Bad Magic | Language of Angels | S4-E3
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Serhat's new neighbors in West Hollywood definitely had no idea he was wanted by the Turkish police. In 2014, Serhat bought a 1920s bungalow encircled by bushy green hedges. He moved into the three-bedroom house with his new American husband, Anderson. They paid $1.2 million for it.

The following April, Serhat threw a party. He opened the house's sky-blue door and festooned the yard with lights. Among those invited was someone he'd just met from the neighborhood. This man, who asked not to be named, remembers being surprised by the invitation from his charming, super-fit neighbor. At the party, Serhat came over and suggested they pose for a photo together. ♪♪

Around the same time, Serhat reached out to a wealthy Turkish investor. According to Robert, the Hindenburg researcher, Serhat told this investor that he had an amazing real estate opportunity in L.A. He said, give me $930,000, I'm going to buy this house, and I'm going to flip it for you. It was the house of his guest from the party.

Serhat had escrow papers, bills of sale, all in the name of the unsuspecting man he'd taken a photo with. The theory from the person I spoke with is that Serhat could get his fingerprints and could get pictures with this gentleman, and it would aid him in being able to steal his identity. The whole scam seems kind of preposterous, but it worked. It worked.

He basically sold a house to an overseas investor that he didn't even own in the first place. So he just picked a random house on a street that he lived on, like two houses down from him. And he went to this overseas investor and he said, I'm going to flip it for you. The Turkish man fell for it. He agreed to buy the house that wasn't even for sale.

I don't know how this guy trusted him or why he trusted him, but he did and he wired the money to Serhat. Serhat didn't use that money to flip a house. He just started having parties. It was like Serhat had never heard that saying about not making a mess in your own backyard. And that was nothing compared to his other plans for America. It was Dr. Serhat coming over to the U.S. and going on a complete fraud spree.

His ambitions seem to be growing bigger. The next target he set his sights on, the world of high finance and biotech.

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From Wondery, I'm Laura Beal, and this is Dr. Death, Bad Magic. This is Episode 3, Language of Angels. As he built a new life in America, Serhat seemed to move into a world of high finance and science. Just as he'd done in Turkey, Serhat found it easy to impress people with money. But this time, he was trying on a new role, the investor.

And he had a trick that showed potential investors he wasn't just any financier. At one such meeting, a former business associate said he held a table of dinner guests captivated. They were in a bistro in midtown Manhattan. Dishes clanged and waiters rushed by, but the guests' eyes were focused on a spoon lying on the table. The staff stopped and looked as it began to bend, twisting and contorting.

Finally, it came to rest, mangled on the table. Serhat's guests looked at each other in amazement, trying to figure out, how did he do that? But for his business partners, his tricks weren't all that made him a charming dining companion. Serhat let it be known that he was rich. He said his family owned an asphalt plant in Nigeria and a gold mine in Peru. And it got better. He said he was descended from Turkish aristocracy.

The name on his checks even said Prince Sirha D. Gumrukchu. Robert was trying to find a pattern. Part of what we do or what I do is I like to understand the mechanics of any fraud that these people have been involved with in the past. The sheer number and range of different frauds was a surprise. Time after time, the victim seemed to want to believe him, and especially when it came to the health of someone they loved.

according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of a family called the Paloviches. In August of 2015, Serhat arrived in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to do a medical evaluation on their son in preparation for treating his cancer. The court documents say that Serhat acted as a medical professional. He examined the family's adult son, Asa, and promised he would develop a treatment plan.

The next day, Serhat returned with medication. With a needle in Ace's forearm, Serhat started an IV drip. And this is the really weird thing. His treatment plan includes, like, mistletoe, B-17, and natural killer cell injections. The same drugs that Serhat was accused of using on the Turkish patient.

So this starts to reinforce a pattern. The so-called vitamin B17, known as laetrile, is banned in the U.S. and many other countries. The compound breaks down into cyanide and has been linked to poisoning in patients.

He's asking for a lot of money. I mean, they're writing him, I think the first check is for $19,000, and then there's additional checks for tens of thousands of dollars. And not just for Asa. He must have, like, really impressed the family because on his third or fourth visit to the house, he starts treating the mother, too. He took a sample of her blood, which he said was for a stem cell shot. At the time, she was suffering from leg pain and vision problems,

Over the next few days, he gave her between 150 and 200 injections in her feet, ankles, and legs. And according to the complaint, he treated her vision problems with another unconventional method, leeches. All of this wasn't cheap.

They continue writing him checks, bigger and bigger checks. You know, they're paying his airfare. And what happens is he asks them to send between $200,000 and $250,000 for additional treatments that he's going to come administer. To just give you an idea of how big of a deal it probably was to come up with this sum of money. The family's home was worth about the same amount. They sent the money for additional treatments.

Asa passed away in December of 2015. And so the family reached out to Serhat and they're like, hey, that $200,000, $250,000 we wired you for the next visit, can you send that money back? Because you never delivered those services. Serhat replied. He says, yep, I'm going to send the money back. Just wait a little longer. It's on the way. It's coming. They waited and waited and waited.

Serhat didn't send it. To the Hindenburg team, the case was beginning to bring things into focus. What they'd previously found in Turkey wasn't just an isolated instance. It looked like a pattern. Serhat seemed to target terminally ill patients and offer them a dose of false hope at a steep price. By this time, though, Serhat was moving into a completely different scheme.

one that stood to make him even more money and put him at even more risk. It started with an email from a businessman named Gregory Gak. "Serhat, I need your diplomatic skills." Gak has blue eyes, a cleft chin, and Minnesota charm. He'd heard that Serhat was a Turkish royal and approached him with a business opportunity. A trader in Vermont needed someone to front a large amount of cash for an oil deal.

Gack was offering to act as the middleman, and he wanted to see if Serhat might be interested in investing. Gumruchu, out of the blue, says that he's got $22.5 million standing by to finance this oil deal. That's Thomas from Hindenburg. The trader from Vermont's name was Greg Davis. Davis was a slim black man with rectangular glasses, a family guy,

When Gack told him he'd come up with the money, Davis was excited, but asked for proof that the money was there. And so Serhat provides the other business partners, Gregory Gack and Greg Davis, with a letter from a bank in Cyprus. But Davis thought something was off. He looked up the bank's website and it seemed brand new.

Not only that, some of the language on the page appeared to have been copied and pasted directly from Bank of America. Davis and Gack realized that the letter they'd been given is absolutely false. The bank didn't even exist. Serhat said he'd been acting in good faith. It was the so-called bank that was scamming him. But that wasn't the end of it. You know, normal people at that stage could just walk away from a deal. But not these guys.

After all, there was a lot of money on the line. It's like, oh, yeah, OK, we figured out that this bank's not real. Do you have the money? Can you come up with something else? And so that just starts a whole series of cons and frauds and lies. Serhat was running multiple scams at the same time. And for a while, it must have seemed like he was getting away with it.

But then, at the start of 2017, his past began to catch up with him. On February 9th, a phalanx of FBI agents swarmed a quiet Los Angeles neighborhood. Agents converged on a white bungalow and rushed in. Serhat was out on the sidewalk, in handcuffs. He was being charged with 14 felony counts relating to fraud and theft.

Obtaining money, labor, or property by false pretenses. Grand theft of personal property. Identity theft. The charges touched on every aspect of Serhat's crime spree. Real estate fraud, bad checks, identity theft. The list is long and devastating. False personation.

Each of these charges alone call for a possible sentence from 16 months up to three years. But even longer sentences were requested due to the amount of money involved. His bail was set at $625,000. Aggravated white-collar crime. The charges threatened to destroy everything Serhat had been building in America.

And they landed just as he was on the cusp of pulling off his biggest magic trick yet. An idea he'd been working on with a wealthy businessman. An idea called Enochian.

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ZipRecruiter.com slash doctor. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash D-O-C-T-O-R. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Eight years before he ever met Serhat, Rene Sendlev strode into an upscale restaurant in Copenhagen. He was there to celebrate the greatest success of his life.

He'd begun his career as an apprentice in a small jewelry shop. Now, he had just helped sell the business he co-founded, Pandora, to a private equity firm. He was worth over half a billion dollars.

One board member called for a toast. So he stands up and then he says, "Okay, it's incredible that we're standing here tonight." Journalist Ole Hall spoke to those who were there that night. Who would have thought that this company would actually be a success? We don't even know what we did. We just did it. And then it just happened that we got very successful. It's incredible.

And people are clapping and laughing and they're just having a very nice evening. But René, he found that speech so incredibly insulting. For René, the success of his company was not a coincidence. It was the exact result of a strategy and a vision and a plan.

To René, the thing that made Pandora such a big success was expanding into America. But his colleagues didn't give him the credit. Olay says that René was convinced that it was his plan that had made them all rich. And that lack of acknowledgement drove him crazy. I think he was just hungry, hungry for more. He was convinced that he could build up something that was bigger than the company he had left.

Rene found his next challenge inside of the Symbian Science Park, a low-slung modern building near the center of Copenhagen. The complex is packed with startups that work in software, gaming, and biotech. The company was called Dandrit,

It was working on a groundbreaking new treatment, a vaccine for colon cancer. Even though his expertise was in the jewelry business, René was excited to invest in such a promising industry. By the spring of 2016, René was the second largest shareholder in the company, just in time for the stock to crash. Dandert's researchers had failed to find the blockbuster they'd hoped for.

