F
or a private detective working in Los Angeles, most investigations tend to follow a predictable pattern. You get a divorce case, or a custody case, and from the time the client pays the retainer, you know what the job will entail. You’ll follow a guy around taking pictures from hotel parking lots, or outside of a club on Sunset, trying to prove he’s having an affair. Or maybe it’s a workers’ comp case. Same thing: You tail a guy, take pictures, prove he’s not really hurt.
But the Adam Iza case, it was different from the start.
Iza was a computer wiz who’d made millions off crypto. He had called Paramount Investigative Services in November 2021 with what seemed like a straightforward job: He was hoping to recover a stolen laptop with $300 million in crypto on it, and had a good idea who had taken it.
Paramount’s founder, Ken Childs, didn’t know a whole lot about crypto but promised Iza he could track down the laptop. He warned it could take a while, though — the guy who stole it probably didn’t want to be found.
After a few weeks of surveilling the suspected thief and turning up no solid leads, Childs decided he wanted to meet Iza. The crypto world was full of con artists, and Childs was keen to make sure Iza was who he said he was, a kid in his twenties worth $700 million. This job was going to get expensive. Childs asked Iza for his address, and headed to Bel Air.
When he pulled up to Iza’s house, he couldn’t see past the towering hedges and big redwoods circling the property. He texted Iza to say he’d arrived, and a security guard dressed in all black emerged. He stood about six feet four and wore an earpiece.
The guard opened a wrought-iron gate, and Childs drove onto a horseshoe-shaped driveway, past a blacked-out Crown Vic, which he figured belonged to security. The house had been built in 1927 in a Mediterranean style, all white with a red-tiled roof; but just a few years before, an architect who’d done work for Rod Stewart and Sylvester Stallone had gutted the interior and updated it with Italian-marble floors and cathedral ceilings. Prince once lived here. Architectural Digest called it one of the finest homes in Bel Air.
Editor’s picks
Iza emerged from its arching French front doors as Childs exited his car. He was wearing a black turtleneck and black pants. “He looked like he was right out of The Matrix,” Childs recalls.
Suddenly, the gate opened again, and a black Rolls-Royce Phantom pulled up. Another security guard opened the door and a petite Filipino woman emerged in dark sunglasses. Two small children scurried out behind her. Her name was Iris Au and she was Iza’s girlfriend, Childs would later learn. On Instagram, she called herself the Goddess and tended to post selfies in places like Dubai, or on the steps of a private jet, or on a horse.
She didn’t look up or say anything to Childs, or anyone else. Instead, she headed toward a back entrance of the 36,000-square-foot mansion with her children and disappeared.
Iza invited Childs inside.
“I just remember thinking, like, ‘Holy fuck,’” Childs says. “It’s such a bizarre, massive-ass house. I was impressed and rolling my eyes at the same time.”
The home had a staff entrance, three elevators, and a separate pool house, with an indoor pool designed to look like a Turkish bath, complete with a sauna and steam showers, a bowling alley, an indoor racquetball court, and a 700-bottle wine wall. Rent was roughly $200,000 a month.
Related Content
“I was kind of waiting for that dude in the Old Spice commercial who’s half man and half horse to come jogging through the center entry,” Childs says. “You would have thought some kids designed the place.”
Iza led Childs to his office, which was trimmed in heavy oak. As they discussed the likely hurdles of the laptop-recovery job, Iza said he didn’t care how long it might take — six months, nine months, a year. Childs offered to charge him $100 an hour, a discount from his typical $150 an hour. Iza assured him he had the money. Childs left Bel Air that day with few concerns about Iza’s ability to pay. Before long, though, he began to feel a little uneasy, like something didn’t quite add up.
In May 2022, the FBI called Childs out of the blue and told him they wanted to meet.
“Once the FBI started asking questions, I began to wonder what I’d become a part of,” Childs said. “I felt like eyes were on me.”
But the FBI wasn’t interested in Childs. Their target was Iza.
Last September, federal prosecutors in the Central District of California charged Iza with tax evasion and wire fraud, alleging the man they’d dubbed the Crypto Godfather ran what amounted to a criminal conspiracy, complete with police officers on his payroll who allegedly intimidated rivals and helped enforce extortion schemes.
