Win AD’s Founders Bank on Public Disclosure. What Are They Hiding?

Of the 363 schools that make up NCAA Division I athletics, about two-thirds fall under state or federal freedom of information laws requiring them to open up their books to the public. Consequently, reporters who cover college sports have been conditioned to make FOIA requests, such as for employment contracts the second new coaching hires are announced.

But long before many journalists made this their habit, two cousins and lifelong friends, Ben and Drue Moore, recognized the commercial potential of the industry’s disclosure requirements. In 2009, they formed a Delaware limited liability company, Winthrop Intelligence, betting that athletic departments would pay for easy, ready and comprehensive access to what their rivals were spending.

Gathering and organizing the information from multitudes of universities was cumbersome at the start, but well worth the effort.

Within just a few years, the Moores’ company came to dominate the niche market it effectively created. Its software service, dubbed Win AD, boasts a suite of searchable databases extracted from over 150,000 documents that include athletic department employee agreements and nearly every significant revenue-generating contract—multimedia, apparel, ticketing, food services—across the multi-billion-dollar intercollegiate enterprise.

A top-drawer subscription to Win AD currently retails for around $14,000 per year, according to contracts Sportico obtained through public records requests. The broad majority (up to 80%, according to sources) of NCAA D-I schools subscribe to the service, along with many D-II’s as well, making the company one of the most dominant third-party vendors in the industry.

More than one athletic director has groused about the irony that Winthrop Intelligence has basically convinced schools to pay an annual premium for information they themselves were supplying. But as the company advertises, Win AD can more than pay for itself by helping athletic departments determine fair market value when hiring employees and contracting with third parties. On its website, Win AD provides 30 individual “case studies” from schools who have benefitted from the “business intelligence and market transparency” it delivers.

The service is so entrenched in college athletics that it’s sometimes referenced in coach and administrator contracts as the dispositive authority for gauging whether ex-employees terminated without cause are fulfilling the terms of their buyouts.

With little overhead and a small staff, Winthrop Intelligence has returned millions of dollars in profits to its founders and proven that—at least in the commercial sense—transparency pays.

In more recent years, however, the Moore cousins seem to have discovered the allures of inscrutability, embarking on a series of opaque, risky and invariably failing business pursuits in partnership with a man named Scott Brooks (aka “Robert Scott Brooks,” “R. Scott Brooks” or “RSB”). At 6-foot-4 and over 300 pounds, Brooks is a large, commanding presence. He is also an ex-felon with a court-documented history of mental illness; he was incarcerated for nearly a year in federal prison after pleading guilty to bank fraud, then later spent several stints in a New Hampshire county jail for repeatedly failing to pay child support.

Yet Brooks quickly went from total stranger to the Moore cousins’ business partner, wealth management advisor, real estate consultant, “senior executive reorganization specialist,” co-lessee and all around right-hand man. With Brooks’ guidance, Ben and Drue Moore pursued a hodgepodge of speculative and unfamiliar entrepreneurial endeavors, from commercial ware-washing to malted beverages, none of which have proven financially successful—at least not in the conventional sense. All the while, Winthrop profits have been funneled through a convoluted asset-concealment scheme involving shell companies, trusts, collusive lawsuits and questionable bankruptcies, according to court records and sources.

Their activities have been denounced in multiple courts, where opposing counsel and at least one judge have suggested the cousins are engaged in an illegal conspiracy. To date, Ben Moore has been sentenced to one 30-day jail sentence after being found in contempt for repeatedly ignoring discovery requests in the divorce proceedings with his now-ex-wife, where questions about the ownership and true value of Winthrop Intelligence have been central to the dispute.

“This case presents a unique problem to the Court created by (Moore’s) lack of disclosure and lack of credibility,” Colorado District Court Judge Lisa Arnolds wrote in her permanent orders in November 2021, accusing Ben and Drue Moore of colluding to “hide assets” from not only her court, but also the IRS.

“This case presents a unique problem to the Court created by (Ben Moore’s) lack of disclosure and lack of credibility.”

Colorado District Court Judge Lisa Arnolds

If that is true, then the Moores appear to have largely succeeded so far, and by doing so, they provide their most revealing case study: how easily confounded the justice system can be when it comes to addressing allegations or evidence of financial malfeasance.

The Moores and Brooks did not respond to repeated interview requests or dozens of specific questions emailed to them earlier this month.

Not unlike Win AD’s signature database, this article is built on thousands of public records, including state and federal court filings, police and jail documents, bankruptcy forms, transcripts of creditors meetings, property deeds and various financial disclosures. The reporting also incorporates interviews with sources, most of whom declined to speak on the record, citing fear of retribution from the Moores or Brooks; the latter, while not a lawyer like Drue Moore, has been a frequent litigant over the course of his life.

Indeed, Brooks’ role within the Winthrop saga appears to be very much in keeping with a hazardous career that has often been at loggerheads with the law. More mysterious, however, is why the Moore cousins, living lives of comfort and success, threw their lots in with him.

It’s a question that perplexes even Brooks’ own son.

“People act based upon incentive,” said Chase Brooks, 31, who partnered with his father and the Moores on two failed business projects, before having a falling out with the three. “Ben and Drue are no exception. They’re both intelligent people with plenty of logical reasoning skills. They either saw an abundance of opportunity if they stayed aboard, or an abundance of risk should they jump ship.”

BASE PRODUCT

The Moore cousins grew up in Rockford, Ill., a town where their family had long-standing ties. Willard Moore, their grandfather, was the first agency manager at the local State Farm Insurance branch, and Winthrop Intelligence was named for Winthrop Lane, on which he once resided.

Drue Moore attended the University of Tulsa for undergraduate and law school. After practicing as an attorney in Oklahoma, he moved to California to become a sports agent, co-founding a firm, Beach Sports Group, with famed entertainment lawyer Stanton “Larry” Stein, whose clients have included Simon Cowell, Post Malone and Drake. Moore later moved to North Carolina, where he took a job as vice president of corporate development and general counsel for Total Sports Inc., the book publisher that later merged with Quokka in a $132 million stock acquisition. 

Ben Moore, meanwhile, graduated from St. Olaf College in Minnesota and got his master’s in software engineering from the University of Minnesota. Moore married Amy Elizabeth, a schoolteacher-turned-sales rep, in 2006, and co-founded a company that offered a business-focused social media platform designed to track employee goals. SEC filings show the company raised a couple million dollars from Silicon Valley investors before sputtering out around 2013. Moore and Elizabeth would later divorce in May 2019.

