Original subtitles

[ Crossing signal clanging ]

[ Train horn blows ]

Purves: We're in Opelika, Alabama.

Sunny Opelika, Alabama.

I'll certainly say Kyle Sandler is a swindler.

He was a crook that showed up in town

and swindled a whole load of people

with some cockamamie story that he cooked up.

There are a lot of people who'd like

to get their hands on him, I think.

[ Chuckles ]

Hey, it's Kyle from Nibletz.com,

brought to you by the Round House,

Alabama's fastest start-up space.

Kyle Sandler. He was a...

He was a character.

Failure is good. Fail fast.

When you're a start-up entrepreneur,

failure is part of the game.

There's this popular culture stereotype

of start-up guys,

and it's definitely Kyle.

They use words like exit.

They refer to money in "K."

What am I going to do for the next four hours?

Hustle, grind, and work, guys. That's what we do.

Marsh: There's this idea of social capital,

especially in small towns in the South.

Everyone gets some social capital to start with,

and you can either spend it wisely

or you can spend it poorly, and he spent it poorly.

And that is why he is in jail.

♪♪

[ Sirens wailing ]

♪♪

Opelika is such a small little town, you know.

You drive through downtown and it looks very cute and historic.

I covered everything Opelika related.

I remember we had a black bear loose in downtown Opelika.

Reporter: A wild morning in Opelika

as a black bear wanders through...

We ended up actually winning a bunch of awards

for that coverage.

Fuller: I'm just an old country mayor,

but we've got so many things to be proud of.

Shane: Your love for Opelika. Can't help yourself.

[ Laughing ] Yeah, I got caught up in my own rhetoric.

Of course, we have this thing called Touch-A-Truck,

and there's every kind of truck

that a kid wants to crawl all over.

♪♪

Marsh: I'm a bartender. I hear everything that goes on.

I've lived in these 10 blocks my entire life.

Hence my Opelika shirt

and my Opelika tattoo.

Isn't that great?

We've always been an industrial city.

We were very pivotal in the cotton trade

and very rowdy for a long time.

They used to tell people to duck

when they came through on the train

because people would always be shooting.

Kyle Sandler...

I should probably tell you how I met him the first time.

So, he comes in and he starts telling us

how he used to be at Google

and he wants to come and spend some money in Opelika

and he wants to build a coworking space, right?

And like an incubator thing.

Automated voice: #StartupAmerica.

#Watch.

The future is here.

#AdidasSuperStar.

Now this is just epic.

Computer emoji.

#MayTheForceBeWithYou.

Kyle had this kind of nerdy look about him.

You know, he wore his glasses, he always, always had

his cellphone in his hand.

He told everyone that he worked for Google at one point in time

and that he had set his sights on Opelika

because Opelika was Alabama's first gig city.

♪♪

We want to make the internet fun again

with our new fiber-optic network.

Our 1,000 megabits of unharnessed speed online

is literally to the wall.

Opelika was very proud of that claim to fame.

Reporter: The Round House opened in November,

as Opelika is only one of only seven cities in the nation

offering fiber networks to businesses.

We're attracting start-ups and companies

from across the country that need access to big data.

The first time I met him,

he did say that he was gonna make Opelika

the Silicon Valley of the east.

Marsh: So, the Round House started in 2014,

and in the beginning it was this very bright, exciting thing.

Because what you had was like 20 start-up companies in there,

and it was a Monster Energy and Red Bull-fueled

pile of craziness.

Almost every day, I'd head over.

-Look, it's the bartender! -Whoo!

Marsh: The first night, they had those hoverboards,

and people were jousting with them.

And there was a snack bar in there

that he always kept stocked like a fat kid at Christmas.

Just junk food everywhere.

♪♪

It was a hoot.

It was just a strange, strange place.

I'm a serial entrepreneur

and I've had numerous business ideas.

The most recent is called the Can-Can --

a round, portable toilet.

It was designed for advertising, so you would actually wrap it

to make it look like beer cans, or batteries, or anything round.

At the Round House, my role was basically a mentor

for the young entrepreneurs.

I would review business plans and look at their pitches.

Weston: My project is called the West Vest,

and it was a hunting vest for quail.

There's four pockets on the front where you can keep stuff,

and then in the back right here there's a zipper.