“For years, I had been warning people that this disorganized crime space was trending toward organized crime,” says Allison Nixon, the chief research officer of Unit 221B, a collective of cybersecurity experts. “Every subsequent year there was some kind of new development or new level of organizational sophistication with these guys.”
When Iza was arrested by the FBI last September, Nixon immediately recognized the name. She had been tracking him for two years, and his relationships with senior members of what’s called the Com, or the Community, one of the most dangerous criminal hacking groups operating in the U.S. The charges against Iza suggest cybercrime has entered a new phase, Nixon says.
Iza in front of a wall of self-portraits
“It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around this, because they have a certain image of organized crime and they have a certain image of cybercrime,” Nixon says. “But maybe the best way to think of the Adam Iza case is a convergence of those two things.”
Riding that unchecked wave of growth in crypto took Iza from a quiet, solitary childhood in the Midwest suburbs to a world of outlandish wealth, shady operators, and mind-boggling schemes.
“It was like The Great Gatsby,” a friend of Iza’s says. “He was living this amazing life, and everyone wanted a piece. But at the same time, you wondered if it was real, and how long it could go on.”
From Tech Nerds to Thugs
Until very recently, local police agencies, including sprawling departments like the LAPD and the NYPD, didn’t take online financial crimes, or the loose collection of hackers who perpetuate them, all that seriously. That’s partly because they didn’t understand the technology, partly because they weren’t equipped to build those types of cases, and partly because they didn’t see the stereotypical hacker (think antisocial incel) doxing Dana White or swatting a Papa Johns as all that dangerous.
But in the past few years, something has dramatically shifted. Crypto crimes once contained to online harassment now often include kidnapping, extortion, and armed threats. In May, a crypto investor was allegedly held hostage and tortured in a luxury Manhattan townhouse, in what police say was a failed attempt to steal his $30 million crypto fortune. That same month, a gang in Paris attempted to kidnap the daughter and grandson of the chief executive officer of a crypto firm in broad daylight. These are not isolated incidents, but rather part of a global trend: In the past two years alone, there were kidnappings for ransom of cryptocurrency moguls in Toronto, Sydney, and Danbury, Connecticut.
Over that same period, crypto crime has exploded. In 2023 alone, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 69,000 reports of crypto-related financial fraud. And while crypto made up just 10 percent of the financial-fraud cases the FBI investigated last year, it accounted for nearly half of all reported losses: a staggering $5.6 billion.
All of the things people love about crypto — its decentralized nature, the ability to move digital coins around the world in an instant, the fact that all transactions are tracked in real time — make it a magnet for criminals. Because every crypto payment is locked into the blockchain’s permanent ledger, in most cases there’s no way to reverse them. And unlike banks or credit card companies, there’s no central authority or customer-service department with the power to cancel or undo a payment, meaning it’s nearly impossible to recover what’s lost.
Clearance rates for crypto crimes are also abysmal, Nixon says. Law enforcement only has resources to focus on the biggest cases, meaning the best hackers can operate for years without facing any kind of legal repercussions. Of those who do face consequences, Nixon says, “Once these people get out from their very short sentences, they go right back to their gangs and then educate the rest of the members how the justice system works and how they got caught, so they can learn how to not get caught again.” She adds, “Their careers are marked by this constant upward progression of severity and dollar amount.”
Iza’s path into this world was circuitous. Born Ahmed Faiq in Iraq in 2000, he came to the U.S. with his family in 2011, the same year the American military officially withdrew from the country. They settled in St. Louis. While Iza’s family wasn’t particularly religious, he was Muslim in an area that was mostly white and Christian. His best friend from the time, Adam Faleh, says Iza had few friends and mostly kept to himself. “He seemed to enjoy solitude,” Iza’s sister tells me.
Even before he was in high school, Iza had found a passion, his mother says: computers. Faleh remembers coming over to the cramped home where Iza lived with his parents and four younger siblings and Iza showing him the computer he had built. He kept it on his bed because his room was too small for a table. “It had all these wires sticking out of it,” Faleh remembers. “But it worked.”
