The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins

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The people of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember the longtime sheriff as a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask.

By Alexandra Marvar

Author’s Note: The American sheriff is an office as old as the colonies. In England, the sheriff—the reeve of the shire—was appointed by the king to maintain law and order, collect taxes for the crown, and raise the posse comitatus. After the Revolutionary War, this British import became an elected position. But 250 years on, some U.S. sheriffs seem to still want to answer to a king—and in the absence of a king, to hold absolute power. The following story was first published in 2018, in a too-short-lived magazine called Topic. At the time, I thought of my work as righting a whitewashed historical record, sharing an underrepresented perspective, filling out the context around a supposedly heroic “legend in his own time” in the Deep South. We were not quite one year into Donald Trump’s first presidential term, and constitutional sheriffs—ironically, the term for sheriffs who believe they have more authority than the Constitution when it comes to choosing whether or not to enforce federal laws—were emerging as some of his most vocal supporters. Now a year into Trump’s second term, this claque of sheriffs are ever more boldly superseding federal law on issues like immigration, voting rights, and election procedures. Revisiting this story now, I understand Lummie Jenkins differently. I’d originally considered my piece to be a history, revealing the dark truth about a man who tamped down the civil rights movement in his county while maintaining a public reputation of charm and humor. Now I also see it as a case study on the making of the constitutional sheriff and how that figure’s particular brand of power has persevered through wave after wave of democratic reform.

—Alexandra Marvar

Talk to anyone over the age of 70 in Camden, Alabama, and they can tell you a story about Lummie Jenkins, the sheriff of Wilcox County from 1939 to 1971. According to newspapers across the Deep South, Percy Columbus Jenkins—also known as Sheriff Lummie, Mr. Lummie, or just Lummie—was “a superb raconteur,” a “master psychologist,” and a “modern-day hero.” It was common lore that, unlike other sheriffs in the region, Lummie didn’t need to carry a gun, and he didn’t go prowling for suspects. Instead, he kicked back in his chair at his chinaberry-wood desk, packed his pipe with Prince Albert tobacco, and summoned the guilty parties to the Wilcox County Courthouse in downtown Camden simply by word of mouth. Out of fear or respect, the legend goes, suspects came in of their own accord.

Introducing The Atavist’s Revived series.

The length of Lummie’s tenure as Wilcox County’s chief law enforcer—eight consecutive terms—broke records in Alabama. And because much of it took place before the dawn of Miranda rights, which were enshrined in law by a Supreme Court ruling in 1966, there are countless stories, some surely truer than others, about the sheriff’s knack for coercing a confession from anyone. Newspapers reported claims that he employed sorcery, mind reading, and dreaded doses of “Truth Medicine”—sips from a glass bottle of Listerine he kept in his office that sported the disclaimer “Will paralyze if you lie.” Lummie had powers, people said, that exceeded those of ordinary lawmen.

You could say that law enforcement was in his blood. His father, P. C. Jenkins Sr., was sheriff of Wilcox County from 1911 to 1914. Lummie was just 12 when he snuck out of school to watch his dad preside over a public execution by hanging in Camden’s town square. “There were so many people,” he later recalled. “It looked just like a show day.”

Wilcox County sits in Alabama’s Black Belt, so named for its rich, dark soil and concentration of Black residents. It’s a place where the legacy of slavery runs deep; immediately before the Civil War, few counties across the South had more enslaved people. The sheriff’s domain comprises the city of Camden, four small towns, and a tangle of hilly two-lane highways and red-dirt roads that weave through the overgrowth of fallen cotton empires and felled pine woods. In 1960, there were some 18,000 residents in Wilcox County, 78 percent of whom were Black. Today, the population is fewer than 10,000 and more than 70 percent of residents are Black. Then as now, Wilcox hovered near the top of the list of the nation’s poorest counties.

In 2008, Lummie’s granddaughter, Delynn Jenkins Halloran, celebrated her grandfather’s gilded reputation by self-publishing a compendium of lightly edited newspaper articles and collected praise titled Lummie Jenkins: The Unarmed Sheriff of Wilcox County. The contributors to her crowdsourced book included white family members, white journalists, white congressmen, white governors, and white sheriffs of nearby Alabama counties—as well as the white wives of many of these men. An additional source on Lummie’s legacy, from autobiographical cassette tapes he recorded in his final years, was the man himself.

On the cover of the 168-page paperback is a color photograph of the sheriff. He wears a jaunty grimace and a white cowboy hat to match the white vest buttoned over his brick-red shirt. One of his cherished pistol-themed tie clips glistens at the center of his chest. Taken for the Birmingham News in 1968, and appearing above the caption “Wilcox County’s gunless sheriff always gets his man,” the photo shows Lummie leaning against a sheriff’s cruiser before the antebellum columns of the Wilcox County Courthouse, squinting through the fat lenses of his glasses.

I visited the site of this photograph in the fall of 2018. The courthouse looked exactly the same as it does in the Birmingham News photo; even the Jim Crow–era drinking fountain still protruded, unmarked, from a patch of grass on the street corner. I’d been to the area a couple of months earlier to meet a legendary group of quilt-making artisans in a nearby community called Gee’s Bend.¹ Lummie Jenkins had been dead for forty years, but in Gee’s Bend I kept hearing mention of the late sheriff and his granddaughter’s book.

1. During the Great Depression and into the mid-twentieth century, women in Gee’s Bend stitched quilts from every available fabric—cotton scraps, old blue jeans, feed sacks—to keep their families warm. In the 1960s, civil rights organizers helped the women set up a mail-order business. In the 1990s, a pioneering art collector named Bill Arnett came to the community, purchased quilts in large numbers, and surfaced them to arts critics, collectors, and curators. Today its quilts are on U.S. postage stamps and in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide.

I was hard-pressed to find a cup of coffee in Camden—Hardee’s had run out—but I did come across copies of The Unarmed Sheriff on two occasions. It was on a shelf at the Wilcox County Library, upstairs from Lummie’s former office in the courthouse, where a researcher helped me locate news clippings about him. (“Mr. Lummie!” she remembered warmly, and told me that he had once given her family a puppy.) The book was also available for $16.95 at the Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center, a nonprofit gallery and shop packed with gifts, paintings, and crafts, located about five hundred feet from the courthouse door.

Outside Wilcox County, copies of The Unarmed Sheriff were harder to come by. There was a used copy available on Amazon, where the book had two reviews.² One gave it five stars: “Awesome book. Very very good read.” The other was a one-star review: “Wait a minute wasn’t this the ‘infamous’ Sheriff who beat the Black woman McDuffie to death with a rubber hose? … So thankful my father got me and my Mom out of Alabama as soon as I was born.”

2. Today I can only find a copy on eBay, for $84.

“Wait a minute wasn’t this the ‘infamous’ Sheriff who beat the Black woman McDuffie to death with a rubber hose?”

Gee’s Bend is an unincorporated town, tucked so deep into one of the Alabama River’s oxbow arcs that it feels (and functions) like an island. The families there can trace their roots and last names directly back to slavery. In the generations that followed the Civil War, white landowners left; Black residents stayed. The town’s geography makes it thirty-eight miles from Camden by car via the nearest bridge, or about six miles on the local ferry—an hour and a half drive or a fifteen-minute boat ride.

In 1949, during Lummie’s tenure, the government decided to change the town’s name, which was taken from plantation owner Joseph Gee. Authorities rechristened it Boykin, after a segregationist senator. Following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, residents filed a request to rename their home again, this time to King. Nearly sixty years on it’s still Boykin, but most everyone calls it Gee’s Bend.

On an afternoon in October 2018, I boarded the ferry in Camden. I rode across a wide, flat reservoir to the muddy shore of the Bend. The Welcome Center served a free hot lunch to seniors on weekdays, and when I arrived a few women—all quilt makers—were picking over the carrot-and-raisin salad or skipping directly to the Moon Pies.

Lummie’s reign as sheriff ended almost a half-century ago, but several of the women remembered him well. At first the stories I got—as a white stranger asking questions in a community where outsiders are few and memories are long—felt reserved. But as the women cautiously gauged my response, their physical reactions said more than their words. When I asked Lola Pettway, then 77, if she remembered Lummie Jenkins, she recoiled, like I’d spooked her. She could remember Mr. Lummie standing at the edge of a field, watching her and her family pick cotton; something about that image sent chills through her body. Nancy Pettway, then 83, told me about how, just before she was married, Mr. Lummie made the trip over to the Bend, arrested her fiancé, and threw him in jail after hearing that he’d killed a dog that attacked him.

I left the Welcome Center and drove a few miles down dirt lanes and through rolling fields to a farm on John Gragg Road. A silver Cadillac was parked askew near some hay bales in a field of cows. Barking dogs eagerly surrounded my car. I was there to see none other than John Gragg, 88, the son of a well-known preacher and landowner in the Bend. Gragg came to the door with his walking stick and invited me into the living room of his one-story 1930s farmhouse.

“Lummie Jenkins?” Gragg said. He sat back in his recliner, his walking stick resting on his knee. “He was the boss man.” He chuckled to himself. The music from an old black-and-white western flared up from his television set. I asked him if it was true that Lummie didn’t carry a gun. “Didn’t carry a gun?” Gragg sounded amused. “He carried a gun and a nightstick.”

Virtually everything I’d read—all the profiles, op-eds, obituaries, and tributes—pegged the sheriff’s mystique to the idea that he was unarmed. But Gragg remembered a different Lummie. He also remembered the sheriff’s cronies. “He had his snitches,” Gragg said, “and they would tell him what he want to know.”

As I kept talking to people in the Bend, I heard more about this other Lummie Jenkins. The one who, if he was in a mood and caught a Gee’s Bend resident on the wrong side of the river after Camden’s eight o’clock curfew, would make them swim home, even in winter. Fear was essential to keeping white power intact, and as the civil rights movement whipped up revolutionary energy across the Black Belt, Lummie’s and his colleagues’ efforts intensified. People told me that, in 1962, as voting rights organizers started to arrive in Wilcox County, the leadership shut down the Gee’s Bend ferry, turning a short passage into an all but unmanageable journey—you needed a car, gas money, and time. This effectively cut Bend residents off from local services, including the voting registration office. Lummie reportedly made a comment about the decision that’s the stuff of legend: “We didn’t close the ferry because they were Black. We closed it because they forgot they were Black.” (The ferry would remain out of commission for forty-four years. In 2006, it was reopened with fanfare and hat-in-hand apologies.)

Gee’s Bend residents also remembered King’s visits in 1965, and the march on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, some forty miles north. They remembered walking as children and teenagers for days in the rain with King and John Lewis. They remembered gathering by the hundreds at the Camden courthouse for another demonstration, being blockaded by Lummie and Mayor F. R. Albritton, being immersed in tear gas and pummeled with smoke bombs, getting arrested, kneeling in the street, refusing to leave. They remembered the songs they sang. Some people also remembered what happened to David Colston, what happened to Della McDuffie.

Some people would have preferred not to remember that time at all.

Lummie Jenkins may have been a nonpareil in Wilcox County, but he was not an anomaly in the Jim Crow South, where sheriffs were considered more powerful than the American president. He held office during the rise of “peace officer” organizations—groups of law enforcement officials, organized state by state, who shared similar conservative ideas about the Constitution and other matters. Lummie was a loyal member of the Alabama Peace Officers Association and something of a celebrity among its ranks, serving as vice president and then president between 1959 and 1963. As one admirer wrote in a 1975 edition of the Alabama Peace Officers Journal, “Lummie is not only respected and loved by his people in Wilcox County; he is the only officer I have ever seen walk into a meeting of law enforcement officers and get a standing ovation.”

Members of peace officer organizations embraced a concept called interposition: They believed that it was a sheriff’s job to insert himself between state or federal authorities and his constituents to prevent the enforcement of laws he didn’t agree with. In 1958, the Supreme Court held that this doctrine had no legal basis, but peace officer groups continued to foster and amplify sheriffs’ dissent against legislation they didn’t like. This would last decades. In 1994, a pair of sheriffs filed a suit against the federal government over a new law that compelled police to run background checks on people who bought handguns. The sheriffs won—it was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled, for the feds to make local police enforce the policy. Then, in 2013, in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, dozens of sheriffs united again, this time against gun-control regulations proposed (but never passed) during the Obama administration.

American sheriffs are still spreading the doctrine of interposition. The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), which was established in 2011, is now a nationwide organization of right-wing law enforcement officers who share an interpretation of the Constitution that gives sheriffs the “authority to check and balance all levels of government within the jurisdiction of the County.” Among its most famous members is Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was pardoned by Donald Trump in 2017 for racially profiling Latinos in order to turn them over to immigration authorities.

There’s always been just one way for most sheriffs to maintain their power: They have to keep getting elected to office. For most of Lummie’s career, that wasn’t a problem. Then came the civil rights movement.

In January 1965, registration of eligible Black voters across the South was upwards of 40 percent, but in Wilcox County it was zero percent. Meanwhile, white registration was 113 percent—some deceased residents were still on the rolls.

One day in 1963, a dozen or so men dressed in their Sunday best climbed into pickup trucks and caravanned from the Bend to Camden. They intended to register to vote, a right guaranteed them by the Fifteenth Amendment, which by then had been on the books nearly a century. They knew that they were breaking ground and risking everything. They’d all heard the infamous story about an elderly Black minister who, years prior, tried to register in Wilcox County, only to be shot and killed. The incident wasn’t documented, but true or not it had an impact. One by one, the men filled out an application at the county courthouse. All of them were rejected.³

3. The first documented instance of a Black man attempting to register to vote in the county was the Reverend James Foster Reese, a transplant from Kentucky. He believed racial dynamics in Wilcox County could and should change, so one day in 1958, he went to the courthouse to exercise his right to get his name on the voting roll; he was turned away. He kept trying to register, but the more he persisted, the more consequences he faced, including physical attacks and threats to his family. He eventually moved to Tennessee. He never succeeded at registering to vote in Alabama.

Hundreds of Black residents would follow their lead in the next two years. Every one of them had to overcome the fear of death. They also had to accept that they could lose their jobs, and that they and their families might face intimidation and threats. The Ku Klux Klan and other vigilantes across the South torched churches, set off car bombs, and assaulted or murdered Black neighbors and voting rights organizers in a desperate war to keep the white power structure intact.

As if that weren’t enough, Black would-be voters had to contend with onerous logistics. As of early 1965, the voting registration office in Camden was open for business twice a month. If a Black resident had a way to get there at the right time on the right day, they still had to pass a literacy test. If they did that, state law dictated that they needed two registered voters of good “moral character” to vouch for them before their registration could be validated. In Wilcox County, there were apparently no white voters willing to vouch for their neighbors of color. In January 1965, registration of eligible Black voters across the South was upwards of 40 percent, but in Wilcox County it was zero percent. Meanwhile, white registration was 113 percent—some deceased residents were still on the rolls.

