I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme Part VI: The Leak

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme

Part V of the story can be read here

Out of the Fire

The drive from Connecticut to Florida is beautiful, but it’s long. I’ve made the trip in the past, but this time it was different. What had before been a leisurely journey home from a summer vacation was now an urgent mission to expose the truth. If I didn’t do something quick, Ciro and Michel would continue their crimes and abuse unchecked, perhaps even escalate them.

When I returned to Palm Beach after a 23-hour drive carrying a heavy box of skin care and laboratory equipment I had brought with me on the road, I was ambushed at the Oumere door by the girls who work in the Worth Avenue courtyard semi-jokingly calling me every name in the book for abandoning them there for the summer. The heavy wall of humid heat that engulfs the Florida tropics makes the area undesirable for most, so south Florida becomes a ghost town in the summer. The girls thought I would just be gone for a few weeks, which ended up turning into a few months.

As I stood there sweating, aching, red from the sun, all of my senses magnified: The long drive, the international Ponzi scheme, the heavy box, the animal abuse, the heat, the human trafficking, the chatter. All I could say over the cacophony was, “can someone just get me a cigarette?”

For the next two weeks, my routine was: make skincare, write, sell skincare, write, go home, write — and repeat. As I wrote, what I thought would be a straightforward, albeit somewhat long-form article evolved into a sprawling investigative report spanning over a hundred pages, ultimately divided into five parts. Too much had happened, too many discoveries had been made, and the story was far too complex to leave anything out.

The investigation was like cutting off the hydra’s head — every time I severed one, two more would grow in its place. I would interview one person about their experience being conned or abused by Ciro or Michel and they would always have someone else they wanted me to speak to, or someone would contact me saying that they wanted to talk about what happened to them.

I eventually had to stop interviewing people. The article was going to be the size of an encyclopedia if I wrote about everything I learned. Ciro’s crimes were mountainous and everyone in polo had a story to tell of his deceit.

I finished the drafts of all five parts sometime around late September or early October. Part 5, in particular, relied heavily on victim statements from interviews I conducted, witness testimonies, and accounts from people who had directly experienced, witnessed, or been involved in Ciro and Michel’s questionable business dealings, potential crimes, or unethical actions. The article was about the facts, its purpose was getting the truth out there responsibly, so I had to send the unpublished rough draft to select individuals to fact check before final publication.

One night, I printed out the entire manuscript and just stared at it. As I looked at the full story laid out in front of me — every lie, every betrayal, every scam spelled out in black and white — I realized I had a problem.

I had no idea how to get anyone to read it.

The Dilemma of Truth

I didn’t know anyone in the polo world of influence. Yes, I could scrape together a few email addresses of people who seemed important and send them the article, but I figured no one would care. Why would they? The polo community seemed like a disjointed entity, too indulgent and too busy admiring its own mirror image for a story about a couple of deviant con men who scammed me and hurt my horse. I thought this investigation would end up consigned to the ash bin of history: unread and unnoticed. And the con men would go on.

What a gift it was to be wrong.

A few nights later I was lying in bed and a message came in: “Hi Wendy, I read your article. Sorry you got ‘Ciro’d.’ A polo player sent to me.” Then, not long after, another message came in: “Hi Wendy, I read your article, I went through something similar.” Another polo player. I thought this was odd, how did they know?

I decided to get up and take my dog for a midnight walk and as we walked, I read messages from people all over the world. Messages of people saying their entire barn had read it, or their entire club was passing it around. Messages from polo players, patrons, customers, mistresses, club owners, managers, and everyone in between. Everyone had read the article. Everyone was sharing it. Everyone knew.

People were reaching out to me to share their own experiences, telling me they’d gone through the same thing, that they knew about Ciro, or had been victimized by him. That Michel was a sick pervert who had victimized them. The article had made its way around the world, from South America to Africa to Europe.

“He scammed me out of a $50,000 investment.”

“I was sent your article — he tried to run the same scam in my barn.”

“He ran off with the horses and dumped them at a farm and fled the state.”

“He took $30,000 from me for a horse and the horse never showed up.”

“The people in my polo club are all talking about your article.”

“Thirty people sent me your article in one day.”

Then came the message that really did it:

“You’re famous lol.”

Now, my ego was already swollen by all of sudden being Miss Popular, but the confirmation of newfound celebrity inflated it to funhouse style, grotesque and cartoonish proportions. The high was unbelievable, like that rush of doing fish scale cocaine for the first time back in high school. No, I didn’t need the flaky stuff to get me off anymore, all I needed was that glorious knowledge that Ciro and Michel had met their end, humiliated and ridiculed by the only community that could see any worth in them. And it was because I had exposed them for the human garbage that they were.

In the darkness that night I stalked through downtown Delray, no longer a victim of crime but a deranged oracle of truth, high as fuck, basking in the glow of my own righteous glory. The great polo scam article internationally acclaimed, the villains exposed, gutted and disgraced, ensnared in the black widow’s web and eaten alive.

You’re mine now.

Then as I turned onto a dark but familiar corner, a black Cadillac Escalade rolled by with the music up and windows down. Behind the wheel, a garden-variety South Florida pervert, cruising past real slow for a free peek. He stuck his face out, eyed me up and down, a total turn-off of shitty male behavior typical of the OnlyFans generation.

Normally I just ignore drive-by leerings and keep walking, but I stopped and stared at him. Blaring from his speakers was the great hip-hop banger of my dearly missed Y2K era, Overnight Celebrity. The gods of some religion must have sent this guy to play the background score that evening.

Grinning with hollow black eyes and a crooked gold tooth, the pervert prophet gave me a thumbs-up, then hit the gas as he laughed and disappeared into the night.

At first, I was offended that I wasn’t getting paid to be some midnight creep’s roadside attraction. But then, in that moment, I learned to stop worrying and love the serendipity of the coincidence.

He was right.

That psychopathic grin I had when I almost decapitated Ciro with his own mallet back in July was back: Polo united was in shambles, Ciro was exposed, Zoe, humiliated. Michel — Michel…

And then my blood ran cold.

The grin vanished, replaced by the hollow, shell-shocked thousand-yard stare of a Vietnam era war veteran. The city fell silent. The sky turned pitch black. I could feel the universe zoom in on my face, tightening the frame like that one bad acid trip from high school, as the words slipped out before I could stop them —

“Oh no. Everyone read about me fucking Michel.”

Oh shit.

For the first time on that walk, I had a humble thought. Although I’d written the article to be read, and I knew it would be eventually, the fact that an unpublished draft — my copyrighted material — was being disseminated internationally without my consent was really like the entire world had just opened my Penthouse Forum style investigative journalist diary and read the whole thing.

And there was a lot of fucking going on in that journal.

Looking back, I was probably embarrassed that everyone now knew I nailed Michel, hard, outside that barn while a horse watched, but that was an important part of the overall story.

And telling that story was the price of finally stopping evil. The necessary method to rid the world of putrid vermin, to mop the earth and send them back to hell.

I am the demon cleaner, and I have a job to do.

The Emperor’s Tailors

Just before the article’s dissemination, Ciro and Michel left Greenwich with an air of invincibility, as if everything that I had done that summer had simply vanished into the wind, never to be spoken of again. They went to Morocco with Sugar Daddy, and from what I was told, they acted like massive tools over there — fully outstaying their welcome and leaving behind the same impression they always do: that they’re assholes.

And upon their return to south Florida, Ciro and Michel carried themselves with even bigger egos and the confidence of men who believed they had won. But I was watching them. It wasn’t particularly hard; they post everything they do on Instagram.

Strangely, Ciro and Michel didn’t rebook the Santa Clara Polo Club, where they had been based before. Instead, they moved to a shared barn and field just down the road, owned by Michel’s patron. Coincidentally, it was also the site of our midnight first time back in April. It was a significant downgrade from their previous facility, a move that still doesn’t quite make sense to me.

Instead, they appeared to shift focus. The tailors needed a new kingdom to infest and a new emperor to clothe. So, they pitched the Polo United tent at a new location: Grand Champions. This was likely a strategic move. Grand Champions is a central hub in the polo world, filled with wealthy clients and plenty of opportunity to impress and recruit new patrons. If Ciro and Michel were on the hunt for a new mark, this was the perfect studio to weave their next invisible robe of lies.

“Though they could see nothing, for there was nothing to see.”

It was also during this time that I filed a lawsuit against Ciro and Michel for fraud. I told my lawyer to file immediately and serve them without delay because I knew they’d run off to Argentina.

Serving Michel was easy. In addition to public mortgage and property records for the house he owns, the Polo United registration with SunBiz in Florida, a public record, listed his home address as the company headquarters. He had also left me a thank you love note in my car once, using an old envelope with his home address and cute little hearts he wrote on it.

You’re welcome, babe.

Ciro, however, was another story. He was a vagrant, bouncing between budget motels or anywhere else that would take him. He lied to me about where he lived to hide the fact that he was living alone in a place that I imagine can only be described as a seedy rundown flophouse. On his US Polo Association registration, he’d listed an address that didn’t exist — an apparent inversion of Michel’s home address.

Ciro’s falsified USPA record

I had been shown an eviction notice from California indicating that Ciro and Zoe had been kicked out of their apartment there. Ciro was also sued the year prior by a different landlord in California for unpaid rent. That likely explained why he didn’t appear on any lease records. One thing I knew about Ciro was that he had nowhere to go because no one wanted him, not a landlord, not a friend, he had no one. In Greenwich, he spent hours alone every day at a grocery store called The Happiness Market. Even after it closed, he’d linger in the parking lot.

One of the many times Ciro and Zoe were evicted from their apartment for not paying their rent.

So, I figured he was following the same pattern here. I knew he liked an Argentinian café in Wellington called Cilantro’s, where all the polo players hung out. He desperately wanted to be one of them. I told my lawyer to have him served there, which he was.

Ciro’s return of service, how embarrassing.

Back in September, I told Karen, another Polo United victim, that I discovered Ciro and Michel were animal-abusing con men, and she needed to act now if she wanted her money back. She had paid $50,000 for a Polo United membership that was supposed to start on September 10th, 2024. I told her that Ciro and Michel weren’t coming back to Wellington by then, they were hanging out in Greenwich and then jetting off to Morocco with their sugar daddy. They didn’t even have a field booked for when they would eventually come back.

Karen, like just about everyone else they conned, was naive about the severity of the situation. I told her to take action immediately but instead I was brushed off. She thought if she was patient, if she “let them settle in” once they finally returned, as she stated to me, she could gently pressure them into returning her money. As if these were reasonable men running a legitimate business. If logic or fairness had anything to do with how they operated then there wouldn’t have been a massive multimillion dollar international Ponzi scheme wrapped up in human trafficking, animal abuse, securities fraud, tax evasion and sexual exploitation. But here we are.