Iza was into Bitcoin, and already cashing in. One day he showed up to high school driving a Porsche Boxster, Faleh recalls. He started wearing Louis Vuitton and Gucci.
“He would walk into class and people would be like, ‘Who is this guy?’” Faleh says. “They thought he was some rich kid with rich parents, because no one even knew what Bitcoin was. He was mysterious.”
When Iza was 17, he moved to California and, within a couple of years, had changed his name. To Faleh, it seemed like he had simply disappeared.
How and why Iza moved to Los Angeles is a bit murky, as is his descent into criminality: When I talked to his friends from that time period, they seemed reluctant to say too much.
With restaurateur Nusret Gökçe, a.k.a. “Salt Bae”
But several sources who know Iza well told me on condition of anonymity that while living in Missouri, he had become friendly with members of the Com, the underground hacker collective, and that prominent members of the organization had been so impressed by crypto-mining software Iza had built that they sponsored his move out to L.A. (Iza denies ever being part of the Com.)
According to Iza’s friend Milad Sarwari, a cybersecurity expert who goes by the name Hackistan, it was during this time that Iza became friendly with some of the most notorious hackers on the planet. They belonged to a group called UGNazi, which stands for Underground Nazi Hacktivist Group. The collective had several members, but its three most famous were known as the gods: Mir Islam (Josh the God), Troy Woody (Osama the God), and Eric Taylor (Cosmo the God). The trio had rocketed to fame in the hacker underworld circa 2011, when they doxed Kim Kardashian, Donald Trump, and Jay-Z, and published the addresses, Social Security numbers, and other personal information of then-first lady Michelle Obama, the director of the FBI, and the U.S. attorney general.
UGNazi were most famous, however, for stealing thousands of credit card numbers, which eventually culminated in a massive FBI investigation known as Operation Card Shop.
“Adam got involved with the wrong group of people,” a source close to Iza says. “They were all older than him, and I think he was a bit lost, looking for, like, a big brother or a father-figure type. These were people who could play on that and manipulate him. It set him off on the wrong path.”
A few years after graduating high school, Iza called Faleh and invited him to come out to L.A. Iza told his friend he was doing very well. Faleh agreed to travel out to California and work for Iza. His arrival wowed him: A security guard picked him up at LAX and drove him to Iza’s mansion in Bel Air. At first, Faleh didn’t even recognize his old friend, who was wearing a black Tom Ford suit — he had completely transformed himself from the shy, halting boy who preferred spending time alone in his bedroom.
“He looked like a model, like everything was different,” Faleh recalls. “I remember telling him, ‘Damn, dude, you look like Tom Cruise.’”
Iza told Faleh he was making most of his money off crypto, or more specifically a crypto trading platform he’d invented called Zort. Using a proprietary form of AI that Iza said he’d developed, the Zort trading bot deployed signaling technology that analyzed news reports, market trends, and social media sentiment related to all of the crypto exchanges around the world to make trades.
Iza appeared to have more money than he knew what to do with. They’d show up at a steakhouse in Beverly Hills, and the whole staff seemed to know Iza. They went to dinner with rappers, and Iza picked up the bill. They’d go to a mall and a luxury store that would shut down for Iza and his crew.
“We’d go to a restaurant with an entourage. It was like, ‘Who’s that?’ He liked to put on a show.”
“Anytime we’d go to a restaurant there would be, like, an entourage of security, SUVs, just a whole show,” says a friend from the time who is still close to Iza. “And everyone’s like, ‘Who’s that?’ He liked to put on a show.”
He also gave plenty of money away. Sometimes, Sarwari says, they’d go down to skid row and Iza would hand out $100 bills. He supported animal-rescue operations, too.
And he was in love. Iris Au had lived with Iza for a few years, and according to Sarwari, he was helping raise her two children from a previous marriage. To Faleh, it seemed like a lot to juggle, but he says Iza seemed content with the way his life had turned out.
Shakedown Street
In the summer of 2021, Iza began planning for his 21st-birthday celebration. He wanted a party that would match the grandeur of his Bel Air home, something that people would never forget.
A friend put him in touch with a party planner who had supposedly arranged events for Justin Bieber. The party planner — who is identified in court documents as Ryan Chapell — agreed to the job, and a few days before the event, Iza wired him $50,000 to cover expenses and services.