That February, during a civil rights demonstration in Camden, Martin Luther King Jr. himself approached Sheriff Lummie in a crowd outside the courthouse with a request: Would Lummie himself vouch for voters of color? Onlookers would remember that the sheriff was courteous. He explained plainly to King that, well now, being “in politics” as he was, he couldn’t vouch for any individual voters. King asked him if that was indeed the law. “I haven’t read that in the law, but I’ve heard it,” Lummie said. King then asked if he and his colleagues could at least count on Lummie’s protection. The sheriff shrugged: “I only have two deputies.”

The following month, Jim Clark, the sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama, made international headlines for the violence he and his officers wrought on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, on what became known as Bloody Sunday—March 7, 1965. Even local news coverage celebrated King’s march and vilified Clark.

The press wasn’t a problem for Wilcox County’s sheriff, at least not locally. Once in a while, a reporter from elsewhere would note the county’s “bad reputation” in the context of civil rights, but what happened there tended to stay there. Hollis Curl, the publisher of the local paper, was an old friend and hunting buddy who would later eulogize Sheriff Lummie warmly.⁴ Curl’s paper didn’t run a word about the marches, smoke bombs, and tear gas in Camden in 1965.

4. Curl described the sheriff as folksy, humble, loyal, larger than life—“a mighty man.” Lummie “loved people” and helped anyone who came to him. He “had the respect of both races,” said Curl, who was sure that “some of his best friends were colored.”

In charming the local media, Lummie was less like Jim Clark than like Laurie Pritchett, police chief of Albany, Georgia. If Clark galvanized the civil rights movement, Pritchett, whom journalist and historian James Reston once called “the smartest of King’s adversaries,” did the opposite. Just like King, Pritchett had studied civil disobedience and the strategies of Mahatma Gandhi, and he set out to diffuse civil rights efforts without producing martyrs. His tactics included keeping racially motivated violence in check, skillfully managing public relations, and cultivating a cordial relationship with King himself. He countered a civil rights push in Albany in November 1961 by ordering his officers to be nonviolent and calling on every Georgia sheriff within a 70-mile radius to give him access to their jails. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested and dispatched to borrowed cells.

Pritchett’s success was of great interest to Alabama authorities. Bull Connor, the notoriously violent public safety commissioner of Birmingham, once offered what Pritchett called “an outrageous sum” for him to take a short break from his police chief duties and come on as an adviser in the Alabama capital. Pritchett reluctantly agreed, only to leave after a short time in disgust. “I didn’t have anything in common with Bull Connor,” he later said.

Like Pritchett, Lummie had less overt ways of imposing fear and keeping the racial hierarchy intact. Once, when civil rights leaders asked for his protection while they ate at a local restaurant, Lummie let the activists know that it wasn’t his job to look out for them. He also asked for their home addresses. He wanted to be able to reach their families, the sheriff said, because the restaurant’s proprietor was “going to kill you for sure.”

“He was the lawless lawman,” said Sheryl Threadgill Matthews, who at 15 became one of the first of two Black students to integrate Wilcox County High School. There was no police protection for students like Matthews, and no punishment for the classmates who verbally and physically abused her. She wasn’t getting much of an education, she said, so her enrollment lasted only a year before she returned to Camden Academy, the Black Presbyterian secondary school where her father, the Reverend Thomas Threadgill, was a chaplain. “Lummie didn’t play by the book,” Matthews told me. “He did whatever he wanted.”

For a time in 1965, Camden Academy offered housing to student volunteers who came in from across the U.S. to help with voter registration efforts. One student Matthews remembers from that time was Maria Gitin, a skinny white 19-year-old on summer break from college in San Francisco. She had seen the attacks of Bloody Sunday on TV and left home to enlist in a ten-week voter registration program in Wilcox County.

“Lummie Jenkins: not my favorite subject!” Gitin emailed in response to my interview request. She described the sheriff in her 2014 memoir of the civil rights movement, This Bright Light of Ours, as a “notoriously cruel,” “bandy-legged,” “homely” man who endorsed and enforced segregation, and lent his full support to the local Ku Klux Klan, “all while shaking hands and patting Black children’s heads.” Gitin recalled a traumatizing night she spent in the Camden jail, listening to a fellow organizer being brutally beaten in a neighboring cell. (“He was always arresting us,” she said of Lummie when we spoke on the phone. “Every few days.”) Upon her release the next morning, she remembered, she had to pass through the sheriff’s office, where Lummie and his deputies heckled her, laughing and passing around a jar of moonshine. “He was far from unarmed,” she said. “He pretty much always had a big shotgun with him.” It had been pointed at her the day before, when he came to round up her group of civil rights organizers at a local church for “conspiracy to boycott.”

That church was Antioch Baptist, a hub for voter registration efforts. King spoke there at least twice. One night that June, a white mob broke into the building and beat two Black teenagers so severely they were hospitalized. Two days later, on July 1, Lummie showed up at Antioch, ordered everyone out, and padlocked the doors shut.

White students in Gitin’s voter registration program were paired with Black locals. Her canvassing partner was a 16-year-old named Robert Powell. Now living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Powell still had family in Wilcox County. He laughed out loud when I asked him on the phone about the “unarmed sheriff.”

“When we was demonstrating, we had songs made up about him,” Powell told me. “I’ll never forget some of those songs.” He recited one: “ ‘Ol’ Lummie, you’ll never be able to jail us all—segregation is bound to fall.’ ” Powell said that Lummie hated the songs. As for the people singing them: “There wasn’t much he could do at the time, with a hundred or two hundred fifty people, but jail them. And the jail wasn’t big enough to hold everybody,” Powell said. “He couldn’t stand it.”

Shelly Dale was arrested in the summer of 1965 during a voting rights demonstration. She was a teenager at the time; she went on to become Wilcox County’s tax assessor. She kept her arrest record in her desk drawer and fished it out to show me. “When you’re young, you’ll do some crazy things, right?” she said.⁵

5. Shelly Dale’s interview wasn’t originally featured in this story, because the audio files of my conversation with her were corrupted. I was later able to salvage them and can now include her perspective.

But getting arrested wasn’t the most memorable occurrence of that summer. “My baby sister got shot right there, right [in] front,” she gestured out the window of her office, at the town square. She recalled the bullet ricocheting off a parked car. It went in one of her sister’s shoulders and out the other. The bullet left “a long scar,” Dale said, and nothing worse. “If it had went that way,” Dale drew a line with her finger from her shoulder toward her heart, “she would have been dead.”

I asked her if, amid everything that happened that summer, she ever met Lummie Jenkins personally. “Please don’t call him Lummie Jenkins, OK?” she asked me gently. “He was such a mighty man. Please call him Mr. Lummie.” She saw him, she said, but never spoke to him. She told me it wasn’t her place to judge what he did back then. “He just had… power,” she said. “And people was afraid of him. Simple as that.”

By the end of the summer of 1965, the number of Black voters registered in Wilcox County had gone from a couple dozen to five hundred and counting. When the national Voting Rights Act became law that August, Alabama’s vouching rule was no more. The following year, federal election supervisors would arrive to see that Black voters were able to cast their ballots in the 1966 election. It wouldn’t be long before Black voters outnumbered white voters in Wilcox County and throughout Alabama.

Still, the past kept dogging the present, and Sheriff Lummie helped it along.

“Please don’t call him Lummie Jenkins, OK? He was such a mighty man. Please call him Mr. Lummie.”

“We had a café on the side of the road, right down there,” John Gragg told me as we sat in his house in Gee’s Bend. He pointed over his shoulder, toward where Route 5 joins the top of the Bend to the west. In his slow, low voice, he said, “They went in there, beat her up, and killed her.”

By the mid-1960s, there were outside eyes on white law enforcement here. But in the years before the civil rights movement, things were different. Stories from that time still circulate in whispers around Gee’s Bend. Della McDuffie’s story is one of them.

On a Saturday just after midnight in April 1953, Lummie Jenkins and other officers entered a Black-owned café, apparently to enforce a law that no music be played on Sundays. The place was bustling, and witnesses later told the Chicago Defender and the Afro-American that the sheriff and his deputies stormed in swinging blackjacks and a rubber hose, firing shots into the ceiling and floor “to scare the n–––s.” It worked. Patrons dove out windows to escape. One person, however, couldn’t run: the café owner’s wife, Della McDuffie. She was 63 and paralyzed, so she used a wheelchair. Several accounts would describe Lummie ordering her to get up and go to bed. When she couldn’t, he beat her with a rubber hose. Within an hour—despite frantic care from her husband, William, and the arrival of a doctor—Della was dead.

William would later recall seeing a trickle of blood running from his wife’s ear down her face. Her death certificate, prepared by the sheriff’s office, listed her cause of death as a “preexisting blood condition.”

Her family fought back. Future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, then a lawyer and head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into Della’s death, along with injuries sustained by another woman on the scene. According to press coverage from the period, the FBI made preliminary inquiries, but local witnesses, some of whom had already been threatened, refused to testify, and law enforcement was uncooperative. A year later, William McDuffie drowned in unclear circumstances. DOJ investigators wrote back to Marshall that they couldn’t do anything further with the case. Subsequently, the surviving McDuffies reported house fires and death threats made against them. They eventually left Alabama.

On Lummie’s watch, there were other suspicious and often violent deaths of Black residents that the sheriff’s office never found any foul play in connection with. In January 1966, 32-year-old David Colston was killed by a white farmer, J. T. Reaves, near Antioch Baptist Church. Colston had been on his way to a funeral, after which he was going to a rally for the election of Black citizens to local office, when Reaves rear-ended his car. Reaves claimed that Colston got out of his vehicle and confronted him, so he shot him in self-defense. Colston died at the scene.

Following the shooting, Reaves turned himself in to Lummie. As for what happened next, some reports say that, after handing over his gun, Reaves went home. Others claim that he spent a night in jail. Either way, in short order Reaves was free. He was never punished for the crime, which the sheriff’s office recorded was the result of heated tempers during a “traffic incident.”

Witnesses contradicted this account from the start. Colston’s wife, who was in the car with him, said there was no argument between her husband and Reaves. In her telling, Colston went to check his car’s bumper after Reaves hit him and Reaves shot him in the head at close range. It was an assassination.

Colston’s murder seems to have shifted the tone of life in Wilcox County. Black residents recalled their white neighbors becoming emboldened, leaving guns on their car seats and dashboards for all to see. They understood Reaves’s violence to be not just against Colston but against all of them. Colston’s funeral portrait was hung in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference headquarters in Selma—“a literal picture,” Jet magazine reported at the time, “of Alabama Negros’ drive to secure the vote.” ⁶

6. The NAACP called for the investigation of other deaths of Black Wilcox County residents that occurred in 1967—a year Lummie also happened to serve as the county’s coroner. One of the deceased was 31-year-old Rodell Williamson, whose body was found “hung up” with fishing line in the Alabama River. The sheriff’s office declared it an accidental drowning. Lummie was quoted in Jetmagazine as speculating that Williamson “may have been in the river swimming. Or he could have fell in.” Family members who identified Williamson’s body told reporters that his neck was gashed and appeared to be broken, that his head was “smashed,” and that there were bruises on his chest. A number of area residents claimed they’d heard that Williamson had been beaten to death, but Lummie’s deputy said that was “a damn lie—and you can quote me.”

Fewer than two weeks after Colston’s death, a Black grocery store owner named Walter Calhoun put on a suit, drove down to the courthouse, and filed papers to run for sheriff of Wilcox County. Calhoun was evicted from his store two days later, but he didn’t bow to intimidation. His name stayed on the ballot.

Meanwhile, with encouragement from King, Black residents of Wilcox County continued to register to vote. Lummie didn’t seem worried about his electoral prospects. “I’ve always tried to protect people of both races and the people know it,” he told a New York Times reporter. “I believe I’m going to get votes from both sides.”

White federal election supervisors were again appointed to watch over the polls. Ballot counters were white; polling places were white businesses. There was no guarantee that Black citizens’ votes would be counted, that they would feel safe voting for the candidate they wanted, or that they would feel safe voting at all. Whatever happened, whoever was able to vote as they wished, of the 6,198 votes cast in the sheriff’s race, Lummie beat Calhoun by a margin of 722.

It would be four more years before Lummie’s reign finally came to an end. In the 1970 election, at the age of 69, he lost to his opponent by just ninety-three votes. The victor wasn’t a Black man, however. It was F. R. Albritton, the former mayor who’d once joined Lummie in trying to block civil rights protesters from reaching the county courthouse. “The other man catered to the n––– vote,” Lummie lamented to Bob Adelman, a photographer who covered the civil rights movement. “He made speeches to them. He went to their churches. I’ve never done that.”⁷

7. Albritton said he ran for sheriff because his old friend Lummie—who’d had two heart attacks—was planning to retire. Only at the last minute, Albritton claimed, did Lummie decide to stay in the race. According to Albritton, when he won Lummie didn’t speak to him for a month.

The Alabama Peace Officers Association would print that Lummie Jenkins had “retired.” According to a report from a university student teaching in Wilcox County at the time, he went out with a vow to “fill the jails with n–––s” before he left office.

Among the Gee’s Bend voters who cast a ballot for Albritton was John Gragg. “We all voted for Albritton,” he told me. “Albritton got to be the sheriff and forced Lummie Jenkins out.” That was satisfying. “But then Albritton made him a deputy,” Gragg added.

Lummie didn’t leave the law completely, but he no longer had absolute power: a small but significant change that showed Wilcox County might soon be ready for a bigger transformation. And two terms later, in the November 1978 election, a remarkable thing happened. Albritton was beaten by Prince Arnold, a 27-year-old Black schoolteacher from the tiny unincorporated town of Pine Apple. Arnold would go on to serve eight terms, tying Lummie for the title of longest-serving sheriff in the state.

A month after Arnold was elected, but before he took office, 77-year-old Lummie Jenkins died of a heart attack. By then, Sheryl Threadgill Matthews was a social welfare officer at the Alabama Department of Human Resources. “My coworker, a white lady, came up to me at the water fountain,” she remembered. “She said to me, ‘Mr. Lummie said he would die and go to hell before he see a Black man become sheriff. And, well, I guess he sure did.’ ”

According to a report from a university student teaching in Wilcox County at the time, Lummie went out with a vow to “fill the jails with n–––s” before he left office.

