Welcome to Dark Markets, a newsletter about financial fraud and white-collar crime. This premium edition is slightly delayed from the normal Sunday release time. Free subscribers have access to most of this post, but please consider becoming a paying supporter to enjoy this and other research in full.

“For the LeBaron family, the myth of their history – that which is believed true – has always been more important than that which is verifiably true. With the LeBarons, these perceived truths are taken – quite literally – as gospel. Special relationships, unusual dreams and odd coincidences experienced by family members are viewed as divinely inspired, or God’s truth. This truth acts not only as recurring proof of the family’s special stus but as a catalyst and determinant for future actions.”

- Scott Anderson

In February of 2025, a “memecoin” briefly promoted by Argentinian far-right President Javier Milei turned out to be a massive fraud, costing speculators (including many Argentinians) at least $100 million dollars, and leading to threats of impeachment against Milei. The prime mover behind that fraud – and possibly of similar manipulation of first lady Melania Trump’s memecoin – was Hayden Davis, who quickly confessed to having control of the huge pile of fraudulent proceeds. Despite early threats of an Interpol Red Notice, Davis still appears to be traveling the world quite freely.

David Z. Morris

·

February 17, 2025

Read full story

Subscribe

Hayden Davis’ family background is a huge but under-explored part of his story. In my continued fascination with fraudsters, one factor that comes up frequently is parentage. Sam Bankman-Fried, as I argue in “Stealing the Future,” was effectively trained towards sociopathy by his mother Barbara Fried’s hard-core utilitarian commitments and connections to military-industrial power. While I haven’t yet dug into it in depth, SafeMoon scammer John Karony’s parents were more directly part of the “deep state,” with a background as CIA agents, and more recently doing “development work” and “investor relations” (wink-wink) in Africa.

David Z. Morris

·

May 6, 2025

Read full story

Bloomberg has dug up evocatively spooky details of the life of Tom Davis, Hayden’s father. “I used to counterfeit everything on the planet,” Tom said of his checkered past in a in a 2022 podcast episode “I did a lot of illegal substances. I even used to joke that I would do any drug that didn’t do me first.” Then Tom purportedly found God, went to seminary – and subsequently confessed all of his sins to the FBI.

Supposedly, Tom Davis served one year in prison for these crimes. Which could mean they weren’t as big a deal as he puffs them up to be – or could mean something else.

The “something else” thesis is also supported by Tom’s later activities, which included “exploring gold mining in Guyana and spending time undercover in Russia to research and combat sex trafficking.” The real stories behind those adventures remain to be unearthed.

But despite all that, Tom Davis is far from the most interesting of Hayden’s family members.

It has been previously reported but little noticed that Hayden Davis is the great-grandson of another criminal who operated on an international scale: Evril LeBaron, sometimes known as “The Mormon Manson.” Evril, a charming manipulator with a more than passing resemblance to his thick-necked great-grandson, is believed to have ordered or caused between 30 and 50 murders from the late 1960s through the late 1980s as he fought an imagined war for control of a tiny sect of exiled polygamists. Evril used the deprecated Mormon doctrine of “blood atonement” to manipulate his wives and sometimes children to murder people he decreed to be enemies or apostates. That included the murder of his own brother Joel, the then-recognized leader of the LeBaron sect.

It also included, in 1988, the murder of Mark Chynoweth – Evril’s own son, and Hayden Davis’ grandfather.

The involvement of the Trump family in massive frauds is barely news at this point, but this instance is particularly bizarre, and potentially particularly revealing. Specifically, the links between Hayden Davis, Donald Trump, and global far-right politics also connect to this weekend’s illegal and frankly insane kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro. The 2019 killing of nine members of Davis’ extended family in Mexico gave a huge boost to Trump’s aggressive push to classify drug cartels as terrorists – the maneuver that has provided (flimsy) cover for Trump’s rapidly-escalating aggression against Venezuela.

