Scam on rye

When their scandal broke on April 15, 2021, Paul Morina and James Patten had gone to the mat for each other for decades in a town where going to the mat is everything. They were in their 60s, friends since third grade. Above all, they were wrestlers — toughened and trained in Paulsboro, New Jersey, home to one of the most decorated high school wrestling programs in America.

This tight-knit, blue-collar enclave of 2 square miles has spent decades sweeping state titles (34 and counting) and shattering records (one of three high schools in America to reach 1,000 dual-meet victories). Signs around Paulsboro’s doughnut and pizza shops herald their team, the Red Raiders, and the town’s official motto, “Home of Champions.” There’s no greater champion than Morina, the high school star turned New Jersey’s winningest wrestling coach. That’s why he was shouting at Patten. His life’s work was now at stake — because of the deli.

For the past six years, Patten and Morina had owned and operated Your Hometown Deli, a small sandwich shop around the corner from Paulsboro High. It was supposed to be the anchor of Morina’s grand vision and retirement plan: a neighborhood restaurant where generations of Red Raiders could hang out, watch Eagles games, and enjoy Italian hoagies and soft pretzels made by Morina’s girlfriend, Christine Lindenmuth, a math teacher at Paulsboro High.

Now the deli was going viral for all the wrong reasons. That morning, famed hedge fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital had flagged their shop in his widely read newsletter. Despite paltry sales of about $36,000 over the past two years, Einhorn noted, Your Hometown Deli was doing gangbusters in the stock market. It was the sole asset of a public company, Hometown International, which had a market cap of $113 million. For Einhorn, it represented a critical problem: how the market could assign enormous value with no regard for economic reality. “From a traditional perspective, the market is fractured and possibly in the process of breaking completely,” he wrote. But the mystery of the blue-chip deli remained. “The pastrami must be amazing,” Einhorn speculated.

Pastrami wasn’t on the menu. Stock manipulation was, among other crimes in one of Wall Street’s most bizarre capers in decades. I spent two years investigating what actually happened, spending time in Paulsboro, sitting in on bizarre pretrial hearings, and landing exclusive interviews with key players. The inside story, revealed now here for the first time, is a surreal saga of friendship and fraud, a high-stakes, high-power scheme spanning from Paulsboro to Hong Kong and involving two of the most esteemed and endowed universities in the world: Duke and Vanderbilt, each of which invested millions into the deli’s holding company. And on that April day, it was all crashing down on the king of New Jersey wrestling.

Over the phone, Patten listened to his old friend blow up: “What the fuck is going on here? Why would you get me involved?”

“Paul, you just gotta be really careful, the advice you take,” Patten tells me Morina told him in his thick Jersey accent. “I’m your friend, and I’m knee deep into this shit too. And guess what? I don’t own any stock in this thing. I don’t have a fucking paycheck. I got nothing to gain on this thing.”

But one of them would get pinned.

The world’s most infamous deli still stands off a sleepy main road in town, frozen in time. “This was all Paul’s dream,” Patten tells me one drizzly morning last January when we went to see it. Through a window, the remains of an Eagles’ Super Bowl victory party linger inside: round tables with white and black tablecloths, deflated green and white balloons under sagging, water-stained ceiling tiles, and an empty counter where the biggest question on anyone’s mind was once whether to take their steak sandwiches “wit or witout” cheese.

Dressed in a mauve hoodie and black Coca-Cola cap, Patten is a spry, no-nonsense 66-year-old with wavy gray hair and a mind that moves like he did on the mat: calculating and precise. “I know how to hurt people,” he tells me between sips of Dunkin. “I would know how to use your leverage against you.”

Morina, meanwhile, had bulk and obsession. “I went to school for academics,” Patten says. “He went to school to wrestle.” A hulking, heart-on-his-sleeve 67-year-old with short dark hair and earnest eyes, Morina casts an inescapable shadow over this small town. Across the deli parking lot is a low-slung white building with a red awning, the Paulsboro Wrestling Club, which Morina still runs and Patten financed. Parked out back is a truck from Morina’s son’s concrete and demolition business. Around the corner is the Sons of Italy Lodge 2580, named in big blue letters for his late uncle, Carmel S. Morina.