And then there's, like, little cooling bags

that go in in the back,

and that's where you stick your birds whenever you shoot them.

Eletrabi: I'm the co-founder and CEO of Tennibot.

Think of Tennibot as Roomba for tennis balls.

It runs around the court and picks up balls

while you are playing.

Jones: Everybody there was very passionate.

You know, you go in there at 1:00, 2:00 a.m.,

there was always a group of young entrepreneurs

and maybe even Kyle, to some extent, staying there working.

I think I got less than an hour of sleep.

Jason's up! Jason, did you sleep here?

What's up, Zuckerberg?

Baas: The very first day of my job,

they sit me at the front and said,

"You're going to be the community manager."

And I said, "I don't even know what that means, but okay."

[ Laughs ]

Alright. I'll find out what that means.

I was super excited just to be a part of a movement.

Automated voice: #TechCrunchDisrupt.

#StartupLife.

Coffee emoji.

#SouthBySouthWest.

I'm lovin' it.

Baas: Kyle definitely had a way of talking about things

that made you feel like, "Wow, I want to know about that."

Like virtual reality.

Like, buzzwords that people around here

didn't necessarily understand and wanted to know more.

He told me that he worked at Google,

he was one of the very first Google employees,

that he lived above an ice cream shop

where all the very first Google people

would go and get ice cream,

and that he began to work with them from the very beginning.

And I was like, "That's cool. Wow."

It's Kyle the Droid Guy live at Eureka Ball...

Baas: He said he made a lot of money doing that.

And then he went on to start a couple different start-ups,

sold those and had good exits on those.

He talked about big tech companies

and different conferences.

We're going to Defcon, which is going to be epic.

If you went to Defcon with us last year,

you guys know that we rented out a really big club

and had over 5,000 people.

He carried a persona of wealth.

You know, he bought car after car after car.

♪♪

He had a sports car and he had a Hummer.

I had seen Kyle driving around town

a few times in his Jag and I was kinda like,

"Whoa, okay, that does not look like

it belongs here in downtown Opelika."

♪♪

Baas: Kyle needed investors,

and Kyle was really great at marketing the Round House.

He would pitch to investors,

$10,000 got you one point in Round House.

Wacker: I met Kyle at Rotary.

And, of course, he was selling shares in the Round House.

What was supposed to happen was we were investing

in the Round House that would turn around

and invest money in these young, in these small companies.

And they would invest the money for a piece of the action,

sort of like the television show "Shark Tank,"

where they give somebody money,

but they get a piece of the action in return, okay?

And that money would then be divvied up

between the investors.

He was very subtle on how he sold stuff.

He didn't pressure you to give him your money.

You went to him and said,

"I'd like to give you some of my money."

That detached attitude, it was almost just like,

"I don't give a fuck, you know. If you want to be in, you're in.

If you're not, you're not."

I think that probably drew people in, as well.

I ultimately put $50,000 in.

I know there were people that invested much more than that.

Well, you know, I mean, aim high, miss high.

Shoot for the moon, right?

In America, you have to remember,

we'd been dealing with a capital glut

amongst the wealthiest people in this country for years.

This is old, old, old money, right?

And for a lot of older people, this was the first start-up guy

they had ever met.

Okay, now I'm ready. Sorry about that, everybody.

Thanks for listening to Opelika radio.com.

And today I hope to see you at the Round House

for lunch and learn, a community meeting starting at noon

with free pizza from Marco's.

And let's jam.

Baas: Almost every day was a fun day at Round House.

He opened the doors for anyone to come in

and be a part of it.

For myself, Kyle just tapped into my potential

as a community leader.

I never saw myself as that before.

I mentored, I set up pitches and community events.

We've done everything from helping Chris and Angela

open up their ice cream business

to very, very high-tech stuff and everything in between.

He did some really nice things for people.

He helped people.

This morning, Liam called the shots.

Baas: For example, there's a little boy had cancer,

and he took him on a shopping spree.

I could hear him whispering, "Yes, yes, yes!"

And I was like, "Yeah, this is cool."

Baas: He was super involved with different organizations

that were fostering entrepreneurs.

And so he would always go to those

and then invite them into the Round House for pitches.

Every single company that worked in there

had ambitions to be great.

So, um, I guess I'll start with my story.

So, I'm -- My name is Parker Owen.

Parker Scott Owen.

I don't know how far back you wanna go.

Through elementary school and through middle school,

I was the most nerdy person you can imagine.

But in an engineering kind of way, not like Comic-Con.

In high school, I invented a prosthetic leg

made from a bicycle for third-world use.

I ended up winning an international engineering award,

going to the White House,

becoming a keynote speaker for about a year there.

By the time that I graduated,

I really wanted to just go to a state school

and kind of just breeze through it.

[ Drum line playing ]

So, I ended up at Auburn University,

where I started building my first company.

The name of my company is Frapz -- fraternity wraps.

Frapz was the leasing of college students' laptops

for third-party advertisers.

You can imagine this being like Coca-Cola, Pepsi.

And we could actually detect

how many people within a radius of about 15 to 20 feet

you were advertising to in real time.

At the time, we were about $600,000 dollars from finishing

our $2.5 million round.

There's a bunch of entrepreneurship professors

from Auburn University that had invested in this

incubator accelerator in Opelika.

And they told me, "Man, you got to see this guy.

His name is Kyle Sandler.

He was one of the first 100 employees of Google."

So I eventually walked in and met with Kyle.

And he was extremely interested.

He told me from point blank, he said,

"This is something that I want to invest in.

I can write you a check right now

for the full $2.5 million,

but I want to talk to some other people first."

So I was like, okay.

We'll finish this thing out.

At some point, we gave paperwork to Kyle,

and he signed for $500,000.

So we had him on the hook, legally, did everything right.

One of the things that happened next is on our way out,

there was some press there from the local news...

We're here at the Round House in downtown Opelika..."

Owen: And there was this guy that was

quite an interesting character himself.

His name was John McAfee.

And he said, "Boys, you want to know something?"

You know, John McAfee?

McAfee Antivirus software?

Sure, we want to know something, right?

And he told me, point blank, the first time that he met us

is that he had done more cocaine than he weighs.

And I was...

I looked at Connor and I was like,

"What did we get ourselves into?"

Like, who are these people?

[ Scoffs ]

[ Laptop clatters ]

Oh. Hello there. My name is John McAfee.

I am the founder of the McAfee anti-virus software company.

McAfee is one of the best-known names

in anti-virus software.

You've probably used it on your computer.

Today, its founder and namesake John McAfee

is being sought by authorities in Central America.

Police in Belize want to talk to McAfee

about the killing of his neighbor.

McAfee: I've been on the move for two years

because the government of Belize is trying to silence me.

I have a great deal of information

that implicates the government...

He speaks with such a calm, consistent paranoia, right?

You just get the sense that this is just reality

and you just haven't noticed it yet.

And, you know, "Let's go get lunch and talk about the time

that I started a militia in Colombia."

I actually asked Kyle

why you were partnered with John McAfee,

and he said, "Well, John's got a lot of credibility.

Makes this place look good."

Reporter: John McAfee founded Future Tense Central in 2013.

McAfee is growing his company within Opelika's Round House.

Fuller: There was a story in USA Today

where McAfee had a pistol.

Kyle got all upset

because he thought that was going to upset me.

And so McAfee himself called me about that, and I said,

"Hey man, this is Alabama."

I said, "Everybody's got a gun."

I got one myself.

Marsh: John McAfee comes in, and this is where we see

this first pivotal change.

A lot of the credibility of the Round House

starts getting tied to McAfee's name.

Of course, the best thing is

McAfee says he's running for president.

Alabama's first gig city is now the home

to a presidential campaign headquarters

for the first time ever.

The office right as you came in on the left

was the international headquarters for the election

for John McAfee. [ Laughs ]

It is near certain that the authors

of America's Declaration of Independence

could not have anticipated a world

in which spy cameras are hidden in cactuses.

♪♪

♪♪

[ Train horn blows ]

Hughes: I met Kyle in February of 2015,

when I joined the Opelika Rotary Club.

I think there were some definite folks in Opelika,

I think there were some folks in Opelika leadership

that really thought Kyle Sandler

was going to do big things for Opelika.

There were some folks that were drinking the Kool-Aid

as far as Kyle Sandler went,

there's no question.

Me personally, I'm for innovation, disruption,

and bringing business and great living to the city of Opelika.

Owen: He was gaining a lot of traction.