In her divorce case, Elizabeth, who now works as a real estate agent, testified that Drue initially conceived the idea of the college sports database behind Winthrop Intelligence, but Ben’s technical skills were essential in its development. Elizabeth also testified she had put her sales commissions into Winthrop to get it off the ground. (Elizabeth declined repeated interview requests.)

Upon its launch in 2009, the Moore cousins deputized the front and back ends of Win AD to a go-getting sales director named Kevin Barefoot and a former IT head for a textile company named Kevin Cohen.

Cohen took over the duties of making the numerous public records requests of universities for their athletic department contracts. Barefoot became the public face of Win AD, as Ben and Drue willingly receded into the background. It became a common misconception in college sports circles that Barefoot was Winthrop’s owner. One of the only indications to the Moores’ involvement in the company is Drue’s role as signatory on its software service agreements with schools, though his title is listed as either “member” or “vice president.”

Both Barefoot, who now works as vice president of business development for Teamworks, and Cohen, who continues to work at Winthrop, declined to comment.

Despite its rapid market penetration, Winthrop Intelligence kept to its core business, resisting the temptations to bloat its staff or make a play for the numerous other needs of college athletic departments. Initially, a subscription to Win AD’s base product would cost a school an annual subscription fee of around $12,000; with its price having only marginally increased over 14 years, most college athletic departments have never thought twice about renewing.

Describing the company as a “cash cow,” Elizabeth told the divorce court how her and Ben Moore’s lives came to reflect the trappings of Winthrop’s success: They employed a daily housekeeper, a chef, and private tutors for their children, whom Elizabeth eventually began homeschooling so the family could travel around the world.

The family, previously based in Minnesota, relocated to Colorado in March 2014 at Ben Moore’s behest. Later, he would tell a court that the move was so he could take the position of CEO for a sterilization startup company, though this explanation strained credulity. After all, it was the following spring when Moore first became acquainted with Scott Brooks; according to multiple sources, Brooks was the one who introduced Moore to the idea of a new industrial dishwasher that used less soap and water. The two connected at an entrepreneurs meetup in Boulder, where Brooks was living at the time. 

In his CoFoundersLab profile, Brooks bragged of having served as the “youngest principal by far” of a company “stuffed with innovative real estate projects, non-invasive medical products and turnarounds.” He explained that he had since “opted to leave the East Coast,” so he could spend a year driving around “our amazing country in my old Saab convertible” before coming to Boulder.

However, according to court records and interviews, Brooks’ move to Colorado had come amid financial desperation and legal drama, including several bench warrants for his arrest over unpaid child support bills.

Although Chase Brooks had gone to college in Colorado, he was no longer there when his father settled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Chase Brooks says he doesn’t know exactly what drew Scott Brooks to the area, other than it was “a beautiful place that was far from his problems.”

ADD-ON FEATURE

Scott Brooks was born in New Hampshire. His father, Robert H. Brooks, was a former selectman in the town of Bedford, a suburb of Manchester, who had built a small real estate company called HABS from the ground up.

After graduating from Bentley University in Massachusetts and obtaining masters’ degrees in finance and accounting from Boston College and the London School of Economics, respectively, Scott Brooks eventually joined his father’s company, where he charted a far more ambitious vision of a real estate empire.

Charlie Normand, a high school friend who served as the best man in Scott Brooks’ wedding, described him as “very brilliant” and “personable.”

But Chase Brooks says that his father’s admirable qualities were routinely undermined by his personal demons.

“It became clear to me at a young age that my father’s risk tolerance was extraordinary. No level of success was ever enough.”

Chase brooks

“It became clear to me at a young age that my father’s risk tolerance was extraordinary,” Chase Brooks said. “No level of success was ever enough. My father was constantly leveraging himself to excruciating degrees simply because more was possible, and he couldn’t help but try to realize the next level of opportunity.”

This personality made for a “frequency of these boom-and-bust periods,” according to Chase. In 1988, one of Scott and Robert Brooks’ companies obtained two loans from an FDIC-insured bank worth $4.52 million; three years later, after the Brooks’ payments had become “irregular and incomplete,” the FDIC disaffirmed the loan notes and filed a lawsuit seeking repayment. Scott Brooks represented himself in the case, and the judge chastised his “unorthodox manner” before ruling in favor of the bank. (Robert Brooks could not be reached for comment.)

In 1996, a show cause hearing was held in another real estate-related lawsuit filed against Scott Brooks and his father by the estate of a decedent, in which the Brookses were again pilloried by a judge, who called them “obstreperous, uncompromising and difficult.”

“(I)t is apparent to the court that the defendants do not maintain any assets in their names individually and use (their) corporations only to funnel cash,” New Hampshire Superior Court Judge James J. Barry wrote.

Four years later, a federal grand jury indicted Brooks for making false statements and providing false documents in his original application for the loans. In October 2003, Brooks pled guilty to two counts of FDIC fraud. He was sentenced to a year in jail, followed by four years of supervised release during which he was barred from traveling overseas or obtaining any new credit, and he was required to receive court-ordered mental health treatment and take his psychiatric medication.

In his sentencing hearing, the judge told him, “[H]opefully you now recognize what you did was wrong and that there are consequences to that kind of behavior and you won’t engage in similar kinds of conduct in the future.”

Brooks ended up serving 11 months in federal prison and paid over $220,000 in restitution and fines. But despite the sentencing judge’s admonitions, Brooks appeared to carry on as he had before.

In 2005, a state court judge in Connecticut, who had previously ruled against Brooks and HABS in an equity action lawsuit brought by another real estate developer, ordered the Brooks’ companies to pay the opposing attorney’s fees and costs. In his ruling, Judge David B. Sullivan noted that the litigation was made “extremely complicated” by the corporate structure of Brooks’ companies and Scott Brooks’ “willingness to lie and perjure himself, as well as resist legitimate discovery.” 

Of Scott Brooks, the judge added, “He started with a very complicated game of hide the ball and ended with a complete lack of candor and truthfulness during the trial.”

Similar verdicts would be rendered as time went on.

In 2008, Brooks’ ex-wife filed a motion for contempt seeking unpaid child support he had been ordered to provide following their divorce in 2000. In a ruling signed by a New Hampshire family court judge, known in that state as a marital master, Brooks was called out for claiming to have no income while “somehow affording to maintain a lifestyle that is clearly luxurious.”

As it turned out, Brooks’ divorce process served as a dress rehearsal for Ben Moore’s many years later.

LOGIN CREDENTIALS

Amid the child-support arrearage and the various adverse legal rulings related to HABS, Brooks filed for bankruptcy in September 2009.

