Welcome to Dark Markets, a newsletter by fraud investigator David Z. Morris.

I’m a longtime finance and technology reporter and researcher, with stints at Fortune Magazine and the once-mighty CoinDesk. More recently, I’ve been digging up dirt for hedge funds. I’m the author of Stealing the Future, about the FTX fraud and the broken ideologies that rationalized it. Every week I write an in-depth analysis of news in technology, finance, and crypto. But Dark Markets is also home to drafts for forthcoming projects.

This week, we continue a historical investigation that connects one of 2025’s most fascinating and inexplicable crypto frauds with a notorious Mormon polygamist serial killer; the Mexican federal government; and ultimately, with cult leader, pedophile, and scam artist Keith Raniere, founder of the nefarious, Bronfman-funded NXIVM.

Hayden Davis has effectively confessed to the theft of $100,000 based on scamming the President of Argentina - yet somehow, he walks free.

Hayden Davis rose to sudden infamy in early 2025 when he, along with a brother and his father Tom Davis, manipulated Argentinian President Javier Milei into complicity with a “memecoin” pump-and-dump called $Libra. Davis - who also confessed to manipulating the launch of Melania Trump’s memecoin - walked away with control of something like $100 million dollars, and now appears to be rather conspicuously free to walk the Earth like Caine in Kung-Fu - but with a lot more money.

In the first installment of this series, we explored the absolutely bizarre fact that Hayden’s great-grandfather was Ervil LeBaron, aka “The Mormon Manson,” who used the 19th Mormon doctrine of Blood Atonement, preached by Brigham Young himself, to manipulate his polygamist wives to commit murders for him. Ervil’s youngest wife, Rena Chynoweth, pulled the trigger in one of the most notorious killings, that of Rulon Allred, leader of a competing fundamentalist sect.

Rena, who is still alive and just 67 years old, is Hayden Davis’ great-aunt.

(I first started tugging these threads thanks to a tip from Recluse when I appeared on the parapolitics podcast The Farm, so please take a moment to go support that project if you can.)

David Z. Morris

·

Jan 5

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The Allred killing points to the focus of this installment: the crass financial motives half-concealed behind Ervil’s claim to be a religious prophet. Ervil LeBaron engaged in “constant moneymaking schemes,” according to Scott Anderson, “often little more than swindles and extortions.” Ervil’s followers never seemed to object to his scamming, perhaps because, as with most fraudsters, the “typical Ervil disciple [was] uneducated, unsophisticated, of probably below-average intelligence, and a natural follower.” (Anderson, 106).

Both individual Ervil disciples, and the later arc of the family’s political alleigances, were overwhelmingly of the far-right variety. Some of Ervil’s followers, for instance, were former members of the John Birch Society. This becomes much more significant in light of later connections with Keith Raniere, who despite his long hair and thoughtful mien was a right-winger very much in the vein of Jeffrey Epstein, believing women to be second-class humans and ascribing to Ayn Rand’s grade-school “Objectivist” school of authoritarian and eugenic capitalism.

David Z. Morris

·

Feb 3

Read full story

Ervil’s murder of Allred, like the murder of Ervil’s own brother Joel before that, was ultimately motivated by these swindles, meant to funnel more followers to Ervil’s Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God. The “vast majority” of Church income - including personal income earned by individual members - “went straight into Ervil’s pocket” (155) to support his lifestyle, which involved nice cars and a lot of travel, but little conventional work.

“He was the type of person who would go out and entertain those in the field while they worked,” an acquaintance named Harold Tippetts told Scott Anderson (p. 73). “Read the scriptures to ‘em and so on, but he never really liked to work himself. I guess at some point in his life he sensed he had the ability to worm people around to doing pretty near everything he wanted them to do.”

Rather predictably, killing their leaders didn’t make the members of competing sects very quick to adopt Ervil as their new leader, so the murders of Joel LeBaron and Rulon Allred arguably hurt Ervil more than helping. This is typical of the deeply flawed strategies often pursued by sociopaths, who can seem very charming to a small subset of credulous targets, but often seem to lack insight into the workings of healthier human minds, and society as a whole.