In the summer of 1965—the same summer when white residents shot at and tried to run down Maria Gitin, Robert Powell, and other voter registration volunteers in Wilcox County—19-year-old Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, a recent graduate of Wilcox County High School, was still living in Camden. In 2006, as a U.S. senator from Alabama, Jeff Sessions voted along with the rest of Congress to unanimously extend the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Still, he complained that it was outdated and unfair to the history of his state. “I am worried because [the extension] does little to acknowledge the tremendous progress made over the last forty years in Alabama and other covered jurisdictions,” Sessions said at the time. “Today is not 1965, and the situation with respect to voting rights in Alabama and other covered jurisdictions is dramatically different from 1965. I would have expected Congress to recognize this tremendous progress.”

In 2013, Sessions championed a Supreme Court decision restricting federal oversight of voting rules in nine southern states, calling it “good news for the South.” Within two years, Alabama codified a requirement that voters show state-issued identification at the polls, then proceeded to announce that it was closing the offices that issue driver’s licenses in nearly half the state’s sixty-seven counties. All the affected locations were rural, and they included every county where at least 75 percent of the population was Black. Wilcox was among them.

In some ways, Wilcox County is different than it was in Lummie’s time. Many of its current elected officials are Black, including Earnest Evans, the current sheriff, who has held the position since 2010. In a photograph on Evans’s 2018 reelection campaign website, he stands before the Wilcox County Courthouse Annex, which was erected in 1976. It looks a lot like the courthouse Lummie posed in front of in the photo adorning the cover of his granddaughter’s book. Evans’s sheriff’s badge shines on his suit jacket. His gaze is toward the horizon. Underneath the photograph is a reminder: “You will need a Photo I.D. to vote.” Meanwhile, at the county’s main public high school—the one Sessions attended, the one where Sheryl Threadgill Matthews toughed out a year of abuse in the name of desegregation—enrollment has flipped entirely. Due to white flight, not a single enrolled student is white.⁸

8. Today the school is 98 percent Black.

When Robert Powell looks at today’s Wilcox County, he doesn’t see the progress he fought for. “We put our lives on the line to try to create some type of change, as a people, as a race of people,” he told me. “But Camden is still a segregated place to this day.” Despite “all the struggles and sacrifices we made, the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

More from The Atavist Magazine

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14,445 and Counting

The Blue Book Burglar

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I’ve Gone to Look for America

Conversations and revelations about an ailing nation along Interstate 95.

_{Words by Masha Hamilton
Photographs by Cheney Orr}

The Atavist Magazine, No. 167

Masha Hamilton is the author of five novels. She began her career as a journalist, reporting from the Middle East and Russia. She later served as director of communications and public diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and worked in communications for the Rockefeller Foundation.

Cheney Orr is a Pulitzer Prize–nominated photographer. He is a regular contributor to Reuters, and his photographs have also appeared in the New York Times, ProPublica, and the Wall Street Journal. His book War Notes, a collection of portraits and interviews from Ukraine, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others.

Editor: Seyward Darby
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Alison Van Houten

Published in September 2025

---

The sky is dark. The highway hums beneath our tires. We’ve covered a lot of miles today, and the night is pressing us off the road, toward a Virginia rest stop where, years ago, a man was murdered in a bathroom. I want to see the door he pushed open, stand where he stood, feel how quickly ordinary moments can turn.

But more than anything right now, I want to stop. Stretch out in the back of Cheney’s car, let the wash of highway noise lull us for a few hours. It’s been another long day of catching strangers mid-journey, asking one personal question and then another.

We’re on the road, my oldest son and I, traveling nearly 2,000 miles on Interstate 95 from Miami to Maine, and pausing at virtually every rest stop. Our project is simple and vast at once: to ask fellow travelers where they’re headed, and where they think America is going too. I take notes. Cheney takes photos.

For me this trip is a therapy session with my country. I fear that there is a deep crack in our union, and I’m not sure I belong here anymore. Maybe the road can convince me otherwise. I also want time with a son I once knew so well, back when I looked down at the top of his head, but whom I’m learning all over again now that he’s grown to six-foot-four and seen what he’s seen, weathered what he has.

I’m six weeks past being laid off, in a season of layoffs. Cheney is a little over a year past a breakup that shook him loose from the life he thought he’d have and thrust him into another. It marked the end of a marriage he didn’t tell me about for 11 years, a secret that would recast all the holidays we celebrated, dinners we shared, and trips we took. Now we’re driving the coast of a country that has imprinted us with its violence—me in Afghanistan when a bomb tore open a morning during America’s forever war, him on the banks of the Rio Grande when the river swallowed breath. A nation itself now bruised and battered has scarred us with pain and sorrow.

The long ribbon of road insists that life goes on. The days gather, falling into one another, changing Cheney, changing me.

Beginnings and endings—let’s do both now, up front. No spoilers, just a map to provide a sense of direction amid the uncertainty to come.

Our journey began Memorial Day weekend 2025, at the I-95 on-ramp in Miami Beach, where the northbound and southbound lanes split, carving through a cityscape that’s a chaotic snarl of polished skyline and subtropical thicket. Two peacocks wandered in the brush bordering I-95 North, one of them calling out in loud, catlike screeches that competed with the drone of traffic. Along the southbound side, a small community of chickens foraged beneath an overpass. Feral birds, exhaust fumes, wild color: a surreal overture to the road ahead.

We ended 17 days later near Houlton, Maine, on a deserted bridge overlooking the border with Canada. Rain had just passed—puddles were alive with mosquitoes, and the sun hung low behind gauzy clouds. We took a couple of selfies to mark the moment. The clerk at a shop offering travelers duty-free goods told me that business had all but disappeared. I was the first customer he’d seen in three hours. As if to explain, he walked me to a display of chocolate bars, their wrappers stamped with Donald Trump’s face, stars and stripes curling beneath his grin. “People come in from Canada, and they turn the chocolate around so the face doesn’t show. Sometimes they drop the chocolate on the ground. On the ground!” the clerk said with dismay. “Aren’t we supposed to be grown-ups here?”

In between the peacocks and the chocolate were startling revelations and moments of grace. They came from a Cajun great-grandmother driving an 18-wheeler. A philosophical cop from Georgia. An unhoused community living in cars, inventing rest-stop resilience. Conversations arrived unexpected, unguarded. Some drifted open, while others cracked wide in an instant. There were bursts of candor at vending machines and outside bathrooms—intimacy in the unlikeliest of places, with the murmur of the interstate a constant soundtrack.

I-95 isn’t just asphalt. It was born of two ambitions: one public, one military. In 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, lawmakers envisioned a road connecting the country’s entire eastern edge that could also be a means of moving troops and supplies if the Cold War turned hot. Now, at its busiest, more than 300,000 vehicles crowd the interstate daily, including tens of thousands of commercial trucks, those hulking giants that thunder by, rattling mirrors and nerves.

Families ride I-95 with coolers wedged between the seats of their minivans. Truckers push through the night, carrying oranges and lumber and coffins. Greyhound buses, Teslas, and beat-up sedans weave at high speeds. I-95 is an artery of ambition, movement, and flight. A place where millions of people hurry toward love and loss, carrying their hope, their grief, their ordinary Tuesdays, all at 70 miles per hour.

This story unfolds like our experience of the road: not a straight shot but a series of quick confessions, bitter jokes, whispered memories. Strangers laying themselves bare, then moving on. No two encounters were alike; wherever they went, we followed.

In every conversation, and the silences in between, I listened for the shape of an answer to my question: Are we breaking apart, or is there enough left to bind us?

“When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anyone has all their bases covered. So I focus on the things that bring me joy.”

Dale, at right with his dog, Winnie, in South Carolina

“You’re going to appreciate this trip after she’s gone,” Dale says to Cheney, tipping his head toward me.

It takes a moment to register what he means, that he’s referring to my death so casually, after we’ve known each other 25 minutes.

“I appreciate it already,” Cheney responds with a smile.

Dale, 65, retired four years ago and moved from upstate New York to Lake Placid, Florida. We found him on a weathered bench under a sky collecting dusk at the Santee Welcome Center in South Carolina, midway between the Georgia and North Carolina state lines. Death is on his mind this evening, and not just mine. He’s thinking about the end times.

“I was raised a Fundamental Baptist,” Dale offers. “I call myself a recovering Baptist. But some of those things are hard to overcome.”

Especially now. Floods, plague, conflicts, corruption, the money changers in the temple—“you look around and it looks like all that stuff we studied in Sunday school,” Dale says. “When God has had enough with the sins of humanity…”

He breaks off his thought as his mini Aussiedoodle, Winnie, tugs hard on her leash, tumbling in wild arcs around our legs, ecstatic with the kind of life that doesn’t yet know limits.

Dale stresses that he’s not a prepper. But he has thought about what he might need to survive should the world fall apart, and he’s stockpiled a bit of it. He acknowledges that this is an exercise in futility. “When it comes right down to it, I don’t think anyone has all their bases covered,” he says. “So I focus on the things that bring me joy.”

Living in Florida was a longtime dream for Dale. “Since I was a teenager and made my first trip,” he says. A job, a bad end to a relationship, and a delay in getting his pension kept him anchored in New York longer than he wanted. When finally he was able to move, he purchased a house in foreclosure, sight unseen. “When I walked in, I was tickled,” he says. “The house was about in the condition I’d expected—nothing worse.” At last he felt like he was home. 

“I asked God for one year of peace and quiet to enjoy my retirement in the sunshine. And this month I’m starting year five,” Dale tells me, his voice catching with the knowledge that no one gets forever. “I feel more than blessed.”

But Winnie is disrupting that peace. So Dale is heading to the mapled city of Hornell in upstate New York this summer and saying goodbye to her there. A friend has offered to adopt her. “I think it’s a good idea,” Dale says, to himself as much as to me.

“I love her to pieces,” he adds. “But she’s too much for me. She’s a puppy. She needs more than I can give.”

Doubt flickers across his face, and I suck in my breath, feeling the sharp ache of his hesitation. At a time when he fears that the world might end, Dale is giving up something that brings him comfort as well as complication. Winnie, sweet chaos in motion. 

Dale is already practicing his goodbye. I can see it in his eyes and the way his hand lingers on Winnie’s head. I want to believe I’m not practicing my own goodbyes, but long road trips, with their constant departures, stir up profound feelings about mortality, about letting go.

I have been a news junkie all my life. As a college freshman, I rose early to sneak-read the copy of the New York Times left outside my dorm neighbor’s door, sitting cross-legged on the hallway floor. But as Trump’s second term began, I found that I couldn’t stomach much beyond the headlines.

Still, I knew that avoidance was corrosive. During my five years living and reporting in Moscow, mostly during the Gorbachev era, the Russians I knew had a rule: No discussing politics except very late at night, in cramped, smoky kitchens, after a few rounds of vodka. But that kind of reticence seemed only to deepen communal resignation and embolden political leaders.

So in Trump’s America I wanted to talk, even to people who might disagree with me. At the same time, I was scared—that I’d ask the wrong questions, trigger tripwires I couldn’t see. “It’s not going to be like that out there,” Cheney kept telling me.

I wanted him to be right, to trust him. But he’d kept silences of his own.

I’d learned of his marriage only after it was already coming undone. A friend of his, crashing at my house, let it slip, either unaware or forgetting that Cheney’s mom didn’t know. I called my daughter. “Is Cheney married?” I asked. “Oh, Mom, no,” she said, brushing off the idea. Turns out she didn’t know, either. Later that day, when she pressed him, the truth came out. The woman we’d known as Cheney’s longtime girlfriend was actually his wife.

I have a 48-hour rule: When anger strikes, I try to wait that long before speaking, hoping that time will cool my ego and allow curiosity to surface. This time, 48 hours barely made a dent. Two weeks passed before I could bring it up. By then, Cheney was braced for the discussion.

The whole thing started as more whim than promise, he explained. Even he wasn’t sure that it would hold. Also, I hadn’t yet met her and was far away in Afghanistan, working at the U.S. Embassy during one of the most violent stretches of America’s twenty-year war. “If I’d told you,” he said, “it would only have added to your stress.”

“I’ve been back from Afghanistan for a while,” I said, and he laughed ruefully.

“Eventually, it seemed like too much time had passed,” he replied.

It all stung. Not just the secrecy but the assumption that I couldn’t handle the truth, that my life was too fragile to absorb it. He had decided on his own what was best for me. And not for the last time, probably. If I’m fortunate enough to grow old, there likely will come a day when Cheney and his siblings weigh my choices for me. The only consolation: When they were small, I decided for them. Maybe this is how the cosmic books stay balanced.

By the time I suggested the trip up I-95, Cheney and I had said what needed saying. Still, I longed for the kind of trust built not by declarations but by the quiet choreography of collaborating, sharing meals, spending time side-by-side for days on end. In ordinary acts, I hoped to restitch the thread of connection between mother and son.

The morning we set out, the road’s toll was already visible on Cheney. He’d been living largely out of his car for months, moving constantly in part to avoid the pain of staying still. To meet me, he drove 2,200 miles: from Colorado to Texas and on to an old storage unit in Georgia—he had places for his belongings, but not places he felt he belonged—then finally to Miami. Now small red welts freckled his skin, the work of insects so minuscule they’re called no-see-ums. The bugs had slipped through the netting strung across an open window of Cheney’s 2015 Subaru Outback the night before while he slept.

Cheney was feverish and scratched absently as we drove, his discomfort like a low drag on everything he said. We added many pharmacies to our itinerary, searching unsuccessfully for the perfect anti-itch cream. The bites were insistent, and they seemed to trouble my son beyond the physical irritation.

This is how harm so often arrives, not with sirens but with a whisper. The no-see-ums that bite through the night. The slow burn of heat that turns seasons hostile. The safety net that unravels slowly until there’s nothing left to catch you. A nation, like a body, can be marked before it recognizes the wound.

Mile by mile, I-95 leads us into the hurt.

At a Whataburger counter I meet Bill and Sienna, who have traveled the interstate around a dozen times over the past few months to join protests up and down the East Coast. Bill wears a T-shirt that reads, “Stop Pretending Your Racism Is Patriotism.” He’s spoiling for a fight. “I’m a big guy,” he says. “I love it when people ask me about this shirt when they don’t like it, because it’s a pretty good testament to their character.”

Others are fatalistic, certain that what’s happening is beyond their control. “Doesn’t matter what we think,” shrugs Don, who along with several friends just visited Monticello. “They’re going to do what they do.” That sentiment is echoed by Christy, 64, traveling with her pregnant 41-year-old daughter and her 11-year-old granddaughter. “Where are we headed? To a time when ten people run the country and the rest of us just live with it,” she says.