In his Chapter 11 petition, where he described his occupation as “entrepreneur,” Brooks claimed over $6 million in assets, almost all of which he attributed to claims in pending lawsuits that he would ultimately lose. Beyond those, he listed a vacation house on an island off the southeast coast of New Hampshire, which he ended up defaulting on; his 1993 Saab convertible; and $604 in sports and hobby equipment.

Between 2010 and 2012, Brooks served three stints as an inmate in the Carroll County Department of Corrections in New Hampshire, all for missed alimony payments, culminating with a 38-day lockup in August 2012. Chase Brooks says he was the one who drove his dad to the jailhouse, having taken a break from college to tend to Scott Brooks during this “particularly low point.” Scott Brooks’ financial situation had gotten so dire, according to his son, that he was purchasing diesel fuel to pour into the heating-oil tank of the home he was then sharing with Robert H. Brooks.

In the spring of 2014, at the same time Ben Moore and Elizabeth were moving their family to Colorado, Scott Brooks was facing yet another bench warrant in New Hampshire, as his child support back payments topped six figures. By then, he too had decided to relocate, driving cross-country with his then-girlfriend, Hannah Thomas, a recent architectural grad student from Scotland. In July 2014, the pair were randomly captured by a Getty Images photographer as they packed up their campsite along North Carolina’s Outer Banks, following a tropical storm evacuation order. In the photo, a small sliver of Scott Brooks’s red convertible appears in the background.

Less than a year later, Brooks would take a vital role in the financial and personal lives of Winthrop’s founders, so much so that he even helped Thomas land a gig with them. (She did not respond to emails and text messages seeking comment.)

For Brooks, this was not an unfamiliar situation. Over the years, according to several sources that knew him, he had successfully convinced a number of other accomplished professionals—be they childhood friends or recent acquaintances—to partner on business projects of one kind or another. These often ended unsuccessfully.  

“I think that now more than ever we are surrounded by examples of just how far some can get with a bit of charisma, an abundance of confidence, and a convenient set of credentials,” Chase Brooks said. “My father’s ability to tailor stories to the incentives of those he engages with is exactly what enables him. Seemingly reasonable people throw due diligence to the wind.”

CLEARING SPACE

Following his release from federal prison, Scott Brooks started thinking about how to clean things up. In 2007, he registered a New Hampshire company in order to pursue some of his ideas about creating more efficient sanitation products and devices for restaurants. Nearly a decade later, he and Ben Moore partnered on a new kind of “de-watered” restaurant dishwasher called CETO, which they proclaimed to be safer and less expensive than the available systems.

By early 2016, not long after the two first met in Boulder, Moore and Brooks began pitching their dishwasher concept to prospective customers, including Little Pub Co., which operates a string of bars and restaurants in the Denver area. Mark Berzins, Little Pub Co.’s CEO, said he was immediately taken by the idea.

He recalled Brooks as a charming, if somewhat quirky, lead pitchman, showing up for their initial meeting in a well-tailored suit and driving a new BMW. If there were any reasons to doubt Brooks’ legitimacy as a businessman, Berzins said those were allayed by the involvement of the Moore cousins, particularly Ben, who impressed Berzins as a young family man and sharp “datahead.”

Over the next couple of years, Berzins said, he followed CETO intently, eager to deploy the dishwashers in his establishments. Every so often, Brooks would send him updates. Though the project never advanced to the point of a live prototype, “Scott always seemed to have the funding to push the thing forward,” Berzins said.

At one point, Berzins recalled Brooks telling him of improvements they were making at the behest of Chick-fil-A. “Of course it was all bullshit,” Berzins said, though he confessed to believing it at the time.

“This is the classic (example) of using someone else’s good reputation to further your con.”

mark berzins

By 2018, Berzins was ready to give up on his prospective sanitation vendors, but then they offered him something else. One of Little Pub Co.’s bars had been leasing a building on St. Paul Street, in Denver’s affluent Cherry Creek neighborhood. The place was owned by John Silchia, a longtime city councilman.

The building was no longer ideal for Berzins’ bar, so he posted an ad seeking another restauranteur to buy him out of the lease. When Brooks found out about it, he offered to take over the space through CETO, saying that it was looking for a full-scale mock kitchen for testing prototypes. That seemed excessive for R&D, especially since the lease takeover was going to cost at least $100,000, but sure enough, the check came and the money cleared.

In light of that—and in a move he would ultimately come to regret—Berzins vouched to Silchia about the trustworthiness of the new occupants.

“This is the classic (example) of using someone else’s good reputation to further your con,” Berzins said.

ACTIVE DIRECTORY

More than tangible products, however, Brooks’ involvement with Winthrop occasioned the formation of many limited liability companies—across the United States and some in other countries. Most of them were given cryptic names that made it unclear to an outsider what, if anything, they actually did.

Throughout 2016, the Moore cousins were behind the registration of at least six LLCs in Wyoming alone, using a company called Opes Services as its registered agent. Opes is owned by D. Scott Robinson, a tax lawyer licensed in Wyoming and Colorado, whose name began appearing in place of Drue Moore’s as Winthrop’s official manager on the company’s annual reports filed in North Carolina (Drue’s Durham-based home continued to be listed as Winthrop’s official mailing address.)

Why Wyoming? The state is known to be a popular jurisdiction for businesses in search of anonymity; corporate entities there, unlike in many other states, are not required to publicize their actual members’ names. Sure enough, in July 2017, Winthrop Intelligence filed paperwork to domesticate from Delaware to Wyoming.

Two months earlier, Ben Moore had established a Wyoming “qualified spendthrift trust” called the Cushman Trust—named, like Winthrop, for a street in Rockford—designating himself its settler, Opes as a trustee and Drue Moore as the trust protector. According to Elizabeth’s court filings, Robinson had handled the drafting of the trust’s documents. (Robinson declined to comment for the story.)

Ben Moore would later claim that upon its creation, he had transferred his 50% interest in Winthrop into the Cushman Trust.

Elizabeth and the couple’s two children were the trust’s original beneficiaries, though it contained a “floating spouse provision,” which would remove Elizabeth as an heir if the couple were to enter divorce proceedings. Qualified spendthrift trusts are designed, in part, to be inoculated from creditors, and Wyoming provides a unique provision that allows for self-settled trusts, where the trust creator can also be its beneficiary.  

Ben Moore’s claims about when he had conveyed his Winthrop stake to Cushman were undermined by evidence in the divorce case, including copies of the company’s tax returns showing his continued ownership in the company through at least the end of 2017. In any case, Elizabeth would argue that the trust itself was a farce.