While he may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, it seems clear Hayden inherited Ervil’s ability to manipulate people - $Libra and other scams involved not just cutting deals with Milei, but other significant alliances and perhaps a dozen support workers who actually created and deployed the coins.

Ervil is again and again described as lazy and uninterested in work, but living a high life on the backs of his followers. “He lived fairly well while his wives and kids were eating beans and rice,” according to a police officer involved in Evril’s later arrest and interrogation.

This included children, among them Ervil’s own descendants, who instead of being sent to school were put to hard manual labor. That work included dissassembling and refurbishing appliances at a cult business known as Michael’s Appliances, where members were treated “as virtual slaves.” (Anderson, 155).

Ervil’s schemes also included outright extortion - “tithes” extracted under threat of violence - and land schemes, which were mostly frauds but set the stage for his descendents’ literally colonial role within Mexico.

You can imagine the thick-necked psychopath looking down approvingly on Hayden, still out in the world ripping off Gentiles (non-Mormons), and living fat off the proceeds.

Rena Chynoweth, Evril LeBaron’s youngest wife and brainwashed triggerwoman, was the sister of Mark Chynoweth. Mark Chynoweth married Lillian Lebaron, daughter of Evril Lebaron, in 1973.

Mark Chynoweth also killed for Ervil, murdering a 16 year old named Manases Mendez on December 26, 1974 during an assault on Los Molinos, a competing Mormon fundamentalist settlement in Mexico. The goal of that attack, one of the first in Ervil’s decade-plus campaign of terror, was to kill Ervil’s brother Verlan and add those followers to Ervil’s flock.

Mark and Lillian’s children included Emily Chynoweth, who married confessed former counterfeiter Tom Davis in 1995. Hayden Davis is their child, and runs/ran Kelsier Ventures with father Tom.

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Welcome to Dark Markets, a newsletter by fraud investigator David Z. Morris.

I’m a longtime finance and technology reporter and researcher, with stints at Fortune Magazine and the once-mighty CoinDesk. More recently, I’ve been digging up dirt for hedge funds. I’m the author of Stealing the Future, about the FTX fraud and the broken ideologies that rationalized it. Every week I write an in-depth analysis of news in technology, finance, and crypto. But Dark Markets is also home to drafts for forthcoming projects.

This week, we continue a historical investigation that connects one of 2025’s most fascinating and inexplicable crypto frauds with a notorious Mormon polygamist serial killer; the Mexican federal government; and ultimately, with cult leader, pedophile, and scam artist Keith Raniere, founder of the nefarious, Bronfman-funded NXIVM.

Hayden Davis has effectively confessed to the theft of $100,000 based on scamming the President of Argentina - yet somehow, he walks free.

Hayden Davis rose to sudden infamy in early 2025 when he, along with a brother and his father Tom Davis, manipulated Argentinian President Javier Milei into complicity with a “memecoin” pump-and-dump called $Libra. Davis - who also confessed to manipulating the launch of Melania Trump’s memecoin - walked away with control of something like $100 million dollars, and now appears to be rather conspicuously free to walk the Earth like Caine in Kung-Fu - but with a lot more money.

In the first installment of this series, we explored the absolutely bizarre fact that Hayden’s great-grandfather was Ervil LeBaron, aka “The Mormon Manson,” who used the 19th Mormon doctrine of Blood Atonement, preached by Brigham Young himself, to manipulate his polygamist wives to commit murders for him. Ervil’s youngest wife, Rena Chynoweth, pulled the trigger in one of the most notorious killings, that of Rulon Allred, leader of a competing fundamentalist sect.

Rena, who is still alive and just 67 years old, is Hayden Davis’ great-aunt.

(I first started tugging these threads thanks to a tip from Recluse when I appeared on the parapolitics podcast The Farm, so please take a moment to go support that project if you can.)

