Part one: $500M Fraud Rap — and a Baby Photo as ‘Witness Tampering’
HOW A $10 BILLION FIRM DIED IN NINETY DAYS
Suppose Joshua Wander is presumed innocent.
Suppose that his firm, 777 Partners LLC, claimed more than $9 billion in assets and more than 2,000 employees and was managing its problems when the Justice Department killed it.
777 was stressed by rising interest rates, bruised by critical press, but not dead. Then a news organization published the name of a federal prosecutor and announced a money-laundering investigation that, on the government's timeline, did not yet exist.
Suppose that single piece of publicity, quite possibly leaked by the prosecution in advance of their officially opening a criminal case, triggered the commercial death spiral that followed within days.
Suppose the collapse is what made the criminal case possible.
And easier to win.
That a leak can cause a downfall and the downfall can be used as evidence of guilt and that the DOJ destroyed the company that otherwise would have no victims, no one unpaid.
This is the sequence the government and most of the press prefer not to examine too closely.
This is the second in a series. This is about how the company died.
THE STORY
777 Partners was a Miami investment firm started in 2015 by Joshua Wander and Steven Pasko.
Damien Alfalla was the chief financial officer.
Its original business was buying out people who had won lotteries or lawsuits who would be paid over time. Some of them wanted cash right away.
777 bought the right to their future payments at a discount, paid the person a lump sum, and collected their payments as scheduled. To pay the lump sums, it borrowed money from lenders using the future payments as collateral.
Over time, the firm branched into insurance, lawsuit financing, airplanes, small airlines, and European soccer clubs. By mid-2023 it claimed more than $9 billion in assets and more than 2,000 employees.
The payments 777 collected were fixed. The cost of the money it borrowed to buy them was not. From 2015 through early 2022 interest rates stayed historically low.
Beginning in March 2022 the Federal Reserve raised rates at the fastest pace in decades, pushing them above 5 percent by mid-2023. The firm's borrowing costs jumped while the money coming in stayed the same.
That is the built-in vulnerability of the model.
It is also, on the sworn account of the company's court-appointed restructuring officer, the first item on the list of what went wrong.
Mark Shapiro of GlassRatner, who has run 777 since Wander left, told the bankruptcy court in August 2026 that beginning in 2022 "sharply rising interest rates increased the cost of financing" while the aviation and sports investments were still absorbing the effects of the pandemic.
Shapiro's declaration puts the peak higher. At its height in 2023, he swore, the 777 and 600 enterprise "had invested more than $10 billion in assets and was a major employer worldwide."
The May 2024 organizational chart — the one GlassRatner inherited on day one — showed more than 500 legal entities.
As of August 2026 the same enterprise had fifteen employees. All of them working remotely, out of a suite of offices in Dallas belonging to the restructuring firm.
The trouble began, it seems, when 777 pursued a high-profile bid to take control of Everton Football Club of the English Premier League, one of the oldest and best-known clubs in England and founded in 1878.
At the time of the bid, Everton was controlled by Farhad Moshiri. Moshiri's wealth and earlier financing of the club were widely linked in the British press to the Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov.
Usmanov had been sanctioned after the invasion of Ukraine. Whether those relationships still carried influence in 2023 is a matter of public record and private speculation. What is not in dispute is that a successful American takeover would have displaced the existing ownership structure.
Sophisticated people understand that large amounts of money and political exposure can generate opposing publicity.
In July 2023, the Norwegian niche website Josimar, an outlet focused on the business and governance side of football, started publishing critical stories about 777's sports financing.
Josimar was the first outlet to report aggressively on 777's sports portfolio.
Whether it was doing its job or whether someone with an interest in stopping the Everton bid fed it material is not proven.
The timing is convenient for anyone who wanted 777’s bid to fail.
NOVEMBER 2023
Then, in November 2023 a series of articles about 777 appeared in Semafor, a digital news outlet aimed at media professionals, policymakers, business readers, and international elites.
The first Semafor story, on November 14, focused on 777's sports-team financing.
Subsequent pieces reported that 777 had used insurance customers' cash to buy teams, and named a senior lender as a silent partner: A-CAP — Advantage Capital Holdings — associated with Kenneth King.
A-CAP was one of 777's largest sources of capital. Twelve days before that article, on November 2, 2023, A-CAP and 777 amended and restated their holding-company loan agreement. The facility they set up that day made available up to $891 million. That is what a lender does with a borrower it believes in.
On November 29, Leadenhall Capital Partners issued 777 a notice of breach. A notice of breach is not a missed payment. Lenders issue them for covenant failures, reporting lapses, and collateral tests. Borrowers current on every obligation receive them.
Leadenhall, a major lender to 777, would describe A-CAP in civil litigation as the puppeteer behind the 777 marionette and the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain — the words of a party suing A-CAP, written to win a lawsuit, and unproven.
The November 23 article did not prove anything. It took a private capital relationship and put it in front of every counterparty at once.
Whether the characterization was accurate, the effect did not depend on accuracy. Insurance partners, lenders and the Premier League now had a question they had not had the week before.
Counterparties who had been dealing with 777 now had to consider whether they had been dealing with King.
The lenders' relationships with each other became more complicated, because the party financing the operation was now being described in print as the one running it.
THE NAME
The next day, November 30, things got worse. And past the point of no return.
Semafor reported that Assistant US Attorney Nicolas Roos of the Southern District of New York was overseeing a Justice Department money-laundering investigation into 777 Partners.
The article cited "people familiar with the matter."
At the time that article was published, no grand jury subpoenas had been issued, no witnesses had testified, and no grand jury proceedings had occurred.
The investigation itself was not opened until November 28, two days before the story ran. How Semafor came to have the prosecutor's name before the office had a case is a separate matter.
That same day the article appeared, Utah Insurance Department contacted A-CAP about the article. The next day Scottish Widows and Rothesay paused a back-book pipeline pending the reported investigation.
Within days lenders issued default notices, insurance regulators made inquiries, and counterparties withdrew.
The Premier League signaled concern about the Everton bid, citing the DOJ coverage. The Everton effort collapsed. Leadenhall accelerated its debt.
THE WIND-DOWN
In May 2024 Wander and Pasko resigned.
Independent professionals from GlassRatner, led by Mark Shapiro, took control and began winding the business down.
The High Court in London issued a winding-up order in October 2024.
Chapter 11 filings in the United States followed in 2026. Shapiro's first-day declaration in that case describes a multi-year wind-down of self-liquidating receivables.
In May 2025, while the asset freeze was still in place, Leadenhall ran Article 9 foreclosure auctions on three borrower entities. It took portfolios it had itself valued at more than $170 million on credit bids of one dollar each.
Shapiro, who owes Leadenhall nothing and owes Wander less, works for the creditors. He told the bankruptcy court that Leadenhall's "aggressive posture in litigation and collateral disputes ... has driven a disproportionate share of the cost, delay, and disruption in the Company's wind-down."
He signed his declaration under penalty of perjury on August 10, 2026.
WHAT THE MAN WHO TOOK OVER SWORE
Asked to explain to a federal bankruptcy judge why a $10 billion enterprise ended up with fifteen employees, he gave the court a list.
Sharply higher interest rates and financing costs. Continued disruption in aviation and professional sports after COVID. Disputes over the ownership, eligibility, valuation and allocation of collateral. Regulatory developments affecting the reinsurance business — the Bermuda Monetary Authority moved against 777 Re, and reinsurance counterparties began pulling their business back. Creditor disputes. Counterparty concerns.
And this, in his own words: "along with additional adverse publicity, all of which constrained liquidity and access to external capital."
By late 2023, he swore, the combination of tightening credit, the reinsurance disruption, mounting creditor concerns and "significant adverse publicity surrounding Wander and the proposed Everton acquisition caused the Company's access to outside capital to contract sharply."
The firm that had claimed more than $9 billion in assets and more than 2,000 employees was gone.
And Josh Wander stands indicted. He stands to lose more than his business. He may lose is liberty.
But just suppose, for purposes of nothing more than a novel experiment in modern journalism, that we presume he is innocent. And the harm was caused not by him, but by perhaps a government leaker who caued the real harm and created all the victims. That no one would have lost a penny, but for the panic created by that leak.
Impossible? Maybe. But why not also suppose that we can investigate and try to find the truth.
(Part Three: how a reporter got the name of the prosecutor one day before the prosecutor got the case.)
Is It True?