“LEARNING ROOM”

Foundational to the American legal system is the idea that its disputes are sincerely adversarial—one party truly opposed to another party, both advocating for their positions before a judge or jury.

Ostensibly, that is what Ben Moore was seeking to do on Dec. 23, 2016, when he filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit in federal court against six of the Wyoming LLCs recently created by the Moore cousins, along with one from Delaware—Wi Ventures LLC, which was then doing business as Winthrop Intelligence.

Earlier that year, Moore and Elizabeth had purchased two adjoining residential properties on South Fillmore Street in Denver, with plans to build a $5 million dream home. From the start, Scott Brooks was involved in this process, with property appraisal documents showing him listed as Ben Moore’s close contact. Hannah Thomas was even hired to draw up the architectural plans for the new home.

But the house would never get built, and the lots would soon become part of what Elizabeth called a “multi-year conspiracy” between her husband and his business associates, which commenced with the late 2016 litigation.

In essence, Ben Moore was suing Drue Moore, who had either ownership or controlling interest in each of the defendant companies. But since Ben had an interest in the companies through the Moore Family Office, he was also suing himself.

In a complaint full of logical holes and puzzling statements, Ben Moore tried to assert a nexus between the Wyoming LLCs and CETO, and the Fillmore properties.

He claimed to have purchased “four abutting single-family lots,” when, in fact, there was only a record of him and Elizabeth purchasing two. He also stated that the LLCs had made an offer to purchase these properties from him—an offer which he claimed to take quite seriously but then failed to make good on it. This wasted time, according to the lawsuit, cost Moore an opportunity to sell the lots to other potential buyers during a particularly tax advantageous time period. His suit asserted damages in excess of $2.8 million.

Moore was represented in the case by Denver attorney Michael J. Davis, who had previously handled legal matters for the couple. Davis also filed a contemporaneous motion to seal the entire case file and docket, because of the “sensitive nature of the transaction between Benjamin Moore and Drue Moore’s entities.” (Citing attorney-client confidentiality, Davis declined to comment for this story.)

Just five days later, on Dec. 28, 2016, Winthrop Intelligence paid Davis, in his capacity as Moore’s lawyer, $925,000 as a partial settlement payment. Barely a month after the lawsuit was filed, and without the defendants formally responding to the allegations, the parties entered into a settlement agreement. In February 2017, magistrate Judge Y. Nina Wang approved a consent judgment in favor of Ben Moore for roughly $5.5 million, though she denied his attempt to put the case file under seal.

“While this court is respectful of the Parties’ desire to maintain a level of confidentiality to their interactions,” the judge wrote, “the Parties have supplied no authority, and this court has found none, that suggests that parties’ private interests overcomes this court’s responsibilities to keep the judicial process available to the public and open to scrutiny.”

As for the remaining $4.56 million of the consent judgment, Ben Moore later told the divorce court that he had given away his rights to the money, though he provided no documentation that would account for this move.

Likely unbeknownst to Judge Wang was evidence indicating that, even before he filed his suit, Moore had been plotting with Brooks different ways to benefit financially from a legal settlement.

Handwritten notes and a diagram bearing Brooks’ and Moore’s penmanship detailed a plan whereby Winthrop Intelligence would pay a portion of a theoretical future court judgment to the Moore Family Office. The family office would then use that money to “pay off” a note payable obligation to Winthrop; loan Winthrop additional funds; and make a partial settlement payment to Brooks. “Now go around & around,” Brooks wrote, perhaps suggesting that this scheme was replicable.

In a separate flow chart filled with colorful stickies, Brooks diagrammed how money could flow offshore from the Wyoming LLCs, to Davis’ law firm accounts, and then to a company in the United Kingdom.

These records were obtained several years later by Elizabeth, who stated in an affidavit she submitted in Winthrop’s lawsuit against Harvard Cider that she discovered them while organizing her family’s financial records during the divorce process. Specifically, she said the flow chart had been left in the kids’ “learning room” of the family home.

DUPLICATE CODE

By the fall of 2017, Chase Brooks says his dad was in a relatively good state of mind, empowered by his association with the Moores. When Chase told his father about some of the financial challenges he was having with his own entrepreneurial pursuit, Harvard Cider, Scott offered to make an introduction to Ben and Drue.

The alcohol company had recently moved to a warehouse in Boston and rebranded under the name Prospect Ciderworks. Previously, it had operated out of an industrial warehouse space near co-founder Mark Finnegan’s family apple orchard in Harvard, Mass., 25 miles from Boston. The company’s big-city relocation proved to be more expensive than anticipated, Chase Brooks said, putting a crimp in its cash flow and halting its beverage production.

That October, Winthrop signed a memorandum of understanding with Harvard Cider to provide a $140,000 secure line of credit. The lending deal included a “clawback” provision, wherein Winthrop’s loan balances could be converted into equity in Harvard Cider at a rate of 1% ownership for every $15,000 that was due–up to 30.78% of the company. 

A month after the agreement was signed, Chase Brooks and Finnegan fired their third partner, Sam Copeland, whose father had previously loaned money to the cider marker.

In June 2018, Sam Copeland and his father filed suit in Massachusetts state court against Finnegan, Chase Brooks and Harvard Cider, claiming the younger Copeland had been wrongly “frozen out” of his shareholder interest in Harvard Cider and that his father was entitled to be paid back for his loans.

Chase Brooks would later file an affidavit in the case claiming that Scott Brooks and Drue Moore instructed him and Finnegan to represent themselves pro se, and arranged for Harvard Cider to be represented by an attorney named Jeremy Bombard, who Chase Brooks described as a part-time real estate broker with little relevant legal experience. (Finnegan did not respond to requests for comment.)

“(Scott Brooks) and Drue were vastly more experienced in business matters and legal affairs than I was, and I trusted them as our business partners and relied on their guidance and advice,” Chase Brooks wrote. “In addition, we were financially dependent on Winthrop.”

According to Chase, all of the court filings he and Finnegan entered into the case, as well as those by Harvard Cider, were actually drafted by Scott and Drue Moore.

In a telephone interview, Bombard declined to address the allegations that he did not write his own client’s pleadings, citing attorney-client confidentiality. He said he could not recall specifically how he was brought into the case, but that it was a “collaborative process.” Bombard also disputed Chase Brooks’ characterization of his experience, saying that although he was doing some real estate work at the time, he was not a broker, and that he had appropriate litigation experience.