And he brought in more and more investors,

people from across the country.

More and more companies.

They had a day named after him.

Kyle Sandler Day.

The mayor showed up, and he had a...

[laughing] thing that he pulled out.

This is a proclamation proclaiming today

as Kyle Sandler Day.

Owen: It was official at that point.

And you'd seen the biggest grin you've ever seen

on Kyle's face.

He was -- He was loving it.

He was just eating it up.

Congratulations! [ Cheers and applause ]

It was a time of just great exuberance,

and people had just the most optimistic version

of what the outcome could potentially be.

Wacker: Kyle had this young entrepreneur.

He was the rising star of the Round House.

He was what was going to put it on the map.

You know, this was -- this was the home run.

I am Taylor Rosenthal, CEO of RecMed first-aid kits.

RecMed is a first-aid vending machine company

that helps consumers get convenient

and fast access to first aid.

We have a start-up in house that was founded by

a now 14-year-old boy named Taylor Rosenthal,

who was declared Opelika's youngest entrepreneur

by the Opelika Observer.

Myself and the OANews photographer went to Round House

to do an interview with Taylor and with Kyle.

They were working on a prototype at the time.

Kyle was just kind of there in the background

and then would pipe in with,

"Taylor's gonna be a multimillionaire by the time

that he's in the 10th grade."

Everybody noticed that Taylor has got some big things brewing.

A new prototype is on the way.

Hurley: I was also told that Six Flags was interested

in purchasing the first 100 machines.

-Who's your partner? -Um, Kyle Sandler.

Hurley: The next thing you know, Taylor is being invited

to these various tech shows.

And that really kind of fueled the fire.

Taylor stories were really blowing up.

I mean, people were so invested in his journey.

I was just kind of rolling with it

and I recognized that Taylor was,

in many ways, sort of Opelika's sweetheart.

Varney: Our next guest

is a 14-year-old young man from Alabama.

Baas: Everyone loved the fact that he was on television.

Everyone was excited for him.

Taylor Rosenthal could soon be earning big bucks.

Reporter: He's already raised $100,000 from local investors.

Bolton: Great to see you. Thanks for coming in.

Baas: We even had like a viewing party for Taylor.

Everyone wants to believe in a 14-year-old boy.

[ Laughs ] I mean, we all believed in Taylor.

Now, what's this about you got a $30 million offer

for your company -- is that for real?

Yes, it is. Who offered that?

You don't have to use their name.

But what kind of company or person offered the money?

It was a major healthcare company.

And you turned it down? I did.

I said earlier that you were a very smart young man.

What are you doing turning down $30 million

at the age of 14? Um...

We felt like the time wasn't right.

We kind of wanted to grow and develop the company

a little bit more.

I was a little bit puzzled by the idea

that it had morphed into this $30 million idea

just in those couple of months.

Somebody went and put Band-Aids in the snack machine

at the OANews

and was like, "Hey, look, $30 million."

Reporter: He says his magic number is a bit higher.

$50 million. $50 million?

Yes.

Once he cashes out, he says he'll put aside money

to buy a Bentley.

That's when I said, "Man, there's something wrong here."

To hear that this kid turned down $30 million,

not even for a product, but an idea --

I mean, that's -- it's bullshit. [ Chuckles ]

I'm sorry for my language, but it ain't right.

That's kinda when I started getting suspect.

I remember even emailing Kyle telling him, "Hey, I don't think

RecMed's -- you know, I don't think you'll get a patent

'cause there's actually a thing called the Pixus."

That's a machine that hospitals use to vend,

you know, their Band-Aids and their cough drops

and things like that. So I felt it was too similar.

Taylor's invention was some sort of vending machine

for medical supply.

It felt like something doesn't add up.

Kyle -- he mentioned he had worked at Google,

but I couldn't find anything online talking about Google.

He mentioned he sold his company to Yahoo

and walks around in a Yahoo T-shirt.

Looking into this, I can't find any information,

no press release from Yahoo

about any acquisitions in the area,

so that's why I had grown suspicious.

I wasn't thinking con artist.

I'm just thinking weird vibe.

We decided not to move forward

and not to be involved as part of the space.

Hughes: I remember going to the Round House the first time.

It was almost like they were filming a story

about a Hollywood start-up.

That's the impression I got.