As Patten and I walk toward the wrestling club, he knows how unwelcome he is. “A lot of people in town obviously sided with him,” he tells me, “and they looked at me as though I took advantage of him in some way. This wasn’t the case.” That’s why he’s breaking his silence: to try to get back what’s left of his name. He’s not the only one. When I reach Morina at the high school, where he still coaches, he makes his first and only comment on the saga. “It’s been trouble in my life,” he tells me, wearily. “It’s something I really had to deal with. I shouldn’t have had to, you know what I mean?” He declines to say more, and did not respond to multiple subsequent requests for comment.

In the late 1970s, Patten and Morina were teammates under the town’s legendary coach, Bob Fredrick, who led the Red Raiders to 11 undefeated seasons. He was known for pushing his athletes beyond his competitors: running steps, grappling ropes, workouts on Christmas Day — anything to get an edge. The gas refinery behind their school helped them become track stars too. “It would spew out some chemicals that, you know, you would suffocate,” Patten recalls. “Since we were familiar with the chemicals, it was like a like a secret weapon. We would run our races back along there, and the other kids couldn’t breathe.”

I learned more about crime in prison than anywhere else. I’m just a business person, I just consumed this stuff.James Patten

Morina, says Fredrick, is “the hardest working person I’ve ever known.” The son of a hard-driving construction worker father, Morina led the Red Raiders to several state finals, then went on to become the 12th-ranked wrestler in the country at James Madison University. In 1985, when Fredrick retired, Morina took over, leading the team to an undefeated record in his first season.

As depicted in “Home of Champions,” a 2025 documentary about Morina and the Red Raiders wrestling program, Morina has pushed his wrestlers to their physical and emotional limits. The dedication went beyond the gym. The Morinas became renowned around the community for housing the wrestlers from broken homes alongside their own kids. It wasn’t uncommon to see a dozen players sleeping on the living room floor.

That commitment took a toll. His marriage couldn’t endure the strain of his wife’s battle with cancer and his dual demands as wrestling coach and, since 2008, principal of Paulsboro High. His wife survived; the marriage did not. After his divorce, Morina began dating Lindenmuth, who did not return requests to comment. They shared a passion for well-layered hoagies and Paulsboro wrestling.

In 2013, Morina came up with a way they could help the community like never before: by opening a deli. Not exactly a gourmand’s paradise, Paulsboro desperately needed another restaurant. If he opened one, he thought, the people would come. He just needed some money to start it up. The question was: How far was he willing to go to get it?

While Morina had stayed in Paulsboro to build the wrestling dynasty, Patten went to Wall Street, where he and his older brother built a lucrative brokerage firm with four offices and more than 80 employees. Though he’d moved to a tony suburban family life a couple hours away in northern New Jersey, he stayed close with Morina and donated often to Paulsboro’s wrestling team. “Paul would call me up and say, ‘Hey, I got three kids that can’t afford to go to wrestling camp, can you help out?'” Patten recalls. Making millions, Patten was happy to oblige.

In 2003, Patten and Morina bought two buildings for $125,000 (of which Patten paid $105,000). They converted one into the Paulsboro Wrestling Club and leased the other. Patten also drove down to Paulsboro to help Morina run the club’s wrestling camp, where their sons were now following in their footsteps. The guys from the old wrestling team trusted Patten to invest their hard-earned cash into the stock market. “I grew up with Jim, I liked him,” says Steve Anuszewski, a former teammate and now Morina’s assistant coach at Paulsboro High.

An FBI investigation found that Patten’s wins on Wall Street weren’t all they seemed. In 2006, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority permanently barred Patten from working as a stockbroker for violating securities laws and failing to pay a $753,000 arbitration award. Patten calls it a “stupid mistake.” Four years later, he pleaded guilty to mail fraud after faking a financial statement to cover up a mess of bad bets he’d made with a client’s cash. He served 24 months in prison.

“I learned more about crime in prison than anywhere else,” Patten says. “I’m just a business person, I just consumed this stuff.”