In a dualism that captures the essence of both Trump and the LeBaron clan, the same incident may have also connected the Trumps and LeBarons directly, laying the groundwork for the massive financial frauds of both $Libra and $Melania.

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(This is not a complete family tree – all of the LeBaron men had many wives and dozens of children.)

Benjamin F. Johnson, Mormon pioneer

Grandfather of>

Alma LeBaron

Father of>

Evril LeBaron m. Rena Chynoweth (wife #13; Killer of Rulon Allred)

Parents of>

Mark Chynoweth

Father of >

Emily Chynoweth m. Tim Davis

Parents of >

Hayden Davis + Gideon Davis

The story of the LeBaron Clan, and of Hayden Davis’ $100 million fraud, begins with Alma Dayer LeBaron – a man who heard voices.

According to award-winning reporter Scott Anderson’s incredible multigenerational saga The Four O’Clock Murders, this is quite literal – Alma heard commands that he believed to come directly from God. And he listened: By 1923, the supposed voice of God had told Alma LeBaron to move his family back and forth between the United States and Mexico nine times. The voice also told Alma to maintain the deprecated Mormon doctrine of polygamy, or plural marriage; and convinced Alma that he was the true leader of the entire Mormon Church.

It will come as little surprise that nothing good followed these revelations.

Eventually, the same frequent experience of divine inspiration, and the same credulous belief in the validity of whatever anyone claimed God had told them, would lead Alma’s children and descendants to utter disaster and enduring shame. The voice and commandments of God would give Alma’s male descendants both a powerful lever for manipulating their followers (predominantly other family members), and a license to commit any grave act that they were “divinely inspired” to undertake.

Most consequentially, this would include “blood atonement” – a doctrine of holy killing first mooted by Mormonism’s founding fathers. Alma LeBaron’s son Evril LeBaron would turn blood atonement into a way of life, using it to manipulate some of his 13 wives, dozens of children, and other followers into waging a campaign of terror and murder, focused largely on other Fundamentalist Mormon sects he saw as a threat to his own ambitions. This included the murder of his own brother, Joel LeBaron; and the killing of Rulon Allred, another competing Mormon Fundamentalist leader.

The killer of Rulon Allred was Rena Chynoweth, the youngest of Evril LeBaron’s 13 wives – and Hayden Davis’ grandmother.

Hinting at the darker, truer motives behind Mormon polygamy, Rena Chynoweth was almost impossibly young when all of this happened – born in 1958, Rena killed Rulon Allred in 1977, when she was just 19. Today, she is still alive and in her late 60s. “The Thirteenth Wife: Escaping Polygamy,” a Lifetime movie based on Rena’s life (and bizarrely starring college admissions fraudster Felicity Huffman) was released in May of 2025.

That was just after her grandson Hayden’s massive fraud unwound. Hayden, along with his father Tom Davis and at least one brother, engineered a series of pump-and-dump “memecoin” frauds that netted them as much as $100 million through a mix of insider trading and social engineering that got them close to powerful figures. The most important was the manipulation of Argentenian President Javier Milei into endorsing a fraudulent “meme coin” called $Libra.

The LeBaron lineage is important to understanding how Hayden Davis’ connections to Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Javier Milei may have been made. A likely catalyst was yet more bloody violence involving the LeBarons: the 2019 killing of three LeBaron women and six children outside their still-extant Colonia LeBaron in northern Mexico. This led to a petition by the LeBaron family to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations, a push very much in line with longer-term goals of U.S. right-wingers and the Trump administration.

It doesn’t seem any LeBarons met directly with Trump at that time – at least not on the record. But one contemporary member of the clan, Alex LeBaron, is a former Mexican congressman, and reportedly met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the wake of the shooting, highlighting suspicions that the LeBaron family has been, and remains, useful for the pursuit of U.S. priorities in Mexico.