And that was the mistake everyone made. I heard the same silly nonsense from every single person I warned about Ciro and Michel’s scams. They thought Ciro and Michel could be reasoned with, manipulated, played at their own game. That they could just “ask nicely” for their money back or “have Ciro and Michel feel bad for them” enough to give them a refund or the horse they paid for. And when I said how stupid that approach is, I got the brush off. I was often alone in my awareness that the only thing that works on criminals is a real threat — litigation, public shame, something that actually costs them.

I told her to file a lawsuit if her money wasn’t returned and I put her in contact with my lawyer. Michel promised to refund her money and never did. Like everyone else, she learned the hard way that I was right — Ciro and Michel were not going to give back that money so easily.

In October the article was leaked and then on October 28th both Ciro and Michel were served with Karen’s lawsuit — and mine.

And then they ran off to Argentina.

Who was that other rat fuck who fled like a bitch coward into Argentina’s open arms…Oh, right.

Demons Can Cite Scripture Too

It was while they were gone that I began to learn about the fallout from the leak. First, I heard that Michel received a call from Memo Gracida. I don’t know the exact contents of that conversation, or if it truly happened at all, but if it did occur, I can guess Memo wasn’t pleased about Ciro using his name to sell a stolen horse.

Then Michel claimed the owner of Grand Champions told Ciro and him to get the hell out. Albeit this banishment, if true, was only temporary as Michel was back to playing there within a few weeks.

Go team!

It was despicable that Grand Champion’s grand morality had an expiration date shorter than a carton of eggs, but I discovered something horrific about that place too in my investigation, so my expectations and respect for them couldn’t be any lower.

Michel then claimed he lost a female client he had been coaching for the U.S. Women’s Open because her mother pulled her out after reading the article. To that, I say: good on the mother. She sounds like a smart woman and a responsible parent who cares about keeping her daughter safe from an adulterous degenerate who wasted no time touching and then fucking his female student once the opportunity arose.

Michel bemoaned that the article harmed his relationship with his daughter, but he wasn’t thinking much about his family when he left them at home to go have sex with me. Or when he got a handjob from a strange woman on an airplane. Or a blowjob in the backseat of a car by a random woman while her husband watched. Or when a woman he met at a bar in New York City took him home and then hid his clothes somewhere in her apartment so he wouldn’t leave in the morning.

But the crying didn’t end there. Michel groaned that the leak hurt his ability to sell horses — which is another win. He treated those poor animals like disposable equipment, abusing them and wringing every last dollar out of them, selling sick and injured ones to his patrons for top dollar, before moving on to the next.

In September, one of my sources at Mashomack watched as Michel’s aggressive riding caused the breaking of one of his horse’s hooves during a match. Didn’t flinch as the poor animal suffered. Just got off and climbed onto another like he was switching out a mallet.

I also think Tully is dead.

Evil and cowardly men failed Tully, she deserved better.

Although Ciro whined about “losing 10 Polo United clients” as a result of the article, I cannot take credit for this, as much as I’d like to. In part 5, I made the prediction that their criminal behavior, lack of professionalism, and overall inability to do anything but scam people would doom Polo United, forcing Ciro and Michel to ‘pivot’ their entire operation to their biggest whale, Sugar Daddy. And this turned out to be correct.

Polo United only had about 6 “members” at its peak and Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb fucked things up in a unique way for each of us:

Karen: They stole $56,000 and got served with a lawsuit.

Andi: Conned out of $70,000 in a stolen horse investment scam.

Juan: Paid for an Argentine horse that never existed.

Miles: Handed over $5,000 for lessons that never happened. 

Sugar Daddy: We all know what they’re doing to him, even if he doesn’t.

And then, of course, there was what they did to me.

Add it all to the pile of Ciro’s lies — the article didn’t kill their polo business. There was no business to kill. Polo United was never meant to be a legitimate operation. It was deliberately set up to be fraudulent from the start, a well-polished scam draped in the prestige of the sport. The polo field was just a backdrop, a stage set for the con. And if there was any doubt about their intent, look no further than the fact that every single one of us was scammed in a unique way — a custom-tailored deception, designed to extract the most money from each target before moving on to the next.

But there was no moving on this time. The fallout wasn’t confined to the United States. The polo world is small, but with a reach beyond American borders. And as Ciro and Michel fled to Argentina, they found that the consequences had traveled with them.

While Ciro and Michel were in Argentina, they thought they’d find refuge — get a hero’s welcome with open arms in the one place they believed they could still hide. Instead, I heard that no one wanted to be seen with Ciro. I was told that Mariano Aguerre’s crew finally realized what garbage they were. When I asked what the entourage had to say about Ciro and Michel, the response was blunt: ‘Que son una mierda.”

I remember one night when Michel was at my place, we had a conversation I’ll never forget. We were lying in my bed and Michel laughed and said that Ciro had been hesitant to take my business that day in February, when I first messaged him about a lesson. Ciro was worried about potential drama between me and Peter Pan and had his reservations, but Michel said he convinced him to let me into their club.

I wonder how many times a day they regret that decision.

They say a storm is coming, I say it’s already here.

The Whores of Babylon

“I was a victim of Michel’s manipulation for many years. He confessed to me he has no guilt.” One of Michel’s victims told me one night. “He seduces women to satisfy his desires as if we are objects. He discards us and then comes back whenever he wants with lies. He is a great manipulator. His inner emptiness is so great that he cannot love anyone. He only needs to create a good and exemplary character to convince himself that he is one.”

The woman found me after she had read the article and she told me that Michel, in an effort to paint himself as the innocent victim, dismissed me as a lunatic with a word processor out for revenge. Then, because he is such a genius, he handed her the article — you know, the one with the GIANT SCREENSHOTS OF OUR TEXT MESSAGES. Giving her the evidence proving every word I said was true.

Here’s one:

I’ve had better.

“I believe everything you wrote. He told me the same story about the husband watching his wife with [Michel] having relations. I also believe the chats you posted. He told me the same thing about alternating. He can’t get that topic out of his mind. He is perverse…I think he has no emotions. He doesn’t feel.”

A statement from one of Michel’s victims.

The victim went on to tell me that Michel has no relationship with his family, which matched what a well-known figure from an established polo family told me about him, that his family disowned him for his total lack of ethics.

I believe that the familial estrangement may have happened long before my article because Michel’s duplicity didn’t start with Polo United — his moral decay had been rotting him for years. And it explained why Michel would involve himself with a loser like Ciro.

Ciro wasn’t a legit polo player. Michel was. Ciro was a nobody. Michel had a name. On paper, they had no reason to join forces, and everyone always asked me what they were doing together.

What they shared — what bound them together — was corruption. Neither had ethics, neither had shame, and both were willing to whore themselves out completely to get what they wanted.

Michel liked to pretend to me that his trips from Florida to Taqueada in California were purely about polo — play a match, get paid, head home. But nothing I saw with Michel was ever that honest.

I believe that when Michel traveled to Taqueada to join Ciro for a match, it was more than just a business trip — it was his transcontinental springboard into a polo-playing sex romp.

Or at least his attempt at one.

Taqueada members I interviewed told me he would sit with them on the sidelines and openly declare that he had to cheat on his wife — there was simply no way around it: he disliked her and resented their shotgun marriage. This pathetic recital was likely one of his grooming attempts, testing the waters to see if a member would take the bait and service him out back before he had to head on home.

But I don’t believe it was just about sex for Michel, I believe it was about conspiring with Ciro to control the Taqueada members.

Ciro had his methods. He arranged Michel to me as a gift to keep me in the club — something Cipher later confirmed. This wasn’t just prostitution, it was strategy — a calculated operation deeply rooted in Taqueada.

A source who had watched the entire Taqueada operation unfold from the beginning told me that Ciro had a deliberate way of keeping the women tethered to the club, ensuring they stayed loyal and kept paying in. He manipulated emotions, creating the illusion of personal connections while subtly pitting certain members against one another. What should have been a professional environment centered on polo became a web of tension and competition, carefully orchestrated to keep his influence intact and scam hidden.

I noticed that Ciro and Michel put on an evolved form of the same concerted act with Jennifer in Greenwich. Michel would flirt with her on the field, Ciro would be at her home late at night. I believe I saw what looked like one weekend together in New York City, which, if true, is kind of an odd thing for a woman to do with an out-of-towner who just started teaching her daughter polo.

The fact that Ciro would use sex and exploit the frailty of women to keep clients in his club confirmed to me that he was a true-blue psychopath of generous proportions. Ciro is a homosexual, I know this because in addition to gazing lustfully at any polo-playing man with a handicap of 5 or higher, he once looked me dead in the eye and told me that “the vagina” is gross. There is nothing wrong or shameful about being gay, but when a man hides who he is for too long, something dark will emerge to take his place.

When I lived in Hollywood which is a diverse melting pot for the worst people on the planet, I would encounter a Ciro every now and again: a gay man who would have sex with women because she had something he wanted. They were a strange and rare breed of deviant psychopath, hollowed out, donning borrowed skin, predators disguised as men. And I knew one thing and one thing for sure about these types of men: they were dangerous.

“He lies every time. He takes advantage of the women in love.” Michel’s victim told me. She was clearly upset, and I was upset that Michel hurt her.

The Scream of the Butterfly

When Ciro and Michel returned from Argentina, they secured a new partnership for Polo United with the International Polo School in Wellington. With Polo United now reduced to just the two of them playing for and profiting off a team they built around Sugar Daddy, they needed to keep the farce going and money flowing.

I’d never heard of the International Polo School before, but their willingness to welcome exposed criminals into their Palm Beach Invitational was gross, greedy and pathetic.

But that’s polo. The professionals aren’t there to be ethical; they’re there to pass the ball to a rich man, stroke his ego, and cash a check. The polo schools mostly exist to keep the whole charade going.

They’re all mercenaries at the end of the day, and mercenaries play for the highest bidder.

Ciro, with his criminal accomplice and Jay Leno-in-drag lookalike, Juana Socas.

When I saw the polo community start to let Ciro and Michel slime their way back in, I felt conflicted. I had done my part — exposed the truth, laid out the evidence, made sure the world saw them for what they were. But if the people in this world were so corrupt that their outrage was just theater — temporary morality to make themselves look honorable before quietly welcoming them back in — there was nothing more I could do.

I knew something had to be done. Ciro wasn’t just a con man; he was a predator. A deviant, an animal abuser, a fraud who had spent years ruining lives and getting away with it. He was a force of great evil on this planet, destroying the earth and harming its life. He needed to be stopped.

However, there was a problem:

In this whole plan, in this entire story, I was the archangel, I was the black widow, but I was not the executioner.

“The serpent’s tooth is not in me; I do not strike to kill, only to remind.”

But maybe there was another who was. The higher force who was there with me the whole time, guiding me through this entire journey, giving me the strength, guidance and sheer will to persevere to maintain her dominion. She is the watcher of the universe, the guardian of the living, the great force of time and balance. She is Mother Nature.