In 2013, about a year after Patten was released, he got a call from Morina, who pitched him on the deli. He says he thought it was a “horrible idea.” Restaurants are all headache and no money. “I wouldn’t own a deli if you had a gun against my head,” Patten told Morina.

“There’s a need for this,” he says Morina told him, pleading with him on what the deli could do for the community. Patten gave in for his friend.

And the moment he heard Morina’s story, he knew just the guy to get the money: Peter Coker Sr., who’d been working with Patten’s brother for decades. “He’s an old boy from North Carolina,” Patten tells me: clever, connected. A former star athlete himself, the 6-foot-5 forward had led North Carolina State to the 1965 Sweet Sixteen. Then he became one of North Carolina’s most successful money managers, handling fortunes for local institutions, including his alma mater’s endowment fund.

Like Patten, Coker also had several encounters with litigation. In 1991, Coker and two former executives of Unclaimed Freight furniture stores were accused in a lawsuit of improperly taking at least $1 million from the company. The case settled in March 1992 with no admission of wrongdoing. “We had not done the things Valley Advisors claimed, so this resolution is good for all parties,” Coker said in a news release at the time. That same year, according to The Morning Call, American Express sued Coker, accusing him of fraudulently shifting hundreds of thousands of dollars of assets to prevent collection of the money he owed the bank and filing for bankruptcy in bad faith, claiming he was actually solvent at the time. Coker declined to be interviewed; his sole comment to me when I met him at a hearing in 2025 was, “Good luck with the story.”

Coker expanded his money management firm into a lucrative and legal business model called a reverse merger. It worked like this: Through his firm, Tryon Capital, he created publicly traded shell companies — empty companies listed on the stock market with no real business activity. He’d file the paperwork, then get them listed on the pink market — the lowest tier of the over-the-counter marketplace, where there were little financial reporting or disclosure requirements. Shell companies and penny stocks changed hands with minimal oversight. A defunct mining business could trade alongside a company operating out of a P.O. box in Reno, both worth fractions of a penny, both ripe for insiders to promote the stock and potentially sell their inflated shares for profit. Coker would then find a private company, often overseas, that would merge with one of these public shells, to instantly gain the gravitas and capital access of being traded on American stock exchanges — without the scrutiny of a traditional IPO. Coker and his partner Peter Reichard created eight shell companies in 2010 that were later sold off to other owners, CNBC reported.

They had no skill set to run a deli. It became glaringly obvious, they didn’t even know basic business.James Patten

This is where Patten thought the deli could come in. Patten says he explained to Morina that Hometown Deli could gain some initial capital by becoming the first asset inside a publicly traded shell company. Once public, they could find another company to reverse merge into it. Having a real deli with actual revenue, even modest, would add legitimacy to what was otherwise just paperwork. Plan A was to jettison the deli from the publicly traded company once the reverse merger was complete. “Plan B,” says Patten, was “maybe he gets lucky. Maybe Your Hometown Deli becomes a household name.”

After hearing Patten’s idea, Morina and Lindenmuth were game. So was Coker, whom Patten says figured he could get them $25,000 from the initial funding. Patten took the pitch to investors from Paulsboro. He started with Bob Fredrick, their retired coach, who was still a father figure to them both. He was immediately skeptical. “I asked him, ‘What are you doing?'” Fredrick tells me.

“Look, this is the thing,” Patten recalls telling Fredrick. “You’re not really investing in the deli. You’re investing in this vehicle. The deli is a subsidiary of it. And we’re doing, we’re raising the money so that Paul has money to run the deli, like he’s gonna get some money.” Fredrick wasn’t a financial guy, but like Patten, he’d do whatever he could to support Morina. He invested a few hundred dollars.

In May 2014, after raising $181,000 from former local wrestlers, Patten’s sister, girlfriend, and her mother, Coker and his family, and a few others, Patten and Coker incorporated Hometown International as a private company. The still-unopened deli was its one and only subsidiary. Morina was appointed president, CEO and chief financial officer, and Lindenmuth vice president and secretary.