The $100 million $Libra fraud comes to look a bit like a footnote in this context – but it is the very continuity of criminality here that makes the story so fascinating. The Libra fraud was perpetrated by Hayden Davis and his father Tom Davis, who is not a LeBaron but brought his own legacy of fraud as a confessed habitual counterfeiter prior to a purported religious conversion.

Subscribe

In this multigenerational story, we face a profound question of human nature. It’s clear that the LeBaron family experienced endemic mental illness across many generations. What’s not clear is the extent to which these ailments, which frequently resembled schizoaffective disorder and included extremely high levels of sociopathy, were the product of genetics, as opposed to culture.

As I’ve also explored in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, sociopathy and resulting criminality can be fostered by a culture that discounts the fundamental sanctity of human life. In SBF’s case, an upbringing in utilitarianism seems to have exacerbated his tendency to view other humans as disposable tools. In the case of the LeBaron clan, ironically and revealingly, the same outcome seems to have resulted from a completely different mythology – a religious faith in direct communication with God that granted Holy Truth directly to privileged leaders like Evril LeBaron.

David Z. Morris

·

October 14, 2023

Read full story

In the end, of course, there is little difference between the Mormon Fundamentalism of the LeBarons, and the Utilitarian Fundamentalism of the Bankman-Frieds. Both are ways to claim unique power for a few against the many, and both became, directly or indirectly, the basis for massive crimes and frauds.

Both, it seems, fostered sociopathic disregard for human life among those already vulnerable to such disordered narcissism.

The 4 O’Clock Murders is a high-caliber piece of detailed and objective reporting, which makes the truly bizarre nature of the events it describes all the more unsettling. Above all what emerges from the story is that the entire LeBaron family has been profoundly troubled for more than a century.

Again and again, Scott Anderson describes delusional, deranged, and even psychotic behavior from members of the clan. If they weren’t murdering each other, they were building flying saucers to get ready for Revelation.

Claim my free post

Or purchase a paid subscription.

Welcome to Dark Markets, a newsletter about financial fraud and white-collar crime. This premium edition is slightly delayed from the normal Sunday release time. Free subscribers have access to most of this post, but please consider becoming a paying supporter to enjoy this and other research in full.

“For the LeBaron family, the myth of their history – that which is believed true – has always been more important than that which is verifiably true. With the LeBarons, these perceived truths are taken – quite literally – as gospel. Special relationships, unusual dreams and odd coincidences experienced by family members are viewed as divinely inspired, or God’s truth. This truth acts not only as recurring proof of the family’s special stus but as a catalyst and determinant for future actions.”

- Scott Anderson

In February of 2025, a “memecoin” briefly promoted by Argentinian far-right President Javier Milei turned out to be a massive fraud, costing speculators (including many Argentinians) at least $100 million dollars, and leading to threats of impeachment against Milei. The prime mover behind that fraud – and possibly of similar manipulation of first lady Melania Trump’s memecoin – was Hayden Davis, who quickly confessed to having control of the huge pile of fraudulent proceeds. Despite early threats of an Interpol Red Notice, Davis still appears to be traveling the world quite freely.

David Z. Morris

·

February 17, 2025

Read full story

Subscribe

Hayden Davis’ family background is a huge but under-explored part of his story. In my continued fascination with fraudsters, one factor that comes up frequently is parentage. Sam Bankman-Fried, as I argue in “Stealing the Future,” was effectively trained towards sociopathy by his mother Barbara Fried’s hard-core utilitarian commitments and connections to military-industrial power. While I haven’t yet dug into it in depth, SafeMoon scammer John Karony’s parents were more directly part of the “deep state,” with a background as CIA agents, and more recently doing “development work” and “investor relations” (wink-wink) in Africa.