And when all was done that I could do, she said to me, Step aside. I will handle this.

And she did — with one of her own children.

A horse.

A lingering question I had in my investigation was why Ciro got banned from Indio, California. I heard from multiple sources he was kicked out of there, told never to return, but no one knew why. After searching and looking and asking everyone I could, one night I finally got my answer. Ciro got kicked out of Indio because he was caught beating the horses.

Before me nothing was created, that is not eternal: and eternal I endure. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

On January 5th, Ciro was playing a match at the International Polo School when he made an illegal move, crossing the line of the ball and cutting off his own teammate. His horse threw him down. Ciro hit the ground hard and lost consciousness.

He never woke up.

The news reached me quickly. My only concern was for the horses or if anyone who actually mattered had been hurt. I relaxed once I heard everyone was fine.

When people called me — or I called them about Ciro’s collision and coma, my tone was always the same: one of repressed jubilation.

Their tone, no matter who I was speaking to, was always the same: unmoved and indifferent.

And everyone all used the same word: karma.

“Ciro was always afraid of the horses.” — Cipher

Over champagne a night or two later at a swanky Delray restaurant, my date asked me if I was going to go to the hospital to look at Ciro, and I asked him if he thought I should. Should I go look at evil, disarmed, lost in purgatory, suffering its last breath in eternal darkness. He paused and said no, that he thought I was better than that.

And although I disagreed that I was above petty torments, I agreed that going to a hospital to see a patient for reasons other than compassion would be a low thing to do. Frankly, it would be the sort of thing big pieces of shit like Ciro, Zoe, or Michel would do. So, I didn’t go.

But I didn’t need to go. Someone else I knew visited the hospital and told me what happened. When he entered the ICU where Ciro was kept, he noticed an overwhelming, vile, and putrid smell. He was confused because Ciro wasn’t in a negligent state — he looked clean and maintained. He asked the nurse what the smell was coming from Ciro, and the nurse confirmed it was necrosis. Tissue decay. Cell death.

Ciro’s brain was rotting.

The Law of Consequences

GoFundZoe

Most people I spoke to after the incident said they found out about what happened from Zoe Cookson — Ciro’s long-time accomplice, financial frontwoman, and possible sham-marriage wife. And every single one of them said the same thing:

They didn’t believe her.

Zoe and Ciro spent years conning people, so when she suddenly went on a worldwide pseudo-sympathy campaign, claiming Ciro was in a coma and how “devastating” it was, everyone called the hospital themselves to confirm he was actually there and not just on the run again, dodging the hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of dollars in debt he owed to his victims.

It was strange that Zoe would reach out to people with no urgent connection to Ciro to inform them of his coma, unless she had an ulterior motive, which I believe she did. She likely contacted those Ciro owed money to as a way of passively attempting to absolve debt repayment and maybe to get something else.

A few days later I was notified by one of my sources of a Gofundme page newly set up to panhandle funds for Ciro. At first, the organizer was an unknown woman named Danielle Smith. Then suddenly the name changed to someone familiar: Zoe Cookson.

At first the Gofundme’s organizer was a mystery woman named Danielle Smith, which then changed to the familiar, Zoe Cookson.

Messages over the ensuing days piled up, asking me if it was another sham, another shameless money grab, the final con of an ersatz Bonnie and Clyde. That even in [near] death Ciro is still scamming people.

I didn’t know if it was an outright scam, but what I did know was that the proposed use of the funds was suspicious and riddled with contradictions. In private, Zoe was telling creditors that Ciro was unlikely to recover. Michel was also heard telling people that Ciro had no brain function. And yet, in the Gofundme, Zoe painted a picture of a fallen polo hero, fighting for his life, kicking his legs, squeezing hands, responding to voices — all he needed was a million dollars to make a full recovery.

The problem was, even Zoe couldn’t keep her lies straight. Just four hours after launching the GoFundMe, Zoe posted an update on CaringBridge, a website for publicly posting updates of ill people, laying it on real thick. Zoe described how she was by Ciro’s side, playing The Sound of Music for him, how he was “tired” after being taken off the ventilator, and how they shared a “little video call” with his brother.

It was sappy. Cheesy. It made me want to puke. The same woman who claimed Ciro was in a coma and jumped to tell people it “didn’t look good”, now wanted everyone to believe he was lucid enough to FaceTime, listen to show tunes, convey tiredness and bask in the warmth of her bedside devotion.

When I saw it, I only had one thought: That manipulative bitch.

Prove it, Zoe.

I believe Zoe posted this CaringBridge update because she realized her charity scam money grab would never get that big million-dollar payout and needed a melodramatic sob story for big time guilt-money acceleration. Sugar Daddy donated $5,000 and Jennifer, Ciro’s almost cash cow in Greenwich, donated a massive $200. But she gave her thoughts and prayers, which I’m sure Zoe found to be just as good as cash.

But then, just as quickly as she played the role of doting caretaker, Zoe disappeared. Within days, she was on a flight back to England, leaving behind the illusion that she would be keeping vigil over Ciro and updating the generous donors about his recovery. She never posted another update.

Instagram story posted on Zoe’s Instagram just days after claiming she was in Florida. The setting of this photo does not appear to be Florida.

And that raises the real question — what exactly was she doing there in the first place? She claimed his insurance covered his hospital bills, so why raise money specifically for rehabilitation, something not realistic for a coma patient?

Zoe ran off to England over a year ago under suspicious circumstances. When Taqueada collapsed, Ciro fled to Florida, while Zoe suddenly relocated to England, claiming she had to care for her father. She and Ciro publicly stated they had broken up, yet she continued handling all the financials for Polo United from behind a screen, which is odd for an ex “girlfriend” to do, but not for someone with legally shared finances. Nor is it odd for the owner (CEO) of Taqueada, to whom money is actively being funneled, to do.

Zoe is the CEO of Taqueada

And now, after all that time away, she just happened to reappear in the U.S. two weeks after Ciro’s incident, only to vanish again after setting up and getting money from a dubious and parasitic fundraiser.

What was her real reason for coming back, and what was she running from this time?

“Earth and sky fled from His presence, and there was no place for them.” — Revelation 20:11

Later, Zoe quietly altered the GoFundMe description to include covering travel expenses for Ciro’s family — an apparent bait-and- switch, and possibly a violation of the platform’s terms of service. Donors had been led to believe their money was going toward Ciro’s rehabilitation, not footing the bill for alleged airfare and accommodations. I don’t believe anyone from Ciro’s family ever actually came to the hospital.

And then there was the conveniently vague promise that any “unused funds” would be donated to traumatic brain injury charities — charities that, unsurprisingly, she never bothered to name.

The entire campaign reeked of shameless opportunism, with Zoe dangling just enough sentimentality to reel people in while keeping the actual destination of the money as secretive as possible.

Zoe first claimed the funds were strictly for Ciro’s rehabilitation. Then after thousands of dollars were donated, she altered the purpose of the funds to include travel and accommodations for Ciro’s family.

Zoe also conveniently omitted Ciro’s grim prognosis from the GoFundMe but had no problem sharing it with those he owed money to.

She kept it “private” by telling everyone — except the donors.

The Vultures are Circling

I had been watching the Gofundme donations for weeks when I noticed the total had dropped by $5,000. My first thought: Sugar Daddy. His was the largest and most obvious contribution — while others gave a few bucks, he put in a sizable $5,000. When I saw the missing funds, I checked the donor list. His name was gone. So was his Instagram post promoting the fundraiser.

I thought about what I uncovered and published in Part 2 — a lien Sugar Daddy placed on Ciro in July, right around the time Ciro was running phase 1 of the Polo United horse investment scam. This was Ciro and Michel’s way of stealing money by pretending to buy Argentine horses with a cash advance, only for them to pocket the money and never make with the horses. Ciro got his money for this venture from Andi and Sugar Daddy. Me and Miles didn’t fall for that shit.

When Ciro went to Argentina he indicated on Instagram that he was purchasing multiple horses for Sugar Daddy. Later, I was told that these horses may have belonged to the same family who, back in July, he tried to sell me the Ghost Horse from. And when their horses left Argentina, its rumored that they hadn’t been fully paid for.

When I went back online in February 2025 to check the records, I found two new liens filed by Sugar Daddy in California, securing a legal claim over all of Ciro’s present and future personal property as collateral for an outstanding debt.

I then reached out to a source who claimed that the family may still be seeking payment from Sugar Daddy, which might have caused an argument between the two parties. If true, he likely assumed he had paid in full after handing the money to Ciro, who just pocketed it.

I believe that another argument may have occurred between Sugar Daddy and Zoe Cookson who were both picking over the remaining meat on Ciro’s bones before he dies and everything is gone. Zoe was likely funneling the Gofundme money directly into her personal account for her own use and Sugar Daddy may have felt entitled to funds going into Polo United. His retraction of his donation may have had something to do with that ongoing tug of war.

When I continued my search, I found something even more revealing. On February 13, 2025, Sugar Daddy — operating through his company, York RE Capital Partners, LLC — filed a lawsuit in Westchester County, New York, against both Ciro Desenzani and Michel Dorignac, seeking at least $375,000 in damages.

The lawsuit alleges conversion, breach of contract, and fraud, and includes sworn claims that Ciro and Michel intentionally misrepresented Polo United’s financial condition to induce Sugar Daddy into investing.

York RE Capital vs. Dorignac and Desenzani

Specifically, the complaint accuses them of furnishing fraudulent financial statements, inventing phantom accounts receivable, inflating the value of Polo United’s assets (including horses), and then misusing investor funds for personal debts, rent, and unauthorized purposes.

Fraud.

These allegations bear a striking resemblance to Ciro’s prior misconduct in California involving Taqueada Polo, where investor money was also funneled away from business use — under Zoe Cookson’s direction — and allegedly diverted into offshore accounts and personal expenses.

At first, I thought that Sugar Daddy wised up, realized he had been had by two common criminals and wanted to go after them, until I looked at the affidavits of service.

Ciro had been in a coma at St. Mary’s Hospital in West Palm Beach since January 5, 2025, and Michel had been actively playing polo with Sugar Daddy — his teammate and employer — in Florida for months leading up to and even after the lawsuit was filed. Despite this, when Sugar Daddy filed his February 13th lawsuit in Westchester County, New York, he initially attempted to serve both Ciro and Michel at their old, temporary summer addresses in upstate New York, where we had stayed only during the Greenwich polo season.

This makes no logical sense — Sugar Daddy had been physically present with Michel in Florida nearly every week, and he was well aware that Ciro was in a Florida hospital in a coma. Why, then, would he direct service to New York?

And when the service obviously failed, he then attempted to serve the comatose Ciro at an old address in Wellington, FL where it was known he was not located.