When I meet Joe, it’s late afternoon in Georgia. The air presses in, damp, alive with gnats. He and his wife are 12 hours into a 20-hour drive, and his face bears every one of those hours and more.

“I’m whooped,” he acknowledges, leaning against the side of his car as if staying upright is too much effort. A cigarette hangs from his fingers. His eyes stay fixed on the women’s restroom, where his wife has gone. This stop is for her. He wants the trip over.

They are headed from Saint Petersburg, Florida, to Newburgh, New York, the town Joe grew up in but doesn’t like. He needs to see his brother, who is in a nursing home. It might be their last visit. “He’s not doing well,” Joe says. He grimaces as if in pain, then wipes the expression away. Grief, it seems, is an extravagance he can’t afford, not with the miles waiting and the day mostly gone.

We change the subject. I ask how he’s feeling about America these days, and he says that the world has gotten meaner since the pandemic. “I don’t like what’s coming for my three grandkids.”

His words mirror my own worries about the flawed inheritance we’re leaving behind, unraveling like an heirloom quilt. “So what are you doing,” I ask, “to help them prepare?”

“Teaching them to shoot.”

He says this without drama or bravado. His voice is grim, resigned.

Joe carries a Glock nearly always. His wife is surprised that he left it at home for this trip. “My permit doesn’t hold in New York,” he explains.

I try to lighten the tone. I ask what he’s optimistic about.

“Reaching my destination,” he says. “Just that.” Then he draws a long breath from his cigarette and exhales, slow and deliberate, like a man letting go of more than smoke.

By the numbers, I-95 is America’s deadliest highway. It claims hundreds of lives every year. The emotional impact of this loss is everywhere. Truckers describe wrecks they’ve passed; motorcyclists recall friends killed on the road.

At a rest stop in Seabrook, New Hampshire, Mary, 59, tells me about a long-ago family trip to Florida. She was a teenager then, one of five siblings. “There was a bad crash,” she says. “My dad, being who he was, pulled over to help.” The man’s leg was nearly severed. Her father held it in place until the ambulance arrived. Her sister cradled the man’s head. “It was in the local papers,” Mary says, then looks off toward the trees.

David, a maintenance worker, describes the evening of February 21, 2024, when a speeding 18-wheeler barreled into the rest stop where he works near Savannah, Georgia, slamming into multiple vehicles and igniting a fire that engulfed several rigs. Two truck drivers were killed. The flames lit the night sky.

There are other legacies of harm etched into the earth beneath the interstate, held by the asphalt. To build I-95, bulldozers carved through cities, leveling blocks, erasing whole neighborhoods. Often Black. Often poor. Families were scattered, churches toppled, maps redrawn in the name of progress. People watched the America they knew vanish beneath pavement.

The interstate reminds me and Cheney that, no matter where you are, this country’s violence is never far away. Not that we need reminding.

April 6, 2013. A suicide bomber struck members of my team in Zabul Province, southern Afghanistan. I was the director of communications and public diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy. I boarded the first helicopter out of Kabul to get to my people.

We’d lost Anne Smedinghoff, who was 25, my daughter’s age at the time. Four other people died, three soldiers and a translator. At least ten more were wounded. One of my staff lay in a coma; another was unable to walk.

Someone handed me Anne’s purse, punctured with shrapnel, her phone still inside. It felt impossibly heavy. I wanted to set it down. I wanted to never let it go.

February 24, 2024. Piedras Negras, Mexico. Cheney watched as a small group of people waded into the Rio Grande, trying to cross to Eagle Pass, Texas. Among them: a young couple, Rossana, 25, and Widman, 26.

Cheney photographed them as they entered the murky river. He watched them retreat from its force, regroup, and try again. On the U.S. shore, a Coast Guard officer shouted warnings through a loudspeaker, but it was too late. Cheney saw the current pull the couple apart. He saw their heads bobbing, their hands reaching. The water took them under.

Rossana’s body washed ashore in Mexico and was quickly returned to her family. Widman drifted toward the U.S. side; his body was not repatriated to Guatemala for four months. Cheney traveled there, to the town of Yepocapa, to stand with Widman’s family as they sealed his casket into a tomb.

These deaths did not happen to us directly. Grief belongs to those who lost their kin, to the friends left with nothing but memories. And yet. America’s violence—its wars, its borders, its history—folds itself into the stories of those who witness it, along with a stark question: What could we, should we, have done differently?

Cheney and I spend a night at a rest stop near Dale City, Virginia. Here, in December 1996 around 3 a.m., a man named Bobby Lee Durham Sr. pulled in driving a white Cadillac. A 51-year-old trucker from Dover, Pennsylvania, he was headed home from South Carolina, where he and his family had been handling things following his father’s death.

Durham helped his disabled sister to the restroom and crossed the breezeway to the men’s room. Two teenagers were waiting inside. They demanded his wallet. He handed it over. “Please don’t hurt me,” he said. They shot him anyway. The triggerman later wrote a crude rap song boasting of the killing: “Three to your head. Bang, bang, bang. He’s dead.”

I photograph the entrance to the restroom, trying to see it as Durham might have. A brick archway. A drinking fountain. A metal door glowing sickly yellow under artificial light. Haunting yet heartbreakingly ordinary. No sign that this would be the end.

The next morning, birdsong rises from the trees, but the rest stop feels uneasy. Most of the picnic tables are chained off, with signs that read, “Out of Service, Do Not Use.” Heavy slabs of concrete that once promised community are now stripped of function. They feel like a sign of our shrinking commons, a warning to the country’s travelers: What we share is now cordoned off. Proceed; do not gather.

Back near the bathroom where Durham died I meet Jobert, 55, a prosecutor visiting from the Philippines. He and his family—his wife, three children, and two aunts—are tracing their own version of the American road trip. They stopped in Texas to visit a friend, then made a pilgrimage to Disney World. Next up, they’re going to the nation’s capital. When he mentions his job, I tell him about the murder.

“Really? A murder?” Jobert grows quiet. “No one deserves that in any jurisdiction in the world,” he said, shifting into legalistic formality. “But I’ve been stopping at many rest areas, and I think they are normally safe. I’ve always looked up to America as a friend, a kind nation, a hopeful nation. I hope this trip will show me that it still is.”

His words linger. He’s looking for reassurance. So am I.

“We’re on the same page. Black, white, we all want the same thing. You want your kids to be taken care of. You don’t want to work until you drop dead.”

Gary, at left, a trucker, in Virginia

And it comes, in fits and starts.

I don’t have a script, but I start asking travelers what it means to be American. At the Ladysmith rest area in Virginia, Gary, a trucker and self‑described progressive from Mississippi, puts it this way: “We’re on the same page. Black, white, we all want the same thing. You want your kids to be taken care of. You don’t want to work until you drop dead.”

At the Biden Welcome Center in Delaware, Bob, 57, a Trump supporter with a dog leash in one hand and his mom’s voice coming through his earbuds, offers a version of the golden rule: “Don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want them to do to you.”

Joann, 55, originally from Liberia, tells me about recovering from an illness the doctors couldn’t explain. She woke up one day paralyzed: hands curled, feet twisted, limbs locked. For six months she lived in stillness. She vowed to become a caregiver if she got better. And she did. She’s a nurse now, taking care of all kinds of patients. “What I love about this country,” she tells me, “is its diversity. That’s what makes it powerful.”

Mark, with a graying ponytail, is adamant and assured. “We’re all red, white, and blue in the end. We want a democracy, not a king,” he says. The owner of a chain of spas and salons, he’s parked at a rest stop in Hardeeville, South Carolina. He and his girlfriend, along with their Australian kelpie, Termita, are one month into a slow drift north from Mexico, sometimes taking back roads or exploring bike trails in forgotten places. “I’m seeing fewer political signs than I expected,” Mark says. “Less of that roadside yelling.”

He’s been talking to strangers, too—asking questions, swapping stories. Proximity, he’s found, is a low-tech fix for a high-volume problem. “It’s the fringe radio shows, the influencers selling rage—they make it sound like we’re tearing each other apart,” he says. “But out here, when you actually talk to people? That’s not what I’m seeing.”

Ladd, 26, is a natural storyteller. He’s been a rest-stop supervisor for less than a year, but already he’s seen enough to fill a book. “Some insane things,” he says, grinning, shaking his head at the memories. A woman trying to bathe her Chihuahua in the bathroom sink. A mime who stopped in (“He didn’t have much to say,” Ladd deadpans). A wild boar that sent tattooed truckers into a scared huddle as it tore around the parking lot.

In Ladd’s telling, rest stops like his are more than breaks in a journey. They’re a kind of stage where the absurd and the ordinary collide. He calls them “the great equalizers.” A shiny new Mercedes slides into a parking space alongside a ’91 Corolla. Young and old, rich and broke, weary and restless all shuffle toward the same humming drink machines, the same toilets. For a moment, divisions fall away, and hierarchies flatten out.

Ladd tells me he sees people you might not expect to interact talking and laughing together all the time. “I’ve seen truckers flying the Confederate flag on their vehicles. They hover around the vending machines, and they’ll strike up conversations with Black truckers, or we have Mexican truckers as well that come in,” Ladd says.

Harmony isn’t always a given, he acknowledges. His biggest headache? Two of his employees fall into such bitter theological debates—both are Christians, but from different denominations—that he has to keep them on separate shifts.

Cheney cues up a road-trip playlist he found on Spotify. Johnny Cash belts, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” It feels like we have, too. We keep stopping, keep talking—we meet some 250 people in all. The encounters collect in my mind like a stack of Polaroids, each a flash from the road, beckoning me to return to it later.

“My whole life has been driving,” Mary Ann tells me. She used to operate “forklifts that could lift a truck to the top of a two-story building.” Fifteen years ago, she started driving a rig professionally. Now she calls trucking her “retirement.”

After a year driving solo, she decided she needed a partner, for company and for safety—someone to stand beside her when she pulled into lonely stops in the dark. She started asking around and found Archie, a veteran trucker who had 24 years on the road. “I met her in the parking lot,” Archie says, leaning against the side of their truck. “I said we could give it a try.”

They’ve been partners for 14 years now, sharing an 18-wheeler that’s become their home, trading the driver’s seat back and forth across thousands of long nights. Mary Ann invites me up into the cab, where the seat smells faintly of diesel and sun-warmed vinyl. On her phone, she shows me photos of her five grandchildren and one great-grandchild, all of whom live in her hometown of Sulphur, Louisiana. She only sees them once or twice a year. “But they know I’m out here working,” she says, her voice firm with pride. “I want them to know hard work matters.”

Archie’s load is heavier. The life he chose strained his relationships with his eight children. He says that he doesn’t want them coming to his funeral. “They weren’t there for me when I was alive. Why should they be in death?” His words carry the ghosts of things already buried—the hope of reconciliation, the promise of remembrance.

Mary Ann tells me that she has a problem with drivers who don’t speak English well, and it jars me. Then she talks about sharing dinners with those same drivers over camp stoves, the air alive with spices she can’t name, hands of different colors passing bowls back and forth. Suspicion at the threshold, welcome once the table is set: This is Mary Ann’s America.

For others we meet, America is faith and uncertainty interlaced, inextricable.

Taha, 21, has just finished praying with his brother when we meet him at a Pennsylvania rest stop. He says that personal freedom is what defines being American. “The thing I’m worried about the most,” he adds, “is misinformation.”

Ayesha, 43, a calligrapher and mixed-media artist, is traveling with her husband and three children from Tampa to Washington, D.C., for a flight to Lahore, Pakistan, to visit her parents. She wonders if she should leave the U.S. for good. Her husband believes the country still offers them the best chance for stability. “He is seventy-thirty sure we should stay,” Ayesha says. “I’m fifty-fifty.”

Yuri, 52, a trucker from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, left the former Soviet Union a decade ago to get his daughter a better education. He isn’t certain that the school system lived up to his hopes, but he does feel sure that U.S. democracy will survive. “As long as you have elections every four years, don’t worry,” he says.

At a rest stop in Georgia I meet Jesús, 31. He came from Mexico, his wife from Colombia, and he now works in the restaurant industry. He wants to apply for U.S. citizenship, but he’s also considering returning to Mexico with his wife and eight-month-old daughter.

Jesús chooses his words with care. “We will be with family. It’s OK,” he says. His smile widens when he speaks of his daughter. “She’s an American citizen. She has good opportunities.”

Hope, fragile yet determined, rides in the back seat of his car.

Grief and humor, weariness and wonder—the balance between them propels us forward. In South Carolina, Cheney and I interrupt the motion: We rent kayaks, paddle out into a bay, and are rewarded with dolphins. So many of them, and so close. They swim beneath us like shadows, quick and playful.

We pull up alongside a fisherman tossing fish guts over the side of his boat. The dolphins gather like guests at a dinner party. We drift into their celebration and strike up a conversation with the man. His biggest fear? The rising tide. Not the fact of it, but how few people seem to notice.

“I met her in the parking lot. I said we could give it a try.”

Archie, at right with Mary Ann, his driving partner, in New Jersey

I meet Betsy in Delaware on a sweltering afternoon, the kind where the heat makes the asphalt shimmer. She stands by her Tesla as it charges. With her are two young asylum-seeking brothers from Venezuela. They linger in the shade of a thin tree nearby.

“It’s scary when you can’t let an 18-year-old go play soccer because ICE is all over the neighborhood,” Betsy says, nodding toward the young men. Her voice is as sharp as a snapped twig. “The terror that puts people under—it’s beyond anything I’ve experienced.”

Betsy is an ordained priest and retired psychiatric nurse who once helped run a shelter. She tells me that her late husband, Ralph, would hate today’s America. They took a long road trip through the country in 2010, a few years after Ralph was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Betsy planned the trip with care. She tracked down Ralph’s college roommate, his med-school buddy, distant cousins, friends she’d only heard about, former neighbors who’d moved away. Ten weeks. Ten thousand miles. Each stop a chance to connect. “We stayed with someone we knew every single night,” she says. 

Remembering wasn’t the point really. Presence was. Giving Ralph one last taste of everything that made him who he was before the disease took hold. He loved cold beer and ice cream, and many of their hosts greeted them with one or the other. Sometimes both.

They were still a year or two away from Ralph getting lost one door down from their home of thirty years, but forgetting was already a creeping shadow. When they were listening to an audiobook Ralph loved, he didn’t want the driving to end. He knew that by the next morning the plot would have slipped his mind. Once Betsy drove four hours past their destination just so the story could reach its conclusion.

“He didn’t always know what state we were in,” she tells me. “But he loved every minute.”

My own husband died of early-onset Alzheimer’s. Even as the disease tightened its grip, pieces of him—essential ones—remained. I prefer to remember those parts: his stubborn sense of justice, his friendliness. Also, his joy riding horses near the pyramids, and his laugh in the snow.

Betsy and I exchange contact information. She’s 81 now, and she carries the memory of her journey across the country with Ralph like a lantern. It reminds her that there are many ways to show up, to hold on, to keep going.

Memory has always pulled at me: what we carry forward, what fades, what we revise without meaning to. The things we remember become in some way immortal—but only as long as we keep returning to them. As a child, I tried to memorize moments. Not just milestones but flickers: coyotes calling in the desert, the cool edge of a desk, a friend’s whispered secret. Remember this, I told myself.

As a nation we’re reshaping, and in doing so allowing ourselves to forget—our common stories, our hard-won lessons, our fragile bonds of trust. On I-95, the smallest exchanges start to feel like a way back, landmarks amid the rage and outrage that signal common ground. I’m a child again, willing my mind to map a path I can follow whenever I get lost.

Remember this.

John and Maryanne in Kennebunk, Maine, showing off their Kawasaki bike with a Hannigan sidecar. They traveled I-95 together for their honeymoon 34 years ago. For them the highway is a vow kept.

Mike Valentino, 70, wiry, racing from Key West to Ticonderoga, New York. “To see my lover,” he booms, then adds more softly, “who is ill.”

Another Mike, whose wife died of cancer this year. When she first got sick and told him she was ready to leave Michigan to chase warmth, he said, “Whatever you want.” So they moved to Miami. Now it feels cold there without her.

A woman on her way south, giving her tomato plants fresh air in Virginia. “They cost $9 for three in New York and $20 for two in Florida,” she explains. “So I’m carrying them as passengers.”

A man from Appalachia pointing out a mound of fire ants to his wide-eyed daughter.

A Ukrainian-American woman cradling her pet ferret, lamenting the children she lost custody of.

A young woman in a crop top describing a friendship gone sour.

Remember this.

Here is what I will remember of Michael: Dawn, a Smokey Bear statue, the rest stop glowing under first light. I wander toward a man sitting alone on a bench. He gestures for me to join him.

“Where are you headed?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, and I laugh.

“I’m trying to cross off all of the lower 48,” he adds after a moment.

Michael is a police officer with 28 years on the force, serving in the town where he was born, 30 minutes south of Atlanta. The job comes with trauma. “I’ve tried therapy, medication. None of it works. Being on the bike is literally the only time I feel free. Out here alone, riding in the wind, it’s just you and your thoughts. And it’s amazing.”

Still, he knows he’s gambling with his life. “Every time you get on a bike, someone will try to kill you,” he says, grinning in a way that doesn’t dismiss risk but makes room for it. “Not on purpose. They simply don’t see you.”

Any miscalculation on his part can also be dangerous. Michael knows this in his bones. In January, he laid down his bike when someone he was following too closely slammed on their brakes. He suffered a few broken ribs. “Hurt worse than I ever thought that would hurt,” he says.

But he treated the accident as part of the bargain. “If I get run over, I get run over,” he says. “It’s probably better than some of the other ways I could’ve left this earth.”

We talk about his hometown, where violence seems to be getting worse. “Used to be one murder a year was a big deal. Now there are several.” But he doesn’t buy the idea that the country is in inexorable decline, coming apart at the seams. “I think the bulk of people in America can sit down and share a meal or talk about anything,” he said. “There’s more we have in common than we do different.”

Here is what I will remember of Michael: his faith in community, and his belief that freedom, even with risk, is worth the ride.

“When we were planning this trip, I didn’t expect to feel this way,” Cheney tells me one afternoon. He’s logged more than 25,000 miles on the road since the end of his marriage. Now I-95 seems to be asking him, almost kindly: How much farther can you really go before you need to stop?

Since moving into his car, I’ve learned that it runs on more than gas. It runs on order, a collection of rules my son has honed in the time he’s been on the move. He pulled out the back seats to install a sleeping platform and storage, and everything has its place: stove, camera gear, water, paper towels. If I stash a sweater where his tennis shoes go, I’ll hear the quick snap of his correction.

He isn’t being fussy. He’s protecting ballast, the modest mooring he’s been able to create after losing so much.

In time he trusts me to know where to store the plates and drape damp towels. And somewhere between interstate exits, between chasing the first blush of morning and the soft spill of dusk with his camera, Cheney has also realized that he wants something more grounded than an organized car. The idea of settling down again is no longer something to resist.

I study him as he drives. I admire that he’s meeting his sorrows, moving through them, and staying open to what comes. Our pursuits aren’t so different. His search is for home, mine for country. Both of us are circling versions of the same question, trying to find our place in a world restless with change.

“We’ve made this like a home. You know, we live in our car, but life is not bad.”

Maryanne, at left with Ángel, her partner

One night we find ourselves in a neighborhood improvised from asphalt and exhaustion. About 30 people live in their cars next to a rest area. Most are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Together they’ve turned an in-between place into something enduring.

Among them: Brian, once an HVAC installer, sidelined by a fall from a roof. Joe, who works as a pizza maker at a local restaurant. Mary Beth, unhoused now for more than two years, who unwinds at night with an episode of The Andy Griffith Show on her phone. “When you lose your home, you lose a lot of things,” she says. “But one of the first things you lose is neighbors.” Here she’s found them again, the fabric our country depends on.

The residents tape holiday decorations to their dashboards, give one another birthday cards. They gather to watch the sunset through the large windows of the rest-area café, sometimes lingering to gossip. They call out good night before climbing into their cars to sleep.

Maryanne and her husband, Ángel, give us the lay of the land. “Liz lives in that green car. Brian is in that brown car. Tina and her sons live in this one,” Maryanne says. “They’re like family for us now. We’ve made this like a home. You know, we live in our car, but life is not bad.”

Together forty years, with four kids to show for it, Maryanne and Ángel were evicted last year. They tell us their love story: They worked at the same grocery store, he in produce, she in the meat and fish department. “He wrote me love letters in Spanish,” Maryanne says. She’d taken only a little bit of Spanish in school. “I had to spend hours trying to figure out what he wrote.”

Ángel, now in his seventies, is recovering from a leg operation and visits the hospital frequently to have his bandages changed. “I’m in pain,” he admits, wincing.

They’ve lost so much, but not each other.

This place. It’s remarkable. And infuriating. People who’ve built lives, worked, raised children, paid taxes, now exposed to every hard edge. That night Cheney and I enter briefly into their community, sleeping in the parking lot. Rain taps on the car roof while I lie awake, listening, thinking about loss. How to guard against it, and how to lean on others when it happens.

As dawn breaks, the women at the rest area gather. Men stretch. Coffee steams in Styrofoam cups. As Cheney and I pull away, I watch the makeshift neighborhood shrink in the rearview mirror, half in shadow, half in light.

When we reach Maine, I know that I’ve found what I was looking for with Cheney: a bond reforged. In a thousand fleeting gestures, we’ve recovered our rhythm and ease. My relationship with my country remains complicated, but the America I’ve met on the road is also far more recognizable, resilient, and generous than the noise of now would have us think. Online, we’re a nation of factions. In parking lots and at picnic tables, we’re a nation of encounters. Strangers have offered small gifts freely and with care: a joke that cracks the heat, a baseball cap, a paper cup of fresh orange juice, a story about a stray cat hitching a ride across state lines atop an engine before emerging at a rest stop with a startled meow. 

Before ending our trip, Cheney and I step into what feels like a loop of time, detouring to a rambling three-story house where I lived with his father the summer before my senior year in college. We wander around the house, now gutted for renovation, and climb to the second-floor porch overlooking Kenduskeag Stream. I remember sitting there on warm evenings with the man I would marry, imagining the future.

Later we hike the Beehive Loop trail in Acadia National Park, clinging to iron rungs drilled into a cliff face. Sometimes Cheney extends a hand back to help me up. The scramble demands trust—in the metal, the rock, each other—and a willingness to keep moving, even when the next hold is out of sight.

The lesson of the cliff follows me back to the highway. Do I belong in America? The truest answer is: for now. Because belonging is a practice, a choice remade again and again, even as trust frays and the horizon blurs. It means offering what we can, and receiving what comes. Public life doesn’t pause; it unfolds continuously, sometimes violently, and it spills into private life, upsetting our balance. But we can turn our grief into guardrails and keep groping our way forward, one handhold at a time.

Maybe this is what hope looks like today: stopping, listening, recognizing one another. Treating presence itself as a radical act. Deciding, day after day, to remain, to take part.

At the northern terminus of I-95, Cheney and I turn around in his car, heading back toward my home in Brooklyn. Storm clouds gather overhead, the edges rimmed in gold. The highway stretches on with no guarantees, still becoming.

More from The Atavist Magazine

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The Longest Journey

All That Glitters

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All That Glitters
His alleged victims say he bribed New York Police Department officials, stole millions in diamonds, and persuaded Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Kim Kardashian to shill for a scam cryptocurrency. So why is Jona Rechnitz still free?

By Miranda Green

It was like something out of a fairy tale—or the Los Angeles society pages. As a crowd of celebrities and reality-show cast members mingled near displays of diamond jewelry at the five-star Hotel Bel-Air, Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Ben Talei got down on one knee to propose to his girlfriend. “Congratulations!” a bewildered Kim Kardashian said to the couple. Then she looked at the stone. “Come on, now’s your time,” she joked about the ring. “You want it thicker.”

The November 2019 scene, caught on phone cam and later shared with the New York Post, was exactly the kind of spectacle the event’s organizer, Jona Rechnitz, must have hoped for. Rechnitz, the proprietor of a jewelry firm called Jadelle, had put together that evening’s Holiday Diamond Showcase to celebrate his business. Smiling wide, Rechnitz mingled easily with the attendees. Faye Resnick of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was there, as was Kris Jenner—the event’s official host. Yet Rechnitz didn’t stray far from Kardashian, who graciously accepted requests for selfies throughout the night.

Six-foot-four and 300 pounds, Rechnitz cut an imposing figure, but his dimpled cheeks and engaging eyes made him look younger than his 37 years. It was a face people tended to trust. His company’s profile was growing. That September, Kardashian had worn some of Jadelle’s bling to the Emmys. Jadelle recently announced a partnership with storied handbag brand Judith Leiber, and its jewelry had landed on the cover of Vogue Japan—huge accomplishments for a company that had existed for only two years.

The night was an opportunity to make big-ticket sales and to claim Jadelle’s spot as the go-to jewelry company for the city’s privileged class. Attendees tried on high-carat, multicolored diamond rings, necklaces, and earrings between hors d’oeuvres; a portion of the proceeds was promised to Toys for Tots. The party also marked a successful homecoming for Rechnitz, who had returned from New York to his native Los Angeles to launch Jadelle. His father was there, as were diamond dealers Rechnitz had worked with on both coasts. By all appearances, he was living his best life: he owned a Bugatti, rented an office at a premier Beverly Hills address, and paid $17,000 a month for the estate he lived in with his wife and six children.

Rechnitz’s return to the West Coast, however, was less a fresh start than an escape. In 2016, he had pled guilty in New York City to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud, meaning that he had attempted to bribe public officials. When he left New York, he told a judge that he hoped to put his past behind him, to become a better man. Jadelle was his vehicle for doing so, and Los Angeles’s celebrity culture was the fuel, Rechnitz told the judge, that he needed to power his rebirth.

But shortly after the Holiday Diamond Showcase, much about Jadelle’s success would come into question; even the marriage proposal was later revealed to be a stunt. Within months, Rechnitz faced multiple lawsuits for fraud and theft, allegations that he’d taken out multimillion-dollar loans using stolen property as collateral, and accusations that he’d leveraged his celebrity connections to create a false impression of credibility.

Yet, despite a decade of legal troubles, Rechnitz to date has escaped serious consequences. He has yet to spend a single day in prison, even for the New York conviction. In reporting this story, I reviewed thousands of pages of legal documents and spoke to 15 associates, former friends, and lawyers involved in more than a dozen lawsuits against Rechnitz. Many of them think Rechnitz avoided justice because he cooperated with federal authorities in New York, and may still be acting as a government informant—something Rechnitz himself is said to have claimed. Whatever the truth, nothing seems to stick to him.

Chapter 1

Rechnitz was born into an affluent Orthodox Jewish family with roots in California. He attended Yavneh Hebrew Academy, a prestigious private school, and graduated from Yeshiva University Los Angeles High School, in the same class as conservative pundit Ben Shapiro. Rechnitz’s father, Robert, worked as a real estate developer, served as the national finance cochair for Republican senator Lindsey Graham’s 2016 presidential campaign, and was active in American Friends of Likud, a not-for-profit outfit that promotes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political party through educational programs. After attending New York’s Yeshiva University, Rechnitz married his girlfriend, Rachel, and followed his dad into real estate. By 2007, he had a job at the U.S. branch of international development firm Africa Israel Investments, owned by Israeli billionaire diamond magnate Lev Leviev. He eventually rose to become the company’s director of acquisitions.

While at Africa Israel Investments, Rechnitz noticed that a client of his had a car with plates marked “Sheriff,” which allowed him to park wherever he wanted—street cleaning, tow-away zones, and handicap signs be damned. The client offered to introduce him to the man who’d provided them, Jeremy Reichberg, an official liaison between the New York Police Department and Borough Park’s Orthodox Jewish community. As luck would have it, Reichberg would soon be hosting a benefit for the NYPD’s football team. Rechnitz spent $5,000 on a ticket to get into a room with the department’s top brass. According to later testimony by Rechnitz, he made an impression on Reichberg. His donation even netted him a plaque from the team.

“It made him look good, made me look good, and we started to become friends,” Rechnitz said in court, according to The New York Times. “I didn’t know many people that had connections with police, growing up in Los Angeles, and I thought this would be an awesome tool for me personally and for my business.” His time with Reichberg also scored him points professionally. When Rechnitz’s boss came into town on a business trip, Reichberg had the police escort Leviev from his private plane.

In 2011, on the verge of turning 30, Rechnitz decided to establish his own real estate firm. He named it JSR Capital, using his initials. Rechnitz rented an office in the heart of the midtown diamond district. It was at JSR that Rechnitz developed a taste for the high life. He’d later testify that he charged more than $1 million annually to his credit cards; one lawyer claimed Rechnitz’s receipts showed that he spent more on tickets to New York Knicks games than he did on his taxes.