[ Fanfare plays ]

♪♪

My first impression when I walked in

is here's a guy, he's playing the part.

Kyle was just talking fast and swilling his Red Bull.

♪♪

I saw a lot of money being spent,

a lot of money going out,

but I couldn't for the life of me figure out,

where's the money coming in from?

♪♪

♪♪

[ Bell tolling ]

Owen: It'd been four or five months

since we had been in Round House

and we haven't gotten a check.

We're running on 8 grand at this point.

We're bled out.

And I told Kyle, I was like, "Kyle, I need your check."

And he just kind of smirked.

And then it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

He flipped.

He said, "Lemme tell you how this game is played, boys."

And... [ Chuckles ]

He said, "We're gonna have to renegotiate."

I think he enjoyed being in a position of power over somebody.

More like the Godfather than anything.

He wanted to be that guy.

A gangster.

Which he kind of was.

So we left.

We took all of our documents, all of our stuff,

with boxes in hand out the door.

And that is the day that everybody knew

that the jig was up.

Because we were the only company

that had raised money prior to being there.

So, it's what happened.

I lost my livelihood and my company

and our future

because of that.

Marsh: I think, really, if you chart it,

it all kind of makes sense, right?

It's kind of the progression of a guy getting deeper

and deeper and deeper and deeper.

And knowing he's in over his head,

but, you know, there's no way back,

and so you have to keep going forward.

About this time, he starts the second Round House

down in lower Alabama and he starts traveling a lot.

My voice in my head screamed the moment that he left town,

going, "Why is he not here?

Why is he not answering these emails?

Why is he avoiding people?"

Investors definitely were looking for answers,

and wanting a meeting.

And Kyle, he kept putting that off and putting that off.

And then at one point, you know, he just said,

"I'm going to buy them all out.

I'll buy every one of them out."

And he told me that he had a big annuity

that came every year,

that he would get

a million dollars.

And I was like, "Wow."

And he's like, "Yeah, it's my Google money.

It's to protect me from touching it too much."

I said, "Okay, if that's the plan, great."

His birthday, the annuity day, was coming up, and I felt

like a release, like here we are, we're almost there.

We were all kind of getting ready for that investor meeting

and this buyout.

And Kyle comes in and he starts working on his computer.

He was feverishly doing something.

He called me and a colleague of mine into his office

and he said, "I just want you to know

everything's going to be okay.

You know, everything's going to be fine."

And he slid this paper across

and it was like a Fidelity report of his investments

and all the things that he was worth.

But my colleague just looked at him and said,

"I saw you,

and I saw you out there,

and you were on Photoshop

Photoshopping that Fidelity logo on that.

This is bullshit.

This right here is fake."

And my heart just, like, sank.

This is crazy. [ Laughs ] Really?

You're going to forge a document just for me to believe in you?

I left that day.

Hughes: I can remember sitting at my desk

getting a phone call from Kyle

and he was kind of whispering, he was talking very, very fast.

It was almost as if he was hiding somewhere

and the police were outside his door.

And he was just flooding with,

"They've got me. I'm busted.

Listen, this whole thing was a scam."

I was like, "Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on."

I said, "Kyle..."

I said, "I'm your friend.

You know, you need to be careful."

I said, "I'm, you know, a few weeks from being sworn in

as the district attorney.

If it is what you're saying,

I may have to prosecute this case."

I said, "So you need to stop talking right now."

And he goes, "No, man, I just wanna talk, I just wanna talk.

I don't care about any of that. I'm caught, I'm busted."

He goes, "I want to make it right.

I want to make it right."

He did have contrition in his voice,

like he felt bad that he did this to these people

that were his neighbors and his friends and trusted him.

He almost sounded like he really cared.

Baas: I think it was a couple days later he came down

and he shut Round House down.

Kyle walked in

and he said that he was really sorry,

the money's not there.

It was all a lie.

And so...

I had to, like, confirm it one more time with him.

Like, I remember pulling him aside and being like,

"You mean the annuity, the million dollars every year,

that's not real?"

And he said,"No, it's not. I don't have the money."

Hughes: I think the city of Opelika

collectively, you could've knocked over

with a feather when this came out.

I mean, Round House was so intertwined

with the city of Opelika and the gig internet

and everything that was going on.

I mean, everybody was just floored.