To Iza’s friends who attended the party, it seemed like a huge success. They remember seeing rappers like Akon and Gashi there, as well as models and influencers. But Iza wasn’t happy. Per a source close to Iza, to increase attendance, Chapell had invited patrons from a nearby bar, who had arrived drunk and trashed the bar area of the mansion, urinating and defecating on the marble floors.
Two days after the party, Iza summoned the party planner to his home. Once inside, Chapell was separated from a colleague he’d brought along and led into a home office, where Iza sat behind a desk with a black handgun in front of him and an AR-15 nearby. Visibly agitated, Iza loaded bullets into a magazine while several bodyguards — some wearing law-enforcement-style badges — stood watch. Several of the bodyguards, court documents say, were deputies from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.
Iza supported an animal rescue in Dubai.
The department has a troubled history. The largest sheriff’s agency in the U.S., it has for years been described by watchdogs and former cops as corrupt, with an entrenched culture of lawless groups operating within its ranks. These internal cliques, or deputy gangs, which have been tied to specific LASD precincts, have names like the Banditos, the Grim Reapers, and the Regulators.
In 2019, eight LASD deputies sued the county, alleging that the Banditos functioned like a prison gang, complete with “shot callers” who determined who worked which shifts, who got overtime, and who got promotions. Those in the gang were marked by a distinctive tattoo: a skeleton with a mustache wearing a sombrero and a bandolier. Getting into the gang — or “chasing ink” — typically required engaging in violence against civilians that skirted the law, or was obviously illegal, like beating a suspect during an arrest. “If you get in a shooting, that’s a definite brownie point,” a whistleblower told CBS News. As Rolling Stone detailed in 2021, that year nearly one in six LASD deputies surveyed said they had been invited to join an illicit subgroup.
Iza’s head of security, an LASD deputy named Eric Saavedra, had belonged to a clique known as the Jump Out Boys, according to court records. The clique encouraged violent policing, even rewarding members when they were involved in shootings, per a lawsuit against members of the clique. Iza would brag to friends, in text messages over Telegram later seized by the FBI, that he could get his security detail to do whatever he asked of them, which included illegal activity.
Seated in the office of his mansion, Iza told Chapell he wanted half his money back because the party hadn’t lived up to his expectations. Iza demanded Chapell return half his fee and asked him to hand over his phone. At one point, Chapell says in a lawsuit, nine LASD deputies who were part of Iza’s security detail drew their weapons. Chapell relented, turning over his phone and divulging his passcode. Iza then transferred $25,000 from the party planner’s bank account, photographed his passport, driver’s license, and credit cards, and told him to leave the house.
Chapell’s problems escalated from there. Federal investigators have alleged Iza began communicating with Chapell’s girlfriend and relayed to Saavedra that the party planner was a drug dealer. Saavedra allegedly passed this information on to a fellow LASD deputy without disclosing where it had come from, or that he and his team of deputies were on Iza’s payroll.
In late September 2021, Iza paid Chapell’s girlfriend to fly the party planner back to L.A. and supplied her with cash to buy drugs, prosecutors allege. A few days later, deputies pulled over the car Chapell was riding in for what they said was a traffic violation. After claiming Chapell had an outstanding warrant, they searched the car and found cocaine under his seat and mushrooms in his backpack, which his girlfriend had planted at Iza’s direction, federal prosecutors allege. Iza and Saavedra watched the arrest from nearby and allegedly took photos of the scene.
Iza sat behind a desk with a black handgun in front of him and an AR-15 nearby.
“For a drug dealer, you fucked with the wrong people,” Iza texted Chapell a few days later, along with a photo of the arrest in progress. The next day, after Chapell texted his girlfriend accusing her of setting him up, Iza followed with another message: “The cops had you on their watch list for weeks, so go complain to them [a]bout setting you up. Hahaha. Worthless loser.”
Later that month, court records allege, Iza held another associate — identified in court records only as L.A. — at gunpoint inside his Bel Air mansion while off-duty LASD deputy Michael Coberg stood by. Accusing L.A. of scamming him, Iza threatened to hurt the man unless he paid up. The victim transferred $127,000 to Iza that same day.
