t put his finger on what led him to do what he did next, Anderson agreed to help McKee. Under McKee’s guidance, he started making phone calls to Olsen using burner phones that Anderson claims were given to him by the entrepreneur. One night, Anderson called Olsen’s cell phone posing as David Thompson, the supposed president of Affiliated Land Brokers, and left him a voicemail. When Olsen heard the voice, it sounded familiar to him, and he saved the message.

Olsen still has the voicemail. Anderson begins by identifying himself as David Thompson and, after apologizing for calling so late, details all of his unsuccessful attempts at contacting McKee. Then he describes various permits that needed to be purchased so that the equipment deal could proceed.

“We had to pay those commerce permits, we had to pay ’em. We couldn’t let $2 million worth of equipment go for 11 grand, so I used his credit card,” Anderson states.

Before cordially ending the call, Anderson stumbles through a joke about McKee potentially suing his “David Thompson” persona and then stresses that he had to use McKee’s credit card so that they could keep the equipment.

Anderson also agreed to use the same burner phones to make calls to an Ames Construction executive — this time pretending to be Bishop Stevenson. Speaking as Stevenson, Anderson attempted to ease the executive’s worries. There were never any demands to Ames for money, Anderson maintains, just reassurances that the bishop was still planning on getting to the industrial park project.

In the time that has passed since making those phone calls, Anderson says he’s spoken to his bishop, his family and psychologists in an effort to figure out why he did something he knew he shouldn’t have.

“To this day, I cannot think of what tipped me over the line,” Anderson says. “But I was trying to take pressure off of Al. He was sick, he was my friend. I was worried about him.”

Meanwhile, Olsen was still suspicious about the voicemail from the man alleging to be in charge of getting him his equipment. He had met Gary Anderson enough times to develop a strong hunch that the former commissioner was the real voice behind the call. To confirm his suspicions, Olsen called a friend who was a detective with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. As soon as the detective, who had worked closely with Anderson in the past, heard the voicemail, he identified the voice as belonging to Gary Anderson.

At the same time, legal representatives from Ames Construction were going directly to LDS Church officials with the letters that were supposedly from Bishop Stevenson. They were able to confirm through LDS legal counsel that the letters were, in fact, forgeries and that the high-ranking church official had never actually had contact with McKee. Realizing that they’d been had, the church’s legal team contacted investigators at the Utah County Attorney’s Office. Anderson’s wife, Molly, woke him up earlier than usual on the morning of December 22, 2015. He wasn’t due at work for another hour and a half, but Molly was insisting that he wake up immediately.

When he came upstairs from his basement bedroom, the scene reminded Anderson of something out of a television show. There was a team of several officers surrounding his home. Once they were inside the house, they informed Anderson that they had obtained a warrant for his phone because they believed that incriminating text messages between Anderson and McKee were on the device. They read him his Miranda rights and, although Anderson says he would have gotten it for them himself, then proceeded to search the home until they found his cell phone.

During the search, Anderson says that he admitted making the fraudulent phone calls.

“We don’t like the sound of that,” Anderson recalls one of the officers stating after he confessed.

“I know,” Anderson says he replied. “It was stupid.”

On February 26, 2016, both Anderson and McKee were charged with multiple felonies — including three counts of second-degree communications fraud.

Due to the potential for a conflict of interest in the case, the Utah County Attorney’s Office requested that the state attorney general’s office prosecute Anderson and McKee. The case was taken by the office’s Mortgage and Financial Fraud Unit, which regularly prosecutes white-collar crime cases in which large amounts of money have been taken from multiple victims. Assistant Attorney General Jake Taylor, who is in charge of the unit and was involved in prosecuting Anderson, says that in most of the cases that his office prosecutes, a violation of trust has occurred. The victims, he adds, typically give money to someone else because they know their family or because they attend the same ward.

Taylor says that the key pieces of evidence in the case against McKee and Anderson were the phone records that investigators obtained after they seized the duo’s cell phones. Those records demonstrated, he adds, that McKee and Anderson were conspiring through text messages to defraud Olsen. In addition to the messages, both Olsen and the executive from Ames Construction had recorded phone calls and voicemails in which Anderson was impersonating someone else.

“If you’re a juror, how do you ignore that?” Taylor asks. “He’s someone that you think could be trusted and here he is making phone calls pretending to be someone he’s not.”

Olsen didn’t realize the scope of his former friend’s crimes until he attended a preliminary hearing for McKee and Anderson on June 2, 2016, where he heard about the other schemes that McKee had been involved in. He also listened intently as a forensic accountant detailed exactly where all of his money had been going.

There were trips to Africa and England, the financing of mission trips for members of their ward, and vacations with extended family to Disneyland during which McKee had paid the entire bill. By the time the accountant was finished, Olsen had heard a detailed account of how his $755,740 had been spent paying for his former friend’s lavish lifestyle.

Most of McKee’s other claims don’t check out either. A spokesperson for MIT said that the school’s registrar’s office had no record of McKee ever being a student there. Olsen would later learn that McKee had never actually purchased the Tintic Mining District, but instead had merely taken out a five-year lease on the property. Neither Olsen nor Anderson believe that McKee ever had cancer, and Anderson now believes that the 3M contracts McKee showed him were forgeries as well.

Anderson’s trust in McKee didn’t vanish until he heard testimony during the preliminary hearing. Up until that moment, the former county commissioner had maintained his belief that McKee’s business dealings were legitimate — even if some of his methods had crossed the line. But when Anderson saw the fake email accounts, forged letters and impersonations that McKee himself had done, he could no longer defend him.

