原文标题：《He Went After Crypto Companies. Then Someone Came After Him.》
By John Carreyrou
Compiled by: Qianwen, ChainCatcher
The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind.
Kyle Roche was a rising star in cryptocurrency law — until his career went awry. Who orchestrated his downfall?
In a secretly recorded video, attorney Kyle Roche describes his close relationships with his cryptocurrency clients.
1. Rising Star
When Kyle Roche arrived in London in late January 2022, he was already a celebrity. Although only 34 years old, he was already one of the veterans in the emerging field of cryptocurrency litigation. He had a law firm named after him and had filed lawsuits against more than a dozen cryptocurrency companies, including one case that resulted in a huge verdict against the alleged founder of Bitcoin.
Now new opportunities are beckoning him.
The two businessmen arranged to fly Roche in from Miami to discuss an investment in a new business venture he was forming, and drove him to a luxury townhouse in Mayfair to meet them.
That evening, Roche had dinner with one of the men, who called himself Villavicencio and was from Argentina, at one of London's fanciest restaurants, Jean-Georges at the Connaught Hotel.
Roche said he woke up the next morning feeling dizzy. He can’t remember anything except that he was pretty sure he spotted Villavicencio’s business partner, a Norwegian named Ager-Hanssen, wandering around a nearby table. The woozy feeling struck him as odd because he didn’t think he had drunk much. When Roche flew back to Miami a few days later, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
A few months later, last summer, Roche’s world began to fall apart. A website called Crypto Leaks published more than two dozen videos he had secretly recorded during meetings with Villavicencio and Ager-Hanssen.
The videos portray Roche and his law firm, Roche Freedman, as vehicles for making money from cryptocurrency clients. In one clip, Roche reveals that the client, a company called Ava Labs, provided him with tens of millions of dollars worth of digital tokens, making him grateful to the company and its founder, whom he likened to a brother.
In other clips, Roche gives the impression that he only cares about promoting the interests of Ava Labs, even when representing other clients. He boasts that he has successfully deflected regulators from investigating Ava Labs and suggests that his lawsuits against other cryptocurrency companies are intended to hurt Roche's competitors.
Image via Joshua Bright, The New York Times
In the video shot by Jean-Georges, Roche appeared to be intoxicated, waving his arms, swearing and calling jurors "idiots."
After the initial shock, Roche realized he had a big problem on his hands. The videos made him look corrupt and unethical. In his defense, he published an article on Medium saying that the videos were illegally obtained and taken out of context. He also denied collusion with Ava Labs.
But it was too late. One by one, companies sued by Roche filed motions to disqualify the firm from their cases. In October, the first of those motions succeeded: A federal judge in New York removed Roche Freedman from its case against Tether, the operator of the world’s most widely used stablecoin.
Within days, Roche was forced to resign from the law firm he founded. With his career in tatters, he said, he took ethics classes and began seeing a psychiatrist.
Roche was disgraced by his outspokenness and close relationships with clients. But he was also the victim of an international sting. Who was behind it?
2. The New Sheriff of Crypto
Roche grew up in a working-class family in Buffalo. He was the oldest of four siblings and shared a bedroom with his mentally disabled twin brother. As a child, he felt guilty for watching his siblings struggle to accomplish simple tasks while he was thriving in school, and he was determined to succeed so that he could one day support them.
After attending Purdue University and working as a management consultant for a few years, he entered Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law. In his first semester in the fall of 2013, he became fascinated with cryptocurrency. According to his classmates, he kept checking the price of Bitcoin on his laptop during class. Roche cashed out before the price of the token plummeted, making a profit of about $100,000. He used the money to pay his tuition.
Roche was a junior at the time and worked with a professor to write a paper discussing the advantages of Bitcoin as the first currency that is not subject to government intervention. Later, the Wall Street Journal also published a related commentary article.
“That was the first time it occurred to me that maybe I could do something with this,” he said.
At the time, Roche was a first-year associate at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, and he was emerging as a crypto kid. When a colleague in Miami approached him about a bitcoin-related case a few days after the New York Times article came out — he jumped at the opportunity.
The case pitted a man named Ira Kleiman against Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Kleiman was suing Wright for defrauding his brother David, a paraplegic computer forensics expert who died in his 40s, of billions of dollars in Bitcoin they mined together in the early days of Bitcoin.
The whole incident is shrouded in mystery: there is evidence that Wright and David were indeed friends, and it is known that David always wears an encrypted hard drive around his neck, which may contain the password to his Bitcoin wallet. But many people believe that Wright is a fraud and question his claims that he mined early Bitcoin blocks, let alone defrauded others of their money.
To Roche, that was the appeal of the case. If he could get Dr. Wright to hand over his documents during deposition, he might be able to solve Bitcoin’s greatest mystery: the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Roche and colleague Velvel Freedman quickly devoted much of their time to the case.
In 2019, as the Kleiman case was moving toward trial, Roche met a new client who was embroiled in a dispute with a cryptocurrency company. In just a few days, he negotiated a lucrative settlement on the client's behalf. To show his gratitude, the client agreed to invest $7.5 million in Roche and Freedman to start their own law firm. At first, Roche ran the company out of a co-working space in Brooklyn, but when the pandemic hit, he joined Freedman's team in Miami. Their firm, Roche Freedman, quickly became a sensation.
At the time, a host of startups were riding the wave of bitcoin, issuing new coins, driving up prices, and then crashing them. This reminded him of a common stock market scam called “pump and dump,” where scammers post messages online to drive up prices, then short sell the stock before prices fall, pocketing all the profits.
Regulators didn’t seem to be taking any action, so Roche decided to take action on its own. On April 3, 2020, Roche Freedman filed a lawsuit against seven digital currency issuers, seeking class action status, claiming that they used false statements to drive up the prices of unregistered securities, then sold them off, leaving retail investors with losses.
It also sued four cryptocurrency exchanges for facilitating coin issuers, providing some legal arguments for the SEC’s lawsuit against Binance and Coinbase.
Those lawsuits were just the beginning: Sixteen months later, Roche filed the biggest securities fraud case of his career, alleging that British entrepreneur Dominic Williams and entities he controlled defrauded investors of billions of dollars by aggressively promoting and selling a digital coin that claimed to revolutionize computing.
Williams had boldly declared that his Internet Computer Blockchain, a decentralized computer network powered by a digital token called ICP, would replace large cloud services provided by Amazon and Microsoft as humanity’s primary computing platform. After an initial surge in ICP’s price, which made it one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies, it has since plummeted 92%—a collapse that Roche’s lawsuit attributes to massive selling by Williams and other insiders. (Williams has denied the allegations.)
If crypto is the Wild West of finance, then Roche has declared himself the new sheriff. But where there is a sheriff, there are enemies, he will soon learn.
III. Huge Judgments
Emin Gun Sirer runs Ava Labs, a cryptocurrency company in which Roche took an equity stake and whose tokens were worth millions at their peak.
Around the time Roche was working on his first pump-and-dump lawsuit, he met Emin Gun Sirer, a Cornell computer science professor who had hatched a cryptocurrency project of his own in the Brooklyn coworking space where Roche initially worked. Roche agreed to provide legal services to Dr. Sirer’s company, Roche, in exchange for equity and a small portion of its planned cryptocurrency token offering.
Such arrangements are not uncommon in the tech industry. Roche’s former boss David Boies had a similar deal with Theranos, the blood-testing company whose founder, Elizabeth Holmes, was later convicted of fraud. Scandals involving Theranos and another client, Harvey Weinstein, severely damaged Boies’ reputation, but he remains a role model for Roche.
When Roche struck the deal with Dr. Sirer in September 2019, he said he wasn’t sure Dr. Sirer’s project would succeed. At the time, the tokens he held were worth less than 3 cents each.
A year later, Sirer’s blockchain Avalanche was officially launched. As the cryptocurrency market became more and more popular, the price of AVAX tokens soared to over $100, and Roche became a multi-millionaire.
Roche’s compensation agreement with Roche is supposed to be confidential, but anyone who wants to gather intelligence on him will soon be able to find out the relevant information. In February 2021, Roche Freedman fired one of its partners, Jason Cyrulnik. He fought back with a lawsuit that disclosed each partner’s share in AVAX tokens.
That fall, the Kleiman v. Wright trial began in U.S. District Court in Miami. Roche delivered a fiery opening statement, during which he repeatedly directed accusations at Dr. Wright.
In the end, the trial did not resolve the question of whether Dr. Wright actually invented Bitcoin, but the jury ordered him to pay $100 million in damages to a company that Ira Kleiman inherited from his late brother. (The judge later added another $43 million in interest.) Roche’s law firm earned more than $10 million in fees.
With the Kleiman trial over, Roche turned to a project he and Dr. Sirer had been discussing: Ryval, a company that helps people raise money on Avalanche to pay for lawsuits. Roche sees it as a for-profit crowdfunding platform for lawsuits and thinks it can level the legal playing field between individuals and big companies.
But while he was plotting his new career, someone was plotting his downfall.
