Frank Parlato
The inventor Bernhard Fritsch developed the core technology and started StarClub in 2008.
By 2017, many deals were in the pipeline, money was in the bank, 50 employees were working, and there were no missed payments to creditors or staff. A company growing, thriving, digital.
Enter Danny Guy. He was one of 77 investors in the company. He invested – the amount is in dispute – between $7 -$22 million. It’s hard to say how much since he used various entities and agents to make investments.
Not in dispute is when he invested: Between January 2014 and November 2015. These dates will be important later, particularly the end date in 2015.
According to the government Danny Guy invested:
January 16 2014: $2.5 m
June 30 2014: $4.1 m
December 10, 2014: $2.7
January 30, 2015: $7m
November 24, 2015: $6 m
A Going Concern
Danny Guy invested in StarClub when it was seven years old, with millions of R&D behind it. It was a private investment. There were no guarantees. No timelines. There was no promise of any return.
After investing, Guy proposed a reverse takeover (RTO) where StarClub would merge with a struggling public company, inflating the public company’s share value and allowing insiders like Guy to cash out—leaving the merged company worthless and debt-ridden.
It was a way of killing StarClub but letting the inside crew, including him and Fritsch, cash out big. It is called a “death spiral.” And is another name for stealing from stockholders who believed the bullshit Guy was willing to have them told.
Fritsch declined the deal. Guy suggested Goldman Sachs could raise $100 million—and bring StarClub public. Then, it didn’t matter how the company performed. That would be the stockholders’ challenge.
But StarClub, valued at \$2 billion, was functioning—revenue-generating and expanding. It could make it the old-fashioned way – through honesty, not stock manipulation.
Fritsch declined.
Killing It With the FBI
Danny Guy’s third strategy – and anyone who knows Danny Guy will know this is true – was to engage the FBI, use them as his whores – claiming he was a victim of fraud.
Guy had not lost anything. No loss. Not a dime. He was waiting, as investors do, for growth to mature. He was impatient.
In 2017, the FBI shut down StarClub, killed $200M of booked revenue, and ended a $2B business. The collapse was not financial. Not because of failure. Not because the money ran out. There was no loss. Danny Guy used his whore, the FBI, to shut it down.
On August 2, 2017, the FBI arrested Bernhard Fritsch. The judge remanded Fritsch into custody. The indictment came two weeks later.
The company collapsed—not because of fraud but because of force.
For the indictment, clueless FBI Special Agent Greg Austin copied and pasted what he received from Guy’s private investigator, Derrick Snowdy: The allegations, and copies of emails [which were partially edited and falsified].
When you read Agent Austin’s cringe-worthy testimony on the stand, I promise you will be embarrassed for him and exclaim as I did that they should not have let a child go in and testify in a big boy case.
FBI Agent Austin nearly cried on the stand when he admitted he got his marching orders from Danny Guy, who was described accurately by the defense as an international criminal and saboteur of businesses.
Not mentioned during the trial is how Danny Guy used to dictate how the case was to go to his stooges, Agent Austin and the then US Attorney Karen Escalante when they would meet at the Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica.
The drinks were on Guy, but the laugh was on Fritsch.
Proceeding With More Due Process
The inventor and businessman Bernhard Fritsch finally made bail after 20 weeks. For almost eight years, the case lingered, draining Fritsch of his resources.
The judge assigned him lawyers from the public defenders office. By their admission, they were woefully unprepared and inadequate for the trial.
Fritsch asked to represent himself. The judge at first said yes, but then she denied it.
Just before trial, Fritsch got money to retain a private attorney. But that would delay a trial – that had already waited eight years – by as long as a week.
The judge would not be inconvenienced in that manner. The right to counsel of one’s choice does not trump a judge’s calendar.
If Marie Antoinette had said to let them eat cake, Judge Dale Fischer would have said let them eat Fritsch.
The judge ordered Fritsch to use the public defenders within hours after they filed a 12-page declaration explaining how they were unprepared for the trial.
A Showy Trial
Fritsch stood trial in March and April 2025 with his public defenderfs ordered by the court to represent him. The charge was wire fraud. Two counts of wire fraud. There were allegedly two victims. One was Danny Guy. The other was Ian Mann. Count One and Count Two.
However, Mann would testify that Fritsch was not the fraudster but the victim. The government chose not to call him.
To prove wire fraud, the prosecutors must prove that Fritsch had a scheme to defraud Guy using false or misleading statements to obtain money.
Three zealots – true believers -represented the US Attorney for the Central District – Monica Tait, Sara Lee, and Joseph De Leon.
Only Danny Boy
They were stuck with Danny Guy as the only victim. They alleged that Fritsch made certain false statements to Danny Guy to induce him to invest $22 million in StarClub.
They showed a chart to the jury of Guy’s investments with the dates and amounts – through Guy’s companies, Salida and Harrington.
The trial fell apart on day five.