David Z. Morris

·

May 6, 2025

Read full story

Bloomberg has dug up evocatively spooky details of the life of Tom Davis, Hayden’s father. “I used to counterfeit everything on the planet,” Tom said of his checkered past in a in a 2022 podcast episode “I did a lot of illegal substances. I even used to joke that I would do any drug that didn’t do me first.” Then Tom purportedly found God, went to seminary – and subsequently confessed all of his sins to the FBI.

Supposedly, Tom Davis served one year in prison for these crimes. Which could mean they weren’t as big a deal as he puffs them up to be – or could mean something else.

The “something else” thesis is also supported by Tom’s later activities, which included “exploring gold mining in Guyana and spending time undercover in Russia to research and combat sex trafficking.” The real stories behind those adventures remain to be unearthed.

But despite all that, Tom Davis is far from the most interesting of Hayden’s family members.

It has been previously reported but little noticed that Hayden Davis is the great-grandson of another criminal who operated on an international scale: Evril LeBaron, sometimes known as “The Mormon Manson.” Evril, a charming manipulator with a more than passing resemblance to his thick-necked great-grandson, is believed to have ordered or caused between 30 and 50 murders from the late 1960s through the late 1980s as he fought an imagined war for control of a tiny sect of exiled polygamists. Evril used the deprecated Mormon doctrine of “blood atonement” to manipulate his wives and sometimes children to murder people he decreed to be enemies or apostates. That included the murder of his own brother Joel, the then-recognized leader of the LeBaron sect.

It also included, in 1988, the murder of Mark Chynoweth – Evril’s own son, and Hayden Davis’ grandfather.

The involvement of the Trump family in massive frauds is barely news at this point, but this instance is particularly bizarre, and potentially particularly revealing. Specifically, the links between Hayden Davis, Donald Trump, and global far-right politics also connect to this weekend’s illegal and frankly insane kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro. The 2019 killing of nine members of Davis’ extended family in Mexico gave a huge boost to Trump’s aggressive push to classify drug cartels as terrorists – the maneuver that has provided (flimsy) cover for Trump’s rapidly-escalating aggression against Venezuela.

In a dualism that captures the essence of both Trump and the LeBaron clan, the same incident may have also connected the Trumps and LeBarons directly, laying the groundwork for the massive financial frauds of both $Libra and $Melania.

Subscribe

(This is not a complete family tree – all of the LeBaron men had many wives and dozens of children.)

Benjamin F. Johnson, Mormon pioneer

Grandfather of>

Alma LeBaron

Father of>

Evril LeBaron m. Rena Chynoweth (wife #13; Killer of Rulon Allred)

Parents of>

Mark Chynoweth

Father of >

Emily Chynoweth m. Tim Davis

Parents of >

Hayden Davis + Gideon Davis

The story of the LeBaron Clan, and of Hayden Davis’ $100 million fraud, begins with Alma Dayer LeBaron – a man who heard voices.

According to award-winning reporter Scott Anderson’s incredible multigenerational saga The Four O’Clock Murders, this is quite literal – Alma heard commands that he believed to come directly from God. And he listened: By 1923, the supposed voice of God had told Alma LeBaron to move his family back and forth between the United States and Mexico nine times. The voice also told Alma to maintain the deprecated Mormon doctrine of polygamy, or plural marriage; and convinced Alma that he was the true leader of the entire Mormon Church.

It will come as little surprise that nothing good followed these revelations.

Eventually, the same frequent experience of divine inspiration, and the same credulous belief in the validity of whatever anyone claimed God had told them, would lead Alma’s children and descendants to utter disaster and enduring shame. The voice and commandments of God would give Alma’s male descendants both a powerful lever for manipulating their followers (predominantly other family members), and a license to commit any grave act that they were “divinely inspired” to undertake.

Most consequentially, this would include “blood atonement” – a doctrine of holy killing first mooted by Mormonism’s founding fathers. Alma LeBaron’s son Evril LeBaron would turn blood atonement into a way of life, using it to manipulate some of his 13 wives, dozens of children, and other followers into waging a campaign of terror and murder, focused largely on other Fundamentalist Mormon sects he saw as a threat to his own ambitions. This included the murder of his own brother, Joel LeBaron; and the killing of Rulon Allred, another competing Mormon Fundamentalist leader.