“It was a calculated, complicated, diabolical deal,” Anderson says.

Both McKee and Anderson would end up taking plea bargains that stipulated that, in exchange for having three of the felony charges dropped, they would plead guilty to one count of communications fraud. McKee was sentenced to 15 years in prison and ordered to pay more than $1.5 million in restitution to the parties that were defrauded by his crimes. He is currently being jailed at the Tooele County Detention Center and could be as old as 71 when he is released. He did not respond to requests for an interview.

If not for the phone calls, Anderson’s defense attorney, Nathan Crane, believes that the former commissioner would have just been another victim of McKee’s schemes. What Anderson did was stupid, Crane says, but he maintains that Anderson did it because he believed that McKee had legitimate projects going and that he was just stalling for time while McKee was battling an illness.

Anderson had already paid $25,000 to Olsen before his sentencing, which under the terms of his plea deal allowed the former county commissioner to avoid jail time. In total, he was ordered to pay $162,606 in restitution. During his sentencing hearing, Judge Vernice Trease, of Utah’s Third Judicial District, ordered Anderson to make restitution payments of $1,000 a month and questioned how much Anderson would be able to pay without a job.

“Anderson needs to find a job. Or two jobs. Or three jobs,” Trease said in the courtroom. “Someone is out of a lot of money, and Anderson — especially given his background — knows better.”

Some of Anderson’s children who were at the sentencing hearing, including Sarah Schultz, offered to make up the difference should Anderson be unable to afford his monthly payment.

“Up to that point, I just wanted to die. I just wanted to die. I just wanted to be gone. I just wanted to be gone from existence,” Anderson says. “Then my family brought me back.”

The plea deal Anderson accepted was unique, and it stems from a desire to get financial restitution for the victims. If both men were in prison, Crane says, there would be no restitution payments at all. Under the terms of the plea agreement, Anderson was also required to resign from the Utah State Bar and surrender his law license.

Both Anderson and McKee now appear on Utah’s White Collar Crime Offender Registry. In February of 2016, Utah became the first state in the nation to have such a registry, which displays perpetrators’ photos alongside details of their state-level felony convictions. When the registry launched, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said that he hoped it would encourage perpetrators in the state to complete their court-ordered restitution payments. If a convicted fraudster pays his court-ordered restitution, he is removed from the registry.

For Anderson, being placed on the registry does not impact him nearly as much as the repercussions he has faced at church. Although he’s still able to attend services at his ward and is still considered a member of the LDS Church, the fact that he has a felony on his record means he is “disfellowshipped” and unable to participate in church activities like leading prayer during services. If Anderson is able to complete his court-ordered restitution payments, the church will fully reinstate him.

Anderson often thinks about where his legacy stands in the wake of the incident. He says that he feels like he’s no longer the commissioner who brought jobs into the county, or the defense attorney who would often work for free when clients couldn’t afford representation. Instead, he says, he’s the crook — the guy who stole a bunch of money.

“Life is not over,” Anderson says. “But boy it’s changed.”

Chet Olsen’s hands, covered with worn-out work gloves, vibrate as he drives a pastel orange water truck toward his herd of sheep. The only sound on this misty January morning in 2018 is the rumbling of the diesel engine as the truck makes its way along rough dirt roads that divide large fields filled with the remnants of last season’s alfalfa harvest. As 14 large troughs come into view in the foreground, Olsen spots thousands of dark specks in the distance. He sits casually in the truck, on a seat with torn-up blue upholstery that leaves the padding underneath almost completely visible, watching in the side-view mirror as each trough fills up with water.

Olsen’s thoughts are often consumed by the $755,740 loss he suffered at McKee’s hands, and there are reminders of McKee all around him. A short distance east is the site of the industrial development and railroad that McKee was supposedly selected to help build. To the west are the remnants of railroad tracks that McKee claimed to own and, in another one of his fraudulent schemes, was selling to local recycling companies. Just beyond those torn-up tracks is the Tintic Mining District, where McKee brought investors and pitched them on his plans to resurrect it.

In the years since his former friend and Anderson were sentenced, Olsen has often wondered whether he is to blame for his loss. It’s hard to trust people now, he says, and his family is in serious debt. Gary Anderson’s restitution payments don’t even cover the interest on the $755,740 loan that Olsen took out for the equipment. Olsen, along with his wife, Karen, frequently think about how they are going to make ends meet.

“It’s a good thing we did put some away so that the roof over our head is paid for,” Olsen says. “But still, our lifestyle and the things we planned for the future [are] not there.”

Eventually Olsen gets out of the water truck and makes his way over to where the sheep are gathered. Slowly and steadily, he walks the perimeter, leading the skittish sheep toward the water troughs. When the herd arrives, Olsen gets back into the truck and prepares to refill the troughs as they are drained.

There is little chance that Olsen will ever be fully repaid for what McKee stole. “Meanwhile he’s sitting down there getting three meals a day that you and I are paying for,” Olsen says. “He’s got it made. He needs to be out dragging a chain around somewhere, picking up garbage off the freeway or something.”

Once the troughs are refilled and Olsen is through inspecting the sheep, he navigates the water truck back down the dirt road. Past the troughs, crows pick at the body of a dead lamb. Although Olsen can’t say for sure how the lamb died, he notes that some of the main predators in the area are coyotes, which are often depicted in Native American mythology as tricksters that use clever and cunning to deceive others.

Sometimes, in those legends, the coyotes take the shape of men.