On July 18, 2018, Ben Moore recorded a conversation he had with Scott Brooks and Michael Davis, the Denver attorney, in which the three of them discussed how they could file a lawsuit against Harvard Cider as a means of creating a “judgment payment scheme,” as Scott Brooks put it, to “manage wealth.” According to Elizabeth, she discovered the recording saved as a voice memo on her kid’s iPad. Along with the handwritings she had found, transcripts of the recordings would eventually materialize as evidence in several of the court cases.

“(A) capital company like us, we have losses and gains and VC losses, I mean, flying all the time,” Brooks is heard telling Moore and Davis on the recording.

“It just fits into the game, for them to have a $5 million loss in a company that has never made money,” Brooks added. “I can take it over—there is a million ways I can handle that.”

“BLURRED LINES”

Nine days later, Winthrop Intelligence and Scott Brooks filed a federal lawsuit against Harvard Cider, Chase Brooks and Mark Finnegan, alleging that they had been misled by the defendants about their business operating experience as well as the financial condition of their company. Though Harvard Cider reported sales that year of just over $580,000, Winthrop, in its takeover, asserted potential damages in the tens of millions of dollars.

The original complaint was drafted by Scott Brooks, who represented himself, and Davis, on behalf of Winthrop, and it identified Ben Moore as a member of the company, even though he purported to have already transferred his entire interest in Winthrop to the Cushman Trust. Scott Brooks, for his part, was described in the lawsuit as a resident of Denver who served as both Winthrop’s CIO and CFO and a “co-owner of the credit facility” that had been extended to Harvard Cider.

In motions containing identical answers, Harvard Cider, Chase Brooks and Mark Finnegan admitted every allegation made against them by Winthrop and Scott Brooks, including those alleging fraud–a striking act of concession for what was supposed to be a lawsuit among adversarial parties. This raised an eyebrow from the bench.

“I am concerned there are some blurred lines here,” Judge S. Kato Crews remarked in a May 5, 2020, telephone status conference.

The Copelands had been arguing all along that Winthrop’s action against Harvard was a collusive lawsuit designed so the Moores could obtain judgment that they could use to shelter their wealth.

Judge S. Kato Crews now seemed amenable to this theory.

“These are serious allegations which, if true, shed light on the oddity of three defendants [Chase Brooks, Mark Finnegan and Harvard Cider] each admitting, nearly wholesale, every allegation against them,” the judge observed.

In his affidavit, Chase said that in addition to their wealth management prerogatives, Scott Brooks’ and Drue Moore’s purpose for filing a “fraudulent lawsuit” was to “attack the Copelands.” One of the things that the Winthrop parties claimed in their lawsuit was that they were seeking to recover on a $7.3 million “western region” licensing deal with Harvard Cider. While he had initially substantiated this claim in his earlier answers to the lawsuit, Brooks later wrote in the affidavit that it was, in fact, “fabricated.” Though Harvard Cider was unable to pay rent for its lease space in Boston by early 2019, Chase Brooks said that at Scott Brooks’ and Drue Moore’s “direction,” they continued to “occupy the premises rent-free for another six months.”

“These are serious allegations which, if true, shed light on the oddity of three defendants each admitting, nearly wholesale, every allegation against them.”

Judge S. Kato Crews

This was not the first instance of alleged squatting.

In April 2018, Brooks was evicted from an apartment he was renting in Boulder for failing to make rent. Nevertheless, the following month he was seen driving around Denver in a black Bentley when Brooks and Ben Moore took up office space in John Silchia’s St. Paul Street building.

Though the premises were supposed to be the new headquarters for CETO, the technical party to the lease was Saint 575 LLC, another Wyoming-based entity that had been set up by D. Scott Robinson. Silchia recalled meeting Ben Moore early on, but says he was always under the impression that Brooks, who regularly parked the Bentley in front of his building, was the man running the show. 

“The guy was a real bullshitter,” said Silchia, who, after losing his city council seat in 2019, had moved to Phoenix and was primarily living off the income generated from his rental property.

ALL TALK AND SOME CIDER

With Harvard Cider struggling to pay its bills, Chase Brooks said he and Mark Finnegan in late 2018 pitched Scott Brooks and the Moores on entering the budding hard seltzer market, with an organic offering called Sup!

Chase Brooks remembers first casually broaching the idea, when the Moore cousins and his father were in Boston to visit the new Harvard Cider facilities. The Winthrop crew was enthusiastic about the idea and that fall, they registered a company called Liquid Collective in both Massachusetts and Wyoming. Chase said that as part of this collaboration, the Moores and Scott Brooks made verbal promises to provide at least $2 million in funding for the company.

In his affidavit in the Copelands’ lawsuit, Chase also said that Scott Brooks and Drue Moore instructed him and Finnegan to cease any direct communication with Ben Moore about the project, as they wanted to “create a record that Ben was not involved in the business, and that he did not have an ownership interest in Winthrop.”

Despite repeated requests, Chase said Winthrop routinely refused to memorialize the investment terms in any written agreement. Rather, at Scott Brooks’ behest, the company tried to find ways of further obscuring the identity of its ownership. For example, in February 2019, Liquid Collective LLC filed with the Wyoming Secretary of State to change its corporate name to AV USA LLC.

In April 2019, a trademark application for Sup! came from a newly registered Swiss company called Alps Ventures AG, whose purpose of record was to “manage, market, produce, trade, operate and sell sterilization equipment.” (The individual listed as manager of that company, Rolf Müller, a Zurich-based real estate investment manager, declined to comment in response to a LinkedIn message.)

By now, the Moores had reassigned Kevin Barefoot from his role as Win AD’s sales director to selling Sup!, even though he had no experience in liquor retail. Chase Brooks said Barefoot proved to be a quick study, and Sup!’s product placement was going well, with major chains like Jewel-Osco, Whole Foods and Publix all agreeing to put the beverage on their shelves.

Despite this, Scott Brooks was a constantly combative presence in the company’s operations, according to multiple people involved, with Chase often bearing the brunt of his father’s outbursts. At one point, it had gotten so bad that Chase attempted to vote Scott out of Liquid Collective, but the Moores stood by their man.

“Looking back on how everything played out, it’s striking in my memory that Scott was introduced to me as the person who was going to de-risk the investment,” said Michael Kiser, the founder of Chicago’s Good Beer Hunting Studio, which was hired to do the marketing strategy for Sup!

“Looking back on how everything played out, it’s striking in my memory that Scott was introduced to me as the person who was going to de-risk the investment.”

michael kiser

On June 5, 2019, Chase Brooks was supposed to be deposed by the Copelands’ lawyer in their lawsuit against Harvard Cider, which, by that point, was effectively controlled by Winthrop. It was the third time that the Massachusetts superior court had ordered Chase to appear.