The alleged statements Fritsch used to induce Guy to invest, the prosecution said, were made at a meeting in downtown Manhattan in the conference room of a hotel on December 7, 2016,
Guy’s private investigator, Snowdy, even recorded that meeting. No, there was no dispute about the date. But the judge would not let anyone play the recordings at trial. It might have shown something that would not help the prosecution. For instance, like he did not make false statements after all. But that is entirely besides the point.
The point is there was a major evidentiary flaw in the government’s wire fraud case – and wire fraud is what they charged—only wire fraud.
Wire Fraud (18 U.S.C. § 1343) requires the government to prove a scheme to defraud involving material misrepresentations, an intent to deceive, and that the victim – in this case, Danny Guy – relied on those misrepresentations before transferring money.
Oh, dumb luck – or dumb prosecutors. That winsome, hapless trio of incompetent prosecutors alleged Fritsch made the false statement to Guy on December 7, 2016.
But wait, that was December 2016 – almost at the end of 2016. But Guy made his investments in 2014-2015.
Worse luck for the prosecutors. It’s not their fault. They got the whole case from Danny Guy. Guy doesn’t know the law. They were just doing Danny Guy’s bidding.
Time Travel
In wire fraud cases, the sequence is not just a technicality — it is the core element of the charge.
Danny Guy testified Fritsch lied. “He told me something that wasn’t true—and that’s why I invested.”
Wire fraud.
It was a claim of elegant stupidity: that Fritsch, with deliberate calculation, had spun a falsehood to lure Danny Guy into parting with millions. A moment in time, they said—December 2016 – in a quiet conference room, sterile and lit with the fluorescence of intent.
But the prosecutors, meticulous in most ruthless ways, had missed a detail of consequence: Guy had made his final investment over a year before Fritsch allegedly told the lie.
Let me tell you something about people who make mistakes. Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don’t. The prosecution thought they had a clean story. A lie. A man. A pile of money. A hotel room in December 2016.
But they missed the sweetest, saddest irony: the money was already gone. Danny Guy had invested over a year before the supposed con event happened.
Maybe the lie was so good it bent time. Or perhaps someone forgot to read the spreadsheet.
Sure, in the Ministry of Prosecution, truth is flexible, and time is elastic. In this version of justice, cause may follow effect, and chronology is merely a suggestion.
And while in obedient prosecutors’ heads, time may bend, but the wire fraud law does not.
Without a pre-investment misstatement, there is no wire fraud. This was not merely exculpatory. It is dispositive.
Fritsch made a statement in December 2016. Danny Guy wired the money in 2014 -2015.
And the government says, “Hey! That 2016 statement caused the investment made in 2015“
It is a novel precedent conjured up: The chronology of a crime no longer matters.
The three prosecutors alleged wire fraud by cause and effect — and the “effect“ came first.
There was this rather stupendous “aha“ moment at the trial, we forgot about time — and one would think it would have ended the case then and there.
Judge Fischer Accomodates
Just as she stretched the constitution in not letting Fritsch have the attorney of his choice, Judge Fischer stretched the rules for the prosecution. Her courtroom is California, and it’s woke and Orwellian. And Kafkaesque.
Judge Fischer did not declare a mistrial. She let the prosecution shift from wire fraud to another charge, a charge not in the indictment. (We will get into that in our next in this series.)
Trial by ambush.
Imagine the government charges a man with murder. At trial, the alleged victim walks in —alive. Rather than drop the case, the judge allows the prosecution to accuse the defendant of bank robbery.
This, essentially, is what happened in United States v. Fritsch.
To be continued…
Editor’s Note : I have raised the constitutional issues of this case with people interested in helping Donald Trump reform the Department of Justice’s foul practices and who are very conversent in how to effect this – knowing that the top administration is peopled with men and women of integrity, people who believe in due process and fair trials. I will have more to report on this later.
Frank Parlato is an investigative journalist, media strategist, publisher, and legal consultant.
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H. G. Wells The Time Machine is great movie and a mediocre book in my opinion.
It does look like D. Guy misunderstands some of the principles of financial risk. The way to invest in risky asses that you think may have high expected gain, is to invest in studying a large number of assets and choose a diversified portfolio, which means, a portfolio that includes small investments in statistically independent risky assets. As an example, before he ran for president, George Romney’s investor group invested in about 100 startups of which one (Staples) succeeded. I do think there probably is an issue of trust involved and that lies on the expected gain side of the equation. A pyramid scheme has zero expected gain. Not only in the causality calculation, also in his strategic thinking, it seems Guy put the cart before the horse. He had a number of institutios where he had influence all make one and the same investment in Fritsch’s vision, endurance, integrity or ability to enforce intgrity, etc etc. You don’t see Warren Buffet trying to recover losses by cause-and-effect arguments.
Trump is paying attention! The black robed criminals and rogue agents will be weeded out. Keep the faith.
Love it, Trump is King and real big shiz
I’m dumbstruck that this comment thrills me.