With the $25,000 from the raise, the couple brought their deli fantasy to glorious, greasy life. They installed a counter for sandwiches, coolers for meats, sparkling white tile floors, and a half dozen round tables, and on October 14, 2015, Your Hometown Deli opened its doors. With Lindenmuth and her mom making sandwiches and local kids behind the registers, it served up Italian hoagies, hot sandwiches of gourmet ham, prosciutto, mozzarella, and tomato, and homemade chili made by Morina’s old friend Steve Anuszewski.

Sublime as it was to run the shop, being a subsidiary of a company trying to go public meant endless paperwork — receipts, audits, inventory —all while Morina was also coaching and serving as Paulsboro High’s principal. It didn’t help that Morina’s employees were high schoolers, not business operators or accountants.

“They had no skill set to run a deli,” Patten says of Morina and Lindenmuth. “It became glaringly obvious, they didn’t even know basic business.”

And they had everything to lose. The Securities and Exchange Commission is always on the lookout for suspicious shells, and the agency was already raising flags. After Hometown International filed for its IPO in 2015, the SEC sent a letter asking for more transparency. “Please revise your disclosure throughout your filing to state that you are a shell company,” the agency wrote. With Morina and Lindenmuth consumed by the administrative work, Patten got their usernames and passwords to handle it himself. In addition to using the accounts to cut checks, he could “sign” their names using a digital stamp.

He took care of it. On October 20, 2019, four years after the deli opened, Hometown International began trading on the Pink Market under the initials HWIN for $1 per share.

The next step was to find a candidate for the reverse merger. Peter Coker Sr. had just the guy for the job: Peter Coker Jr.

The son, then 50, had spent decades establishing himself as a fun-loving, ambitious money manager for Hong Kong’s power bros. Crucially, he also had connections with powerful hedge funds that could complete the Hometown mission.

By then, Junior’s wheeling and dealing was starting to catch up with him. As chairman of the Hong Kong-listed South Shore Holdings, he’d raised $1.6 billion to build The 13, a gaudy, five-star resort hotel in Macau. When it opened in September 2018, it had no gaming license — the entire premise of a Macau hotel — and rooms were unfinished. Lenders came calling for $423 million in outstanding loans. The hotel went bust, making headlines. South Shore applied for voluntary liquidation.

After his father told him about Hometown Deli, Junior officially came on board the project in December 2019. “Once Junior got involved, I bought into the bullshit,” Patten says. Junior had Hong Kong crypto bros all over his WhatsApp. They could write the big checks they needed to raise money and find a merger candidate. “This fucking guy’s got access to unlimited capital,” Patten recalls thinking. “They’re gonna find a real deal here. We’re all gonna make a ton of money. I believed it.”

Now that they were a team, Patten says, the Cokers told him they were concerned about the couple running the shop in Paulsboro. Morina and Lindenmuth had already complained about keeping up the paperwork and were making noises about wanting out of the deli entirely. If Junior was going to fluff Hong Kong’s power players, they couldn’t have their president/CEO/CFO and vice president/secretary suddenly split. Patten says he urged Morina to hang in until the reverse merger mission was complete.

To help them with the plan, Patten says, the Cokers turned to Manoj Jain, whom they knew through previous dealings. Cambridge-educated, Jain is the cofounder and co-chief investment officer of Maso Capital, an asset management company in Hong Kong. In email correspondence reviewed by Business Insider, Jain shares the Cokers’ excitement at the company’s prospects. In June 2020, when the question of whether to change Hometown International’s name came up, Coker Sr. wrote in all caps, “DELICATESSEN EMPIRE PLEASE,” to which Jain replied, “Even Whole Foods began with one store …”

Patten says that Jain had the two clients that could provide the investment they needed to make Hometown look more attractive to a merger candidate: Duke and Vanderbilt University.

Anders Hall, chief investment officer for Vanderbilt’s $10.9 billion endowment fund, later testified in a restitution hearing that most of the university’s investments are made through third-party managers. To spread risk, the endowment limits each manager to about 1% of the total portfolio. “We’ll do reference checks, we’ll do background checks,” Hall said. “We really have to get very comfortable with the manager, because that responsibility to allocate donor capital to a third party is one of the biggest responsibilities.” Once a manager passes muster, they’re granted what Hall calls “a very wide latitude to invest the capital however he or she sees fit.”

Justin Nixon, investment manager for the Duke University Management Company (DUMAC), helps handle the school’s $12 billion endowment. He later testified that once funds are invested with a third-party manager, DUMAC follows up with quarterly calls and an office visit at least once a year. “The ongoing due diligence is very important and very thorough,” he said.

In April 2020, Duke and Vanderbilt each approved the purchase of $1.25 million worth of $1 shares in Hometown International. In a written statement to Business Insider, Anders Hall wrote, “It is important to note that Maso Capital had discretion to make all investment decisions.” Duke did not respond to requests for comment.

Patten and Nixon say that Jain saw an opportunity in the deli that went beyond a simple merger play. As Hometown’s stock price climbed, so did the value of Maso’s holdings — and crucially, the management fees Maso collected from Duke and Vanderbilt, which were calculated as a percentage of their portfolio values.

According Nixon’s testimony and Patten, Jain directed buying activity to hit specific price targets. Patten recalls Jain wanting the stock to hit $4. If it did, Duke and Vanderbilt, who bought at $1, would already have a sizable return. In 2021, Jain told The New York Times Magazine, “Maso Capital has no knowledge on the buying or selling in HWIN.” He declined to be interviewed for this story.

On April 6, 2020, according to federal prosecutors, Junior sold 2 million shares at a price of $0.0015 per share to a shell company he controlled called Global Equity. Nine days later, the remaining 1.5 million shares were funneled to shell companies he controlled out of Macau. The prices were deliberately low — the market price at the time was approximately $4 per share, according to a federal criminal indictment. The idea wasn’t profit; it was camouflage.

That same month, according to prosecutors, the entire 3.5 million-share block that Junior had picked up from Morina and Lindenmuth was quietly reshuffled into four nominee entities in Macau — Global Equity Limited, VCH Limited, IPC-Trading Company, and RTO Limited. On paper, it looked like a change in hands. The entities were “under Coker Jr.’s control, but formally in the names of other individuals,” according to the indictment. Patten participated in arranging the transfers, according to prosecutors.

Patten and the Cokers transferred shares to relatives and friends and used those accounts to make what are known as “match and wash” trades, the indictment said. That boosted the price of Hometown International “by giving the false impression that there was a genuine market interest in the stock,” it alleged.

“It was stupid on my part,” Patten tells me. “But they put the fox in the chicken house. I knew the markets, and if these guys were to come and buy the hell out of stock, am I stupid? I’m gonna take advantage of it a little bit.”

It wasn’t the team’s only chicken house.

Federal prosecutors in New Jersey alleged that Junior, his father, and Patten had orchestrated parallel schemes involving Hometown International and another shell company called E-Waste Corporation, manipulating the stocks of both. From July 2020 to April 2021, E-Waste’s rose a stock a whopping 19,900% — from 2 cents a share in to $10 by April 2021. Market cap: $120 million. For a company with zero revenue.

By that April, Hometown’s stock had also risen from $1 to $14 per share. It now had a market cap of more than $113 million. Most companies trade at one to 10 times their annual revenue. This deli, which had done less than $36,000 in sales over the previous two years combined, was valued at more than 3,000 times its revenue.

Three months earlier, a ragtag army of Redditors sent shares of GameStop soaring in a coordinated effort to squeeze Wall Street short-sellers and flip the script on traditional market power. Since then, hedge fund managers like Einhorn had been hawk-eyed for similar meme stocks. So in April, when he saw that a struggling suburban deli was worth north of $100 million, he suspected there was something funky inside its mystery meat. “Small investors who get sucked into these situations are likely to be harmed eventually,” he wrote in his newsletter, “yet the regulators — who are supposed to be protecting investors — appear to be neither present nor curious.”

Then everyone got curious. After Einhorn’s newsletter went viral, reporters and cameras descended on Paulsboro, and swarmed the deli to ask the hoagie makers what they knew. The story was going viral from Reddit to The New York Times. A reporter from Philadelphia magazine made his way past the four cops guarding the door to review the cheesesteak. When a Business Insider reporter visited, he found that while the building “looks more suited for a VFW outpost than a food establishment,” he conceded “they do make a mean cheesesteak.”