QUITTING THE APPLICATION

In his affidavit, Chase said that Drue and Scott Brooks had repeatedly pressured him not to submit to a deposition. This time, they told him of their plans to file a bankruptcy petition against Harvard Cider, to ensure that he wouldn’t have to answer the Copelands’ questions on the record. Chase Brooks noted in his affidavit that filing for bankruptcy had long been a “tactic” his father used to disrupt unfavorable litigation.

So on June 4, 2019, Winthrop filed a Chapter 11 petition putting Harvard Cider into bankruptcy. The petition listed Michael Davis as Winthrop’s attorney in the case, even though the lawyer had not long before represented Ben Moore in his lawsuit against Winthrop. The petition also established Winthrop as a major creditor of Harvard Cider, claiming that the companies had previously agreed to a $6.2 million settlement agreement.

However, according to Chase Brooks’ affidavit, this settlement was a “sham” orchestrated to give Winthrop priority in the creditors’ line and stymie the Copeland litigation. In an interview, Brooks said that his father and the Moores were most concerned about the Copelands’ ability to tie their Harvard Cider claims to the newly-established Liquid Collective.

After some production issues with other manufacturers, Liquid Collective signed a production agreement in November 2019 with Milwaukee Brewing Company, which had just built a gleaming new, multimillion-dollar facility and was on the prowl for contract brewing business.

By then, Chase Brooks said, he had been trying to find ways to wrest his hard seltzer brand from Winthrop and his father. He said that despite its initial seven-figure promises, Winthrop ended up providing less than $500,000, meted out in meager denominations that put him and the business in a continuously submissive state.

Chase Brooks pushed for a more encompassing partnership with Milwaukee Brewing, which would increase the market power of Sup! while diluting the influence of its investors. In January 2020, Liquid Collective and Milwaukee Brewing Company signed a letter of intent to form a new collaborative beverage business venture. That March, the companies announced their collaboration, which they said would lead to a 20-state expansion of Sup! and the imminent test-piloting of the first “climate neutral certified” hard seltzer.

But behind the scenes, the underlying terms of the production agreement were fundamentally in dispute. With the dawning of COVID-19, Chase Brooks had concluded that despite its early success—he estimated that about $250,000 of Sup! had been sold by that point–the project was futile so long as it was controlled by Winthrop. He resigned in March 2020, and soon thereafter communicated to his father and the Moore cousins that he had no interest in having further contact with them.

DATA DISCREPANCIES

On May 28, 2019, a week before the Harvard Cider bankruptcy, Elizabeth filed for the dissolution of her marriage with Ben Moore. She cited irreconcilable differences, later accusing her ex-husband of being “more focused on his business partners and reaching his personal financial dreams than he was on his wife and his children.”

In a statement, Elizabeth’s attorney, Jordan Fox, said that Ben Moore had encouraged his client to file for divorce after she gave him an ultimatum to choose between either her or Brooks. Fox declined further comment for this story.

A year prior to the split, Ben Moore applied for a real estate loan from MidFirst bank in Denver, a process in which Brooks was intimately involved, according to documents and court testimony. In the course of the loan application, Moore furnished a personal balance sheet claiming a net worth at the time of over $32 million, $19 million of which he attributed to his stake in CETO. In a letter to the bank’s loan officer, Heather McCoy, which later became evidence in his divorce, Moore referred to Winthrop’s 2016 tax return showing the company generated $2.8 million in profits that year.

Holding himself out as the CFO of the Moore Family Office, Brooks also vouched for Ben Moore’s net worth, telling McCoy that his income at time worked out to around $123,000 a month.

“In short, Ben has the cash flow, the capacity, the collateral, and I don’t believe there is any question about his character,” Brooks wrote to McCoy in an email. (McCoy declined to comment for this story.)

However, in a new personal balance sheet Moore drafted three days after Elizabeth filed for divorce,  he now claimed a net worth of $11.6 million and insisted the lion’s share of it, $9.5 million, was tied up in an ownership interest in Winthrop that had already been transferred to the Cushman Trust.

So began what Judge Arnolds would later describe as a two-and-a-half-years-long “game of hide-the-ball and keep-away” by Moore, ultimately leading the court to grant seven contempt citations against him.

Four months into the proceedings, Michael Davis attempted to appear in the case as Moore’s co-counsel, shortly after Davis had been ordered by the judge to produce records and give a deposition to Elizabeth as a trial witness. 

“I don’t think you understand that Ben’s generational wealth is tied up specifically with the goal in mind that an ex-wife can’t get to it,” Davis wrote to Elizabeth’s attorney on Oct. 2, 2019, in an email that would later become evidence in the divorce case. “And there are many attorneys who have worked on that longer and harder than you and I can ever imagine with that specific goal in mind.”

Given, among other concerns, that he had previously represented Elizabeth, Davis was disqualified from appearing on behalf of Moore in this case.

HUFFING AND “PUFFING”

Initially, Moore sought extensions to comply with the financial disclosures divorcing spouses are required to provide, so as to establish the size of a marital estate. When Moore eventually got around to it, Elizabeth contended that he had failed to account for millions of dollars, including the $5.5 million consent judgment he received as part of the lawsuit he filed against the Wyoming LLCs.

She also sought to have sole power of attorney to sell the Fillmore Street lots, which were then on the cusp of a foreclosure auction after Moore had stopped making their mortgage payments. The judge granted her request.

A few weeks earlier, Moore and Scott Brooks filed a “land development agreement” with the City and County of Denver. The document, which bore a date from almost three years earlier, stipulated that Brooks and Moore were to be the sole beneficiaries of any proceeds from the sale of one of the lots. Specifically, the agreement stated that Brooks was to automatically receive the first $400,000 and 40% of any remaining proceeds from the property’s sale.

With the court’s approval, Elizabeth sold the properties for $975,000 on Oct. 25, 2019. Three days earlier, just as Moore was due to face a hearing on several of the contempt citations, Winthrop Intelligence came to his rescue, putting him into involuntary bankruptcy and thus staying the divorce proceedings.

The terse four-page Chapter 7 petition claimed that Moore owed Winthrop $608,000 on account of an unspecified “contract.” The petition was withdrawn a month later, before it could be scrutinized by a judge, only to be followed by a second Chapter 7 petition filed by Brooks against Ben Moore on Jan. 22, 2020.

Claiming a debt of at least $400,000, Brooks told the bankruptcy court that one of the reasons he had filed the petition was because he worried of “potential fraudulent conveyances” in the divorce case. And yet, Brooks withdrew the petition a few months later. By then, the bankruptcies had served their purpose: halting the divorce case for at least three months.