The killer of Rulon Allred was Rena Chynoweth, the youngest of Evril LeBaron’s 13 wives – and Hayden Davis’ grandmother.

Hinting at the darker, truer motives behind Mormon polygamy, Rena Chynoweth was almost impossibly young when all of this happened – born in 1958, Rena killed Rulon Allred in 1977, when she was just 19. Today, she is still alive and in her late 60s. “The Thirteenth Wife: Escaping Polygamy,” a Lifetime movie based on Rena’s life (and bizarrely starring college admissions fraudster Felicity Huffman) was released in May of 2025.

That was just after her grandson Hayden’s massive fraud unwound. Hayden, along with his father Tom Davis and at least one brother, engineered a series of pump-and-dump “memecoin” frauds that netted them as much as $100 million through a mix of insider trading and social engineering that got them close to powerful figures. The most important was the manipulation of Argentenian President Javier Milei into endorsing a fraudulent “meme coin” called $Libra.

The LeBaron lineage is important to understanding how Hayden Davis’ connections to Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Javier Milei may have been made. A likely catalyst was yet more bloody violence involving the LeBarons: the 2019 killing of three LeBaron women and six children outside their still-extant Colonia LeBaron in northern Mexico. This led to a petition by the LeBaron family to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations, a push very much in line with longer-term goals of U.S. right-wingers and the Trump administration.

It doesn’t seem any LeBarons met directly with Trump at that time – at least not on the record. But one contemporary member of the clan, Alex LeBaron, is a former Mexican congressman, and reportedly met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in the wake of the shooting, highlighting suspicions that the LeBaron family has been, and remains, useful for the pursuit of U.S. priorities in Mexico.

The $100 million $Libra fraud comes to look a bit like a footnote in this context – but it is the very continuity of criminality here that makes the story so fascinating. The Libra fraud was perpetrated by Hayden Davis and his father Tom Davis, who is not a LeBaron but brought his own legacy of fraud as a confessed habitual counterfeiter prior to a purported religious conversion.

Subscribe

In this multigenerational story, we face a profound question of human nature. It’s clear that the LeBaron family experienced endemic mental illness across many generations. What’s not clear is the extent to which these ailments, which frequently resembled schizoaffective disorder and included extremely high levels of sociopathy, were the product of genetics, as opposed to culture.

As I’ve also explored in the case of Sam Bankman-Fried, sociopathy and resulting criminality can be fostered by a culture that discounts the fundamental sanctity of human life. In SBF’s case, an upbringing in utilitarianism seems to have exacerbated his tendency to view other humans as disposable tools. In the case of the LeBaron clan, ironically and revealingly, the same outcome seems to have resulted from a completely different mythology – a religious faith in direct communication with God that granted Holy Truth directly to privileged leaders like Evril LeBaron.

David Z. Morris

·

October 14, 2023

Read full story

In the end, of course, there is little difference between the Mormon Fundamentalism of the LeBarons, and the Utilitarian Fundamentalism of the Bankman-Frieds. Both are ways to claim unique power for a few against the many, and both became, directly or indirectly, the basis for massive crimes and frauds.

Both, it seems, fostered sociopathic disregard for human life among those already vulnerable to such disordered narcissism.

The 4 O’Clock Murders is a high-caliber piece of detailed and objective reporting, which makes the truly bizarre nature of the events it describes all the more unsettling. Above all what emerges from the story is that the entire LeBaron family has been profoundly troubled for more than a century.

Again and again, Scott Anderson describes delusional, deranged, and even psychotic behavior from members of the clan. If they weren’t murdering each other, they were building flying saucers to get ready for Revelation.

Claim my free post

Or purchase a paid subscription.