The next day, Deputy Coberg picked up L.A. at his hotel and again transported him to Iza’s residence, leaving him alone with Iza at the home’s shooting range, according to court records. Iza held L.A. at gunpoint, Coberg would later state in a plea agreement, and demanded L.A.’s business partner transfer money to him, which he did later that day.
Cybersecurity experts who had been tracking the Com had never seen anything like this. Doxing a judge or calling in a bomb threat, that was one thing. But hiring off-duty cops to intimidate and extort victims, or throw them in jail, represented a significant escalation. Iza had just crossed a line, and eventually, it would bring him down.
A $300 Million Mistake
By February 2022, private investigator Ken Childs was growing weary of working for Iza, no matter how good the money was. He would soon worry about the legality of what Iza was asking him to do.
From the beginning, Iza had insisted his stolen laptop was in the hands of Enzo Zelocchi, an actor and Hollywood producer he’d met a few years before.
Zelocchi had introduced himself as a movie producer looking for investors for a crypto documentary. Back in his native Italy, he was a model and a celebrity, he said, with a long list of movie credits to his name. But Iza was immediately skeptical, according to later testimony given in a deposition: Zelocchi had more than 10 million followers on Instagram and posts with nearly 1 billion views, even though Iza had never heard of him. Iza suspected his movie credits, which claimed to feature stars like Brad Pitt and Al Pacino, were all fake. (Zelocchi says hackers working with Iza “infiltrated” his IMDb page and removed most of his credits.)
“It just didn’t seem real,” Iza would later testify. Zelocchi’s business proposals, he said, were “just make believe, all hypothetical — you know, ‘What if you could do this? What if you could do that? Is this worth a billion dollars?’ Just, you know, the common stupid person’s idea of how to make money.”
“For a drug dealer, you fucked with the wrong people. Worthless loser.”
According to a complaint Iza filed, he and Zelocchi had met several times to discuss the retrieval and return of the laptop, including more than once at a Cheesecake Factory in Beverly Hills; and yet, it was never recovered. Childs was confused about the nature of their relationship — and why Zelocchi had the laptop in the first place. Even if they found the laptop, Iza said he didn’t have the passcode to open it, or the code to open the wallet that held the $300 million. “It’s, like, the most valuable, worthless fucking thing on the planet,” Childs remembers telling Iza.
He agreed to track down Zelocchi but says he made one thing clear: no stealing, no breaking the law. Just surveillance. The whole thing seemed a little curious to Childs, but he wouldn’t realize until years later how truly dangerous Iza could be. In one incident in November 2021, for example, shortly after Iza hired Childs, two LASD deputies on Iza’s payroll pulled guns on Zelocchi at a gas station in Corona, more than an hour southeast of L.A., and searched his trunk. Zelocchi filed a police report, but the story of how he had ended up in Corona with Iza was so convoluted that no charges were filed.
Later that year, Iza used his connections with LASD to obtain a warrant for Zelocchi’s phone. The deputy who helped Iza texted: “Warrant is complete … I will get it signed in the morning.” Iza forwarded the exchange to an associate, as well as a photo of himself posing with a group of officers. “Damn my guy actually filed the warrant,” Iza texted. “That’s some serious shit to do for someone.”
After more than a decade as a private investigator in L.A., Childs knew celebrities often hired off-duty cops for security, and that the lines between legal and illegal blurred fast. If a threat to a client surfaced, it wasn’t unusual for an officer to quietly run a license plate or pull phone data. But Iza had blown far past that kind of activity, and Childs worried Iza was now asking him to do something that could put them both in jail.
It was late February 2022, and Childs was running surveillance outside of Zelocchi’s apartment in Hollywood when he saw a man named David Do arrive with what looked like a laptop bag. Iza had long suspected Do was a hacker Zelocchi had hired to break into the stolen laptop. From across the street, Childs could see the two men seated side by side with open laptops in front of them.
Childs called Iza to describe what he was seeing. Iza was stoked. It appeared Zelocchi and Do were rapidly cycling through passcodes that popped up on both screens, trying to hack into one of the laptops. “I need pictures,” Childs recalls Iza telling him. “I need to see everything.”
