Kota Youngblood: Fake Cartel Fraud, Conviction, and 40-Year Sentence

Kota Youngblood, whose real name is Dennis Schuler Jr., is a former Cleveland used-car salesman who settled near Austin, Texas, posed as a decorated Delta Force veteran, and defrauded more than 30 people out of roughly $12 million through fabricated Mexican cartel threats and phony investments. On December 4, 2024, a federal judge sentenced him to 40 years in prison and ordered him to pay $12,766,384 in restitution.¹

Who He Really Was

Youngblood had no military service, no college degree, and no work history beyond selling used cars. He grew up near Cleveland as Dennis Schuler Jr.²³⁴ Military-style tattoos, a hushed and confidential speaking voice, and hints about secret tours in Afghanistan rounded out the persona.

None of it was real. Military records confirmed he never served.³ Prosecutors would later describe a lifetime pattern of fraud, going back to high school, when Youngblood ran up $20,000 on his father’s credit card and never paid it back. Asked whether he was surprised to learn his son had been arrested for fraud, his father said, “Not at all.”⁵ In 2011, he had been arrested in San Bernardino, California, for writing a fraudulent $94,000 check for gold coins, which he sold and gambled away; he was convicted and sentenced to time served.²

How He Got Close to His Victims

Youngblood settled in Manor, Texas, east of Austin, and worked his way into a tight community of fewer than 200 families whose kids played youth ice hockey at Chaparral Ice in north Austin and the Pond Hockey Club.⁶ He presented himself as a hockey dad with two sons and spent lavishly on the group: renting out a movie theater for the team, covering group dinners and road trips, handing out $100 bills on birthdays, giving gifts like a Zamboni-shaped remote-controlled drink cooler worth close to $400.⁴

He picked targets carefully. He identified parents who were anxious, financially comfortable, or driven by loyalty, flattered their kids as athletes, and dropped what FBI agents later called “info bombs” about classified operations and current events to prove he was plugged in. He often left his car running in a driveway, saying he was “on call” and might be summoned for a government mission at any moment.⁶

The Two Sides of the Scheme

Between roughly 2018 and July 2023, Youngblood took in about $12 million from more than 30 victims using two intertwined pitches.¹

Fake Cartel Threats

Youngblood told victims that Mexican drug cartels had placed hits on them and their families. He showed them fabricated documents and claimed to have audio evidence obtained through a “friend at the National Security Agency.”³ He fed the fear with specific details, like knowing what a victim’s child wore to a track meet on a particular day. At an Austin seafood restaurant, he told victim Eric Perardi that his own son, Eventine, had been murdered and dismembered by a cartel that was also hunting Perardi’s family, and that the cartel had carved Perardi’s initials into the dead man’s arm.⁴ FBI agents later found Youngblood’s son alive.

Trading on his supposed Delta Force background, Youngblood offered to “mobilize contacts” and provide protection for a price. Requests started small, sometimes dressed up as loans for funeral costs or cemetery plots, then grew into demands for hundreds of thousands of dollars.⁴ He demanded operational security: no paper trails, payments through intermediaries, total secrecy. The secrecy did double duty, hiding the fraud and cutting victims off from anyone who might challenge the story.

Fake Investments and Collateral

Youngblood also sold “investments” promising 30 percent returns or better on money he said he was putting into gold bars, coins, antique clocks, and sports memorabilia. Early on, he paid small returns to make the deals look real.⁷ For bigger sums, he offered collateral he claimed was rare and extraordinarily valuable: baseball bats supposedly used by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, a Fabergé egg, a rare Star Wars manuscript, and a Confederate First National flag he said was worth millions. He had actually bought the flag on a payment plan for $85,000, and it was later appraised at about $125,000, without the historical significance he described.⁴

Isolating and Turning Victims Against Each Other

What made the scheme hold together was Youngblood’s talent for driving wedges between the people he was defrauding. He fed different victims contradictory stories, telling James Holloway that his son Lane was in danger while telling Lane that his father was arming the cartels. He convinced Lane Holloway to quit his job at Amazon, legally change his name to “Will Elessedil,” and move his family from Texas to Florida, living in anonymous hotels because cartel assassins were supposedly closing in. He also directed Lane to set up fake social-media accounts and post fabricated allegations of drug trafficking, sexual misconduct, and money laundering against other victims, including Eric Perardi, to discredit anyone who might expose him.⁴

Lead federal prosecutor Dan Guess said he had never encountered this level of cruelty before. FBI agents compared Youngblood’s hold over victims to a cult leader’s.⁴

What the Victims Lost

Investigators eventually identified 45 victims and 10 attempted victims, and suspected there were more.⁵ They ranged from middle-class professionals to wealthy retirees. A few of their stories show what the scheme did to people’s lives.