I went into Kyle's office that very next day

and his computer was gone.

He lickety-splitted out of town

before he got tarred and feathered.

Baas: You had investors coming in, they were angry.

They were going into filing cabinets and stealing files,

and people were trying to collect computers,

anything that was there that was left.

♪♪

Marsh: It's like if you've ever seen one of those videos

where somebody throws a ping-pong ball

into a room full of mouse traps?

It's chaos for a minute,

and then everything's gone

and it all falls silent.

And the Round House was kind of left as this husk.

And then I think, very quickly after him,

you know, ending the Round House,

that's when he publicly said he didn't work for Google.

And again, that was, for me, like a -- whew!

What? You kidding me?

You didn't work for Google?

Like, the very thing that you started your lies with with me,

that was the foundation of it. [ Chuckles ]

That was hard.

That was very hard. Mm-hmm.

We were all just trying to get answers.

I mean, who is this guy who lied to all of us?

Would it better if we held hands?

-[ Laughs ] -That's good. Yeah, it works.

So, when we were growing up,

we knew Kyle Sandler, um, starting...

He was always around.

Yeah.

We grew up in Maryland.

In high school, everyone knew him as the kid

who burned the putt-putt down.

We have rumor

that he was also burning bridges in the area.

He did burn things.

And then the report card.

So, his parents had promised him something

if he got, like, a really good report card.

And so he photocopied my report card

and he took the letters

and cut them out and pasted them over his,

and then photocopied that and gave it to his parents.

His parents were furious. Oh, they were so mad.

Ugh!

He had a tough relationship with his dad.

It was definitely his mom he favored.

She, I think, covered and protected him

for a long time, and he abused that.

He would take money from her purse all the time.

That was a normal thing for him.

He treated it like it was a bank account.

His adoption always seemed to weigh over him.

He had a lot of questions about who he was when he was younger.

I think if you dig real, real, real far down,

I think probably at the root of all this

was just wanting to be loved and appreciated

and a part of something.

That's really it, you know.

There's a certain definition to "lie"

where I don't believe it

and I'm passing it off as the truth.

But when you talk to Kyle, he does believe it.

Yeah. And he's passing it off as the truth.

Kyle really has not changed too much over the years.

I think he's just a bigger version of who he was back then.

Marsh: Now Kyle finds himself with an enormous amount of heat.

And he did this in Alabama.

The people that he's dealing with are not people

that are used to people not following through.

And for all of the travails and problems

of the good ol' boys system,

one thing you can say is it does keep people honest.

And so they start chasing after him hard.

I got a call from an FBI agent.

I was, you know, "Whoa, this is crazy,

[ Laughing ] I'm getting interviewed by the FBI."

We started identifying all the witnesses,

coordinating with headquarters and we initiated

an investigation shortly thereafter.

We did find a criminal history when we ran his name.

He used aliases and secured different loans

using different names.

Owen: Kyle had been in several other places around the country

and was a convicted felon of forgery.

Purves: How does one become a crook?

I don't think anybody looked him up.

That was the thing that amazed me afterwards.

Nobody had bothered to check his credentials.

And he walked into town, gave this wonderful story,

and he was believed.

He was confident.

I think that's what people were drawn to, was the confidence.

Now, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there that are saying,

"Kyle, well you know, you've got -- you're well off,

you do well, you travel all over the place."

He did not look the part.

No 20- or 30-million-dollar person has bad teeth.

And I remember, we went up to his house for a party

that he was throwing on for some of his entrepreneurs,

bringing in more investment dollars.

And it was just nasty.

He had dogs and cats and birds.

And he never cleaned up after the --

I mean, there was feces on the floor.

Oh, my God, did he trash that house.

It was really a mess.

Owen: I remember one night

I went to his house for movie night.

You could just see a whole playlist of just

"American Greed," "American Greed," "American Greed."

That was like his favorite show.

Man #1: The limit on the credit card

was the only thing that stopped him.

Man #2: They exceeded the greed limit.

He loved "American Greed."

Which I thought was very interesting in hindsight.

I guess if you are a con artist, you study con artists.

Was Kyle learning how to be a better criminal?

Yeah, I think so. I think so.

It was a very long time until they caught him.

Hughes: It almost became a running joke

of, well, the FBI's here, the FBI's there.