Iza lurking outside of Do’s apartment
Childs says Iza instructed him to take down the hacker if he left the apartment with a laptop in hand. Childs reminded him of their ground rules: “We’re not in the fucking robbery business.”
A few days later, one of Childs’ investigators called him in the evening, just as Childs had sat down for dinner with his wife and kids. The team was surveilling Do outside an apartment in Garden Grove when a security guard hired by Iza showed up. The burly man exited his vehicle and started giving orders to Childs’ team. Childs worried this could go south fast. Iza had previously sent his security detail to Zelocchi’s house and tried to break in; Zelocchi had fired several rounds before police arrived. Childs apologized to his wife but told her he had to go.
By the time Childs got to the apartment, he says, his team was gone, but Iza’s guy was still there. He told Childs he’d been sent to do what Childs refused to do: recover the stolen laptop. Childs tried to talk him out of it, but the guard seemed committed.
Childs was about to go home when he saw Do exit the apartment with what appeared to be a laptop bag. Childs says he saw Iza’s watchdog emerge from the shadows and throw Do to the ground. After a brief struggle, Childs says, Iza’s guy grabbed the bag and took off.
“I’m trying to bail at this point, because I’m like, ‘Fuck these guys,’” Childs recalls. But then he realized Iza’s guard had left his iPad and phone in Childs’ car and was now headed back to Iza’s mansion in Bel Air.
Childs felt he had no choice but to follow him. He planned to quit, but, he says, Iza owed him $90,000 and he wanted to make sure he got paid first.
Once inside Iza’s house, Childs says, he followed three security officers into Iza’s office, where Iza was seated at his desk, trying to crack into the laptop that had been snatched from Do. “He’s showing me a screen of code, and he’s telling me exactly what this line means, and I’ve got to be a cheerleader to make sure I get paid,” Childs recalls.
As it turns out, they’d retrieved the wrong laptop. “It was like Dumb and Dumber: Multimillionaire Crypto Version,” Childs says.
A few days later, Iza texted Childs and told him he wasn’t going to pay him because Childs hadn’t done what Iza asked — namely, recover the stolen laptop when he had a chance. Childs reminded Iza he owed him $90,000. Iza responded that he spent more than that in a month shopping for clothes.
Childs says Iza then told him to go fuck himself.
Cops and Robbers
By 2022, law enforcement alleges, Iza was also engaging in financial fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. (He was also using aliases by then, including Tony Brambilla and Diego Facebook.) His crypto trading platform, Zort, was nothing more than a front that Iza used to defraud victims and to launder stolen bitcoin, investigators say. And around the same time he’d orchestrated his party planner’s arrest, the FBI says, Iza would become involved with a hacker who had obtained access to Meta merchant accounts, which authorities allege Iza would use to defraud clients of roughly $40 million.
If not for “using the cops to do his dirty work,” which attracted the attention of the FBI, Allison Nixon of Unit 221B says, Iza “could have been operating for many years, pulling off all these scams. I think he’d still be at it.” (A source close to the investigation says this isn’t true. “Iza had many, many victims,” the source notes.)
Iza did know he was being investigated by the IRS, according to his attorney, Josef Sadat, and he was worried enough to hire a tax attorney. (The FBI would allege Iza owed $13 million in unpaid takes between 2020 and 2023.) Sadat says the tax attorney advised Iza that if they began cooperating with the IRS, he could possibly avoid any criminal charges.
Instead, Iza left the country, taking trips to Switzerland and spending extended periods of time in Dubai. “Even $300M there isn’t shit,” he wrote in a text, seemingly referring to back taxes. And if the IRS did pursue criminal charges, “Hopefully I’m out [of the U.S.] by then,” Iza said.
Iza began shuttling back and forth between L.A., Monaco, Switzerland, and Dubai. He was facing mounting legal troubles from all sides. A former client of Zort in Texas was suing him, demanding $1.5 million in damages. Zelocchi and Childs had also filed lawsuits and, unbeknownst to Iza, were working with the FBI.
