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Have you ever been scammed? In The Wedding Scammer—the first true crime podcast from The Ringer—host Justin Sayles tracks a mysterious figure who once wronged him: a man with a lot of aliases, a lot of failed businesses, and a trail of victims. Justin follows him through a sham media company, a series of ruined weddings, and beyond, trying to find answers. Episode 1, “The Glass Castle,” is out now. Subscribe on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, and jump down the rabbit hole with Justin each Tuesday for new episodes, as he takes you on a seven-part journey that isn’t complete until you get to the end.
I still remember the baby blue sweater.
It was February 2016, and I was on the 35th floor of a WeWork in downtown Los Angeles. I was in the middle of an interview for a job at a new media startup named Newsaratti. The company’s owner—an eccentric man who introduced himself as Michael Esposito—had just burst through the door. He was stout, with a bulldog frown, and wearing that sweater. He was followed by his boyfriend, Barrett Walters, and their Yorkie named Kingston.
Immediately, the vibe shifted. What had started as a pleasant conversation between me and Newsaratti’s general manager became ground zero for a human cyclone. Michael spoke a mile a minute, and he wanted me to know one thing above all else: that he was unfathomably rich. And so he began unloading his biography on me. He had run successful restaurants in New York, he said. He said that his dad was a coal tycoon and a big Republican donor. And to get back at his dad, Michael explained, he was using his trust fund to start his dream company. This company. Newsaratti.
You probably can recognize that there were red flags from the very first moment I met Michael. I know I recognized them. This megarich guy, desperately trying to impress a lowly editor. A trust fund kid with no media experience looking to build an empire to spite his father. I had an overwhelming sense: There’s something wrong with this guy. But as he spoke, I looked out the giant window behind him—past the red flags, to the views of Los Angeles in every direction. The sky was almost dull behind that baby blue sweater.
I listened to his vision for the company. And then, when he offered me a higher starting salary than I’d ever made before, I felt excited. Anxious, even. And I thought, “Just take the money, idiot. Best-case scenario, you’ll have financial stability. Worst-case, you’ll get a good story out of it.”
You can probably guess which one I got.
The job in this glass castle remains the most curious thing that has ever happened to me. The whole Newsaratti experience was just a blip in my life, but it ended in spectacular fashion, with me and dozens of my coworkers wondering why we didn’t get paid for our work, and Michael Esposito vanishing. A lot of people were confused and hurt—financially and emotionally. And when something like this happens to you—when you get an up-close look at a mysterious figure who can best be described as a con man—it sticks with you. Questions nag at you. Like: Am I just gullible? Were we the only ones he did this to? And most importantly: Who is this guy, really, and how can I find him?
Just a few months after Newsaratti collapsed, I was hired by The Ringer. And with all due respect to Mr. Esposito’s grand vision, getting to work here was my actual dream job. But every now and then, my mind would drift back to the guy in the baby blue sweater and all the people to whom he owed money. So about 14 months into the pandemic—still curious about what happened and now with some time on my hands—I set out to find answers. And after speaking to countless victims and associates of his over the past two and a half years, I got a lot of what I was looking for.
The biggest thing I can tell you is this: We were not the only ones. The man I knew as Michael Esposito made a lot of enemies in the years since I met him. He started catering companies and restaurants that blew up just as spectacularly as his media company. He found himself at the center of lawsuits and labor complaints—ones he lost to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, after not showing up for hearings to defend himself. And he left behind a trail of people who say that he ripped them off, exploited their dreams, or ruined their weddings.
That last part is where the title of this podcast comes from. I may have come to this story through a doomed media venture, but this podcast is called The Wedding Scammer for a few reasons. One, it’s got a ring to it. (No pun intended.) Two, some of the most emotional stories in this show come from his time in the wedding industry. Three, his ties to the wedding business are how I eventually tracked him down. This happened when he was living in another state, in relative obscurity, seemingly ducking any connection to his past self—or past selves.
All of this is to say that the process of making this show has been a journey. One that has taken me around the country, down rabbit holes, and deep into the psyche of a man I knew only briefly, seven years ago. In hopes of finding what really happened—and tracking him down and getting his side of the story. It’s gone from curiosity to investigation to—at some points—full-fledged obsession. It’s also led me to make a lot of new friends. People I wouldn’t know otherwise, but who I’ve become bonded to because of our shared experience.
People who I couldn’t have made this show without. People who couldn’t get help from the authorities, so they went looking for answers of their own.
The most important thing I’ve learned about scams over the past few years is that they sometimes fall through the cracks of the system. When I tell people about the Michael Esposito story, they often ask, “Why haven’t the cops done anything?”