Eventually they served Ciro in the hospital.

Ciro served on March 3rd while being in a coma since January 5th

Even more bizarre is the fact that, despite filing a lawsuit against Michel on February 13, 2025 — accusing him of serious crimes like fraud, conversion, and embezzlement — and serving Michel officially on March 1, 2025 Sugar Daddy continues to play alongside him on the polo field. Not something I would do with someone I am suing for fraud.

Not only has Michel remained a featured pro on Sugar Daddy’s York RE Capital Polo team, but Sugar Daddy has gone so far as to use Polo United’s branding in his team’s marketing materials.

Michel is still playing for York RE Capital despite the lawsuit. Juana Socas, the former Polo United accomplice now is appearing with York RE Capital.

If Michel defrauded him, why would Sugar Daddy still entrust him with his horses, his team, and his brand image? These aren’t minor accusations — I think they might be felonies. And yet their professional relationship appears completely undisturbed.

It feels off. In my opinion, the lawsuit looks more like a chess move than a genuine pursuit of justice — I question if it is possibly a strategic filing to get ahead of other creditors, distance himself from legal fallout, or gain control of Polo United’s assets while Ciro remains incapacitated. I question the legality of this maneuver. These are my concerns, and whatever the case may be, the contradiction between the courtroom and the polo field is suspicious.

And the fact that this is all done while Ciro lies in a coma, alone in darkness is disgusting. Michel is the weak rat that led the vulture to dying prey so he wouldn’t be eaten first.

The Court Jester

On February 11, 2025, Avery Chapman, the lawyer for Polo United, Ciro and Michel in both mine and Karen’s lawsuits, told the courts Ciro was dead. He filed a suggestion of death to the courts in both cases, claiming Ciro had “passed away.” Oddly, he filed motions to withdraw as Ciro’s counsel which were dated February 5, 2025 but not filed until February 10. My lawyer notified me, and I wasted no time spreading the news.

Avery Chapman, an officer of the court, filed the above Suggestion of Death and Motion to Withdraw.

But then I got a message from a source: Ciro’s not dead, he’s still in the hospital.

I was adamant. Don’t believe everything you hear from polo gossip, I said. He’s dead. End of story. End of HIS story. It had been filed in an official court statement.

Then I thought about it.

If I needed a good lawyer, Avery Chapman wouldn’t be my choice. In my opinion, even Michel — who once asked me if people lived on Mars — has better judgment. I have seen Avery’s “style” of “litigation” and the type of people he represents and, in my opinion, Benito Mussolini may have had more career ethics than this guy. But I would think that even the worst attorney on the planet wouldn’t file a death notice with the court that turned out to be false.

Or so I thought.

Back in November, a few days after Karen and I filed our lawsuits, Avery was seen on the polo field with Ciro and Michel. Based on the context, it appeared to me that this was a Polo United-furnished match for his own team, Chapman Law Polo. I have no direct evidence of this, only the photos, and this is purely my opinion.

Go Team!

I met Avery once, back in April, when we played a match together — him on Polo United’s team, me on the opposing side. Ciro and Michel liked to claim they lost business because of my article, but from the photos, it seems like at least one customer stuck around.

In part 5, I addressed what I interpreted as Avery’s strange role in their operations. I wrote about how he drafted and issued NDAs to Ciro’s victims in California, which, in my view, discouraged them from warning others in Florida. That silence, I believe, made it easier for Ciro and Michel to set up the fraudulent Polo United and continue their operations unchecked. Avery is also the registered agent for Polo United since July 1, 2024.

Polo United Articles of Organization

When Avery’s motion to dismiss both Karen’s lawsuit and mine were denied on January 29th and February 5th, both judges ordered him to finally file an actual response — something that should have been done back in November. Instead, it was delayed for months through a series of delay tactics: constant extensions, seemingly baseless motions, and what seemed to me to be any excuse to drag it out or shut it down.

No response to the lawsuits were submitted in February, but on February 11th, just two days before Sugar Daddy’s questionable lawsuit was filed, Avery filed a Suggestion of Death with the court, claiming Ciro had “passed away”, along with a request for a 60-day abatement and a motion to withdraw as his counsel.

I had my suspicions. In my experience, anyone involved in Ciro’s business should not be trusted.

I called the hospital.

Ciro was still there. Still in a coma. Still alive.

That’s not what Avery said.

Next time, Part 7: Into the Night

Related profile: Zoe Cookson

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme Part V: As Tyrants Fall

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme

Part IV of the story can be read here

The Taqueada Scam

Cipher connected me with a polo club owner in California who, he said, despised Ciro and would tell me everything I needed to know. Finding people who hated Ciro wasn’t difficult — there were plenty, and they all seemed eager to see him go down.

It wasn’t surprising. Like all tyrants, Ciro Desenzani had his moment of glory, where people flocked to him for favors and connections. Using him to sell their horses or to bring wealthy patrons to them. But once his empire began to crumble, even more people were eager to watch his downfall.

When Caesar was at the top, all of Rome amassed to kiss his hand. And when he fell, everyone lined up to stab him in the throat.

When I called the club owner, she explained that she had taken in some of Ciro’s former victims, members of his so-called Taqueada Polo Club. Her account made me feel sick.

What Ciro Desenzani and Michel Dorignac had touted as a legitimate club in the heart of Silicon Valley, complete with state-of-the-art facilities, turned out to be little more than a junkyard with a dirt patch and plot of grass in Gilroy. The fences were chewed up, the field wasn’t level, and there was no proper irrigation. I was told that at one point, the water had to be brought in from out of town in buckets for the horses to drink because there was no water available at Taqueada for them.

It was never truly suitable for polo; horses constantly tripped on the uneven ground, and there was no way to water the field.

Dangerous conditions at Taqueada Polo

The owner went on to describe how Ciro had collected substantial sums of money through investments and memberships before fleeing to Florida. She suggested I speak with “Ruby”, a former Taqueada member, who might be able to share more.

Ruby told me she had boarded a horse at Taqueada during a period of heavy rains in California. The weather had left the stalls and paddock area submerged in mud, sometimes up to the horses’ knees. Instead of addressing the drainage issues or relocating the horses, Ciro confined them in these muddy conditions. Disturbed by this neglect, Ruby told me that she had confided in someone named Zoe about her concerns.

“Zoe?” I asked. “You mean Zoe Cookson?” Ruby confirmed. Ciro had mentioned Zoe to me a few times, but aside from receiving some billing messages from her, I had never seen, met, or really known anything about her. According to Ciro, Zoe was supposedly an ex-girlfriend, though I never believed it. From blasting Whitney Houston in his car, to cringing at Karen’s “vagina” jokes, to suggesting I name my polo team Yellow Rose — it all felt off. Then there was the time he made me watch a girly over the top femme Dior ad featuring Natalie Portman twirling through Paris in a frilly dress — on repeat, as he admired it. No straight man would obsess over an ad like that. I had long suspected Ciro was a closeted homosexual. If Zoe was in his life, she was more likely a beard, carefully chosen to maintain appearances within the conservative polo community.

Ciro and Zoe at Santa Clara

Ciro never said anything nice about Zoe the few times he mentioned her. He would show me a picture of her and say that because she was ugly he deigned himself to be with her. I agreed with Ciro, Zoe was incredibly unattractive. She looked like a scarecrow, only slightly more inbred. Ciro also said that she handled his accounting because she wasn’t good at anything else. He spared no criticism for her and truly seemed embarrassed to be associated with her.

Nothing like writing your own fan mail. Happy birthday, Ciro and Zoe.

Ruby explained that when she voiced her concerns about the horses standing in mud, Zoe had lied, exploiting her English background to claim that in England, horses were accustomed to living in muddy conditions. When Ruby complained about the lack of shelter, with the horses exposed to the blistering sun, Zoe and Ciro’s response was to demand more money, promising to use the funds to buy an awning. They also told her if she wanted to resolve the mud problem, she’d need to pay for sand.

Ruby went on to say that Zoe had told her she was severing ties with Ciro and that Polo United was now solely Ciro and Michel’s venture. Ruby was surprised when I informed her that Zoe was still very much involved.

But how involved was she? Zoe has been a shadowy figure since the beginning of Polo United and her purpose wasn’t clear. Turn over was constant in Polo United, and Ciro and Michel only had a few clients at any given time. Why did they need Zoe to handle their books?

I was then told Zoe might be in England and possibly have a foreign bank account there. As I dug deeper, I discovered that she and Ciro might even be married. Their lavender marriage would make it easier to move funds discreetly out of the U.S., further fueling my suspicion that their partnership was never based on a genuine connection but rather of a transactional nature, a “marriage of convenience” as they call it, to facilitate the movement of money and to protect their schemes.

The more I learned about Zoe, the more she seemed like a California version of Michel. She played the “good cop” role, appearing to be the nice, innocent one whom members could confide in, while secretly relaying information back to Ciro. I began to suspect that she and Ciro had even orchestrated situations for the members to gain sympathy for her, making her seem sad and innocent, thus diverting any suspicion of her involvement in Ciro’s schemes.

There were stories of Zoe complaining about Ciro’s supposed infidelity, but after spending time around him, I believed Ciro had no real interest in women — only a mix of anger and confusion towards them. I once saw him attempt to feign interest at a party by being a textbook sleaze to my friend, Anne. It looked more like Ciro watched a YouTube video on how to be a straight man and was acting it out, poorly. His method acting of the alpha male was about as convincing as Elton John claiming he can get a diamond-hard erection from looking at a Hustler Magazine centerfold.

Ruby went on to tell me that Ciro had even stiffed the workers who were supposed to install the irrigation for the field. In response, they capped the wells, making it impossible to water the grounds. Ciro then took a $60,000 membership from her for another “season” at Taqueada and then fled California.

Taqueada Polo facility

I verified Ruby’s story with other former members who had filed lawsuits against Ciro. They confirmed the fields were decrepit and unsuitable for polo. One member recalled how her horse had broken its leg due to the poor conditions, leading to its euthanasia. Worse still, after Ciro and Zoe assured her that another horse was safe to ride, it threw her off, causing permanent injuries, ending her polo career.

Two other members described the dangerous corrals where the horses were kept. Ciro and Zoe had used cheap wire fencing intended for goats, which posed a constant hazard to the horses. The members said they had to go to the field daily to push the wire back in to prevent injuries. The corals where the horses were kept were filled with piles of dirt. Trash lined the sides of the field. The negligence and lack of expertise in setting up a proper polo facility were nothing short of shocking.

The “state of the art” Taqueada Polo Facility, Gilroy CA

It was also disclosed to me that the horses that these members had in the care of Zoe and Ciro were also neglected. One of their horses they noticed was lying down all day, which Ciro dismissed and rode in a match. The horse had colic and almost died. Ciro and Zoe were not giving the horse access to pasture, causing the agonizing gastrointestinal issues that almost killed it. This verified what Cipher told me about Ciro in Florida, and how he wasn’t giving the horses access to pasture. Often “forgetting what day it was” and leaving the horses in their stalls.