The FBI began probing Iza’s past, in particular his links to hackers in the digital underground. In November 2023, FBI Special Agent Barbara Johnson traveled to the Philippines to interview two of Iza’s former acquaintances, Mir Islam and Troy Woody, who were incarcerated there, charged with the murder of Woody’s girlfriend.
Woody told the FBI that Iza had stolen millions in cryptocurrency from them and had used Zort to launder it. The laptop Iza had hired Childs to recover had actually belonged to Woody, he said. Iza and Zelocchi had stolen it together but didn’t have the passcodes to open it. When they stole the laptop, Woody alleged, Iza pointed a 9 mm at Woody and pulled the trigger, but the gun had misfired.
Back in the United States, the FBI and the IRS were closing in. They interviewed the party planner Iza had allegedly robbed, and the associate he’d held at gunpoint over $127,000. They showed up unannounced at the home of one of Iza’s closest friends in Las Vegas. They interviewed Ken Childs, David Do, Enzo Zelocchi, and the hacker who had allegedly helped Iza scam Meta merchant accounts. They toured Iza’s former Bel Air mansion. They interviewed his girlfriend, Iris Au. And they eventually interviewed the LASD deputies Iza had collectively paid six figures a month for security.
On Sept. 23, 2024, the FBI took Iza into custody in Los Angeles. He was planning to go to Zurich, they had been told, and if he got on a plane, they feared, he might not come back.
A Dangerous Mind
Last January, Adam Iza and Eric Saavedra both agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy charges that included “intimidation, extortion, illegal search warrants and other abuses of police power.” Iza also pleaded guilty to tax evasion and wire fraud, and admitted he’d defrauded Meta of more than $37 million by using phishing scams to sell lines of credit to advertisers. In his plea agreement, he also admitted to using law enforcement to extort a victim identified as L.A. in court documents of $127,000, and using LASD deputies to intimidate, harass, and extort the party planner, Chapell.
Iza also admitted to using law enforcement to pull warrants on Zelocchi and Do, ordering one of his security personnel to rob Do, which resulted in Do’s assault, and breaking into Zelocchi’s house with the help of off-duty LASD deputies.
Besides Saavedra, three other LASD deputies have been charged in the case. Saavedra and his attorney did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
In July, two LASD deputies agreed to plea deals. David Anthony Rodriguez, 43, pleaded guilty to conspiracy against rights and admitted he had lied to a judge to improperly obtain a search warrant for a victim’s GPS location, which he passed along to Saavedra. He faces up to 10 years in jail.
Christopher Michael Cadman, 33, agreed to plead guilty to conspiracy against rights and subscribing to a false tax return. In previous court filings, Cadman had been referred to as “LASD Deputy 6,” and in his plea agreement, he admitted he had held Chapell, the party planner, at gunpoint until he transferred Iza $25,000. He also admitted he had coordinated the traffic stop a month later in which Chapell had been arrested after planted drugs were found in his car. Cadman faces up to 13 years in prison. He did not respond to a request for comment through his attorney.
Last January, Iza pleaded guilty to tax evasion, wire fraud, and conspiracy charges that included intimidation and extortion.
On Sept. 29, a third former LASD deputy, 44-year-old Michael Coberg, pleaded guilty to extortion and admitted to helping set up Chapell’s false arrest.
In a statement reported by the Los Angeles Times in July, the L.A. Sheriff’s Department said it had fully cooperated with the investigation and that it had fired Saavedra, Rodriguez, and Cadman. “These alleged actions, as detailed in federal court documents, are deeply disturbing and do not reflect the values of our Department or the dedicated work of the vast majority of our deputies who serve with integrity,” the statement read. LASD Sheriff Robert Luna, who was elected in 2022 on a campaign built largely around cleaning up the department, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Despite Luna establishing the Office of Constitutional Policing to root out deputy gangs, the county inspector general argued earlier this year that LASD had made no systemic effort to identify gang members within its ranks or investigate group misconduct. Critics point out that decades-old, secretive clique structures remain deeply embedded in the department.
