Latest / Narcisist Psychology / He Promised Papers - He Took Everything: The Quiet Consul of Dellwood

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He Promised Papers - He Took Everything: The Quiet Consul of Dellwood · Narcisist Psychology

0:03
Speaker 1: On the eleventh of June twenty nineteen, a county surveyor
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Speaker 1: named Crystal Stevens crouched at the rear threshold of an
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Speaker 1: abandoned looking house in Harmon Township, Ohio, measuring a property
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Speaker 1: line for a fence dispute. Under the back doorstep, pressed
0:19
Speaker 1: flat against the concrete, like it had been placed there deliberately,
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Speaker 1: she found a laminated immigration document, a federal form. Someone
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Speaker 1: had hidden it there, then apparently walked away from everything
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Speaker 1: it represented. That document would unravel four years of systematic
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Speaker 1: psychological control, and it would lead investigators to a man
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Speaker 1: who had peace by peace, dismantled another person's entire existence legally, financially,
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Speaker 1: and socially, while that person thanked him for it. The
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Speaker 1: form was an I eight sixty four, an affidavit of
0:53
Speaker 1: support used in immigration proceedings. It had never been submitted
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Speaker 1: to any processing center, according to investigators. Jason Reid had
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Speaker 1: told Ryan Cole it had been filed months earlier. When
1:05
Speaker 1: the case finally reached a court room, prosecutors would describe
1:09
Speaker 1: what Reed had done as one of the most methodical
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Speaker 1: financial and psychological exploitation schemes they had encountered. In a
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Speaker 1: non family, domestic context. What made it possible was not
1:20
Speaker 1: brute force. It was paperwork, patience, and the specific vulnerability
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Speaker 1: of a man who had spent seventeen years in a
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Speaker 1: country that never fully let him belong. There is something
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Speaker 1: in this case that does not resolve cleanly even after
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Speaker 1: the sentencing. The mechanisms Reid used were almost entirely legal
1:38
Speaker 1: instruments a power of attorney, a joint bank account, a
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Speaker 1: lease co signature. The crime lived in the intent behind
1:46
Speaker 1: each signature, not the signature itself. Ryan Cole was forty
1:51
Speaker 1: eight years old in June of two thousand nineteen. He
1:55
Speaker 1: had been born in Cibou in the Central Philippines, and
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Speaker 1: by the time he was a teenager, both of his
2:01
Speaker 1: parents were dead, each within two years of the other.
2:05
Speaker 1: An aunt raised him. He left the Philippines as an
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Speaker 1: adult on a work visa tied to a food manufacturing
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Speaker 1: contract in the Delwood, Ohio area. That contract dissolved within
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Speaker 1: eighteen months he stayed. Seventeen years is a long time
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Speaker 1: to build a life in the margins of legal status.
2:23
Speaker 1: Ryan worked. He kept his head down. He found a
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Speaker 1: routine in the Dellwood community food pantry on Mercer Road,
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Speaker 1: where he volunteered every Tuesday morning, sorting donations and stacking shelves.
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Speaker 1: According to Helen Baxter, the pantry's coordinator, Ryan was never late.
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Speaker 1: He called ahead when he needed to miss a shift,
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Speaker 1: which happened perhaps twice in three years. He was the
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Speaker 1: kind of volunteer, she would later say, who learned the
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Speaker 1: names of the regulars. He lived on the second floor
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Speaker 1: of an apartment on Glenfield Road. He worked alongside a
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Speaker 1: man named Eddie Soriano at a food packaging plant, and
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Speaker 1: the two became close enough that Eddie held a spare
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Speaker 1: key to a storage unit Ryan rented. Ryan never mentioned
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Speaker 1: that arrangement to anyone else. He attended a Catholic parish
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Speaker 1: on Elmwood Street, where he was known by the priests,
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Speaker 1: if not by the broader congregation. His world was small.
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Speaker 1: That was not a weakness for someone navigating uncertain immigration status.
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Speaker 1: A small and carefully maintained world is a rational adaptation.
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Speaker 1: The problem is that a small world has fewer witnesses,
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Speaker 1: and fewer witnesses means that when someone begins to reshape
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Speaker 1: that world from the inside, there is almost no one
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Speaker 1: positioned to notice. Jason Reid noticed the architecture of that smallness.