My horses get colic every day — Ciro Desenzani

One member, desperate to leave after witnessing the abuse, found her horse held hostage by Ciro. He blocked the horse in its enclosure with a trailer, refusing to release it until she agreed to sign an NDA, effectively silencing her. It wasn’t an isolated incident; I learned from several sources that Ciro routinely used NDAs to silence those who knew too much.

An NDA does not protect against criminal activity, I had to keep explaining this and I couldn’t understand why no one knew that.

I was also told about Ciro’s lies when it came to horse sales, in addition to trying to sell an old horse as a young one, like he tried to do with Karen at one point, he also claimed he was the US supplier of horses to a particular Asian royal family. When the member contacted the proper references to fact check this statement, it was discovered that this royal family never heard of Ciro.

The members also experienced what Ruby had, a payment for a club “membership” and then Ciro fleeing the state, leaving them bag-holding without a club, refund or answers.

It made me wonder how Ciro, a relative unknown from Chile, and Zoe, equally inconspicuous, had managed to secure the initial funding to rent the field and launch this sham of a club. I was then told that Ciro had been taking investments in the land, falsely claiming he owned it, when he was merely renting.

Ruby then suggested I reach out to Midnight Rose, a name that carried an almost mythical weight within Polo United. Midnight Rose was the figure behind the lawsuits against Ciro and was the source of the first suspicions many of us had about his integrity.

The Night Knows What the Morning Never Suspected

Midnight Rose recounted how Ciro had approached her back in 2017 with a grand proposal: an opportunity to invest in the future of polo by building a state-of-the-art club and facility in Silicon Valley, California. He painted a vivid picture of an elite establishment, featuring professional-grade polo fields, luxury stables, and a world-class training program that would rival any in the country. The offer was enticing, presented as not just a chance to make a significant financial investment but also to help create something extraordinary.

Midnight Rose invested heavily — $100,000 in Taqueada Polo California LLC, plus a $50,000 loan to Ciro. Ciro alleged that the project was worth over $1.2 million, and Midnight was assured that her 10% membership stake would yield substantial returns once the club was fully operational. A claim Ciro was not legally allowed to make.

As an investor, Midnight was entitled to view the financial records, but her repeated requests for transparency were stonewalled. Ciro and Zoe, the supposed manager of Taqueada, kept crucial financial details hidden, denying her any clear picture of where the funds were going or how they were being used.

Meanwhile, the club quickly began to struggle with cash flow. Lacking credit of their own, Ciro and Zoe turned to Midnight, who agreed to help by taking out business credit cards to cover some of the operating expenses. But those credit cards soon became a vehicle for misuse. Midnight discovered that Ciro and Zoe had been deliberately hiding the monthly statements from her, a tactic used to obscure the fact that they were making personal purchases rather than covering legitimate business costs.

Midnight’s findings confirmed what others had told me: none of the investment money had been used to build the prestigious club promised to her. There was no irrigation, the horse corrals were chewed up and deteriorating, and the field itself was a disaster — completely unfit for polo. This wasn’t a start-up club struggling to get off the ground; it was a full-fledged polo investment scam.

I analyzed all of the documents from the Taqueada club and then coupled with documents I was given from other sources, Im not a lawyer but in my opinion it looks like there were no fewer than 10 felonies committed by Ciro Desenzani and Zoe Cookson. Everything from securities fraud, to embezzlement to obstruction of justice:

1. Illegal Solicitation of Investment-Under the Securities Act of 1933, it is illegal to offer or sell securities (in this case, membership interests in the LLC) without proper registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or a valid exemption.

• No registration was filed, and no exemptions were sought for Taqueada Polo, making this an unregistered securities offering.

2. Fraudulent Promises and Misrepresentation- Ciro sent Midnight an email confirming that she could expect to make a profit from her investment. He assured her that the funds would be used for specific purposes, like renting land and building the club.

• Under Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, it is illegal to use fraudulent means to offer or sell securities. The promise of profits without disclosing risks or providing financial documentation constitutes securities fraud.

3. Improper Handling of LLC Formation- Taqueada Polo California LLC was formed, but Midnight was not given proper access to the company’s financial records, even though she was a member-owner.

• California Corporations Code Section 17704.10 requires that all LLC members be provided with access to the company’s financial records. The failure to do so was a violation of state corporate law.

4. Misuse of Investment Funds- Midnight made an initial capital contribution and took out business credit cards to cover expenses for the club, including corral fees and horse training.

• Ciro and his partner, Zoe Cookson, used the credit cards for personal purchases unrelated to the club, and Ciro requested that some payments be funneled into his personal bank account. This constituted fraudulent conversion and embezzlement, as the investment funds were diverted for personal gain.

5. Breach of Fiduciary Duty- Despite repeated requests, Ciro and Zoe continued to deny Midnight access to the financial statements and credit card records.

• This was a breach of fiduciary duty under California law, as the managing members of the LLC have a legal obligation to act in the best interest of the company and its members.

6. Failure to Disclose Risks and Illegal Guarantees- As Midnight continued to invest money into the club, no financial disclosures were provided to her about the risks involved in the investment.

• Making assurances about profits without disclosing the inherent risks is considered fraudulent inducement and violates federal securities law.

7. Use of Investor Funds for Personal Expenses- Midnight discovered that expenses she thought were being used for the polo club were, in fact, going towards personal purchases by Ciro and Zoe.

• The misuse of funds for personal gain constitutes embezzlement and fraudulent misrepresentation.

8. Sale of Membership Interests Without Disclosure- Ciro attempted to buy back Midnight’s 10% membership interest in the LLC without providing a clear financial picture or disclosing the state of the company.

• The lack of transparency and misleading representations violated California and federal securities laws, as proper disclosures are required for such transactions.

9. Tax Evasion- Ciro failed to pay taxes on the income and transactions related to the polo club. The IRS delinquency indicated ongoing tax issues since 2021.

• Federal tax laws require timely payment and filing of taxes. The failure to comply with these requirements constitutes tax evasion, a criminal offense.

10. Fleeing the State to Avoid Legal Consequences

• Ciro left California in an apparent attempt to evade legal consequences, including multiple lawsuits and potential criminal charges.

• Leaving the state to avoid litigation or prosecution can be considered obstruction of justice and may lead to additional penalties or charges.

11. Animal Neglect

• Horses were kept in knee-deep mud, deprived of proper pasture, which contributed to colic and other health issues.

• These conditions reflect animal neglect under California Penal Code Section 597, which requires proper care for animals, including adequate shelter and food.

12. Negligence with Field Maintenance- Ciro and Zoe neglected to properly maintain the polo field, which led to hazardous conditions, causing horses to stumble and resulting in injuries to members.

• California law mandates that businesses offering equestrian services maintain safe conditions. Failing to do so can constitute gross negligence.

13. Use of NDA’s to intimidate victims and to obstruct justice- Ciro’s use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to silence his victims not only deepened the deception but also violated multiple laws. By coercing his victims into signing NDAs with the intent of preventing them from reporting his criminal activities — such as fraud and embezzlement — Ciro ran afoul of both federal and state statutes designed to protect whistleblowers and uphold justice.

• 18 U.S. Code § 1512, it is a federal crime to intimidate or corruptly persuade someone to withhold information from law enforcement regarding illegal activities. By using NDAs as a weapon to silence his victims and block them from communicating with authorities, Ciro violated this statute, which carries severe penalties, including significant prison time.

• Ciro’s attempts to use NDAs to shield himself from accountability directly contravened California Civil Code Section 1668, which renders any contract that seeks to exempt a person from responsibility for fraud or illegal conduct void and unenforceable. In other words, these NDAs were legally invalid, and Ciro’s efforts to use them to suppress whistleblowing amounted to further illegal activity.

• Additionally, under federal whistleblower protection laws, such as the Dodd-Frank Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, individuals are explicitly safeguarded against retaliation when reporting fraud or other violations. These laws prioritize transparency and protect those who come forward to authorities like the FBI or SEC. Ciro’s use of NDAs to stifle reports of securities fraud was a direct violation of these protections

And then there’s Tax Fraud

After speaking with other witnesses of the Taqueada investment scam, I uncovered another pattern in Ciro’s deception. I was told that he would manipulate the balance sheets to make the company appear as though it was operating at a loss. Doing so would allow him to avoid paying dividends to investors while justifying hefty bonuses for himself.

Even more alarming was the IRS delinquency notice I uncovered, suggesting Ciro may have been underreporting his income. Taqueada Polo had generated over $1,000,000 in revenue during at least one of its operating years, yet the tax document I saw appeared to show a much lower figure. If this is accurate, Ciro wasn’t just deceiving his investors — he was also defrauding the government.

The Taqueada Polo Club was a sham from the start, not even legally permitted to sell securities. Yet somehow, Midnight’s California lawyers saw no issue with it. They simply reviewed the paperwork, gave their approval, and moved on. I couldn’t help but cradle my head in my hands and think, What the fuck?

I went back to Ruby, who had also sought legal recourse for the funds she lost — stolen — from Taqueada. Her lawyers gave her the runaround, treating it like she had buyer’s remorse over a bad car purchase, and discouraged her from filing suit. And for the others I spoke with, it was more of the same. When I first informed my lawyer about everything that was happening, he told me I needed to take this information to the police. But when I asked Ruby and the others if they had reported it to the authorities or if their lawyers had even suggested doing so, the answer was always the same: No.

I interviewed many Taqueada victims who sought legal recourse, only to be failed by their counsel — either through discouragement of a legitimate lawsuit or through a basic failure to understand the law. These California lawyers, who should have been protecting their clients, overlooked the blatant fact that some Chilean thug had no legal standing to sell investment shares in an unregistered company. It was a staggering display of incompetence that left victims vulnerable, highlighting just how crucial it is to find adequate legal representation to protect your rights and the rights of others.

In stark contrast, Midnight Rose refused to be silenced. She was adamant in her pursuit of justice, and because she found strong representation in Florida, she was able to file her lawsuit against Ciro. It was her persistence and legal action that allowed us Polo United members to discover her case and begin to question Ciro’s schemes. Midnight’s lawsuit was the first crack in the facade, planting the seeds of doubt that eventually led to the unraveling of his entire operation. Without her, Ciro’s con would have likely continued unchecked, protected by layers of legal failure and deceit.

When I shared my findings from what happened in California with Karen, including the multiple felonies Ciro had committed, she asked why he wasn’t in jail. I explained that no one in California had reported what had happened. If you have a bike stolen and don’t file a report, the police aren’t going to be out there searching for a bike thief. A crime goes unpunished if no one steps forward to expose it. It’s why figures like P. Diddy can get away with decades of abuse before anyone is held accountable — because the avalanche of truth only starts when someone finally files a lawsuit or speaks up.