Iza’s victims, meanwhile, say they are doing their best to move on. Childs is still trying to get the $90,000 Iza owes him, plus legal fees (in a court filing, Iza has argued that Childs never adhered to their agreement). David Do says it’s hard to put a price tag on the harassment campaign he endured. He says he never had the laptop Iza was so obsessed with finding, and that he isn’t even a hacker. He claims he just responded to an ad on Freelancer.com to build a website for Zelocchi. Somehow, the surveillance teams watching Zelocchi had become convinced Do was something else entirely.
Besides being mugged by one of Iza’s henchmen, a brick was thrown through his window and his car was vandalized. “It’s hard for me to go out at night,” Do says. “After everything that happened, I was just so paranoid. I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone.”
As for Zelocchi, he says Iza ruined his reputation in Hollywood. After Iza sued him, Zelocchi claims, he lost major film opportunities, was branded a criminal in industry circles, and had to flee Los Angeles. “Long story short, I was basically stopped for about three years,” he says. “I had to reinvent myself.”
Now based largely in Dubai and Monaco, Zelocchi says he feels like a man living in exile. He still goes back to L.A. but is wary of staying too long. “His mind is dangerous as fuck,” he says of Iza. He adds, “I just want to do my routine — my walk on the beach with coffee, the same Starbucks, the same pizza place in Santa Monica.”
A year or so before his arrest, Iza broke up with his longtime girlfriend, Iris Au. Last year, she announced she was dating a British model who had appeared on Love Island.
Au agreed to a plea deal in March, admitting that she’d failed to report taxes on more than $2.6 million. She also agreed to forfeit any assets obtained through Zort or the various other shell companies authorities allege she and Iza set up to launder stolen crypto, including a Porsche, a Ferrari, three Mercedes-Benz, 14 Louis Vuitton bags, eight Hermès bags, two Dior bags, a glock, and a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 rifle.
From another apartment she rented with Iza, in Dana Point, California, police seized a black-and-yellow Jacob & Co. Godfather watch Iza wore and three Godfather sculptures. Through her attorney, Au declined to comment.
Since his arrest, Iza has been held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown L.A., which holds federal inmates awaiting trial, who can range from white-collar criminals to cartel enforcers.
“Personally, I’m not aware of a facility that’s tougher than that one,” says Iza’s attorney, Sadat. “That’s not a knock on the officials who are over there. They have a very difficult job, and they’re limited in their resources. It’s more what the inmates are capable of. It’s an ugly place to be.”
At first, a source close to Iza says, he was despondent and felt betrayed by his friends, suspicious that anyone who had ever been close to him had simply been interested in his fortune. He even wondered if his family members, from whom he was estranged at the time, loved him. When they reached out to him to see how he was doing, he couldn’t shake the thought that they were simply contacting him because they wanted money.
“He actually wasn’t happy even before he was arrested,” Sadat says. “He felt an emptiness.”
But now, after spending roughly a year in jail — much of it in excruciating physical pain due to complications from leg-extension surgery — friends say Iza has reconnected with his family and rediscovered his Muslim faith. He prays daily.
“The whole thing is a tragedy,” Sadat says. “You have somebody who clearly is very mentally advanced, who you could maybe even call a genius, extremely young, with the whole world in front of him, potentially millions and millions of dollars, and he took a wrong turn, largely because he surrounded himself with people who did not have his best interest in mind, nor helped push him in a direction that, I think, would have allowed him to use that brain of his for more good than bad, to create a better world. That’s the sad part.”
Through Sadat, Iza responded to a series of questions via email in August. He blamed the mistakes he’d made on bad choices that led him to use drugs and alcohol, and the wrong friends and mentors. He’d lived his “whole life behind a computer,” he said, and rarely left home as a teenager, suggesting his decision to move alone to Los Angeles at the age of 17 might have been avoided had he had a more traditional American upbringing.
“Regrets? I’ve had a few,” Iza wrote. “But I’ve lived, I’ve learned, and now I will turn the tide, rise above it, stand tall, and continue the journey.”
Iza’s sentencing is scheduled for December. Sadat says he hopes the judge takes into consideration how young Iza is, just 25, and that he has no prior criminal record as an adult. And while Iza doesn’t know how long he’ll be in prison, he tells Sadat there’s one thing he misses above everything else: computers. As soon as he can, he says, he’s going to get on one.