Though his real estate company was considered a midlevel firm, Rechnitz spent liberally to forge connections at the police department. The first of many trips he helped finance occurred in February 2013, when he and Reichberg coughed up nearly $60,000 to charter a private jet to fly themselves and two police officials to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. According to prosecutors, they also bankrolled the group’s stay at the MGM Grand, as well as a female escort who joined them on the plane wearing a sexy stewardess outfit provided by Reichberg. Once home, according to court documents, Rechnitz and Reichberg continued to send gifts to at least one of the officers. In August, they paid part of the hotel bill for that officer’s vacation with his family in Rome. A few months later, the pair bought him a $3,000 watch and paid $6,000 to install railings at his Staten Island home. They even showed up to his house at Christmas—two Hanukkah-celebrating Jews in elf costumes, delivering jewelry and a Nintendo.

It was around this time that Philip Banks III, the top Black official on the force, was promoted to the NYPD’s highest uniformed position, and requested that his protégé, Michael Harrington, move from Brooklyn South to work as his executive officer. It just so happened that Harrington was one of the officers who did favors for Reichberg, and he was happy to satisfy yet another request: introducing Rechnitz and Reichberg to Chief Banks. The three men began dining out twice a month. Rechnitz paid for meals at glitzy Kosher restaurants, and they bought Banks a ring that Rechnitz testified had belonged to Muhammad Ali.

In December 2013, Rechnitz and Reichberg decided to charter another private jet, this time to the Dominican Republic. The guest list included Banks and his longtime friend Norman Seabrook, who was president of the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association (COBA), a union for New York City’s jail guards. During one especially debauched evening, Rechnitz testified, Seabrook admitted to wishing he’d been more financially successful—he was in crippling mortgage debt. What’s more, he’d recently lost his beloved dog. Distraught and inebriated, he opened up his shirt to show Rechnitz the tattoo of the animal on his chest. “You should be making money,” Rechnitz told him, according to testimony. Seabrook agreed. “It’s time Norman Seabrook got paid,” he responded.

Rechnitz soon connected Seabrook with an old family friend, Murray Huberfeld, founder of a hedge fund called Platinum Partners. Rechnitz’s grandfather and Huberfeld’s father grew up in Poland, and both had survived the Holocaust. Rechnitz had sold Huberfeld apartments on the Upper West Side, and he came to Huberfeld with a new business opportunity: Would Platinum Partners be interested in investments from Seabrook’s union? The only catch, Rechnitz told him, was that Seabrook would have to get a kickback.

Eventually, Seabrook directed $20 million of COBA’s money to the fund, according to court documents. To uphold his side of the deal, Rechnitz needed a way to pay Seabrook. Rechnitz decided he would pull $60,000 from his own savings, then make himself whole by sending fake invoices to Huberfeld for eight pairs of courtside Knicks tickets. He allegedly routed the ticket transaction through a business acquaintance of his, who was later charged for a Ponzi-style ticket-reselling scheme. Now he just needed to get Seabrook the cash. One day in December 2014, Rechnitz visited the Ferragamo store on Fifth Avenue. Emerging with a new men’s handbag, he stuffed $60,000 cash inside and walked a few blocks to an idling SUV where Seabrook was waiting. Little did the men know that law enforcement was watching everything—and the exchange of money would eventually take everyone down.

Everyone, that is, except Jona Rechnitz.

“Rechnitz has been, without exaggeration, one of the single most important and prolific white collar cooperating witnesses in the recent history of the Southern District of New York.”

Over the next two years, investigators questioned more than twenty police officials and charged seven people with crimes ranging from misapplying police resources to conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud. Eight people associated with Platinum Partners were indicted in a $1 billion investment-fraud enterprise for operating “like a Ponzi scheme,” according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York. Rechnitz was facing significant prison time. But according to court records, Rechnitz cut a deal with prosecutors to become a cooperating government witness. Rechnitz subsequently met with the U.S. Attorney’s Office some 80 times. He spilled dirt on his business transactions with Huberfeld and Reichberg, and cooperated with a probe of New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s fundraising practices after testifying that he’d helped raise $100,000 for de Blasio’s 2013 campaign, expecting political favors in return. (Asked about Rechnitz by CBS News, de Blasio called him “a liar and a felon.” De Blasio was not charged.)

The federal case was considered the biggest modern corruption scandal in New York City at the time. In signing the cooperating witness agreement, Rechnitz agreed to plead guilty to the fraud conspiracy charge and to testify against his co-conspirators. Fighting for his freedom, Rechnitz appeared to hold nothing back on the witness stand. Though Rechnitz was facing 20 years in prison, prosecutors nevertheless praised his candor. “Rechnitz has been, without exaggeration, one of the single most important and prolific white collar cooperating witnesses in the recent history of the Southern District of New York,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Martin Bell in a 51-page memo.

As Rechnitz awaited his sentencing, two new realities became apparent. First, he was no longer seen as a macher in his community of God-fearing, family-minded men, but as another of the city’s countless grifters. Second, his name was synonymous with fraud and snitching; who would invest with him now?

And Rechnitz desperately needed income. While he claimed that his real estate firm owned as much as $100 million in property, he faced foreclosure on one of his prime holdings: 32,000 square feet of retail and office space that took up an entire block in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn. Rechnitz also had mounting legal fees and was facing millions in potential restitution payments to COBA. So Rechnitz did what innumerable dreamers have done: He went west to reinvent himself.

Chapter 2

When Rechnitz returned home to Los Angeles in 2017, he needed a place to live. Finding one was no easy task. The house had to be large enough to fit his family of eight, within walking distance of a reputable synagogue, and owned by someone who wouldn’t slam the door when they looked up his credit or googled his name. To help, Rechnitz turned to the Jewish community. A local real estate broker suggested a home owned by an ER doctor and property investor named Joe Englanoff. At first Englanoff demurred; he’d heard about Rechnitz’s past. But then Englanoff’s father called. “Look, I’ve known Jona’s dad for years,” the elder Englanoff told his son. “We don’t do business, but he made a personal call to me, and if you could find it in your heart to give him a second chance, because he’s trying to move out here to California from New York. He’s really in a bad way. He’s reformed.”

Englanoff offered to rent Rechnitz a house down the street from his own in the coveted Beverlywood neighborhood. The modern Italian-style estate had a pool, waterfall jacuzzi, basketball court, in-ground trampoline, and balcony with city views. The rent was $17,000 a month.

The two men settled into a friendly relationship. Their families saw each other at temple functions and waved hello on the street. Englanoff’s family was charmed by Rechnitz’s generosity and personal touch. After Englanoff’s son mentioned that he liked basketball, Rechnitz showed up at his house with former Celtics forward Paul Pierce.

With his family established in one of L.A.’s trendiest neighborhoods, Rechnitz turned his attention to building his new company, Jadelle Jewelry and Diamonds. The company was registered in late 2017 in Delaware under Rechnitz’s wife’s name. The logo, a butterfly, carried its own significance—the endeavor would be a metamorphosis and a new beginning.

It would take more than a logo to grow the company; Rechnitz needed both gems and clients. Soon, Jadelle was trumpeting its first big get: Former Lakers center Shaquille O’Neal, with dozens of carats of glittering diamonds hanging from his neck, appeared on the company’s Instagram account in June 2018. “Another satisfied client @shaq wearing the Jaddelle [sic] HAMSA proudly,” read the post.

Two weeks later, Jadelle’s account shared a post from celebrity realtor Josh Altman, of Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing. “@jadellejewelry of Beverly Hills got me looking like Mr. T today,” read the caption. “Not sure this is good for my neck.”

One connection Rechnitz made in those early days was Peter Voutsas, who remembered Rechnitz striding into his Rodeo Drive storefront with otherworldly levels of confidence. “He told me, ‘I’ve heard you’re my biggest competition. We should work together on sales, because we have mutual clients,’” said Voutsas, who had never heard of Rechnitz.

At first, Voutsas was skeptical of Rechnitz’s pitch, so he consulted his peers. The network of diamond dealers and wholesalers in L.A. was small and tight-knit. Many of them, like Rechnitz, were Orthodox, and had followed previous generations into the industry. Updates and gossip flowed easily. When Voutsas called several other jewelers whose names Rechnitz had dropped, they vouched for him and told Voutsas that they were impressed by his celebrity clientele. No one had a bad word to say. That was enough for Voutsas, and the two began what Voutsas called a “successful and trusting relationship.”

Jewelry is sold largely on consignment, known as memorandum or memo, and while there is usually a written agreement, paper is only as good as the person behind it. “This is one of the few businesses left on this earth that’s done on handshake, where it’s based on trust,” said Jerry Kroll, a lawyer who handles insurance cases in the industry. It worked like this: Rechnitz would approach Voutsas with clients and ask to take some of Voutsas’s jewelry on memo. Voutsas would tell him how much a piece cost; if Rechnitz sold it for more than that, he kept the difference. If Rechnitz didn’t complete the sale, he returned the item. In short order, the two men did more than thirty successful transactions together, which Voutsas said totaled $39.4 million, and were hobnobbing basketball stars like O’Neal, Scottie Pippen, and Sam Cassell. “At the beginning it was legitimate,” Voutsas told me.

Rechnitz even told Voutsas about a tactic he used to drum up high-net-worth clients: He bought the best seats at basketball games. “If you have front-row seats on the floor or one or two rows back, all you have to do is look to the left or the right and you see famous people,” Voutsas said. There, Rechnitz could mention his businesses and work his charm.

It was at a game, Rechnitz told acquaintances, that he met the man who would become one of his most loyal clients and business partners, boxing legend Floyd Mayweather Jr. Early in Jadelle’s posts, Mayweather appeared in two videos on the company’s Instagram account, wearing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gem-encrusted watches and thick gold chain necklaces. “It’s one thing to buy jewelry from @jadellebh but it’s another thing to wear it fashionably,” read one caption that tagged Mayweather. Another post promoted Jadelle’s appearance at a jewelry expo in Miami Beach: “@JadelleBH in MIAMI—By day you can find us at The Original Miami Antique Show… and after dark, we’ll be catering diamonds to our local clients—with #tbe @floydmayweather. Thanks Champ🙏🏼.”

One day in June 2019, Rechnitz told Voutsas that he had a meeting scheduled with the Kardashian sisters at one of their homes. He asked if he could borrow a security guard for the day to protect the jewelry, Voutsas told me. Over the following weeks, Jadelle posted a slew of photos: Kim in a diamond cross necklace, Kylie in a double strand necklace of teardrop diamonds, Khloé with trillion-cut diamond earrings, and Kourtney in heart-shaped diamond studs. It’s unclear whether the Kardashians paid for the jewelry or Rechnitz gifted them the pieces in exchange for posts, but Voutsas said he was paid for the items he’d given to Rechnitz. The social-media campaign brought Jadelle significant celebrity clout—and helped grow its Instagram followers to more than 175,000.

The coup de grâce was an appearance Kim made on the red carpet at the Emmys that year, wearing three layers of diamond chains and a thick cross. Two months later, she was the star of Rechnitz’s Holiday Diamond Showcase. There was just one thing holding Rechnitz back from a future of glitz and glamour: He had to fly back to New York for sentencing.

“I am a changed man,” Rechnitz wrote to U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein ahead of his December 2019 sentencing hearing. Rechnitz was facing up to 20 years in prison and millions in restitution.

Rechnitz blamed his actions on his naivete and a work culture that rewarded social climbers. “While living in New York City, I wrongly felt pressure to become a big shot,” he told the judge. “I was in my late twenties, and big people in the real estate industry were dealing with me. My ego was big, and I so badly wanted to impress these people in order to advance my career and profile.”

Family and friends focused on the new, redeemed Rechnitz. His wife, Rachel, promised the judge that her husband had “become a much better, humble, more open and truthful person.” His neighbor and landlord, Joe Englanoff, wrote a letter saying that Rechnitz appeared to be making amends and wanted to leave his past behind. His father, Robert, even tried to accept some of the blame, saying, “It was unfair of me to allow Jona to take so many responsibilities upon himself without my guidance and involvement.”

Judge Hellerstein, however, had followed Rechnitz’s testimony in the other trials and drew his own conclusion. “He cheapens people. He works on their insecurities and their quest for material possessions and just does the opposite. He diminishes people,” Hellerstein wrote in his decision.

Rechnitz’s co-conspirators had already been sentenced. Huberfeld and Reichberg received two and a half and four years in prison, respectively; Seabrook, who took the bribes, was sentenced to nearly five years. Harrington, who had introduced Rechnitz to Chief Banks, was sentenced to two years of probation and 180 hours of community service. (Banks, who appeared to have learned that the feds were closing in and abruptly quit the NYPD a day after investigators applied for a wiretap in the case, was never charged.) In light of those sentences—and how vital Rechnitz had been to the case, according to the assistant U.S. attorney—Hellerstein sentenced Rechnitz to five months in prison and five months’ house arrest, and ordered him to repay as much as $10 million to the union. Rechnitz immediately vowed to appeal and was released on bail. He flew back to Los Angeles and his growing jewelry business.

What’s more, according to court records, Voutsas later got wind that Rechnitz hadn’t sold the jewelry at all, but instead pawned it for a $1 million cash loan.

Peter Voutsas had consigned roughly $7 million worth of jewelry with Rechnitz before the 2019 holidays, including two pieces Voutsas took on memo from another jeweler, David Rovinsky: a 43-carat yellow diamond ring with a $1.9 million price tag, and a 134-carat yellow radiant diamond necklace priced at $1.5 million, according to court filings. Voutsas was told that 16 pieces sold, but by late January 2020 he had yet to be paid for them. What’s more, according to court records, Voutsas later got wind that Rechnitz hadn’t sold the jewelry at all, but instead pawned it for a $1 million cash loan with an interest rate of 6.5 percent per month. On January 21, Voutsas received a series of panicked texts from Rechnitz.

“I’m dealing with a huge crisis now and my dad is at bank trying to sort out issue for me in regards to all this,” Rechnitz texted Voutsas, according to screenshots included in a later lawsuit. “I understand if you never want to deal with me again or see my fave [sic] ever again i’m so sorry.”

As the men texted back and forth, Voutsas learned that other jewelers were hounding Rechnitz for money, too. One of them was Oved Anter, who had consigned seven pieces of jewelry worth $2.8 million to Jadelle, according to a lawsuit Anter later filed. When Anter asked for his money, Rechnitz offered various excuses, and at one point begged for leniency claiming that his mother had suddenly become ill. “Dont say a word paramedics were here. So i’m not in the mood. My siblings dont know. She had a blood clot. Please,” he texted Anter. But by then, Anter had begun to doubt everything Rechnitz told him. “You already use that excuse a few days ago with somebody else,” he responded.