When the case resumed, the judge pressed Moore about the discrepancies in his stated net worth he had disclosed to the court and to MidFirst bank just one year before. Moore explained that he had openly exaggerated his assets in the loan application, which was well understood by the bank. CETO, he told the judge, was nothing close to a multimillion-dollar venture and the dishwasher was “never more than an idea.” In fact, Moore valued his actual stake in the company at $36,000, calling the $19 million figure he had previously assessed it at as merely an act of “puffing.”

LIQUID DETECTION

On May 7, 2020, Liquid Collective filed for Chapter 11. The “skeletal” bankruptcy petition listed Drue Moore as the company’s lone member and Brooks as its “senior executive reorganization specialist.”

Subsequent filings would later assert that Drue Moore and the Moore Family Office held a 51% stake in the company, while AV USA LLC, the pseudonym for the Wyoming-registered Liquid Collective LLC, held the remaining 49%.

As the bankruptcy judge would later note, the original petition failed to contain a number of basic disclosures, including schedules and a statement of financial affairs. The court entered a notice of deficiency and later granted an extension of time for Scott Brooks and Drue Moore to provide that information. But the deadline was missed and neither Scott Brooks nor Moore showed up at a meeting of the creditors in June, leading the bankruptcy judge, Kimberly Tyson, to issue a show cause order demanding they explain why they should not be held in contempt. Ultimately she ruled to convert the case to Chapter 7 and the disclosures were eventually provided.

Liquid Collective blamed its bankruptcy on being undermined by Milwaukee Brewing Company. In his affidavit, however, Chase blamed his father and Moore for the companies not being able to come together in a merger. (Milwaukee Brewing Company’s representatives declined to comment.)

No longer financially reliant on Winthrop, Chase Brooks sent an email to the Department of Justice’s bankruptcy fraud tip email account on May 19, 2020, claiming to have evidence of potential crimes committed by the “investors” of Liquid Collective and Harvard Cider. He told Sportico he didn’t receive any response, and the public affairs department for DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

The next day, the Copelands, acting as an intervenor in Winthrop and Scott Brooks’ federal lawsuit against Harvard Cider, filed a motion to dismiss the case. The 16-page document, which sought to terminate the litigation over jurisdictional issues, accused the Moore cousins and Scott Brooks of engaging in a “collusive lawsuit” as part of broader “racketeering activity.”

“Given the vast web of shell entities created by (Scott Brooks) domestically and internationally and his endless appetite for dissembling, obfuscation and racketeering, the Copelands are well aware that obtaining a civil judgment would be a Pyrrhic victory,” the motion stated. “They have shone light on this illicit enterprise with the hope that it will serve the public good.”

In a statement, Sam Copeland said that as the guarantor of loans and lease accounts with Harvard Cider, he was forced to “shoulder the burden of those costs” while at the same time paying for business school. He and his father never reclaimed any money from the company, according to Copeland, nor their “very costly” attorneys fees.

“We invested three years in the court system and found it to be very disappointing,” he said.

Winthrop officially let Kevin Barefoot go the following month. According to Chase and other sources, Barefoot had not been paid by either Winthrop or Liquid Collective for months and left with a five-figure, unreimbursed credit card debt owing to Sup!-related expenses.

“I think he was one of the most talented sales people I worked with, and he absolutely got victimized,” said one person familiar with the situation, who agreed to speak on the condition they not be named. “I think it is one of the worst things I saw.” But there were other candidates.

STORAGE PROBLEM

On June 19, 2020, John Silchia filed an eviction lawsuit to remove “Saint 575 LLC” and “all other occupants” from his premises, claiming the tenants were behind more than $13,000 on their rent. Leading up to that moment, Silchia told Sportico that Scott Brooks had attempted to negotiate a lower rent on account of the pandemic.

“I said ‘you have to be kidding me,’” Silchia recalled. “‘Brooks, you are driving a goddamn Bentley, and you’re asking me to lower the rent?’ So, they said they wouldn’t pay it.”

When Berzins found out about the dispute, he tried to reach Brooks to figure out what was going on, but says his calls went unreturned. 

By the time Silchia was finally able to access his property, following a judge’s eviction court order on July 8, 2020, he said he was brought to tears by the condition of the place—there were holes in the walls and floors, damage to the wiring, missing windows and pocks on the facade. Silchia theorizes that his tenants had tried to turn the place into such a mess as to render it unrentable. 

With his nest egg depleted by legal fees, and his prime source of income in disrepair, Silchia says he ended up setting up a bed in the building and living there for four months. “I was broke,” he said. “The restaurant income is pretty sizable, but this is all I had.” Even years later, he swells with emotion when recounting the experience.

“I am such an idiot,” he said.

MILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION

In August 2020, a creditors meeting for the Liquid Collective bankruptcy was held by conference call. It had been delayed for months as Scott Brooks and Drue Moore failed to meet filing deadlines and provide necessary disclosures. 

Leading the call was the court-appointed trustee Harvey Sender, who evinced a deep skepticism about the business of not only Liquid Collective but also Winthrop. Sender repeatedly pressed Brooks about his role in the struggling hard seltzer start-up. Brooks explained that he had been employed by the Moore cousins to serve as the company’s “turnaround guy,” in exchange for $1 million “if it comes together.”

The deal, Brooks confessed, was never put in writing.

“I wish I did it better,” Brooks said, “but it’s a verbal agreement with guys I trust.”

Sender asked what specifically he was supposed to do in order to earn his seven-figure fee. 

“Make it work or kill it,” Brooks said.

Sender was incredulous. “So, you get a fee for taking on this role even if it doesn’t go anywhere?” he asked.

Brooks avoided directly answering that question. “I suspect we’ll all be litigating over … damages in the context of it going sideways. I see the mess coming,” he said

Of course he did; he would initiate it.

On Nov. 18, 2020, Brooks filed a $3.2 million breach-of-contract lawsuit in Colorado federal court against Ben Moore, Elizabeth, Fox, MidFirst Bank and the couple who had later purchased the S. Fillmore St. lots from the marital estate. He accused the collective group and numerous “John Does” of a scheme to deprive him of the money he claimed he was due from the sale of the properties.

In a Zoom interview, Brooks’ attorney in the case, Andrew Quiat, described his client as “one of the brightest” he’s represented in his four decades practicing law.

“I have pursued some fairly notable con artists on the other side of the equation over the years,” Quiat added. “And Scott is a very bright guy and sophisticated in every sense of the word.”

