I owe money to drug dealers, to, you know, mobsters.
I’m about $1.3, $1.4 million in the red.
When it came time to pay, and I didn’t have the money,
I was just telling a lot of lies.
And that’s when the threats start coming in.
At the height of it all, Ian’s ego is so freaking huge
it couldn’t even fit through a doorway.
It’s going to be a big one for us.
I get this sense that you think that you’re smarter than everyone.
Is he a bad guy? Is he a good guy?
It’s a snowball effect of selling out these teen parties,
making anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 in profit a night.
Here we have Ian Bick buying jet skis with investor money.
I go from a legitimate business
to I’m stepping into an entirely different realm
where I have no idea what I’m doing.
It’s pretty clear that there’s fraudulent behavior
and crimes being committed.
Prosecutors accuse the team
of running a nearly half million dollar Ponzi scheme.
I was convicted of defrauding investors
of almost half a million dollars.
[THE TEENAGE PONZI SCHEMER]
My name’s Ian Bick.
I was sentenced to three years in federal prison,
accused by the FBI of running a Ponzi scheme.
I was also the kid that was always bullied.
So when I set off to do all these adventures and parties
and planning this whole event business,
it was definitely to put myself forward to be liked,
to chase popularity,
and create this new image for myself that I was this young entrepreneur.
VIP access, bitches.
The most I ever made in a night was about $20,000 or $30,000 in profit,
and the most I ever lost in a night was $100,000, $110,000.
I’m Steve O’Connor,
and I’ve been friends with Ian Bick for around two decades.
At the very beginning, I was actually really impressed.
I invested in it, too.
And I would get more money back than I put in,
so at the beginning, I thought he was pretty successful.
You know, I wasn’t putting in huge amounts of money
like some other people were.
I mean, some people were putting in astronomical amounts of money.
I was this high school kid, 16 at the time,
that wanted to do a new dance, and it was for a good cause.
The dance is a huge success.
It’s about 250 people, $20 a ticket.
We raised about $2,500.
I realized I can make some serious money off of this
if I got 250 people to pay $20 a ticket.
Can I scale that? Can I make that bigger?
How can I turn that into a moneymaking venture?
You can make a lot of money off of kids paying per ticket.
Word that differently.
And then-- What are you worried about?
You can make a lot of money off kids!
Next thing I know, I’m at the doorsteps of Tuxedo Junction,
which was a local club at the time in Danbury.
I rent the front room, and I pack it out.
And then after that, it’s just a snowball effect
of selling out shows at Tuxedos, these teen parties,
making anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 in profit a night.
On the outside,
Ian always looked like a successful, confident person.
But I think one of the fuels that drove him
was that he never actually felt that way.
So he was always striving to get a little bit further.
He had too much confidence.
And he did a great job at convincing people to give him money.
I’m here. I’m working on the venue,
finding investors, whatever I have to do.
I raised $100,000.
It came from family.
It came from parents of friends,
acquaintances of those friends.
And it was a bunch of high school kids that knew nothing about money.
I’d take the $100,000
that was supposed to be for a Wiz Khalifa show.
Our business partner at the time,
he had said he could book Wiz Khalifa,
so we raised the money.
And it turns out he couldn’t book Wiz Khalifa.
So we were sitting on $100,000, $120,000,
we’re 17 years old,
and we go to our investors,
and we say, “Hey guys, we couldn’t get him,
but we have a plan to break the money up into four or five smaller shows.
If you want to stay on board, great.
If not, we’ll give you your money back.”
And half pulled out, half stayed in.
We put the money into the shows
and this is the start of all my problems
because on the first show,
one of the guys that was partners on the shows with us
comes up to me at the end of the night.
He’s like, “Dude, the show tanked.
We lost, like, $80,000.”
At that point, I’d already told my close--
these are my best friends, we made money.
They’re at the show, it looks packed,
so I made the decision to cover it up.
The end of 2012 is when I do my last teen night at Tuxedos.
By the spring of 2013,
I was about $50,000 in debt to investors.
And we take on another initial round of investors
to start doing a whole fall string of shows in the fall of 2013.
The whole time, it was just money in, money out
on a bank account.
No accounting whatsoever,
just a couple of kids on this Wells Fargo bank account
with access to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I’m 18.
My business partners are all 18.
We’re looking at it like,
“OK, we need to get some paychecks out of this, too.”
We figured if we’re running the company,
we’re putting money into these concerts for the fall,
I was naive enough to think,
“OK, these concerts are going to make a ton of money in the fall,
so why not spend some of those profits now?”
We blow money on Gucci clothes. I’d never worn a Gucci outfit.
We took trips to California.
When I want something, I’m going to go after it.
I said, “Hey, get me two jet skis.”
I think we blew, like, $100,000 between strip clubs.
We were like celebrities.
Ian’s whole lifestyle was all about being flashy
as if he was rich
because that's how he wanted to be.
He shouldn’t have tried living that lifestyle
because it actually got him into more trouble than he should have.
I’m booking all these acts, I’m living this lifestyle,
but the shows, they all bomb.
Every show loses money.
Artists would... they wouldn’t show up.
Or they would trash their hotels
and cause thousands of dollars in damages.
Certain things were miscalculated,
and that’s when Ian started getting in serious trouble.
Show days are crazy.
You never know what’s going to happen.
You could be getting hit up for something, for money,
you could be getting chased by someone.
You couldn’t catch up to it.
If one failed, OK, there was five more that could pay it back.
But when they all failed, that was just a deeper and deeper hole.
If someone gave you a million dollars today,
what would you do?
I’d definitely dump it all into this place.
I’ve had the opportunity of people giving me
a lot of money like that before,
and I lost it by investing in other people.
So now I want to, if I’ve got money, invest it into myself.
I had gotten the idea to reopen Tuxedo Junction.
What’s up, Danbury? It’s 3LAU.
I cannot wait for our show at Tuxedo Junction this weekend.
It's going to be absolutely crazy.
I’ll be at Tuxedo Junction.
Y’all come out and fuck with the gang.
I’m booking these national acts, The Chainsmokers, Zeds Dead,
Kid Ink.
The biggest acts in EDM and hip-hop are coming to Danbury, Connecticut.
So Tuxedos is making money,
but I have so much bad debt behind me,
I can never get ahead.
So say if I made $20,000 on a show,
that show money should have been used to pay for the next show
or to pay the rent of the place.
But instead, it’s going to my bad debt,
so I then have to take even more money to cover that show money.
And so at that point,
I had no more investors to get money from,
so I started to go through shady people through the club business.
It was like money laundering, basically.
There was cash, and I needed cash.
They wanted high rates of return,
and I took the money and used it to pay off debts,
or kind of just inject some cash into my business.
When things started sliding downhill,
the city of Danbury was actually picking on him a lot.
They were sending officers to his parties
after he lost his liquor permit,
and they were pulling the whole bar apart,
trying to find liquor.
They were cutting locks.
They were sending undercover cops,
and they were trying to, I guess, arrest him on the spot.
And you could really tell he was on thin ice.
And eventually, they got to him.
Anything you want to say?
Not at the moment.
Right before Ian went to jail,
I think he was in about half a million dollars in debt.
With interest and everything else, it was more than that.
He owed a lot of money.
Cops showed up at his house and arrested him on the spot.
4:30, 5:00 am hits, and there’s just this pounding at the door.
Our whole street is lined up with FBI cars and local police cars.
They’re banging on the door, and my mom’s running downstairs.
And she opens the door, and they’re just like,
“Step aside. Step aside. Where is he?”
Bick, who is just 19 years old, is now facing federal charges.
I pled not guilty to the charges.
I didn't think that I had set out with that intent to defraud anyone.
Prosecutors say Bick solicited investment funds from his friends,
former classmates, acquaintances, and their parents
by promising high investment returns
over relatively short periods of time.
When I was in court, the whole thing seemed really surreal to me.
I see Ian in a jumpsuit
with two federal officers standing next to him.
He's in handcuffs the whole time.
They say the team convinced more than 15 people
to invest nearly a half million dollars.
At 21 years old, I was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
When Ian immediately got out of jail,
phew, he had big plans.
It almost sounded like he wanted to get back into
what got him into trouble.
But then as time went on, he finally realized
maybe it’s time to just cut this all to an end.
Still paying back his restitution fund, by the way.
He’s got a little... a lot more to go.
I think it’s definitely very attention-grabbing
when people say, “A teenager who ran a Ponzi scheme.”
To me, I look at it as just a story about a bunch of kids
who made a high amount of really fucked-up decisions,
a ton of mistakes,
they were very young.
I’ve had times where you make a bunch of money in a night,
and you feel like you're on top of the world.
But then a week later, you get knocked down,
and you don’t know how to come up from that.
I think had I made those mistakes now,
as an older person,
or even if I was older, like a 30-year-old,
I think it would be looked at differently,
and I couldn’t sit here and say, “Ah, I was young, and I didn’t know.”
I’ve been at some of my highest points
and I’ve been at some of the lowest points.
I definitely take full responsibility for everything.
It falls on me. I was the one that took those risks.
I just think that it could be characterized in a different way.
I don’t know if I’ve ever really experienced true success yet.