Have you heard from Sandler? And I think by that point,

nobody really thought they would see him again.

We knew he'd fled. We had an idea that he was in Texas.

He didn't really try to hide the money trail.

Officer: Hey, Kyle, come here. Talk to me.

Officer Shuer, Bryan Police Department.

How you doing? -I'm good. How are you?

Gravelle: In Texas, he had started another scam.

Take this bag off for me.

Yes, ma'am, do you have your ID on you?

Gravelle: In fact, he was married to three women at once.

He didn't divorce any of them. He just kept moving on.

The last one, he had convinced her to quit her job,

start this LLC, was going to try and oversell stock

like he did with Round House.

He got handcuffed, you know, right there in front of her.

That was the first she realized something was amiss.

Officer: He's got a warrant out of Maryland, too.

Did you know about that one?

No, I don't know anything.

I think the third wife, she got it annulled after --

at least that's what I heard.

When Kyle was arrested, the first thing

everyone wants to know is, what did they get him on?

And where did everyone's money go?

That was the only conversation.

But the immediate thing thereafter was --

we got this fucker.

It was jubilant.

Like, there were many a drink bought

because Kyle Sandler was going to jail.

I got a text message of a video of him being arrested,

and it just brought a big smile to my face.

[ Laughs ]

Marsh: There was a sense of justice.

This guy screwed our town to get some cheap thrills

and buy a junky car or two.

It was pretty cool that, you know, the town of Opelika

is the one that took him down.

Reporter: Kyle Sandler, the man charged for his role

in a scheme that swindled over $1.9 million

out of more than 50 investors,

appearing in court Tuesday physically trembling.

Kyle sold basically more of the company that existed.

That's fraudulent. You can't do that.

The people in Opelika,

they wanted their pound of flesh.

Wacker: Several of us went down for the sentencing.

I got up and I addressed the court.

It's pretty hard to admit that you got taken for a ride.

It was stolen from me with a smile,

and I gave it over with a smile.

That's the part that hurt about it.

Reporter: His state sentence is 12 months in jail.

He will then be sent to a federal prison

to serve around five years for his federal sentence.

Automated voice: This call is from a federal prison.

♪♪

[ Train horn blows ]

♪♪

Baas: My husband came up the steps of our porch

and he said, "You got a letter from Kyle."

And I was like, "Whoa, okay."

"Inmate at the Montgomery city jail."

"When I started writing apology letters,

your name was at the top of the list."

Mm.

"I'm sorry, Emily, for lying to you..."

[ Chuckles ]

"...deceiving you without your knowledge,

and manipulating you.

I loved the good work we did

in the community you built."

I built. [ Chuckles ]

[ Sniffles ]

[ Inhales shakily ]

"Now, in retrospect, I could have probably built it with you

and bootstrapped and honest."

[ Sniffles, sighs ]

♪♪

Kyle sold me this picture.

I believed in that dream,

and I wasn't going to let him or anyone else ruin that.

So, I get a text message from a man

who said he was going to restart a coworking space.

And he said, "I hear you are the person that made that place."

And he said, "Would you consider coming back to work?"

And I said, "Yeah.

Let me Google you first." [ Laughs ]

-Congratulations. -[ Applause ]

Reporter: Located in the heart of downtown Opelika,

Collaboration Station brings together entrepreneurs

and small business owners.

Baas: I have every office full and I have 21 new offices

and we are opening a second location.

I don't want to give any credit to Kyle.

None whatsoever.

Like, I don't think he deserves any credit.

But I wouldn't be who I am today if I hadn't met him.

I really came into my own as an adult

and as a professional because of him.

I'm want to leave this town better than I found it.

[ Laughs ]

And I don't plan on leaving anytime soon, so...

This is my home. And I love it.

I love Opelika.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

Marsh: If you just read the story,

you think, you know, this con artist came in

and took all these poor schmucks

in this Alabama country bumpkin town

and killed their town.

And that's not true.

Opelika's doing great.

And we're probably better for going through it.

[ Bell tolling ]

Why pick Opelika? [ Chuckles ]

Not the first place you go to, really, is it?

And then once you've been here, it's a lovely place to live.

As he found out, I think -- until he got caught.

[ Laughs ]

♪♪

[ Cellphone ringing ]

District Attorney Brandon Hughes.

♪♪

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