Four days later, Rechnitz texted Voutsas, asking him to keep quiet about any issues between them—particularly since another jeweler had flown in to check on his own diamonds: “I also have Moty Klein in town at the same time while this is all going on which is extra stress as he can’t hear any of this.” Klein, whose name is spelled Moti, was one of the owners of Julius Klein Diamonds, which shared the same office building as JSR Capital in New York. Even after Rechnitz’s criminal conviction, Klein’s son had consigned several jewelry pieces with Rechnitz at the holiday showcase. Now Klein wanted his money, as did David Rovinsky, the jeweler whose pieces Voutsas had loaned to Rechnitz.

On March 18, 2020, Rovinsky sued Voutsas for loaning his jewelry to a known felon. The two settled and in April 2020 filed a joint suit against Rechnitz, claiming that he had stolen jewelry worth $7 million. Anter filed his own suit in June. Each lawsuit echoed the other: stories of early sales followed by bounced checks and pawned jewelry. In his suit, Anter referred to the ordeal as one of “Jona Rechnitz’s blazing trail of Ponzi scheme frauds.”

In fact, according to a separate lawsuit brought by real estate investor Victor Franco Noval, Rechnitz had been bankrolling his company for at least a year on borrowed money. The suit alleged that, in January 2019, Rechnitz had taken out a sizable loan with an astronomical interest rate in Jadelle’s name. He borrowed the money from Noval, who was trying to sell one of the most coveted plots of land in Beverly Hills, known as the Mountain, for $1 billion. In an email exchange coordinated by his lawyer, Noval told me that he was introduced to Rechnitz through their fathers, who worked in real estate. Shortly after, according to Noval’s suit, he gave Rechnitz a $2.9 million loan with a 9 percent monthly interest rate. As collateral, Rechnitz handed over diamonds valued at more than $7 million and a 2012 Bugatti worth $400,000. But in his lawsuit, Noval claimed that by the end of the year, Rechnitz had failed to make any payments on his loan and his debt had ballooned to $5.8 million.

Just weeks after Rechnitz was formally sentenced in New York, according to Noval’s suit, Rechnitz asked Noval’s brother if he could sell the jewelry he’d used as collateral at an upcoming trunk show; whatever profit he made from sales would pay down the loan. Noval allowed Rechnitz to retake ownership of the jewelry pieces for one day, and in exchange Rechnitz wrote two checks, for $2.5 million and $1.3 million.

The day after the trunk show, Noval’s brother went to Rechnitz’s office to collect the jewelry, only to be told that Rechnitz had an interested buyer and wanted to keep the pieces. When Noval tried to cash Rechnitz’s checks, they bounced. Noval filed a report with the Beverly Hills Police Department alleging that he’d been “swindled and defrauded.” A month later, Noval filed his suit against Rechnitz. In it he stated that he believed Rechnitz wasn’t the legitimate owner of the diamonds he’d used as collateral; he suspected that they, too, were on loan.

Noval’s suit claimed that Rechnitz had acted as if he was impervious to criminal convictions, and it blamed his attitude on Rechnitz’s cooperation with federal authorities in New York. “Rechnitz mistakenly believes that this provides him immunity from committing fraud in California,” it read. “The fact that Jona only received 10 months custody time with 5 months house arrest has only emboldened him to commit more fraud, grand theft, and to issue worthless instruments.” Rechnitz and his wife both pled the fifth, declining to provide their side of the story for the record during the proceedings.

In April, Noval joined Voutsas and Anter in filing an involuntary bankruptcy suit against Jadelle Jewelry and Diamonds in an effort to liquidate the company’s assets and recoup some of their money. As proceedings continued into the summer, a motion was filed by an unexpected third party—the Department of Justice. Government attorneys submitted a request for a limited stay of discovery in the trial, arguing that it could jeopardize “parallel civil and criminal” FBI and IRS investigations into Noval “and associates.”

“The government believes that its investigations would be severely compromised if discovery into matters under criminal investigation were permitted, as it would likely reveal sensitive facts,” the filing read. (Additional details were sealed; a judge denied The Atavist’s request to unseal the documents.)

The motion revealed that Noval may have financed real estate transactions and development, including the Mountain, with money stolen from the government of Kuwait and transferred from a bank identified as “AUB” into California accounts. “Based on the government’s present investigation, some or all of the funds for the Noval-Jadelle Transfers appear to be traceable to the AUB Transfers,” the attorneys wrote in the public filing. (Noval’s attorney said that no criminal charges were filed, and the government told him that any criminal investigation related to the properties has been closed.)

The motion also announced that the FBI was separately investigating “the alleged theft or taking by fraud of millions of dollars in diamonds while on consignment with Jadelle.” Agents had recently obtained 31 pieces of jewelry believed reported stolen by jewelers. The pieces were confiscated from the home of a person identified by the initials TT; Fish and Wildlife Service agents had raided TT’s home earlier that month looking for two endangered ring-tailed lemurs, which are illegal to own in the U.S. For those suing Rechnitz, the DOJ’s motion gave them some hope that authorities were looking into Rechnitz’s business in California. But no charges have been filed against Rechnitz for the allegedly stolen jewelry.

Ultimately, the judge denied the DOJ’s request for a stay, arguing that there was no cause to grant it. And after months of legal filings, the trustee appointed to oversee the bankruptcy case moved to dismiss, because it was unlikely to generate any financial recoveries. Instead, the trustee accepted a settlement of $215,000. Noval, Anter, and Voutsas objected, arguing that “rather than proceed with the pursuit of tens of millions of dollars of potentially avoidable and recoverable transfers, the Trustee instead has capitulated and decided to do a deal with the devil, in the process allowing Jona Rechnitz, the perpetrator of this massive fraud, to buy his way out of this case.” The judge dismissed the case anyway.

Voutsas’s and Rovinsky’s case was ultimately settled, and Anter withdrew his suit. (His lawyer said he could not disclose the reason for withdrawing it.) Despite those victories, Rechnitz’s troubles continued to mount. Three more companies sued him for fraud from mid-2020 to early 2021. In all, the six lawsuits against Rechnitz asserted that he owed more than $15.5 million. L.A.’s diamond industry had by now largely blacklisted him, and it seemed as if Jadelle’s reputation was finished. One day in September 2020, Jadelle posted an Instagram photo of musician Justin Bieber wearing its jewels. The caption mentioned “ups and downs.” “We keep pushing and are here to stay. We shall prevail. Love always wins. Thank you to our customers and your loyalty. ❤️,” it read. The day after that post, Jadelle’s Instagram went quiet.

Then, in the spring of 2021, Rechnitz announced a new venture—one that would bring him into the highest echelons of the sporting world.

Chapter 3

On May 5, 2021, Rechnitz called Joe Englanoff, his neighbor and landlord, with a proposition. He was working with Floyd Mayweather to organize a fight against YouTuber Logan Paul. Though Mayweather retired in 2017 with a 50-0 record, the 44-year-old had recently agreed to an unsanctioned fight with the 26-year-old Paul. Rechnitz was now considered part of Mayweather’s entourage, called the Money Team. He’d traded his suits for black T-shirts, “TMT” baseball caps.

“He said to me, ‘You know, I just got off the phone with Floyd, and we have this wonderful opportunity to buy these tickets,’ ” Englanoff told me. If Englanoff fronted some money—about a million dollars—Rechnitz could sell the tickets for up to ten times the face value; Englanoff would get his money back plus 25 percent of the profits. Rechnitz had introduced Englanoff to Mayweather. In fact, Englanoff tried to sell a Bel Air property to the boxer. In 2019, he visited Mayweather’s home in Las Vegas, and joined Rechnitz on a private flight to the Super Bowl aboard Mayweather’s jet. (The boxer did not join them.) Englanoff felt comfortable enough to invest $1.4 million, with Rechnitz acting as Mayweather’s agent.

In June, Englanoff flew to Miami for the fight. When Mayweather stepped into the ring at the Hard Rock Stadium to shake Paul’s hand, he wore a T-shirt bearing the red logo of EthereumMax, a new cryptocurrency Rechnitz was helping to market. The fighter told reporters that he was paid $30 million to wear the logo on his shorts. (According to a press release, EthereumMax would be the “exclusive cryptocurrency accepted for online ticket purchasing for the highly anticipated Floyd Mayweather vs. Logan Paul Pay-Per-View event.”) The match went the full eight rounds and no winner was declared, but that barely mattered: Mayweather reportedly made as much as $25 million from the event. After the fight, Englanoff joined Rechnitz in a hotel room, where Rechnitz sat at a desk tallying bricks of cash, surrounded by armed guards. In one corner, men operated whirring cash counters. “There was money everywhere,” Englanoff told me.

According to the lawsuit Englanoff later filed, things soon began to unravel. Weeks after the fight, Englanoff still hadn’t received a penny for the tickets. At the end of June, nearly a month after the fact, Rechnitz met with Englanoff in person and said that there had been a change of plans: The team reinvested Englanoff’s profits into an August exhibition fight between Yordenis Ugás and Manny Pacquiao in Las Vegas. Rechnitz told Englanoff not to worry, he would now make even more money.

Englanoff didn’t want assurances—he demanded to be paid the amount he was promised. According to the suit Englanoff later filed, Rechnitz agreed to send Englanoff a wire for the profits, and one of his partners would send a check for the original investment. Neither materialized. “Instead,” the suit read, “a series of false statements and excuses began.” First, Rechnitz claimed to be in Hawaii, and said that the wire didn’t come through “because of the different cut-off times.” Then Rechnitz claimed that his account had been locked because of fraud. On July 23, nearly two months after the Mayweather fight, Rechnitz wrote Englanoff a check for $100,000, calling it a “religious act and gesture.”

Eventually, according to the lawsuit, they reached a written agreement: Englanoff would agree to invest in the second fight and receive at least $4.9 million no later than September 6. But when the day came, Rechnitz had bad news: Sales for the event were lower than anticipated. Still, according to the lawsuit, he promised Englanoff $5.7 million within ten days. Again the money didn’t arrive. According to the suit, Rechnitz dispatched his father, Robert, to reassure Englanoff. On the phone, the elder Rechnitz said that he had invested in the tickets himself, and assured Englanoff that his son was good for the money. Englanoff said he told him: “Your son’s running a Ponzi scheme.”

The next day, Rechnitz wired Englanoff another $100,000, calling it an “act of good faith,” according to the suit. Rechnitz followed up with an in-person meeting with his father at Englanoff’s home later that week. There the Rechnitzes said that they had great news. They had reinvested Englanoff’s money into a third match between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder scheduled for October, and would pay Englanoff a total of $5.8 million, according to the suit. Robert Rechnitz personally guaranteed the full payment. He put his hand on a Torah to drive home the point. But that fight, too, failed to meet financial expectations, according to the suit. Rechnitz reinvested Englanoff’s money in a fourth fight. By then Englanoff no longer believed he’d ever recoup his investment.

But as it turned out, Rechnitz was facing another problem: EthereumMax, the cryptocurrency he’d helped promote during the fights, had gone belly-up—and was about to come under investigation.

EthereumMax launched on May 14, 2021, with copious celebrity endorsements, including Mayweather, Paul Pierce, and Kim Kardashian. Just two weeks after EthereumMax was unveiled, Pierce tweeted that he had made more money since the cryptocurrency’s launch than he had as a commentator for ESPN all year. Tampa Bay Buccaneers wide receiver Antonio Brown promoted it on Instagram three days later. That same week, Miami’s Liv and Story nightclubs announced that they would begin accepting crypto as payment—but only EthereumMax. Kardashian shared the announcement on her Instagram.

Despite the hype, EthereumMax lost 93 percent of its value in just two months. In January 2022, ten plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the company for making false or misleading statements to investors through social-media advertisements that disguised their control over a large percentage of the tokens. “It just stood out as one of the most egregious examples of a crypto scam,” said John Jasnoch, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, when I interviewed him. According to the class action lawsuit, Rechnitz had been instrumental in drumming up publicity for the currency. “EthereumMax’s entire business model relies on using constant marketing and promotional activities, often from ‘trusted’ celebrities, to dupe potential investors into trusting the financial opportunities available with EMAX Tokens,” the lawsuit claimed. “Rechnitz provided … access to several high-profile celebrities that were willing to tout EMAX Tokens in exchange for under-the-table payments.”

The lawsuit alleged that Rechnitz had made hundreds of thousands of dollars from liquidating his EMAX tokens when he knew that promotions were going to drive up the currency’s value. It also said that Mayweather was paid $2.5 million as a “marquee promoter.” (This wasn’t Mayweather’s first brush with crypto, or with legal trouble for promoting it. He’d was fined $615,000 in 2018 for promoting Initial Coin Offerings, another blockchain currency, with DJ Khaled.)

This time the federal government intervened. The Securities and Exchange Commission brought charges against Pierce and Kardashian in 2022, and announced settlements with each—for $1.4 million and $1.26 million, respectively. Neither Mayweather nor Rechnitz were fined by the SEC. Investigators there declined to comment for this story, and wouldn’t confirm whether any investigations into Rechnitz or Mayweather were ongoing.

As Englanoff’s family exited, Rechnitz stared at Englanoff’s 15-year-old son, made a threatening gesture, and yelled, “Do you have something to say to me?”

After eight months of waiting for his money, Englanoff filed a February 2022 lawsuit against Rechnitz and Mayweather for breach of contract, asking for $15 million. Less than a week later, Englanoff claims, he and his family began receiving threats. On February 7, Englanoff parked his Tesla outside his office and tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. “I look up and there’s this really big, like six-foot-five thug, and behind him is a second guy, and they said, ‘We’re sent here by Jona. You’re fucking with the wrong guy,’ ” Englanoff told me. (He subsequently made the same claim when applying for a restraining order against Rechnitz.)

In mid-June, Rechnitz filed his own lawsuit against Englanoff, alleging that Rechnitz had been defrauded because Englanoff’s house was in poorer condition than originally stated. (Englanoff had filed a petition to evict Rechnitz from the property.) Two weeks later, Englanoff said, Rechnitz approached him on their street and made what Englanoff considered a blatant threat. “He said, ‘Either you drop the case against me or I’m going to bring up this whole thing about you being a tax cheat,’ ” Englanoff told me. “And I said, ‘Jona, it’s not true. It’s not even close to true.’ His response to me was, ‘Who cares about truth? Once I get your good name through the mud, try and get [it] back. You’ll never get the genie back in the bottle.’ ” (Englanoff reported the incident to the FBI. Rechnitz did not respond to a request for comment on this or any other allegations reported in this story.)