It turns out scams aren’t as black-and-white as the average person expects. You have to figure out what’s a crime and what’s a civil matter. You have to determine whether someone gave money away willingly—even under false pretenses—or whether they were actually defrauded. I’ve heard about, or read ample documentation about, my scammer doing a lot of unsavory things that typically don’t rise to the level of a criminal investigation: ruining weddings and keeping the money, not paying employees, writing bad checks from an LLC. These mostly fall into file-a-lawsuit territory. And often, on the local level, the more confusing a scam gets, the more difficult it is to get anyone to take the case on.
J. Michael Skiba is a consultant who works with police, the FBI, and even the United Nations on financial crimes. (He also goes by Dr. Fraud—a fantastic bit of branding that made it easy for me to find him.) He told me about an early case he worked on that involved fraudsters in two states and an overseas money-wiring scheme—which essentially made the scam impossible for local law enforcement to wrap their arms around. “If you go to your local police department, they’re basically going to laugh at you for this, for good reason,” Skiba says. “Not to disrespect, but there’s no training.”
When it comes to the FBI—and the Secret Service, which is, unbeknownst to most, the federal agency with primary jurisdiction over financial fraud—Skiba says it’s a matter of resources. Or, put more bluntly: It’s like triage in a hospital. “Whatever patients come in that are the worst, they get the most attention,” Skiba says. “And it’s the same thing: The FBI, the other law enforcement agencies, they don’t have unlimited resources. If an agent has 50 cases and 40 of them have to do with counterterrorism, and if one comes in for a $10,000 check scam, it gets triaged accordingly.”
So if you got scammed, and no one in a position of authority was able to help you, what would you do? Would you suffer in silence? Or would you do something about it?
The Wedding Scammer is a story about people who chose action.
In December 2022—after a major breakthrough in this story following a year of basically no movement—I sat in a conference room in The Ringer’s Los Angeles offices with my producer, Vikram Patel. We storyboarded the show that would become The Wedding Scammer, writing everything we had on a whiteboard: our main character’s various schemes, his stops across the country, and the potential characters and scenes for each episode. Quickly, a trend emerged. We realized that every place this guy had been, he had made at least one person just as curious as he’d made me. Vikram began circling all these people with a green dry-erase marker. They became what we called our “Green Circle Detectives.”
These Green Circle Detectives come from a variety of backgrounds. There’s the freelance editor who set up a Facebook group called “People Screwed by Newsaratti.” The former server at one of Michael Esposito’s event businesses who thought this story would make for a good documentary. A couple in California’s East Bay who have supplied me with countless documents showing that they were out hundreds of thousands of dollars because they had the misfortune of trusting him. Two women at a floral shop in Houston who told me they’d gotten sick of being owed money and lied to, so they started digging and learned there was a lot they didn’t know.
They all dedicated countless hours to this pursuit, trying to answer those same questions I had. Who is he, where is he, and why has he done what he’s done? It was emotional for most of them. They were out a lot of money, and many felt betrayed by someone they considered a close friend. Some were reluctant to talk to me initially—a few even wondered at first whether I was part of the con. But eventually I connected with all of them. And they created the foundation for The Wedding Scammer. Both with the evidence they supplied—and the stories they were willing to share with me on tape.
And while I want to stress that my journey was never about getting paid back after the Newsaratti fiasco, it quickly became a means of getting answers for the Green Circles. I hope when they listen, they feel as though I have.
The Wedding Scammer is The Ringer’s first true crime podcast. (It is also a story in seven parts that is not complete until you get to the end.) We are not throwing on our investigator hats just for the hell of it. We’re doing it because we believe it’s a good story. And we think it says something about how the true crime boom has turned many of us into amateur sleuths.
But we’re also doing it because it’s my story, specifically. It’s not often that a journalist gets to write (or podcast) about something that happened to them, let alone something so bizarre. I vividly remember the chaos and confusion I felt inside that WeWork, up on the 35th floor. I remember Michael Esposito’s baby blue sweater and the way he’d launch into outrageous rants about Lady Gaga and Martha Stewart that were meant, I think, to double as motivational stories. I remember the look on my coworkers’ faces when they came to the realization that we’d probably gotten conned.
And because of this, The Wedding Scammer is a chance to do some meta storytelling. Breaking the fourth wall, letting you in on the creative decisions we made and the emotions I felt along the way. Taking you inside preparation for crucial interviews and sharing the lessons we took from genre-defining true crime podcasts and documentaries. Explaining to you, the listener, how I came to wear a wire in Houston this past January. (Trust me, that will make sense in the end.)
It’s a podcast with many tentacles, a lot of voices, and a lead character with a handful of aliases. It’s also one with victims whose losses are deeply relatable. Like I said before, it’s a journey. I hope you’ll join me on it.
Host: Justin Sayles
Producers: Jade Whaley, Mike Wargon, Bobby Wagner, Amanda Dobbins, Justin Sayles, and Vikram Patel
Original Music: Justin Catoni of 13th Ward Social Club
Sound Design: Bobby Wagner
Mixing and Mastering: Scott Somerville
Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts