If there’s one person whose lifestyle all Bros want, it’s Dan Bilzerian. It’s nothing but guns and titties and gun titties and titties that shoot guns and money and private planes and other dope things. Like I bet he buys really good produce, too.
Bilzerian claims the money that funds this baller lifestyle comes almost entirely from his poker winnings. Everyone knows that’s bullshit, and that he’s a trust fund baby. Nothing wrong with that; I would love to be one. But what if all those bills Bilz has in his bank account came from a father who has spent the past two decades shielding it from the government, refusing to pay over $60 million in fines?
Less chill, no?
Drew Millard of VICE did a big dig into the finances of the Bilzerian family, and found some shady shit. You can read it here, but the gist is Dan’s dad, who was once jailed for financial fraud, is anything but on the level. And Dan’s down with it.
Public records reveal that Dan Bilzerian has been a party to a byzantine network of corporations, companies, and other business formulations designed to protect the assets of his white-collar criminal father Paul Bilzerian from the government, and that the 34-year-old Instagram star has been a beneficiary of trusts established by his old man in the 90s—at a time when dad owed tens of millions of dollars to the feds.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, Dan Bilzerian acknowledged that he did inherit some money in a trust from his father—a corporate raider and felon who in 1993 was slapped with $62 million in fines by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for fraud and as of 2014 had only paid back $3.7 million of it.
That is a big fucking fine. Paul went to jail in the 80s for fraud, but that didn’t seem to learn him a lesson. (Is that where Dan gets it from?). Nah, he’s still actively up to a lot of shit.
[As] a Florida judge put it in 2001, “Between 1994 and 1999, Bilzerian transferred his substantial assets into a complex ownership structure of off-shore trusts and family-owned companies and partnerships. It is clear that he did this purposefully to insulate his assets from the reach of his creditors.”
“Transfers of assets to family members for well less than their market value have, for centuries, been marked as ‘badges of fraud,'” said Brad Miller, a former US congressman from North Carolina who worked on financial reform in Congress after shit hit the fan in 2008.
Is that Bro or not? Give the whole piece a read, then you tell us.