As had been the pattern, Ben Moore readily acceded to many of the claims in Brooks’ lawsuit against him and the other co-defendants, then used the venue to file counterclaims against Elizabeth and Fox. None of these allegations amounted to anything, as the case was withdrawn by Brooks before the judge was able to rule on motions to dismiss.

Quiat said he continues to stand behind the allegations his client raised in the case, and had no reason to believe the litigation was collusive, though the attorney acknowledged that he might have had an incomplete understanding of Brooks’ track record.

“Your correspondence to me was out-of-the-blue and most interesting,” Quiat told Sportico, after receiving a series of questions for this story. “It has presented me with a wealth of questions and information of which I was previously unaware.”

“OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE”

On Aug. 18, 2021, the second special master appointed in the divorce case, Nancy E. Rice, the former chief justice of the Colorado Supreme Court, issued her determinations about the Cushman Trust.

Rice noted that despite Moore’s timeline for transferring his 50% stake in Winthrop, there were too many records that told a different story: a tax return he had provided to MidFirst bank, showing his ownership through the 2017; the lawsuit he had filed in 2018, in which his ownership of Winthrop was asserted in order to obtain venue in the Colorado federal court; Michael Davis’ email to Jordan Fox about the impenetrability of “Ben’s generational wealth”; and the personal balance sheet Moore had produced in 2019, where he “affirmatively stated” that he retained his interest in the company.

“I have pursued some fairly notable con artists on the other side of the equation over the years. And Scott is a very bright guy and sophisticated in every sense of the word.”

Andrew Quiat

According to Rice’s ruling, some of Elizabeth’s key pieces of evidence were other handwritten notes by Ben Moore that she says demonstrated his intent all along for Drue, as trust protector, to “change the beneficial interest of the trust to (Ben).”

The “overwhelming evidence,” Rice concluded, was that the Cushman Trust was “illusory and fraudulent … created with the specific purpose of depleting or concealing marital assets in contemplation of these divorce proceedings.”

The marriage was officially dissolved two weeks later at the end of a four-day hearing before Judge Arnolds. In his closing argument before the court, Moore attempted to paint Elizabeth as a greedy and vindictive ex-spouse who was hellbent on sending him to jail.

“Wife’s entire case is based upon the premise that what Mr. Brooks told the bank in 2018 was absolutely true and is binding upon this court,” Moore’s divorce attorney, Samuel Stoorman, wrote the judge. “The uncontroverted testimony is that it was not.”

Moore blamed his previous duplicity in the loan application process to being “under tremendous pressure” in trying to simultaneously satisfy his wife’s desire for expensive real estate while appeasing his “aggressive business partner Scott Brooks.”

Moore’s version of events did not sway the court.

On Nov. 12, 2021, Judge Arnolds ordered him to pay Elizabeth a lump-sum settlement of $17.5 million, in addition to $21,175 in monthly spousal and child support payments over the ensuing decade. Moore was also sentenced to a mandatory minimum of 30 days in jail (18 with good behavior) as a punitive sanction on one of the contempt charges. The sentence was stayed pending appeal.

“Ultimately, the orders issued by this Court are based on the Court’s finding that Father was at best lacking in credibility and potentially blatantly lying to the Court,” Judge Arnolds concluded. “The Court notes for (Moore) that all numbers used have come from his own documents. If they are fraudulent numbers all the Court can say is ‘O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!’”

Three days later, Quiat filed a lawsuit in Colorado state court against Scott Brooks, who he accused of failing to pay over $46,000 in legal bills, after initially plunking down a $114,931 retainer.

TERMS OF SERVICE

It remains unclear to what extent the Moore cousins remain engaged with Brooks, whose current whereabouts could not be confirmed.

After filing suit, Quiat attempted to have Brooks served at a luxury condominium unit in Scottsdale, Ariz., which he had previously given as his address and where his name was still listed on the building’s call box. According to court records, when the process server called up to the apartment, a man who identified himself as “Scott” answered, telling the process server to “leave him the f— alone,” and that the “Robert” being searched for would be out of town for the next several months.

When Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies later tried to serve Brooks at that same condo, they reported that the individual who answered the door said he did not know who Brooks was.

This past April, Brooks’ ex-wife also attempted to have him served at that address. According to a sheriff deputies’ report, an unidentified 40-something male answered the door of the condo unit, insisting Scott Brooks did not reside there. Court records indicate that Brooks’ ex-wife, who declined to comment, has not further pursued the matter.

Quiat, on the other hand, filed a default judgment against Brooks and in May the court awarded him $173,556, based on interest and treble damages. The court later attached a charging order to a delinquent Colorado business Brooks had incorporated shortly after he moved to the state in 2015: Habs Real Estate LP.

Charlie Normand, Brooks’ old friend, said he called and left a phone message last month wishing Brooks a happy 61st birthday, but never heard back. Chase Brooks says that he last communicated with his father in the summer of 2020, when he cut off contact with him and the Moores. Several of Brooks’ relatives contacted for this story declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.

In June, Chase Brooks said he received an out-of-the-blue email from Ben Moore, offering to introduce him to another friend in the hard-beverage industry, and a follow-up invitation to talk on the phone. Mostly out of curiosity, Brooks said, he took Moore up on the latter offer. 

“He spoke as if we were just catching up,” Brooks recalled, describing the exchange as “f—ing bizarre.”

In mid-November, Moore filed his reply brief with the Colorado Court of Appeals, requesting a new hearing on “all issues” in his divorce case. He accused Judge Arnolds, who now oversees Denver’s criminal problem-solving courts, of behaving not as an impartial jurist, but as his ex-wife’s “advocate and prosecutor.”

Five days later, on Nov. 19, Moore was remarried to his new wife at a ceremony in Boulder; a week after that, he filed a petition to modify his child and spousal support payments to Elizabeth, claiming  a “substantial and continuing change of income.”

The parties are now waiting on the appellate ruling expected sometime later this year. Even if Elizabeth prevails, she will only be able to collect on the multi-million-dollar divorce judgment if she is able to find a record of those monies, which has so far proven elusive–and expensive.

Nearly three years after it was filed, the Liquid Collective bankruptcy is coming to an end and, with it, Winthrop Intelligence’s belligerent excursion into booze. The bar date for administrative expense claims was last week.

An experienced bankruptcy lawyer and administrator, Sender, the trustee, is no stranger to dealing with recalcitrant debtors. And yet, on that score, this particular one stands out: the cousins who have made millions selling other people’s information are anything but businesslike when it’s their turn to disclose.

“Their activities have been generally unusual and very difficult to deal with,” Sender said. “It is like pulling teeth to get information out of them.”