Cowardice Makes the Rat Bigger

I was advised to talk to another former member of Taqueada, Beck Mason. When I reached out, he took his time to respond. When he finally did, he told me Ciro had left California owing him a significant amount of money — about $70,000. But what he revealed next made my blood run cold: Ciro had taken three of Beck’s horses and disappeared with them. One of those horses was Tully — the very horse Ciro had tried to sell me back in February.

It became clear that Ciro had stolen Tully, transported her across state lines, and tried to sell her.

Remember this?

For a brief moment, Beck seemed determined to get Tully back. I told him I would help track her down, share the address with him, and notify the authorities that someone had tried to sell me a stolen horse, so they could facilitate her return. But there was a problem — Beck had never reported Tully stolen. He was “too embarrassed” to do so.

The situation was dire. Midnight Rose had told me about a similar experience with Ciro. He had taken her horse, “Goldie”, allegedly for use at Taqueada. When Midnight couldn’t locate Goldie, she aggressively pressured Ciro to return her. When Goldie finally came back, she was emaciated and covered in lacerations — starved and abused.

This wasn’t an isolated incident. A source in California confirmed that before fleeing the state, Ciro had taken clients’ horses to a farm in Indio, California, where he abandoned them.

It’s clear that Ciro’s neglect and abuse were part of a larger pattern. He wasn’t just a reckless sack of garbage ; he was a massive serial offending piece of animal abusing shit, harming and abandoning horses whenever it suited him.

My frustration with Beck was severe when I gave him all the information he needed to recover Tully, including contacts for the local police and my offer to help retrieve her. His response? “Ok, I’m heading out to dinner, will be in touch.” After that — radio silence.

I kept pursuing him, giving him updates for many days about Tully. Nothing.

This kind of pathetic cowardice is exactly why I left California. It’s ingrained in the culture to avoid getting involved, even when it’s morally right. It’s a mindset where some effete capricious milksop will put more value on his swanky European vacation or his little night out than with protecting a horse that he was responsible for, even from a potentially deadly fate.

I shouldn’t have been the one caring more about Tully than her own owner did. I didn’t want another horse to suffer, didn’t want another one to die because of someone’s apathy. I confided in a friend, and he told me what I’d heard told to me too many times before: “You can’t save them all.” The words hit me like a slap, and it took everything I had not to punch my fist through the nearest glass.

That California coward made me angry.

Gotham Story

I went back into the forest with Sensei the following morning, we had a routine that we had grown accustomed to and fond of in a quick amount of time, and had developed a familial relationship. Forest riding in the morning, polo in the afternoon.

As I was riding Gastona, and holding onto Maggie with the lead rope, I stood up in the saddle and was able to do it without falling back. Sensei looked back and smiled and said “that makes me very happy, my girl.”

When we emerged from the forest, we entered a sprawling countryside of tall grass. Sensei rode ahead, fast, and called for me to follow. I hesitated — it wasn’t a polo field but a vast open grassland, and I wasn’t on Maggie, but Gastona, a larger mare. Still, I leaned forward, squeezed with my legs, and we took off. With a kick, Gastona surged forward, and we galloped across the North Salem countryside — the cowboy, the archangel, and their horses. I glanced at Maggie, bouncing happily along at a canter, which was something I had never seen her do before. “Maggie is bouncing!” I shouted to Sensei. He just laughed and kept riding; he had seen it all.

Back at the barn, we indulged in Sensei’s favorite pastime — what he called “bullshitting for a bit,” a casual chat session filled with gossip and light-hearted talk before getting back to work.

Over the past few weeks, I had come to the farm daily, getting to know Sensei. I hadn’t mentioned Michel before, waiting for the topic to come up naturally. Finally, it did when Sensei spoke of an upcoming match Michel was playing with The Boss. I saw my chance. I told Sensei how Michel had threatened to have me kicked out of the barn whenever he wanted. Sensei’s response was immediate: he didn’t think much of Michel. It occurred to me that the two hadn’t spoken during the match when I first met Sensei.

He opened up with saying how ridiculous the spectacle was at the match that day. He said Michel and Ciro paid no attention to me, Sugar Daddy, or the other students, and just had us riding around without instruction. He disliked what he saw and mentioned how Ciro and Michel were just wrapped up in their own play, and seemingly forgot that they were there with the purpose of teaching others, and not playing for themselves.

Sensei then shared stories spanning many years of Michel’s questionable behavior — from mismanaging his wife’s money to selling substandard horses to The Boss, a man who had employed him and been good to him for years. He portrayed Michel as a deceitful opportunist, a man who wore a charming facade to manipulate those around him.

Two Face and Archangel — Before the masks came off

It was the first time I had heard someone speak so openly about Michel’s duplicity. While I had seen his two-faced nature firsthand, others dismissed my observations, fooled by his outward charm and “Aw shucks” demeanor. But Sensei knew better. Michel had worked for The Boss for nearly two decades, and Sensei had been there the entire time, watching from the background. With nothing to offer Michel, Sensei had seen the real man behind the mask.

Hell is empty, the demons are here

Later, back at the cottage, I sat outside and revisited the old Taqueada Polo Instagram page. I wanted to learn more about this dubious operation. As I scrolled past countless photos of Ciro, a clown obsessed with his own image, I stumbled across a few images of Michel. He had once mentioned that he would fly to California to play a match at Ciro’s request, but he hadn’t told me he was interviewed by a polo press outlet called Click Polo.

The interview linked to a longer article in which Michel spoke highly of Taqueada Polo, praising its “potential” as a premier polo club in Silicon Valley. He claimed to have known Ciro for ten years in Argentina, contradicting the story Ciro told Taqueada members that they had been childhood friends. The childhood friends story was impossible; Ciro was from Chile, Michel was from Argentina, and their relationship timeline kept shifting. In fact, Michel had once told me they met in California about a decade ago. Now, in this article, he suggested their connection began earlier.

The phrases Michel used in the interview didn’t sound like him. “Ciro saw the potential that no one else did before, not only in the sport but also in the commercial aspect of developing polo in Silicon Valley,” the article quoted him as saying. “Silicon Valley is the global mecca of all tech companies, and this club is very close to it.” Michel wasn’t someone who spoke like that. His English was rudimentary at best, and he often asked me to explain what certain words meant. It was as if someone else — a native English speaker — had fed him these lines. Someone like Zoe.

Michel is the asshole in the black hat.

Then I found what seemed like a smoking gun: Michel said, “Taqueada is a very nice club…It has a very nice field with good irrigation, good sand, and I know that Ciro plans to expand it to build a new field.” There it was — irrigation. The word everyone used to highlight what Taqueada Polo lacked. And here was Michel, who wasn’t a land developer or an engineer, talking about irrigation in a way that seemed beyond his grasp. It was as if he had been coached to say these things, likely by Ciro and Zoe, to cover up the club’s glaring deficiencies and keep the facade intact for current and prospective investors.

It just couldn’t be denied anymore. Michel was complicit all along. And like I said to myself weeks prior, he must have seen the poor condition of the Polo United horses and known there was an issue and ignored it. With Taqueada, there is no way he, an international professional polo player who has played at the best clubs in the world could look at the Taqueada hell hole junk yard, with all of its problems and abuses, nod his head and say, “this is good”.

“Taqueada is a very nice club. It has a very nice field...” -Michel Dorignac

His role in the bad horse sales only confirmed this. An interview with a California witness who had observed the Taqueada scam verified what Sensei had told me. Michel had a history of selling substandard horses, passing off those he couldn’t unload on professionals to Ciro. Ciro, in turn, marketed them to Taqueada members at heavily inflated prices, assuring buyers that a veterinary check was unnecessary. The horses would arrive lame, drugged, and in need of treatment, at which point Ciro charged the members exorbitantly for boarding, training, and medical care, further exploiting their investment.

Later, I spoke to the owner of a polo club in California, a polo player herself and someone from a long family lineage of polo players. She told me that within five minutes of meeting Ciro, she knew he was a phony. Michel, also coming from an extensive polo background, having spent his entire life in the sport, couldn’t possibly have been unaware of Ciro’s misrepresentations. The idea that he didn’t know Ciro was lying about being a top-tier player, a world-class horseman and a polo entrepreneur is ridiculous. Michel knew. He always knew. And he chose to align himself with Ciro for a reason.

Michel’s decision to align with Ciro wasn’t just self-interest — it was also an act of ruthless betrayal. Feeding false information to the press and lending his professional credibility to Taqueada was bad enough, but I learned something that took things to a new level of deceit. When Taqueada was crumbling under the weight of lawsuits and financial ruin, instead of letting the disaster die, Michel and Ciro hatched a truly diabolical plan. I was told the two of them conspired to sell the failing, criminal operation to Michel’s own cousin who had no idea about the legal chaos and criminal activity he was being set up to inherit.

Michel’s moral bankruptcy reached new depths with what I uncovered. He didn’t just stand by while Ciro fled Taqueada in the middle of the night, abandoning the club and making off with stolen funds — Michel was an accomplice. If what I was told was true, then he actively helped orchestrate the plan to offload the failing, criminal operation onto his unsuspecting cousin, setting him up to take the fall for their crimes.

To make things worse, Michel was likely aware of past abuse of Ciro onto his cousin. I was told Ciro didn’t pay the cousin what he was owed for work, delaying payments until the cousin had no choice but to return to Argentina, at which point he only received half of what was promised. If what I was told was true, Michel allowed such abuse to happen, showing his willingness to betray anyone.

The vibrant, thriving, grand facility of Taqueada Polo, taken October 2024

I later learned that Michel had told Karen back in May that Ciro had sold Taqueada for $650,000, supposedly to pay out the members and focus entirely on Polo United in Wellington, Florida. This was a stark contrast to what Michel later told me in July, that evening at my cabin after I confronted Ciro on the field about what I knew about his past, where he claimed he had convinced Ciro to keep Taqueada in operation. For weeks afterward, both Michel and Ciro swore up and down that the club was still running.

This was a calculated game they played — crafting lies tailored to whoever they were trying to deceive in the moment. They built entire false narratives, adjusting the story based on who was listening, manipulating their victims with precision. This wasn’t just the occasional lie; it was an entire architecture of deceit, constructed to keep people in the dark while they continued their fraudulent schemes.

Through my interviews, I learned more about Michel than I ever imagined, watching the mask he wore slowly peel away to reveal the grotesque, two-faced monster I had once shared a bed with. From his extramarital affairs to hiding the existence of his children, to scamming his patron of 20 years and ultimately betraying his own cousin, Michel’s moral failures ran far deeper than shady business dealings. He wasn’t merely complicit in the great Polo Ponzi Scheme— he was an active participant as those terrible things unfolded, proving he had no loyalty, no honor, and no sense of familial duty. His complete disregard for the well-being of his own family, much less the people he deceived and exploited, exposed him as a man utterly devoid of integrity. Throughout all of my time, effort and research I believe one thing for sure in all of this: Michel Dorignac is a morally bankrupt conman, without character or conscience, driven solely by self-preservation, lust and greed.