By the end of the year, René's shares had lost around 70% of their value. If René's goal was to create something bigger and more successful than his first venture, the opposite was happening. René had an ailing pharmaceutical company that needed a lifeline. And that's when he met Serhat. They were introduced by a nutritionist who promotes a program called "Sexy Juicing." And soon, René became Serhat's patient.

René had got some skin growth, what he believed might be skin cancer. And so Serhat comes along and says, "Hey, I'll take a swab of that. I'll take a sample of it. I'll get it sent off to some people that I know, and we'll take it from there. We'll see what kind of treatment you need." When the results came back, René received some difficult news. He had cancer.

But then Serhat took a look at it and, according to Nate from Hindenburg, Serhat had actually treated it and removed a potential cancerous growth and that after Serhat's procedure, this cancer hasn't relapsed ever since. Serhat had seemingly made his cancer disappear. And so we were wondering, like, well, that's interesting because he's not actually a doctor and he's not licensed to practice.

Rene may have been a rich businessman, but when he met Serhat, he was in the same boat as the other patients in Turkey and Pennsylvania. Someone seeking help. Once he was better, he began to wonder if Serhat might not be able to solve his other problem, the company with the failed vaccine. Pretty soon, Serhat met the leaders of Dandrit, too.

Serhat recalls that first meeting when he was on the Fancy Labcoat Guild podcast. They're from Denmark. They flew to L.A. And we had these meetings. And I looked into their technology and I said, this is promising. It's a very old technology. It hasn't been. Science is advanced, but their technology hasn't. Serhat offered his help.

I told them that I can make their vaccine work better and it would take about three months. He was hired as a consultant, but Serhat said they got to be friends. And the more they worked together, the more Serhat shared his own ideas. They were like, what are you doing in your research? And I talked about the HIV research that we're doing. As Rene and his team worked with Serhat, an idea began to form. So they were like, why don't we...

merge our companies. Together with Dandrit, they would form a new firm, one that would be named after the mythical language spoken by angels, Enochian.

Rene believed that he'd found the visionary he and his company needed. He wanted a guru. He wanted a confidant. He wanted a magician. He wanted this mystical figure that could solve all the problems. He felt that he'd got in Sirhan.

In the summer of 2017, papers for the Enochian merger were getting finalized. If the deal went through, it would take Serhat to another level of prestige and wealth. But he was facing some serious threats. He was still facing the charges from his arrest a few months earlier. And as the clock ticks down to the merger, another problem became more and more urgent. His business dealings with Greg Davis.

The messages from the middleman were getting more troubling. I'm getting nasty grams from Greg Davis. Anything I can tell him. Greg is going ballistic and I don't know if I can control him anymore. Our friend is all over me. Greg wants to see a path forward. I believe he's on the road to prosecution. By late December of 2017, Davis was asking for $980,000 to drop the matter.

His message ended with a warning. If Serhat didn't fulfill his part of the deal, their relationship will end in a series of indictments, clearly bearing civil and criminal repercussions. Davis made it clear, pay up, or he'd take Serhat to court. Now, it was up to Serhat. They are in control of how it ends, but it is the end.

Finally, on January 12th, 2018, the merger was agreed to. Despite not being a doctor, despite his history of unscientific cures, Serhat had become a co-founder of Enochian Biosciences. Somehow, he would manage to make each and every threat disappear. The criminal charges, the millions in debt, all gone. And there would be no more threats from Greg Davis.

Because six days before the merger went through, a man disguised as a U.S. Marshal had shown up at his house in Vermont, driven him away in handcuffs, and shot him dead. From Wondery, this is episode three of five of Dr. Death, Bad Magic. I'm your host, Laura Beale.

This series is written by Benjamin Gray. Producer is Nika Singh. Senior producer is Russell Finch. Story editor is Allison Weintraub. Senior editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Fact-checking by Jacqueline Colletti. Additional reporting by Goulson Harmon. Production assistance by Mariah Dennis and Emily Locke.

Sound design and mixing by Aaron May. Senior managing producer is Lata Pandya. Coordinating producer is Heather Beloga. Produced by Storyforce. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesan Sync. Special thanks to Ali Dashti and Guy Rokin of the Fancy Lab Co. Guild podcast. And to Nate Anderson and the staff at Hindenburg Research for use of their reporting.

Executive producers are Bly Pagan Faust and Corey Shepard Stern for Storyforce. Our executive producers are George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent for Wondery. He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs.

Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for prostitution.

I was up. I hit rock bottom, but I made no excuses. I'm disgusted. I'm so sorry. Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy. Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus.