Have you ever watched someone climb to the very top of the world—private jets, Hollywood parties, a Nasdaq listing worth hundreds of millions—only to discover it was all built on quicksand? That’s exactly what happened with one of the strangest, darkest stories I’ve stumbled across in years of following markets and fraud cases.
Last week, a federal judge in Vermont handed down a sentence you don’t see every day for a former biotech darling: life in prison without parole. The man in the dock wasn’t some cartel boss or serial killer. He was the “scientific founder” of a publicly traded company that once promised the world an HIV cure.
And he ordered a hit on someone who threatened to expose him.
From Magician to Medical Messiah
It sounds like the plot of a Netflix limited series, but it actually happened. The story starts with a Turkish immigrant who first made headlines in Los Angeles as a self-proclaimed psychic and mind-reading entertainer. Somehow, within a few short years, that same person reinvented himself as a groundbreaking biomedical pioneer.
Investors poured in. A former high-ranking health official who once worked directly under Dr. Anthony Fauci joined the board and publicly hailed the founder as an unbound genius. The company’s market cap soared past half a billion dollars on the promise of revolutionary gene-editing technology that could finally cure HIV.
Behind the scenes, though, the résumé started to crack the moment anyone looked closely.
The Degree That Anyone Could Buy
One of the wildest moments in the trial came when the founder took the stand and casually admitted he’d purchased a medical degree online from a Russian diploma mill. When pressed, he shrugged it off as “cheating” and said his younger self had been arrogant.
Short sellers actually ordered the exact same fake diploma in 2022 just to prove how easy it was. Same university name, same layout—delivered in days for a few hundred dollars. Yet this was the man leading clinical research that institutions and investors were betting hundreds of millions on.
In my experience following these kinds of stories, credentials are often the first domino. Once one piece is fake, you start wondering how deep the rabbit hole really goes.
A Business Deal Gone Fatal
The murder itself traces back to a soured oil-commodities transaction years earlier. The victim, a Vermont man named Gregory Davis, believed he’d been defrauded out of a substantial sum and began threatening legal action.
At the exact same time, the biotech company was finalizing a major merger that would have sent its stock—and the founder’s personal wealth—into the stratosphere. Any public lawsuit from Davis risked blowing the whole thing up.
So, according to federal prosecutors, the founder decided Gregory Davis had to disappear. Permanently.
“Gregg Davis was a problem for the defendant. It was the defendant who paid for the murder.”
– Lead prosecutor at sentencing
The mechanics of the crime were chillingly professional. A trusted assistant allegedly recruited intermediaries. One of them hired a contract killer who impersonated a U.S. Marshal, abducted Davis from his home in broad daylight, and executed him on a snowy back road. The body was discovered the next morning.
The Money Trail Never Lies
Prosecutors laid out bank records, encrypted messages, and cell-phone pings that mapped the entire conspiracy. Roughly $200,000 changed hands—money the founder allegedly supplied under the guise of cryptocurrency investments and other vague projects.
All three co-conspirators took plea deals and testified against him. Their sentences ranged from nine to nearly seventeen years. The mastermind, however, rolled the dice on a jury and lost badly.
- Assistant who coordinated everything: 110 months
- Middleman who hired the shooter: 140 months
- Actual triggerman: 200 months
- Founder who ordered and financed it: Life, no parole
Watching the sentencing statements, you could feel the weight of seven years of grief from the victim’s family finally lifting—mixed with the surreal realization that the person responsible had been celebrated on earnings calls and at medical conferences.
Red Flags Everyone Missed (Or Ignored)
Looking back, the warning signs were everywhere. Promotional materials that read more like science fiction than peer-reviewed research. Clinical trials with tiny sample sizes and glowing press releases that never quite matched the data. Board members who seemed more impressed by charisma than published papers.
Perhaps the most telling moment came when the company’s own CEO wrote a public letter calling the founder “one of those rare geniuses that is not bound by scientific discipline or dogma.” That line aged about as well as milk in the sun.
Investors, analysts, even some journalists bought the narrative hook, line, and sinker. Due diligence took a back seat to the dream of the next Theranos-level moonshot—except this one came with a body count.
The Aftermath on Wall Street
The stock, once riding high, now trades for pennies if it trades at all. Former shareholders are left holding nearly worthless paper while prosecutors sort through additional allegations of securities fraud tied to the original company promotions.
Regulators are quietly reviewing how such an operation managed to list on a major U.S. exchange in the first place. Expect tighter scrutiny on founder backgrounds, especially in speculative biotech and gene-therapy names.
Short sellers who first rang the alarm bell years ago have been unusually quiet in victory. Sometimes the vindication isn’t sweet when real people end up dead.
What This Means for the Rest of Us
Every few years the market delivers a cautionary tale that feels too outrageous to be true. We got Theranos. We got FTX. Now we have a biotech founder literally willing to kill to protect his illusion.
The lesson isn’t new, but it’s brutal: glamour and groundbreaking claims are not a substitute for verifiable track records. When someone tells you they’re unconstrained by “dogma,” maybe hear that as code for unconstrained by facts.
I’ve covered enough blow-ups to know the pattern. Charismatic founder, complex science most people can’t easily understand, breathless media coverage, and a stock chart that only goes up—until it doesn’t, and the fallout is catastrophic.
Gregory Davis and his family paid the ultimate price for a fraud that started with a fake diploma and ended in a Vermont snowbank. The rest of us get a stark reminder that behind every ticker symbol are real human beings—and sometimes real human monsters.
Stay skeptical out there.