“‘Enormous potential’ — to con everyone.

After I finished my investigative work from the cabin, I went to Gotham that afternoon. Sensei, The Boss, JB and another man were playing polo out in the grass field. They told me to join them, I rode Maggie onto the field and immediately scored a goal. The Boss said “wow and she just started playing polo!” The Boss’ kind comment meant a lot to me. As we continued on, the rains fell down soaking us and the horses, but we played on until it was dark.

Sensei went back to the Dominican Republic and I knew it was time for me to go home, back to Florida.

Would the Real USPA Please Stand Up

The U.S. Polo Association, that august body meant to safeguard the sport’s integrity, sanctioned the Taqueada Club. Their stamp of approval gave Ciro’s operation an air of credibility that helped him lure investors, amass clients, and build the façade of a legitimate enterprise. But when members raised alarms — about neglected horses, human trafficking, and violations — the USPA did nothing meaningful. And their inaction let Ciro pack up his circus of cons and take it across the country to start the whole dirty show again.

Why didn’t they stop him?

Money. My opinion at least. As long as Taqueada was a sanctioned club, the USPA was happy to collect its dues, reinforcing the illusion of legitimacy. But when Ciro stopped paying, they didn’t send investigators or raise alarms — they just called about the unpaid fees. One of those calls went to Andi, a Polo United member who had listed her club association under Taqueada since Polo United wasn’t even registered with the USPA. Instead of recognizing this as a glaring warning sign, Andi continued to pour money into Ciro’s operation, paying membership dues and even loaning him more cash. It was like watching someone toss buckets of water onto a sinking ship, oblivious that the water was coming from the ocean itself.

Ciro wasn’t skilled at polo, but what he lacked in talent, he made up for in his ability to find naive people willing to hand him money.

The witnesses to Taqueada that I interviewed told me that they had discussions with the US Polo Association’s personnel and their grand solution was to let Ciro run out of money and he will “disappear” never to be seen from again. That worked well, he disappeared from California with money and stolen horses to start the con all over again in Florida.

I contacted the US Polo Association myself, both filling out their online animal welfare forms to detail the abuse of the horses and to explain I witnessed human trafficking and a massive financial scam. Their response was along the lines of, we let the club owner know and we can’t help with much else, you do it.

Their e-mail. It was pathetic. It was sleazy. The kind you’d expect from a governing body that governs nothing. It cemented my belief that the USPA is no longer the venerable institution of an ancient and prestigious sport; it’s a cocktail party, a glorified money pit where dues are collected, ethics are optional, and the wealthy elite sip champagne upon a grand pile of steaming horseshit.

The US Polo Association is notably litigious, especially when it comes to defending its trademarks. If they devoted even half as much effort to safeguarding the integrity of polo as they do to protecting their merchandise, I doubt any of this would have unfolded. I suppose there isn’t as much money in protecting a player and their horse as there is in protecting the financial interest of the image of a player and their horse on a branded cotton blend jacket.

I tried to figure out why the USPA did so little here, it seemed like there was an effort to safeguard the evil doers and silence the victims. Karen and I ended up suing Ciro and Michel in October, and their lawyer was a man named Avery Chapman.

I remembered Avery, I met him at Santa Clara on the field in the spring, I believe around the time when Ciro was getting sued by Taqueada victims. Avery serves as Ciro and Michel’s registered agent for Polo United, which not only connects him to their business, but makes him an integral figure in allowing it to operate because a business cannot maintain LLC status in Florida without a designated registered agent.

I researched Avery’s CV which he provides on his website and he has a long-standing association and significant involvement in the US Polo Association, including sitting on several USPA committees including a committee for Equine Welfare.

Part of the Curriculum Vitae for Avery Chapman

I was told by a victim that Avery was also the one who drafted and issued the NDA that silenced the Taqueada members who sued Ciro in May 2024, the NDA, I was told was a condition for settlement. In my view, this NDA wasn’t just a legal document — it was a intimidation tool, and I believe the NDA discouraged those victims from warning others and enabling Ciro to seamlessly shift his operations from California to Florida, leaving a trail of unchecked crimes in his wake.

After Ciro and Michel were served with their lawsuits, one of Ciro’s cronies posted images on Instagram of Ciro, Michel and Avery together on the polo field for a match.

Back in Florida, I reached out to Andi and told her the entire operation was a sham. I told her that Ciro had tried to sell me a stolen horse named Tully. After a moment of silence, Andi revealed that she had purchased investment shares in a bulk group of horses, and Tully’s name was on the list. Ciro hadn’t just stolen a horse and transported it across state lines; he had committed securities fraud by selling investment shares in stolen property. With Ciro, the deceit seemed absolutely endless.

Shortly after my return, Cipher sent me an Instagram post featuring Ciro and Sugar Daddy in Morocco, attending a week-long polo extravaganza at La Palmeraie Polo Club, a prestigious facility owned by the Hermès family. And then I saw another picture, Michel and Zoe were there too.

Ciro the Zero

As I analyzed everything I had uncovered about Ciro, I couldn’t help but wonder — what was the whole point of it all? The elaborate lies, the hoaxes, the fake clubs, the Ponzi Scheme. It couldn’t have been just about money. Ciro wasn’t a big spender. He lived modestly, almost pitifully, for someone who had scammed so much. There had to be something deeper driving him. And then it struck me — the whole operation wasn’t just about conning people out of their money. It was about building a world where Ciro could be something he knew, deep down, he never really was.

Ciro’s entire life seemed to be a web of grandiose fabrications, spun together to compensate for what he lacked in actual talent. One afternoon at Polo United, he gathered us all around to regale us with his latest tale — a story of his past as a child prodigy pianist. According to Ciro, he had been taught by his famous pianist father and performed in grand concert halls across Argentina. But when his father died, he claimed he had to switch from playing the piano to playing polo in order to feed his family.

It was a touching story — except it wasn’t true. The problem was, Ciro wasn’t even from Argentina; he was from Chile. He seemed to forget the details of his own lie when he once told me that he and his mother don’t speak to each other, making it impossible to believe he had ever been some devoted son trying to support his family through the sport of kings. His piano story was just one of many fabrications he crafted to paint a picture of himself as someone far more extraordinary than reality would allow.

Ciro’s entire strategy revolved around finding gullible, wealthy patrons — people who couldn’t tell a low-goaler from a top-level professional. He banked on their ignorance, using it to elevate his own status. At Taqueada, he targeted a member much like he later targeted Sugar Daddy, exploiting their enthusiasm for the sport. He had the member fly him around the country under the pretense of finding sponsors for the club.

But I have come to believe the club was just a front; it was all about finding Ciro sponsors so he could worm his way into matches that his skill level would never otherwise warrant.

Ciro found a way to pull off his con, tricking wealthy novices into believing they were part of an exclusive polo operation. This scam allowed him to infiltrate top venues like the Greenwich Polo Club and even attend a week-long event at Morocco’s La Palmeraie Polo Club. There he was, playing alongside respected figures and mingling with high society — people he’d never share the field with on merit alone. Without his elaborate deceptions, Ciro wouldn’t come close to those arenas, let alone compete among true professionals like Mariano Aguerre. It was all an illusion, built on lies, that allowed him to rub shoulders with the elite while concealing how out of his depth he truly was.

The reality is, Ciro doesn’t have a real team or a steady spot in any polo lineup. If he does manage to get into a match, it’s because a team needed a low-handicap player to fill a slot — nothing more.

When I tracked his movements, I never saw the determination or dedication of a serious athlete. Instead, his days consisted of sleeping in late at a budget motel, lounging around at a grocery store for hours, and occasionally making an appearance at the field if there happened to be a lesson. There was no routine of training or daily riding, no sign of a man working tirelessly to improve his game. He just drifted aimlessly, never putting in the effort to truly belong among the ranks of serious players.

Ciro’s scam was brilliantly orchestrated, in a twisted way. He figured out how to exploit the desires and ignorance of others to claw his way into prestigious matches without ever being a good player. He built an illusion around himself, using lies about his background, connections, and skill to construct a fake life where he could pretend to be something he was not. It was all a hoax — one grand, elaborate scheme to con his way into the polo world, because no legitimate team would have him otherwise.

Beneath all the lies, it became clear that Ciro was a failure at the one thing he loved most. At a subconscious level, he must have known this; his handicap was 2 goals, just barely enough to be considered a professional. In the world of elite polo, that’s scraping the bottom of the barrel. He couldn’t hold his own against the true professionals and was only ever impressive when pitted against beginners who didn’t know any better. The whole Taqueada and Polo United operations weren’t about teaching people the sport or creating a legitimate club. It was an elaborate, abusive scam designed to shoehorn a talentless polo playing potato into prestigious matches where he would otherwise never belong.

An Uncertain Future

It seems that as of now there is not much of a Polo United. Ciro and Michel do not appear to have secured a long-term field at Santa Clara, and many members had already departed. With Ciro in exile from California, Michel relying on sponsors in Florida, and limited polo communities in the U.S., their options are dwindling.

If I had to predict their next move, it would involve focusing on Sugar Daddy. They’d likely pitch Polo United as centered entirely around him, claiming that his “improvement” warranted their exclusive attention. They will charge inflated professional fees, overcharge for mediocre horses, and prioritize networking over actual training. But the illusion can only last so long. Once Sugar Daddy realizes he is paying a premium for smoke and mirrors — everything will collapse.

Afterward, Ciro, Michel, and possibly Zoe will probably flee to Argentina, like the Nazis who found refuge there after the war. They may burrow into some hideaway like the vermin they are and lay low for a while. Michel might eventually return, but if Ciro isn’t’ behind bars, he will most likely never set foot in America again, fearing what might be waiting for him.

Flower of the Time

On the long drive back to Florida, I had plenty of time to reflect on everything that had happened over the past several months. I’d seen terrible things committed by terrible people, but through my investigation and those solitary nights in the cabin, I began to uncover a deeper meaning in it all. The nights were dark out there, far from city lights, where every star in the sky seemed within reach. With no cell phone reception, I’d lie in the cool grass, working to piece together the truth of what I’d witnessed. By the edge of the lake, looking into the forest, I’d think about what happens when people let evil persist unchecked, and what could be done to stop it.

When I would ride Maggie through the hillside, when we hit great speed, it was special bond we shared. Polo brought me that bond with a beautiful animal.

And when I think about what brought me to polo, it was Peter Pan. I thought about why I broke up with him. At his core he was a deeply selfish and broken man who only cared about himself. Throughout my time with Polo United, I kept encountering the same kind of men — selfish and corrupt, who would watch the world crumble to dust as long as their pockets were lined, indifferent to the flames they fanned.