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Speaker 1: Before Ryan did Reid was thirty nine years old. In
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Speaker 1: two thousand fifteen, he advertised immigration consulting services in Filipino
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Speaker 1: language newspapers and community circulars across three Ohio counties. He
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Speaker 1: was not a license attorney. He positioned himself as a
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Speaker 1: practical intermediary, someone who understood the system, who could translate
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Speaker 1: bureaucratic complexity into manageable steps, who would sit with you
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Speaker 1: and explain what each form actually meant. Ryan Cole met
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Speaker 1: him in the spring of twenty fifteen at a tax
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Speaker 1: preparation office. The introduction was ordinary. Reed was helpful. He
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Speaker 1: knew what questions to ask, and for a man who
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Speaker 1: had spent nearly two decades managing his immigration uncertainty mostly alone,
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Speaker 1: someone offering clarity and assistance was not just useful, it
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Speaker 1: was a relief. What followed was approximately eight weeks of
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Speaker 1: what investigators would later characterize as love bombing, not romantic
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Speaker 1: in nature, but intensely. His attentive read accompanied Ryan to appointments.
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Speaker 1: He brought food to the Glenfield Road apartment. He presented
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Speaker 1: himself as invested in Ryan's future in a way that
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Speaker 1: no institution and few individuals had been. According to case records,
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Speaker 1: By the summer of twenty fifteen, Jason Reid held Ryan
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Speaker 1: Cole's social Security number, his bank account information, his passport,
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Speaker 1: a co signature on his lease, and a power of attorney.
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Speaker 1: Ryan believed the power of attorney was limited to immigration matters.
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Speaker 1: It was not. The document Ryan signed gave Reed broad
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Speaker 1: legal authority over his financial affairs. The distinction between what
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Speaker 1: Ryan understood he was signing in what he actually signed
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Speaker 1: is the central mechanism of everything that followed. And what
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Speaker 1: followed was not dramatic. It was quiet, incremental, and designed
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Speaker 1: to be invisible. That is what makes the next four
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Speaker 1: years so difficult to reconstruct and so important to understand.
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Speaker 1: The power of attorney was the key. Everything else read
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Speaker 1: built depended on Ryan never fully understand what that document
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Speaker 1: actually said. From the summer of twenty fifteen onward, Reid's
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Speaker 1: access to Ryan's financial life was not theoretical. It was legal.
6:11
Speaker 1: Ryan's social Security number, his bank account, his passport. Reid
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Speaker 1: held all of it, and Ryan had handed each item
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Speaker 1: over willingly, believing he was building towards something stability, a
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Speaker 1: regularized immigration status, a future that felt less provisional. The
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Speaker 1: withdrawals started small. Investigators reviewing the account records later found
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Speaker 1: a pattern that was almost methodical. Amounts calibrated to stay
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Speaker 1: below the thresholds that trigger automatic fraud alerts, not hundreds
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Speaker 1: at a time, smaller consistent, the kind of pattern a
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Speaker 1: person might not notice until the damage was already done.
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Speaker 1: But the money was only part of it. Ryan kept
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Speaker 1: a diary. He wrote in English, and when English failed him,
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Speaker 1: when the precise word for what he was feeling did
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Speaker 1: not come, he switched to Sibuano, the language of Cibou,
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Speaker 1: where he was born. The diary survived because of a
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Speaker 1: decision Ryan made that investigators would later call one of
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Speaker 1: the most significant facts in the entire case. He never
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Speaker 1: told Reed about the storage unit. It was a space
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Speaker 1: Ryan had rented years before he met Reed. His former
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Speaker 1: co worker at the food packing plant, a man named
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Speaker 1: Eddie Soriano still had a spare key. Reed, who had
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Speaker 1: systematically been introduced to nearly every significant person in Ryan's
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Speaker 1: life by two thousand sixteen, never knew Eddie Soriano existed.
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Speaker 1: That gap, that one unmonitored relationship is where the diary
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Speaker 1: was kept. Detective Marcus Webb reached Soriano in the second
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Speaker 1: week of June two thousand nineteen, about a week after
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Speaker 1: Crystal Stevens had found the laminated I eight sixty four
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Speaker 1: under the back threshold of the Harmon township house. Soriano
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Speaker 1: did not hesitate. He handed over the key and walked
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Speaker 1: Webb to the unit on Route forty. Inside was a
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Speaker 1: fireproof box. Inside the box was the diary and something
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Speaker 1: else entirely. The diary's final thirty pages were translated within
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Speaker 1: forty eight hours by a department translator. What they documented
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Speaker 1: was not a single dramatic betrayal. It was four years
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Speaker 1: of incremental erasure. Reed had walked Ryan away from his
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Speaker 1: parish on Elmwood Street. The questions people asked there were,
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Speaker 1: according to Reed, potentially dangerous for someone in Ryan's immigration situation.