Eric Perardi, an Austin real estate developer and part-time youth hockey coach, paid Youngblood roughly $900,000 over six months after being told a cartel had put a hit on him and his children. He sold business entities, took out lines of credit, and borrowed from friends and family, and he lost his home in the Steiner Ranch neighborhood when he could no longer afford the mortgage. The smear campaign Youngblood engineered drove investors out of his projects. Perardi said he lived in a “perpetual state of emergency,” sleeping with a gun by the bed.²⁴

James Holloway, a former salesman turned clock repairman, met Youngblood in 2018 and wrote 55 checks totaling nearly $250,000 between 2018 and 2019. His wife rolled over $200,000 from her IRA. Youngblood also used Holloway’s clock business as a pass-through, routing other victims’ checks and cash through it to conceal the source and ownership of the stolen funds. His son Lane gave Youngblood more than $500,000 and was coerced into hiding and into running the smear campaigns. James was not charged and testified as a victim at trial.⁴

Gary and Dale Snider, longtime friends of the Holloways, were introduced to Youngblood in 2021 and initially invested $190,000 in a 19th-century gold coin he said could sell for $10 to $11 million. In September 2021, after Youngblood claimed a cartel had threatened Lane Holloway’s family, they paid another $235,000 to “put an immediate end to the threat.” Their total losses topped $1.2 million, and they had to sell their home and rent it back from the new owner. “We were just stupid, but you’re in so deep,” Dale Snider said in 2025. “I wish we could have stopped at $190,000.”⁴

Rebecca and Ricky Kumar, gym owners who met Youngblood through youth hockey, lost close to $200,000. Rebecca Kumar said the experience “almost ruined my marriage.” She was one of the few who grew suspicious early, finding through a 2020 Google search that Youngblood “had problems with the law in California,” and she banned him from her home the next year.⁴

None of the money went into investments or safekeeping. Youngblood gambled most of it on video-poker machines in Las Vegas, especially at the Aria Resort and Casino, where he was observed feeding hundred-dollar bills into machines on more than 200 days during 2022 and the first half of 2023. He lost more than $700,000 in 2023 alone.⁴

How the FBI Caught Him

The case cracked open when Perardi went to the FBI. He had hired a dealer to appraise the Confederate flag Youngblood put up as collateral and learned it was worth a fraction of what Youngblood claimed.²³⁵ Perardi also wore a hidden microphone and recorded Youngblood demanding further payment at a Carrabba’s Italian Grill in North Austin.

Agents also tracked down people Youngblood had claimed were dead, including Lane Holloway and Youngblood’s own son, both alive, and arranged speakerphone calls so victims could hear for themselves. About two months after Perardi’s complaint, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Harding signed an arrest warrant. On July 31, 2023, Agent Wilkinson arrested Youngblood at an Austin-Bergstrom International Airport bookstore as he was about to board a flight to Las Vegas. He had roughly $20,000 on him.⁵

Conviction and 40-Year Sentence

A federal grand jury in the Western District of Texas indicted Youngblood on August 15, 2023, initially on two counts of wire fraud and one count of engaging in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property.⁸ At a detention hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Lane described the alleged scheme as “the most massive pattern of intimidation of threats and violence and death I have ever seen.”²

The case went to trial before U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in April 2024.⁹¹⁰¹

On December 4, 2024, Judge Pitman sentenced Youngblood to 480 months, 40 years, in federal prison, the maximum prosecutors had sought. He was ordered to pay $12,766,384 in full restitution to 32 identified victims.¹ He was 52 at sentencing. Prosecutors argued for the enhanced sentence on the ground that Youngblood was, in Harding’s words, a “predator and a sociopath,” and used the hearing to put in evidence of a lifelong pattern of fraud that could not come in during the guilt phase of the trial.⁵

U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza said Youngblood “developed close relationships with dozens of individuals, building an immense amount of trust seemingly just to destroy their lives financially through elaborate, deceitful misrepresentations.” FBI Special Agent in Charge Aaron Tapp said, “Many of Youngblood’s victims were terrorized thinking their families were in danger; others lost their livelihoods to his schemes.”¹

The Pending Appeal

Youngblood filed a notice of appeal on December 10, 2024, six days after sentencing. The case is docketed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit as No. 24-50982, with appointed appellate counsel Alan Winograd replacing his trial attorney. As of March 2025 the appeal was still in the transcript stage. A court reporter estimated the trial transcripts at 1,790 pages, which were filed in March 2025, and the Fifth Circuit requested the electronic record on appeal with a due date of April 8, 2025. No appellate briefs had been filed or argued as of the latest available docket entries, and Youngblood is proceeding in forma pauperis.¹⁰ As of early 2026, he remained incarcerated.¹¹

1
U.S. Department of Justice. Texas Man Who Falsely Claimed to Be Delta Force Veteran to Defraud Dozens of Victims Sentenced
2
Austin American-Statesman. Wealthy Austin Residents Scammed Out of Millions by Alleged Con Man
3
Task and Purpose. Delta Force Vet Fraud Scheme Cartel
4
Rolling Stone. Kota Youngblood $12 Million Fraud
5
AARP. Scammer Targets Hockey League Parents, Part Two
6
AARP. Scammer Targets Hockey League Parents, Part One
7
Army Times. Man Claiming to Be Delta Force Veteran Convicted in $20 Million Scam
8
U.S. Department of Justice. Man Claiming to Be U.S. Army Delta Force Charged With Fraud
9
Lone Star Live. Officials: Man Claimed to Be Delta Force Veteran to Scam Victims, Used Money to Gamble
10
CourtListener. United States v. Youngblood
11
Longreads. Kota Youngblood Cartel Fraud