Where once the Englanoffs and Rechnitzes had waved to each other on the street, now every interaction was heated. The feud continued undiminished for nearly a year. In the spring of 2023, Englanoff’s wife was shooting video of the house rented by Rechnitz when he approached her car and began arguing, according to a restraining order request she later filed.

“Now I’m gonna turn ugly quick,” Rechnitz allegedly said.

“Oh, like you haven’t yet,” she responded.

“Oh, you are about to see, I’ve been holding back. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Uh ha, that sounds like a threat, sweety,” said Englanoff’s wife.

To which Rechnitz allegedly responded: “It is a threat!”

Finally, on June 14, 2023, an incident sent the two families over the edge. That night, Englanoff was out having dinner with his family for his mother’s birthday when he saw Rechnitz at the same restaurant. As Englanoff’s family were leaving, Rechnitz stared at Englanoff’s 15-year-old son, made a threatening gesture, and yelled, “Do you have something to say to me?” according to a request for a permanent restraining order filed by Englanoff’s wife the day after the confrontation. In the request, she cited the threats made to her family, writing that Rechnitz “knows dangerous and violent people” who were “not afraid to cause harm to people.” She also noted that her husband had spoken to the FBI about the harassment.

Rechnitz offered an alternative version of events in a statement he gave the court, claiming that the teenager had made faces at him throughout dinner. “It appeared that the Englanoffs had enlisted the teenager to vex me and cause an incident to erupt,” he wrote. (Englanoff briefly received a temporary restraining order. In July 2023, a separate request for a long-term restraining order filed by Englanoff’s wife was dismissed without prejudice when neither party appeared for a hearing. After an August 2023 hearing for Englanoff’s request for a long-term restraining order, a judge ruled that he had “failed to sustain [his]burden of proof,” ordered him to pay $15,000 in legal fees to Rechnitz, and dissolved the temporary restraining order.)

On the same day as the restaurant confrontation, a bizarre YouTube video of Englanoff had appeared online. It was titled “Exposing LA’s Biggest Tax Cheat,” and was produced by an influencer named Spencer Cornelia, whose channel has more than half a million subscribers. Most of Cornelia’s more than 500 videos focus on juicy celebrity lawsuits and wily scams. The ten-minute clip about Englanoff, which as of this writing had more than 116,000 views, argued that Englanoff illegally claimed he resided in Nevada to avoid paying state income tax. (Englanoff denied these allegations and told me that he offered to show Cornelia his tax records.)

It wasn’t the first video Cornelia posted about Englanoff—it was the replacement. The first, still viewable on the media-sharing platform Rumble, was about Englanoff’s lawsuit against Mayweather for the proceeds from the fight tickets. After Cornelia uploaded it, he got a call from Rechnitz. “The defendants in the case reached out to me and said, ‘Hold on, everything in that lawsuit is false, and here’s the proof,’ ” Cornelia told me. “That led me down a pathway of looking into Englanoff and making a video on him.” Cornelia uploaded the new video and then did something he said he’d never done before: He registered multiple URLs incorporating Englanoff’s and his wife’s names and embedded the YouTube video on them. He denied that Rechnitz paid him to do so, but Cornelia told me, “Admittedly, I’ve hung out with Jona a couple times.”

That September, Englanoff told me, he was followed as he and his wife drove to a sushi restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. Halfway through their meal, Englanoff told me, two large men walked into the restaurant and threatened him. “They started screaming at me, ‘Hey, you tax cheat. Hey, Floyd’s gonna fuck you up. Jona’s gonna fuck you up,’ ” Englanoff said. “I take my phone and I flip it on them, and it’s kind of like turning on the lights on cockroaches—they start to scatter and get out of there.” (Englanoff showed me soundless security footage in which the men left once Englanoff started filming them, retreating to a black SUV outside.)

Ten days later, Englanoff says, his 20-year-old daughter was approached by a man in the parking lot outside her doctor’s office. She called her father, terrified. To Englanoff the message was clear: We can get at your kids.

Englanoff reported both incidents to the FBI and provided the license plate of the SUV in the restaurant footage. He said that two FBI agents came to his home to interview his family and told him that a recent federal law against cyberbullying might be applicable. Later, an agent sent Englanoff a photo and asked his daughter if it was the the man who’d approached her. She said that it looked like him, but Englanoff has yet to hear anything more from the agency. (The FBI declined to comment.)

In the summer of 2023, something rare happened to Jona Rechnitz: He lost in court. In June, a judge granted $17.7 million plus interest to Noval, the real estate developer. “Ultimately the jewelry was never returned, and the loan was not repaid,” the judge wrote in his decision. He concluded: “There is no doubt in the court’s mind that the jewelry was taken by fraud.”

The victory seemed to pierce what Rechnitz’s alleged victims had come to believe was his impenetrable veneer. But Noval still had to collect the money, and Rechnitz claimed that he didn’t have it. Noval and his lawyer needed to file subpoenas to prove that Rechnitz was wrong—but doing so would take time and a lot of money.

Enter Joe Englanoff. By October 2023, Rechnitz had finally moved out of the Beverlywood house, but Englanoff was still waiting for a trial date for his own lawsuit. He and Noval shared the same lawyer, who now approached Englanoff with a proposition: Instead of waiting on his own judgment—and for Noval to be paid first—Englanoff could buy a controlling interest in the Noval settlement. Noval was tied up in his own legal battles with the federal government, but Englanoff had money to spare. The two hammered out an agreement. Englanoff registered a company to be the official party to the judgment, entitling him to any money collected from Rechnitz. He tauntingly named it Pay Up JR.

Since then, Englanoff’s team has received hundreds of pages in subpoenaed bank accounts associated with Rechnitz. Statements from September 2022 to September 2023 show payments to LLCs that Englanoff’s legal team says can be tied to Rechnitz, including $7.6 million from billionaire Robert Smith, who is producing a documentary series on Mayweather, and nearly $6 million paid to a company called Mayweather Promotions. The records also show payments totaling $680,000 to Rachel’s father. The bank statements from that year alone reveal transactions totaling tens of millions of dollars—more than enough to pay what the court ordered.

As Englanoff continues his efforts to recoup his money, two new lawsuits alleging Rechnitz’s involvement in fraudulent schemes were filed in the past nine months. The first, by Miami jeweler Leonard Sulaymanov against Mayweather, the rapper Tyga, and Mayweather’s Money Team, claimed that Rechnitz represented himself as Mayweather’s exclusive agent in a scheme to take watches and jewelry worth $4.15 million without paying a full or fair price. Though the lawsuit alleged that Mayweather posted images of himself wearing the jewelry on his social-media account, the jeweler claimed that he was never paid. (The case was voluntarily terminated in December 2024.)

The second suit, filed on behalf of a Miami digital artist named Jayson Winer, alleged that Rechnitz and his associates promised they could get Mayweather to use his close ties with billionaire Elon Musk to persuade the tech mogul to purchase Winer’s art and to reverse a shadow ban on his posts on X. (Rechnitz told Winer that Mayweather trained Musk for a much-hyped boxing match with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg that never materialized.) All it would cost, Rechnitz told Winer, according to the suit, was several million dollars.

As it happened, Winer worked at Platinum Partners in New York around the same time Rechnitz helped illegally transfer funds there from COBA. Despite Rechnitz’s reputation, Winer told me, he initially trusted him. If Rechnitz knew a boxing champ, why not a billionaire? Winer said that he only came to believe it was a scam when the duo kept asking for more money up front without connecting him with Musk. In his response, Rechnitz admitted that he’d told Winer that Mayweather could arrange a call with Musk about Winer’s collection for a price, but denied any wrongdoing. (Mayweather did not respond to requests for comment.)

Instead, Rechnitz filed a counterclaim arguing that Winer failed to pay for services rendered by Mayweather. “To feed his celebrity obsession, Winer promised funds he knew he did not have for the chance to make himself and his ‘art’ known to Musk,” the counterclaim alleged. It went on to say that Winer “launched a scorched-earth defamation campaign falsely accusing Counter-Plaintiff Jona Rechnitz of extorting him.” The suit is ongoing.

Chapter 4

Though it has been nine years since Rechnitz pled guilty in the New York COBA case, he has yet to serve any time in prison—even as his co-conspirators were given years. In July 2023, he successfully overturned his 2019 sentence of five months in that case when a court ruled that Judge Hellerstein should have recused himself because he had a close relationship with a witness in a related case. Sentencing was reassigned to Judge Katherine Polk Failla, who ruled in October 2024 that Rechnitz only owed the correctional officers’ union $891,000—some $9 million less than in the judgment handed down by Hellerstein. But Failla has yet to rule on how much prison time Rechnitz will serve; she delayed the hearing eight times over the course of two years. The next date is set for June 2025, though most believe that it, too, will be deferred.

 “Jona’s pretty much judgment-proof. He is the Jewish John Gotti,” said Andrew Smith, the lawyer representing the Miami jeweler who sold the watches to Mayweather and Tyga. “He gets charges brought against him. Then he turns out to be a confidential informant and he gets charges relaxed.”

The delays and inaction have led many to believe that Rechnitz may be protected by authorities. Several jewelers say Rechnitz claimed not only that he was a prolific government informant in New York—but that he was still working in that capacity.

Smith believes that the clearest indication that Rechnitz has some sort of influence with the government is that he has yet to be sentenced in the COBA case. “Jona robbed the New York City corrections officers pension fund. I mean, that’s as bad as stealing from the FBI, right?” said Smith. “You don’t get indicted, take a plea in 2016, and not get sentenced for nine years,” said Smith. “It doesn’t happen.”

The delays have incensed those who sued Rechnitz, many of whom wonder how he managed to escape prison time and further criminal indictments for years. “Rechnitz, a serial informant for the Justice Department, appears to believe that he can defraud victims with impunity, relying on his relationship with the Government to protect him from liability,” Winer’s January lawsuit read.

There have been at least 13 suits filed against Rechnitz or his companies since he moved to Los Angeles, but the courts have only ruled against him in two of them. Others were quietly settled. The EthereumMax class action has a trial date scheduled for January 2026. Englanoff lost his case against Mayweather last summer—the jury didn’t find sufficient evidence that Englanoff had entered into a contract with Mayweather’s production company. But a trial date against Rechnitz and other listed co-conspirators is set for July 2025.

For now Rechnitz remains free, and his alleged victims are left to commiserate with one another over a shared WhatsApp chat where they monitor what Rechnitz and Mayweather have been up to through social media and online articles and videos. The two met with injured Israeli Defense Force soldiers in Jerusalem last October; they were seen courtside at an L.A. Clippers game in early March; and Mayweather even thanked his “close friend” Rechnitz on a recent Fox Business appearance promoting a new line of workout supplements.

The FBI has not charged Rechnitz with any additional crimes. Some hope that will change soon. In January, Winer told me, two district attorneys flew to Miami to interview him about his lawsuit, with an FBI agent joining via Zoom. The Department of Justice then subpoenaed Winer to provide documents before a grand jury in Los Angeles at the end of February as part of a criminal investigation being conducted by the DOJ’s Criminal Division, Fraud Section, according to a copy of the subpoena obtained by The Atavist. But federal grand jury proceedings are secretive, and the government won’t comment on them—or even confirm their existence.

Several jewelers say Rechnitz claimed not only that he was a prolific government informant in New York—but that he was still working in that capacity.

“I cannot go on record,” Jona Rechnitz told me when I first spoke to him last summer. “I am a government witness, and I cannot be making public statements.” But, he added, he’d been thinking about talking anyway: “I did my homework on you. And because you’re an independent and you’re not controlled by anyone, that’s why I said, ‘You know what? Maybe I will actually take her call and respond to her.’ ”

We agreed to meet at Lamalo, a Kosher restaurant near Beverlywood. When I followed up by text the day before, he replied: “I think I have Covid! I’m getting tested if I’m ok then yes.” He texted later to say that, indeed, he was sick. We rescheduled for mid-August, only for Rechnitz to text me the weekend before that he was traveling and could no longer make it. We agreed to a time two weeks from then, but again he canceled. The fourth time we were supposed to meet, he texted me that morning, explaining that his flight had been canceled and it would have to wait until the following week. When I asked him for a new date, he didn’t respond.

I eventually did speak to Rechnitz face-to-face. After spending weeks at the small Santa Monica courthouse for the ongoing Pay Up JR lawsuit, I had all but abandoned hope that Rechnitz would ever appear. But as I sat amid the fold-down seats of the damp courtroom one foggy Monday morning, in he strode with his wife, Starbucks cup in hand. Rechnitz was dressed in a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black Vans. Rachel carried a plush Chanel bag. Englanoff followed shortly after, dressed in a suit, quiet and subdued. The Rechnitzes said little as their lawyer fought attempts by Englanoff’s team to force the release of more of Jadelle’s financial records.

I caught up to Rechnitz afterward and introduced myself. Towering over me, he smiled, as if we’d already met dozens of times. He waved off his worried lawyer, who cautioned him against speaking with me, and took me aside in the hallway. He asked me if Englanoff had said anything to me. I shrugged. “He won’t. He’s a tax cheat and has much too much to hide,” Rechnitz said. “Have you seen the videos about him? I’ll send you the link.” He promised me he’d be available following Yom Kippur; he had a lot to tell me. But after a few more days of fruitless texts, I lost hope of ever getting a sit-down interview. (While Rechnitz initially agreed to answer questions during the fact-check process for this story, he ignored a detailed list sent both by email and by text.)

The first time we spoke, last summer, Rechnitz did offer brief explanations for the more than a dozen lawsuits filed against him or Jadelle. The jewelry he had taken on memo from various jewelers back in 2019? He says his office was robbed. “That was a lot of merchandise, OK, but I wasn’t allowed to tell anybody, because it was an active police investigation, FBI investigation,” Rechnitz told me. But he didn’t clarify the alleged date of theft or provide proof that he’d filed a police report. (The Beverly Hills Police Department said that it had no record of any theft complaint by Rechnitz between December 2019 and August 2020. The FBI wouldn’t comment.)

Furthermore, he claimed he had proof of his innocence: The U.S. Attorney had called him a “victim” in a letter. But when I found the letter in question, written by Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Axelrad, it did not include the word victim. Instead, it read: “The United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California (‘USAO’) has informed you that, based on the USAO’s current investigation and information known as of this date, Jona Rechnitz is considered a witness in any investigation relating to Jadelle Jewelry.”

Before we ended our call, Rechnitz told me that my article was focusing on the wrong angle. “Your real story is how shady the diamond district is,” Rechnitz said. “They’re all bullshitters hiding behind beards and yarmulkes.”

CLARIFICATION: After publication, the Atavist learned that the Englanoffs filed a second restraining order request that was denied after a hearing. The story has been updated to reflect that information.

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