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Speaker 1: Reed had walked Ryan away from Eddie Soriano. Soriano, Reed suggested,
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Speaker 1: could inadvertently expose Ryan's undocumented status to someone who. Mike reported,
8:49
Speaker 1: each severance had its own logic. Each one, in isolation,
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Speaker 1: sounded like protection. Taken together, they formed a wall. And
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Speaker 1: behind that wall, and behind that wall there was Cynthia bar,
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Speaker 1: a name Read introduced into conversations as a kind of
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Speaker 1: calibration device another person he was helping, someone who appreciated
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Speaker 1: his sacrifices without questioning them. Cynthia Barr did not exist.
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Speaker 1: Investigators found no record of her anywhere. She was a
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Speaker 1: character Read had constructed to apply pressure without ever raising
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Speaker 1: his voice. The diary entry that stopped the translator mid
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Speaker 1: page was from October of twenty eighteen. Ryan had been
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Speaker 1: moving something in the back room of the Harmon township
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Speaker 1: house and found the laminated I eight sixty four under
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Speaker 1: the threshold. He recognized it immediately. It was a form
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Speaker 1: he had been told repeatedly had already been submitted to
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Speaker 1: the processing center in Nebraska. He placed it back where
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Speaker 1: he found it. He did not say anything to Read.
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Speaker 1: He wrote about it that night in Cebuano. That entry
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Speaker 1: changed the shape of everything investigator's thought they understood up
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Speaker 1: to that point. The working frame was straightforward. A man
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Speaker 1: had been defrauded, his documents exploited, his isolation engineered. Webb
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Speaker 1: had the account records, He had the laptop mole. A
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Speaker 1: first search warrant had recovered a false property management account,
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Speaker 1: templates for fraudulent I eight sixty four forms, and scanned
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Speaker 1: documents belonging to both Ryan Cole and a man named
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Speaker 1: Albert Soto from Franklin County. Donnah Hesse, a paralegal at
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Speaker 1: a legitimate immigration firm, had surfaced a complaint filed against
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Speaker 1: Jason Reed in twenty twelve under a slightly different business address.
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Speaker 1: Albert Soto had lost approximately thirty one thousand dollars and
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Speaker 1: two years of his life. The complaint had produced no consequences.
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Speaker 1: Reid had done this before the frame was clear, but
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Speaker 1: that October two thousand eighteen diary entry opened something harder
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Speaker 1: to close. Ryan had found the proof, he had recognized
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Speaker 1: what it meant, and he had put it back. Here
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Speaker 1: is what that means. For approximately seven months, Ryan Cole
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Speaker 1: lived in the same house as the document that proved
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Speaker 1: his emigration case had never moved forward. He made Reed's breakfast,
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Speaker 1: he answered Reed's texts when he arrived at the food pantry,
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Speaker 1: and when he left. He kept the secret of the
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Speaker 1: laminated form the same way Read had kept the secret
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Speaker 1: of the power of attorney in plain sight filed under silence.
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Speaker 1: Investigators found that detail more disturbing than almost anything else
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Speaker 1: in the case file, not because Ryan had done something wrong,
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Speaker 1: but because it showed precisely how complete reeds psychological architecture
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Speaker 1: had become, Ryan had the evidence, and he had no
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Speaker 1: framework left in which reporting it felt safe. The second
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Speaker 1: search warrant produced the fire proof box at the Roote
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Speaker 1: forty storage unit. Inside it, alongside the diary, was the
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Speaker 1: original power of attorney annotated in Reed's handwriting, account numbers,
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Speaker 1: withdrawal amounts, dates, and a second power of attorney bearing
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Speaker 1: Albert Soto's signature. Two victims, one box, filed and locked
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Speaker 1: picture the Root forty storage unit. On the day the
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Speaker 1: box was opened, Webb lifts the lid. The documents inside
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Speaker 1: are organized, not hidden in haste filed. Red had treated
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Speaker 1: these papers the way a person treats records they intend
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Speaker 1: to use. Again, that detail anchors the first scenario investigators
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Speaker 1: tested that Red operated as a deliberate recitivist predator who
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Speaker 1: selected victims by vulnerability profile and managed their exploitation as
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Speaker 1: an ongoing enterprise. The evidence supports this with unusual clarity.
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Speaker 1: The two powers of attorney, the complaint from twenty twelve
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Speaker 1: that produced no legal consequence and apparently no behavioral change,
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Speaker 1: the calibrated withdrawal amounts, the fictional Cynthia Barr deployed as
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Speaker 1: a psychological tool. The fact that read advertised specifically in
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Speaker 1: Filipino language and Southeast Asian community newspapers, publications read by
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Speaker 1: people navigating immigration systems that are genuinely opaque and genuinely hostile,
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Speaker 1: people with strong structural reasons to distrust official channels. But
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Speaker 1: the organized box opened a harder question, and it lives
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Speaker 1: in something Read said at the Dellwood Community Department the
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Speaker 1: tuesday he confessed. He told investigators he had always intended
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Speaker 1: to eventually help Ryan regularize his immigration status. He said
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Speaker 1: it the way someone says something they believe. Investigators noted
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Speaker 1: that Reed's self conception did not match the documentary record,
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Speaker 1: but they also noted that it did not collapse under
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Speaker 1: initial questioning the way a fabricated defense typically does. The
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Speaker 1: annotated power of attorney, with its handwritten account numbers and
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Speaker 1: withdrawal totals, made the financial exploitation undeniable. What had left
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Speaker 1: open was how Reed had organized those two realities inside
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Speaker 1: his own thinking. The most consistent explanation the case record
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Speaker 1: supports is not that Reed was confused about what he
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Speaker 1: was doing. It is that he had constructed a framework
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Speaker 1: in which the exploitation and the eventual help were both
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Speaker 1: real to him. The taking was a kind of advance
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Speaker 1: on what he would one day provide. The help that
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Speaker 1: never came was not, in his telling, a lie. It
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Speaker 1: was a debt. He had deferred so many times it
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Speaker 1: had become indistinguishable from intention. That is the part that
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Speaker 1: does not get easier to sit with, Not the fraud,
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Speaker 1: not the documents in the box. The part that resists
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Speaker 1: simple categorization is a man looking across a table and
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Speaker 1: describing his victim's suffering as a temporary condition he had
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Speaker 1: always planned to remedy. The evidence said otherwise. Ryan Cole,
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Speaker 1: forty eight years old, was washing dishes at a restaurant
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Speaker 1: four blocks from a motel in Dellwood when investigators found him.
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Speaker 1: He had left the Harmon township House in May of
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Speaker 1: twenty nineteen after Reed had stopped coming back. The reasons
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Speaker 1: Reid stopped returning were never established by investigators. Ryan had waited,
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Speaker 1: and then he had left. He had not reported Reed
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Speaker 1: to anyone. He had taken almost nothing with him. Reed
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Speaker 1: confessed on a Tuesday. The case record does not specify
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Speaker 1: which Tuesday. In late June of twenty nineteen, but the
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Speaker 1: investigators who were in room noted the day of the
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Speaker 1: week afterward, as though it mattered. It did a little.
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Speaker 1: Ryan Cole had built his week around Tuesdays. For years,
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Speaker 1: he showed up at the Dellwood Community food pantry on Tuesdays.
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Speaker 1: Reed had monitored those arrivals and departures by text, and
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Speaker 1: on a Tuesday, in an interrogation room at the Dellwood
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Speaker 1: Community Department, the framework Read had constructed finally met the
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Speaker 1: record it could not survive. The confession covered the financial exploitation,
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Speaker 1: it covered the fraudulent documents. What it also covered, and
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Speaker 1: what investigators found more unsettling than any single charge was
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Speaker 1: Reed's account of his intentions. He told them he had
16:25
Speaker 1: always meant to help Ryan. Eventually, he said it without
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Speaker 1: apparent calculation. The annotated power of attorney in the fireproof
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Speaker 1: box said something different. Account numbers written in Reed's hand
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Speaker 1: withdrawal totals dates. The gap between what Reed believed about
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Speaker 1: himself and what the paper trail documented was not a
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Speaker 1: small discrepancy. It was the distance between a man's self
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Speaker 1: image and four years of systematic extraction. The charges combined
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Speaker 1: Ryan's case with Albert Soto's Soto, who had lost proximately
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Speaker 1: thirty one thousand dollars and two years of his life
17:04
Speaker 1: to the same operator, had filed a complaint in two
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Speaker 1: thousand twelve under a slightly different business address. That complaint
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Speaker 1: had produced no consequences at the time. Seven years later,
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Speaker 1: it became part of the sentencing architecture. The exploitation of
17:20
Speaker 1: the elderly enhancement was applied because Reed had also drawn
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Speaker 1: on a joint account Ryan held with an elderly neighbor,
17:27
Speaker 1: an account used for bill payments as a matter of
17:30
Speaker 1: convenience repurposed without authorisation. Reed was sentenced to eleven years.
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Speaker 1: Soto spoke with investigators for two hours by phone from Indiana,
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Speaker 1: where he had relocated. He did not appear in court.
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Speaker 1: His account confirmed the pattern in enough detail that the
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Speaker 1: prosecution's structural argument that Red operated a repeating methodology, not
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Speaker 1: a one time offense, held without requiring Soto to be present.