The Home of Champions’ greatest hero saw his world flip upside down. Morina “didn’t want people to think that he was dishonest,” says his old friend Anuszewski. “He’s not exactly sophisticated, but he’s as honest as the day is long.”

Vanderbilt’s investment wing didn’t disclose where it was placing its bets, “so any publicity about the endowment or how we invest is bad,” Hall testified. Being linked with the deli “was especially bad.”

Amid the mayhem, Patten panicked. “Regulators are gonna be all over this thing,” he recalls thinking. “It’s not like a fear that we did something wrong. It was more of the time factor, and fucking up the possibility of a merger.” When Patten called Coker Sr., he told Patten to corral their lawyers. Patten’s phone started blowing up with video calls from Jain in Hong Kong, who feared losing his lucrative Southern Ivies over the unwanted attention, Patten says. As a private university, Hall later testified, Vanderbilt’s investment wing didn’t disclose where it was placing its bets, “so any publicity about the endowment or how we invest is bad.” Being linked with a $100 million deli, he added, “was especially bad.”

Patten says Jain tried to reassure them that everything was still going according to plan. “This is the model,” Patten says Jain told him, “This is what it’s worth. We anticipate it being worth $25 million after we find the correct merger candidate. Nothing’s changed.” Nixon, investment manager for Duke, agreed. “The value will be determined by the value of the merger entity,” he later testified. “So for the purposes of the strategy that they were pursuing, the current price was not relevant.”

Panic was also spreading in Paulsboro. Bob Fredrick phoned Patten. “What can we do for Paul here? He didn’t do anything wrong,” Fredrick recalls telling him. “Can’t we just put out a press release?”

Patten says he explained the lawyers had told him not to talk to the media “until we figure this out.” Fredrick told him he was going to swing by Morina’s later to check on him.

“You want me to come?” Patten asked, “I’ll come.”

Sides were forming. Fredrick told him no. Gathering at Morina’s house, Morina’s inner circle shared his feelings of outrage and betrayal. “This is just a Pearl Harbor-sized event for him,” says New Jersey state Sen. John J. Burzichelli, who grew up in Paulsboro with Morina and Patten and was at the meeting. “He was in a completely different environment for him. He doesn’t know lawyers. He doesn’t know who he can talk to, what he can say? All he knows is: One day, everything’s good, and the next day, the world’s exploding.” With Burzichelli’s help, Morina lawyered up. And he stopped talking with Patten.

For Patten and the Cokers, there was still a business to run and a reverse merger to complete. To keep things afloat, they removed Morina and Lindenmuth as officers and replaced them with Junior, but they needed to keep the deli running. With Morina out of the picture, Patten volunteered to run it himself. He hired his brother-in-law and his niece to help him. When he arrived in June 2021 to take it over, he got a particularly rotten homecoming. Morina, he says, had abandoned the deli without packing up, leaving old food in the fridges, long gone bad. When he went to his old high school to try to talk with Morina directly, he says, he was turned away at the door.

Patten reopened Your Hometown Deli on September 11, 2021, standing behind the counter of the dream that started and ended it all. The next month, despite the bad press, Hometown International found a merger candidate: Makamer Holdings, a private bioplastics maker. Alex Mond, Makamer’s CEO, told CNBC that despite the deli-related controversy, his company saw Hometown International as an appealing merger vehicle because it was already publicly traded. He added that going public would help Makamer raise the capital it needed to grow by issuing debt, with plans to move its stock from the OTC markets to Nasdaq shortly after the merger closed. Makamer did not respond to requests for comment.

Duke and Vanderbilt agreed with Maso to approve the terms of the reverse merger, which included investing another $1.7 million through the exercise of their Class A warrants. Good or bad, the publicity was bringing in new stock buyers; there was more money to make. Patten drafted up the documents for the reverse merger, which closed in April 2022. “I completed the mission,” he says.

Five months later, on September 26 at around 7 a.m., as Patten recalls, he stepped out of the shower when he heard banging on his front door. He ran into his bedroom, still naked, to find his girlfriend in her pajamas, freaking out in bed. He saw lights flashing outside the window across the house and says the FBI stormed in with their Glocks pointed. “Put your hands up,” one of them shouted.

“I’m gonna put some clothes on!” Patten yelled.

“Don’t move!” they said.

“Well, then fucking shoot me!” He said. “I’m gonna put some clothes on!” Patten was arrested. So was 83-year-old Peter Coker Sr. Later that day, the two met in the same holding cell. When Coker tried to talk, Patten said they probably shouldn’t with everyone there. “We’ve done nothing wrong,” Patten recalls Coker telling him. “Just tell the truth.”

On January 11, 2023, Thai police raided a lavish stone villa limned with purple bougainvillea near Surin beach, a tourist haven of Phuket, and arrested Junior on allegations of colluding in stock fraud, fraudulent manipulative securities trading, and related offenses. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey alleged that he, his father, and Patten had orchestrated parallel schemes involving both Hometown International and E-Waste Corporation, manipulating the stocks of both shell companies. They had “arranged for the transfer of millions of shares of stock to a number of nominee entities, including entities controlled by Coker Jr., in an effort to mask their control of the shares … The defendants then used those accounts to commit a number of coordinated trading events” that pumped the stock up by roughly 939%. Photos from the arrest show Junior dressed in a yellow T-shirt, long blue shorts, his dark hair shorn close to the skull.

Fourteen months later, on March 12, 2025, Junior looked far different when he was led into a federal courtroom in Camden, New Jersey for his sentencing hearing. After months in a Thai prison, his hair and his beard were long, wild, and gray. His wrists and ankles were shackled. His father, tall and broad with white hair, pinkish face, and blue suit, watched from a table nearby where he sat with his lawyer.

The father and son both pleaded guilty to securities fraud charges. “I’m terribly sorry for my part. This episode has been the worst time of my life,” the elder Coker said at the hearing. “I’m sorry for every investor who has been harmed by my actions.” Junior told the judge that “this crime has changed me profoundly. It kills me, every time I think about it, how my actions affected my parents. My parents should have never been associated with this abhorrent crime. My greed destroyed us.” Coker Sr. was sentenced to six months in prison followed by three years of supervised release, including six months of home detention, and $500,000 in fines. Junior was sentenced to 40 months in prison, three years of supervised release, and $250,000 in fines.

Last spring, Junior called me from prison to speak out for the first time since this saga began. He was being held in the Essex County Correctional Facility in Newark. He seemed upbeat and gregarious, considering the circumstances. With a possible appeal in the offing, he declined to speak about what he wearily called, in his slight southern drawl, “the whole Hometown saga from the get-go to finalization.” After a brief stay in St. Kitts, Junior returned to Hong Kong. As of January 2026, according to court filings, Coker Sr. has paid an additional $200,000 lump sum and agreed to monthly payments with government liens on his property to ensure full restitution after his death, while Junior has not paid any restitution and has failed to respond to his father’s attempts to get him to contribute.

Morina and Lindenmuth were not charged. Last February, Morina led the Red Raiders to their 803rd victory to become New Jersey’s all-time winningest high school wrestling coach. Dressed in dark blue pants, a white button-up shirt, and a blue tie, Morina clutched the microphone as his young team lined up proudly behind him. Morina credited the kids for wrestling with heart and pride, then his emotions got the better of him. “I love the sport of wrestling so much,” he said, choking back tears, “I love these kids. I love everybody who’s always supported us. I want to thank everybody for sticking around.”

Patten pleaded guilty to securities fraud charges related to manipulating the stock prices of two publicly traded companies on December 20, 2023. His sentencing is now scheduled for May. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and, jointly with the Cokers, restitution fees of $5.5 million. Retail investors are owed nearly $180,000. Duke and Vanderbilt are owed $3.1 million and $2.1 million, respectively.

On a cold January day, Patten drove back to Paulsboro to finish one last bit of business. He still owned the wrestling club building, which was worth about $250,000. Rather than taking it to market, he sold it for $50,000 to Morina. “I’m a nice guy,” Patten tells me, with a shrug. “What can I tell you?”

David Kushner is a regular contributor to Business Insider. His new book is “Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game.”