4. The Hongmen Banquet
Norwegian venture capitalist Christen Ager-Hanssen was among those who invited Roche to London.
According to a copy of the email reviewed by The New York Times, in December 2021, Roche received an email from an acquaintance introducing him to Villavicencio. Villavicencio claimed to be a colleague at Ager-Hanssen and a venture capitalist interested in Roche's new project. Roche didn't know who the two men were, but he welcomed the approach: He was raising funds for Ryval, a project that had received some attention in the cryptocurrency media.
After a conference call, Roche agreed to fly to London at their expense the following month.
They met in Ager-Hanssen’s office, and things quickly took a strange turn: According to Roche, Ager-Hanssen pressed his index finger to Roche’s forehead—“I don’t think it was a gun gesture, but I think he was trying to intimidate me”—and said that if he was going to invest with him, he needed to know everything Roche was capable of.
In hindsight, Roche wished he had walked out. Instead, he took it as a cue to push harder. According to Roche, Ager-Hanssen spent the next few hours coaxing him into bragging about his relationship with Ava Labs while Villavicencio, who was sitting across from him, secretly filmed him.
Using information he gleaned from a lawsuit filed by a fired Roche Freedman partner, Ager-Hanssen tricked Roche into believing he had acquired 1% of Avalanche’s AVAX token supply, which at the time was worth more than $100 million. (Roche said he inflated the 1% figure, and AVAX tokens have since lost 80% of their value.)
Ager-Hanssen then asked Roche to give an example of how he could make a difference for Ava Labs.
“I made sure the S.E.C. and C.F.T.C. had other companies to focus on,” Roche said in the video. “Litigation can be a tool to attack competition.”
Image source, CryptoLeaks
That evening, he said, when Roche arrived at Jean-Georges, he found Villavicencio waiting at a table with a drink waiting for him. Roche remembered Ager-Hanssen arriving about 15 minutes later and sitting at a nearby table with a tall, blond man. Roche said he had little memory of the rest of the evening. He now believes the drink was spiked with drugs, though he has no proof.
In one video clip at the restaurant, Roche boasts about how he has the power to bring down the company with lawsuits. In another video, Villavicencio asks him if Ava Labs has sued any of its competitors. Roche responds: No, they let me do it as a class action lawsuit. This suggests that he filed class action lawsuits against other cryptocurrency companies at the behest of Ava Labs.
After the dinner at Jean-Georges, Roche never saw Villavicencio again, although he had one final meeting with Ager-Hanssen in New York.
On August 26, Roche was attending a wedding in California when one of his clients saw the Crypto Leaks video on Twitter and sent him a link.
He was shocked and hurried to find out when and where the videos were recorded. After he understood the general situation, he called Freedman and contacted the client to control the situation.
Roche’s biggest concern is his assertion that he filed the lawsuits to hurt Ava Labs’ competitors and distract regulators. He says that’s unfounded rhetoric, a desire to impress potential investors because of his humble background. He said he started preparing the first batch of lawsuits a month before he met Ava Labs founder Dr. Sirer.
Dr. Sirer denied that he or Ava Labs had any involvement in the lawsuits, and he said he strongly opposed some of them. Six weeks before Crypto Leaks published the video, Ava Labs’ general counsel wrote an article criticizing a Roche Freedman lawsuit as nonsense.
To protect his law firm, Roche dropped his involvement in Roche Freedman’s lawsuit against the cryptocurrency company, sold his stake in Ava Labs back to the firm, and stopped representing it. (Roche declined to say whether he made a profit on the sale.)
But he realized these actions were not enough, so he resigned from the company, which was renamed Freedman Normand Friedland.
Roche, the man behind the disappearance, is under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, where he has been in seclusion for some time since the video emerged in August.
By Gili Benita, The New York Times
A week after the video surfaced, Roche suffered another blow: According to an affidavit later filed in court, a friend of one of his colleagues reported that he had heard rumors at a cryptocurrency event that Roche's life was in danger. Frightened, Roche and his fiancée hid out in a short-term rental in Brooklyn.
Roche felt his world collapse. He lost sleep and food, he said, and lost 10 pounds. A few weeks later, he and his fiancée returned to Miami, but still worried about their safety, they moved into a rental apartment owned by a relative.
As Roche’s career was affected, Ager-Hanssen called for Roche’s disbarment and tweeted a report he had compiled on Roche that largely repeated the allegations made by Crypto Leaks. He also emailed Cyrulnik, a former Roche Freedman partner, offering to help him prove his allegations against Roche and his former company.