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Speaker 1: The two cases together described not an opportun tunist who
18:00
Speaker 1: had stumbled into fraud, but someone who had refined a
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Speaker 1: system across years and applied it to a specific population
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Speaker 1: immigrant men, navigating a legal process that was opaque enough
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Speaker 1: to require trust isolated enough to delay discovery. Ryan Cole
18:18
Speaker 1: was found during the first week of the investigation. He
18:21
Speaker 1: was living in a motel in Delwood and washing dishes
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Speaker 1: at a restaurant four blocks away. He had left the
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Speaker 1: Harmon township house in May after Reed had stopped returning.
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Speaker 1: He had waited, and then he had left, and he
18:35
Speaker 1: had not told anyone why. When investigators located him, the
18:38
Speaker 1: investigation was still in its early days. Reed had not
18:42
Speaker 1: yet been arrested. The immigration status Ryan had spent seventeen
18:46
Speaker 1: years trying to resolve was addressed through legitimate channels. It
18:51
Speaker 1: was resolved eighteen months after the investigation closed. That timeline
18:56
Speaker 1: is worth holding for a moment, eighteen months after a
18:59
Speaker 1: case that began ann with a laminated document found under
19:02
Speaker 1: a door threshold by a county surveyor. Eighteen months after
19:06
Speaker 1: Helen Baxter wrote down a dispatcher's name because she knew
19:09
Speaker 1: she had been dismissed eighteen months for someone else. The
19:13
Speaker 1: paperwork might have taken weeks. Ryan Cole returned to his
19:17
Speaker 1: Tuesday shift at the Dellwood Community food pantry in the
19:21
Speaker 1: second week of October twenty twenty. It was the first
19:24
Speaker 1: Tuesday permitted under his updated legal status. Helen Baxter had
19:29
Speaker 1: kept his name on the volunteer calendar the entire time
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Speaker 1: he was gone. That is not a small thing. It
19:35
Speaker 1: is not a symbolic gesture that resolves the larger injustice.
19:39
Speaker 1: But it is a specific, documented act by a specific
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Speaker 1: person who decided that Ryan's place should be held. Even
19:46
Speaker 1: when the system she had tried to alert had dismissed
19:49
Speaker 1: her call and written nothing down. She had written something down.
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Speaker 1: She had kept the date, she had kept the dispatcher's name,
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Speaker 1: and she had kept the calendar. The case of Ryan
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Speaker 1: Cole and Jason Reid does not belong to the category
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Speaker 1: of stories where the system worked cleanly. The complaint Albert
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Speaker 1: Soto filed in twenty twelve went nowhere. The call Helen
20:13
Speaker 1: Baxter made in June of twenty nineteen was disestimated on
20:18
Speaker 1: first contact. What broke the case open was a county
20:22
Speaker 1: surveyor measuring a fence line, a laminated immigration document that
20:26
Speaker 1: Ryan had found months earlier and quietly replaced under the threshold,
20:31
Speaker 1: and a fireproof box in a storage unit on Route
20:34
Speaker 1: forty that read apparently never moved. What the case does
20:39
Speaker 1: belong to is a specific and documented pattern that researchers
20:44
Speaker 1: and immigration attorneys have named in their own words, the
20:48
Speaker 1: exploitation of bureaucratic opacity. Reed did not invent a complicated scheme.
20:54
Speaker 1: He identified a process that was already difficult to understand
20:58
Speaker 1: and positioned himself as the the person who understood it.
21:01
Speaker 1: He advertised in the right publications. He arrived at the
21:05
Speaker 1: right moment. He moved slowly enough that each step felt
21:09
Speaker 1: like progress. The power of Attorney Ryan signed was not
21:13
Speaker 1: understood by Ryan to be unlimited. It was. The manipulation
21:18
Speaker 1: worked because it was designed around the specific shape of
21:22
Speaker 1: Ryan's vulnerability. Not vulnerability in the abstract, but the particular
21:28
Speaker 1: exposure of a man who had been in the United
21:30
Speaker 1: States for seventeen years, whose original visa have dissolved, and
21:34
Speaker 1: who believed that the next document, the next payment, the
21:38
Speaker 1: next form, would finally be the one that made things stable.
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Speaker 1: There are no public figures for how many people in
21:45
Speaker 1: similar positions have encountered similar operators. The available record is
21:49
Speaker 1: largely the record of those who were found. Ryan Cole
21:52
Speaker 1: was found. His name is back on the calendar. That
21:56
Speaker 1: is where the record ends and where the weight of
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Speaker 1: it begins. This show is made by Obomedia.