David Z. Morris

·

Jan 5

Read full story

Subscribe

The Allred killing points to the focus of this installment: the crass financial motives half-concealed behind Ervil’s claim to be a religious prophet. Ervil LeBaron engaged in “constant moneymaking schemes,” according to Scott Anderson, “often little more than swindles and extortions.” Ervil’s followers never seemed to object to his scamming, perhaps because, as with most fraudsters, the “typical Ervil disciple [was] uneducated, unsophisticated, of probably below-average intelligence, and a natural follower.” (Anderson, 106).

Both individual Ervil disciples, and the later arc of the family’s political alleigances, were overwhelmingly of the far-right variety. Some of Ervil’s followers, for instance, were former members of the John Birch Society. This becomes much more significant in light of later connections with Keith Raniere, who despite his long hair and thoughtful mien was a right-winger very much in the vein of Jeffrey Epstein, believing women to be second-class humans and ascribing to Ayn Rand’s grade-school “Objectivist” school of authoritarian and eugenic capitalism.

David Z. Morris

·

Feb 3

Read full story

Ervil’s murder of Allred, like the murder of Ervil’s own brother Joel before that, was ultimately motivated by these swindles, meant to funnel more followers to Ervil’s Church of the First Born of the Lamb of God. The “vast majority” of Church income - including personal income earned by individual members - “went straight into Ervil’s pocket” (155) to support his lifestyle, which involved nice cars and a lot of travel, but little conventional work.

“He was the type of person who would go out and entertain those in the field while they worked,” an acquaintance named Harold Tippetts told Scott Anderson (p. 73). “Read the scriptures to ‘em and so on, but he never really liked to work himself. I guess at some point in his life he sensed he had the ability to worm people around to doing pretty near everything he wanted them to do.”

Rather predictably, killing their leaders didn’t make the members of competing sects very quick to adopt Ervil as their new leader, so the murders of Joel LeBaron and Rulon Allred arguably hurt Ervil more than helping. This is typical of the deeply flawed strategies often pursued by sociopaths, who can seem very charming to a small subset of credulous targets, but often seem to lack insight into the workings of healthier human minds, and society as a whole.

While he may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, it seems clear Hayden inherited Ervil’s ability to manipulate people - $Libra and other scams involved not just cutting deals with Milei, but other significant alliances and perhaps a dozen support workers who actually created and deployed the coins.

Ervil is again and again described as lazy and uninterested in work, but living a high life on the backs of his followers. “He lived fairly well while his wives and kids were eating beans and rice,” according to a police officer involved in Evril’s later arrest and interrogation.

This included children, among them Ervil’s own descendants, who instead of being sent to school were put to hard manual labor. That work included dissassembling and refurbishing appliances at a cult business known as Michael’s Appliances, where members were treated “as virtual slaves.” (Anderson, 155).

Ervil’s schemes also included outright extortion - “tithes” extracted under threat of violence - and land schemes, which were mostly frauds but set the stage for his descendents’ literally colonial role within Mexico.

You can imagine the thick-necked psychopath looking down approvingly on Hayden, still out in the world ripping off Gentiles (non-Mormons), and living fat off the proceeds.

Rena Chynoweth, Evril LeBaron’s youngest wife and brainwashed triggerwoman, was the sister of Mark Chynoweth. Mark Chynoweth married Lillian Lebaron, daughter of Evril Lebaron, in 1973.

Mark Chynoweth also killed for Ervil, murdering a 16 year old named Manases Mendez on December 26, 1974 during an assault on Los Molinos, a competing Mormon fundamentalist settlement in Mexico. The goal of that attack, one of the first in Ervil’s decade-plus campaign of terror, was to kill Ervil’s brother Verlan and add those followers to Ervil’s flock.

Mark and Lillian’s children included Emily Chynoweth, who married confessed former counterfeiter Tom Davis in 1995. Hayden Davis is their child, and runs/ran Kelsier Ventures with father Tom.

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