To Roche, the story was self-explanatory: Ager-Hanssen had set him up.
In an interview, Ager-Hanssen denied this. “This was not an operation controlled by me at all, this was carried out by other people,” he said. He said he was genuinely interested in investing in Ryval, that Villavicencio filmed the videos in his office without his knowledge, and that he was not at the Jean-Georges Hotel that night. Ager-Hanssen said he thought he knew who was behind the operation, but he would not identify that person.
Villavicencio appears to have disappeared. He could not be reached at the phone number and email address he left for Roche.
Ager-Hanssen said he had no idea of Villavicencio's whereabouts. He said he had only met the man a few weeks before Roche came to London and realized Villavicencio might not be his real name. "This is a person who doesn't exist," he said.
But Ager-Hanssen has long had a sideline, alongside running his venture capital firm, of digging up scandals about wealthy businessmen in Britain and Scandinavia embroiled in business disputes.
On multiple occasions, he secretly recorded his targets. In a 2014 interview, for example, he recounted how he used a hidden microphone to induce a Swedish financier’s rival to boast that he had hired former intelligence operatives from the CIA, MI6 and Israel’s Intelligence and Special Operations Service.
But if Ager-Hanssen did frame Roche, who hired him to do it — and why?
5. A series of clues
British entrepreneur Dominic Williams, a target of a Roche lawsuit, said he appreciated Crypto Leaks' reporting. Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile, Getty Images
Many people had reason to celebrate Roche's fall.
First on the list was Dr. Wright, the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto, and Calvin Ayre, the gambling magnate who bankrolled Dr. Wright. Dr. Wright soon used the videos to file an unsuccessful motion to disqualify Roche from the Kleiman case. After the videos came to light, Ager-Hanssen became CEO of nChain, a company funded by Ayre and hired Dr. Wright as Chief Scientific Officer.
Through a spokeswoman, Ayre admitted he and Dr Wright were delighted when the video came to light, but they denied any involvement in the scam in London.
Roche believed them because he thought he knew who had hired Ager-Hanssen: Williams, the British entrepreneur who was Roche Freedman.
The target of the company's largest pump-and-dump case.
A series of clues documented in court documents by his former law firm led Roche to this conclusion. The first clue was that on May 12, 2022, Williams wrote on Twitter that he was "coming" for his critics. That same day, the cryptoleaks.info domain was registered.
On June 9, 2022, the Crypto Leaks website went live. The website, which claims to be a defender of the "honest cryptocurrency community", published two reports defending Williams' interests. The first report supported Williams's complex theory about the collapse of the ICP token, which he had previously proposed on Twitter.
The second attacked a New York Times article about the plunge in ICP’s price. Williams tweeted a link to the Crypto Leaks report, calling it alarming. The Dfinity Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit that Williams created to oversee his blockchain, sued the New York Times for defamation in New York. (The New York Times is seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed.)
Roche’s videos were at the center of the third Crypto Leaks expose. After the videos were published, Williams and Dfinity filed a motion to disqualify Roche Freedman as counsel for the plaintiffs in the pump-and-dump case, saying Roche’s comments were a disregard for the integrity of the judicial system.
In court documents opposing the motion, Roche’s former company accused Williams of being behind the cryptocurrency leak and said the video shot at Jean-Georges showed signs of deepfake alterations. It also accused Williams of spreading rumors that Roche’s life had been threatened.
Pete Padovano, a spokesman for Dfinity and Williams, denied that anyone at the foundation had made death threats. When asked if he was connected to Crypto Leaks, Williams said: We appreciate Crypto Leaks' reporting and believe their article speaks for itself.
Roche laid low last fall, but he recently began rebuilding his career as a solo practitioner.
In April, he won a $12.5 million verdict on behalf of six former Cantor Fitzgerald partners who sued the firm for withholding some of their compensation. The ruling, which Cantor appealed, opened the way for Roche, who is also representing dozens of investors in a dispute with Binance, to file a separate class-action lawsuit against the firm.
But Roche's videotaped comments continue to haunt him and his former firm. Last month, the judge overseeing the fraud case granted Williams' motion and disqualified Freedman Normand Friedland from serving as counsel for the plaintiffs.
The judge cited Freedman’s long-standing friendship with Roche and their joint control of a cryptocurrency wallet containing more than one million AVAX tokens. He also expressed concern that the law firm harbored significant ill will toward Williams, which could lead it to reject a reasonable settlement offer.
Unless the lead plaintiff can recruit new lawyers before August, the lawsuit will be difficult to recover. In Roche's view, the conspiracy against him worked perfectly.