I remembered the moment I knew it was over between me and Peter Pan. He was always boasting about his wealth and travels, never once asking what I wanted or what he could do for me. It was always about what he wanted, what I needed to give to him. I never asked him for anything, except once. One day, after bragging about knowing every corner of Florida, I showed him an album cover depicting a woman sitting at the water’s edge in a mythical forest, and asked him if he knew of a place in Florida like this, and if he could show me where it was. He said yes, but never did.

I went out into the forest to discover something, and I did. But I didn’t need Peter Pan to take me there. I found it myself.

Next time, Part 6: The Leak

Related profile: Zoe Cookson

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme Part IV: Into the Forest

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme

Part III of the story can be read here

My Kingdom for a Horse

Maggie lost a shoe on the field, and I think this sparked fear in Ciro. Just days earlier, I had accused him of neglecting the horses, letting them go months without proper shoeing, along with other allegations of animal mistreatment.

The next day, I received a message from Michel Dorignac saying Maggie had been re-shod, accompanied by a video from the farm. I was suspicious about who had taken the video. Like Ciro, I doubted that Michel regularly visited the Brewster farm. I played it up, thanking him so much for caring for Maggie, I needed them to think everything was ok, and that I wasn’t secretly planning my exit.

Later that day, I went to the field to ride Maggie. At the bottom of the hill where the horse trailers were parked, I saw a pickup truck with a man standing beside it, a farrier, shoeing a horse. When I reached the top of the hill, Jennifer was there to watch Skyler ride. Ciro made a show of the farrier being there, proudly announcing that he’d hired him from the Hamptons to shoe all the horses that day.

It was obvious that this was a performance — meant to show everyone that the horses were being cared for. There was no real reason to shoe the horses at the polo club, which didn’t even have its own stables, when it could’ve easily been done at their home farm in Brewster, out of sight. The whole display was meant to send a message.

I decided to send a message of my own, one that symbolized change. I cut a foot off my hair.

Preparing for our exit, I visited a friend up north to see if he could bring Maggie to his polo club in upstate New York. He agreed without issue, but then, without my consent, he called Michel to tell him my plan to bring Maggie there. That night, Michel called me.

He asked what was going on and why I was moving Maggie. I said, “You don’t know?” He claimed he had no idea, and I believed him. “Felony fraud? How about that?” I said. “Don’t you know what Ciro did in California? Don’t you know what happened to Juan?” Michel claimed complete innocence. I warned him to be careful — because if Ciro was committing felonies with this scam, he could get caught up in it because Michel is an owner of Polo United too. Michel promised he knew nothing and asked me to hold off on moving Maggie until we could talk the next day. I agreed.

Two-Face

The next day, I met Michel at the perimeter of the field. He complimented my new haircut, telling me that now I looked 20 instead of 28. The flattery worked (I’m not in my 20's), but I was focused on setting things straight. I laid out everything I knew about Ciro Desenzani’s past, his lies, and his scams. Michel just listened, acting surprised by new information.

Then I asked, “Why are you in business with this guy? He’s a nobody. You’re a legitimate player — do you really need money that badly?” Michel’s smile quickly faded, and he mumbled something about money always being tight. I told him, “I’ll help you get out of this. I want my own polo team, and I can hire you. You don’t need to do dirty business to make it. If you want to start your own business, I’ll help you, but you need to break away from Polo United. If anyone asks from now on you’re just an employee, right? Not an owner? You get what I mean?” Michel seemed to agree with the plan, even asking questions about what to do, and then confessed to me that he had no savings.

Then Michel made an admission that stuck with me. Michel said that he saw that Ciro wasn’t feeding the horses enough, and he stepped in and showed him what to give the horses and how much.

But then Ciro saw us talking. He rushed up the hill and interrupted, asking what we were discussing. I made something up, and he pulled me aside again for another one of his “talks” — really just more attempts to convince me that everything was fine. This time, Michel joined in. As Ciro spewed his usual lies about California being a misunderstanding, not owing anyone money, and Juan’s horse being on its way, Michel kept giving me knowing glances as if to say, “I know, I’m on your side, don’t worry.” When Ciro finished, I simply said, “Right,” and walked away. Michel did too.

Michel and I rode together that afternoon, and given this newfound trust I thought we had just established, I opened up about my perspective on life. I told him how I did my best to live with purpose and that I didn’t see life as one big Black Friday sale, just scrambling to collect as much worthless shit as possible before the end. I shared that if I had only wanted wealth, I could have married the billionaire I dated back in California, moved to Dubai, and called it a “life.” But that sort of empty existence isn’t for me. I live for meaning, not material things. I’d rather be penniless and know I made a difference than live as some tycoon’s concubine property with a Birkin bag and a Bentley.

Michel listened and then told me a story about how when he was just beginning to sell horses as a 20 year old, he accidentally sold someone a pregnant horse in Argentina, and how he took the horse back at his own expense to protect the reputation of his young horse business. We laughed about it and kept riding.

At that point, I believed Michel was truly on my side — that he was another victim in this mess, being taken for a ride. But I didn’t realize until later that it was me who was being taken for a ride.

“Why should I hide who I am?”

A few days later, I asked Michel if he could help me arrange to get Maggie out of Brewster. He agreed, but the promise never materialized, and kept getting deferred, which I thought was odd, wasn’t he on my side for the escape plan out? I was also unsettled by the fact that my offer to help him transition to a more honest polo career was never mentioned again. Something wasn’t adding up.

I started to think about who Michel really was. He was practically born on a horse, coming from a polo family where horse care was second nature, passed down through generations. How could someone with his background not notice the condition of the horses? A child in our club had once mentioned to me that the difference between Mariano Aguerre’s horses and Polo United’s was like night and day. She admired Aguerre’s horses for their great physique, while she said Ciro and Michel’s horses looked subpar by comparison. For weeks, the horses had looked underfed to me, too, but my concerns were constantly brushed off with vague excuses from Ciro.

Michel knows horse care better than Ciro. He is a far more experienced horseman. It was impossible that he could look at those horses — with their low energy and underweight bodies — and think they were fine, I didn’t even think they were fine and I know nothing about horses compared to Michel. He had to have seen the neglect in their feet, in their overall condition.

Then I remembered that remark he said a few days ago about how the feeding wasn’t being done properly until he stepped in. But nothing had really changed until I stepped in.

I kept turning it over in my mind, trying to dismiss the thought, but I couldn’t…It was true. Michel knew. He knew all along.

I reached out to my informant and asked about the state of the Taqueada Polo Club in California. Michel had assured me, back that one afternoon at my cottage, it was still in operation because he had convinced Ciro to keep it going. My informant told me otherwise, Taqueada was defunct — shuttered, completely abandoned.

The betrayal cut deep; the entire time, I had been lying with the enemy. Michel wasn’t a bystander or a reluctant participant; he was fully complicit. The “good cop” act was part of a well-rehearsed good cop bad cop routine to keep the illusion intact, a way to make us believe there was someone we could trust. With his reputation and easygoing charm, Michel played the role of the confidant, the approachable one, the man who would listen when Ciro was being unreasonable. But now it was clear that his friendly demeanor was just a mask. The real Michel was feeding my concerns straight back to Ciro, using my trust as leverage in their scheme.

It wasn’t just Ciro’s lies that burned — it was the realization that Michel had been right there, fueling the deception, making sure I believed in their fraudulent operation while he stood to profit just as much.

I played it cool for several days, pretending like nothing was wrong. When Michel messaged me about a match or anything polo-related, I acted as if all was normal. But I was only putting on a show because I feared for Maggie’s safety. We still had nowhere to go.

On Thursday, August 22nd, I went to the field to play chukkers, and as I looked at Maggie and the other horses, the weight of everything hit me. These noble animals were playing a beautiful sport, yet the sinister, greedy and depraved acts of lesser mortals had turned it into an abusive sham. I couldn’t keep up the facade anymore.

I played the chukkers and walked Maggie back to the trailer, keeping to myself. I didn’t say much to anyone before or during the game; I just wanted to get through it and leave.

After the match, I sat in my car, taking off my boots, hoping to be alone and make a quick exit. That’s when Michel came walking over just as I threw my left boot into the passenger seat.

As he walked over, a memory from a few months earlier flashed in my mind — when he and Ciro had tried to force me to ride Maggie in a lightning storm. I remembered mounting up, only to see bolts cracking the sky in the distance. I immediately got off, but instead of backing down, they led me into the clubhouse, where Ciro began pressuring me to find a sponsor for him and Michel, even telling me I couldn’t be a polo player if I didn’t get one. Throughout it all, Michel just sat there like a goon letting Ciro spew his broken English nonsense. I resented him in that moment as he just sat there like a silent accomplice while Ciro did the dirty work. But that’s what Michel was — always complicit in Ciro’s schemes because he stood to gain from them too. He didn’t care who got hurt in the process, myself included.

As Michel reached my car, a wave of repulsion washed over me, fueled by that memory and everything I’d since learned about him.

He stood by my door and said, “Hi Wendy.” Then he did something I’ll never forget.

They say the eyes are the window to the soul, which may be true, I don’t know, I can’t always tell someone’s nature by their eyes. But what I do know is that I can see the evil in someone in their mouth. A few weeks prior I was out with my date, Frankie B., and we were at dinner. He was being an asshole, for sure, but honestly he was being an entertaining asshole, that’s what I liked about him, so I went with it. Yet, while he was talking about women’s rights (I know), I noticed a micro-expression — a quick, fleeting grimace in his mouth. It was like a demon’s silent howl. Later, I found out he had embezzled millions from his company and committed additional felonies to cover it up.

When Michel approached my car, said hi, and gave me that slow smile, I didn’t see him anymore — I saw the velociraptor from Jurassic Park in the cold, steel kitchen, ready to hunt down those kids. Its mouth slowly opening, revealing rows of sharp, yellowed, salivating teeth as it locked onto its prey.

I closed my car door. He tapped on the window, still smiling but confused. I rolled the window down an inch and said, “I don’t want to talk to you.” He asked why, and I replied, “Because I’m mad at you.” His smile immediately turned into a frown. The only other time I saw him react that way was in July when we were on the field after a match. We were all standing together when Ciro casually mentioned to Michel that I was involved with another man. Michel’s face darkened, he looked down, and started to storm off, but then caught himself, realizing he couldn’t reveal our “secret.” He quickly returned to his spot, forced to stand there as Ciro went on about what a good time I was having with someone else.

Michel immediately began demanding answers — why was I mad, what was going on. It was clear he wasn’t used to being treated like this, thrown off by the sudden shift in control.

I’d had enough and I didn’t owe him an explanation. All I said was, “BYE MICHEL,” in a tone full of annoyance. He kept pressing, “No, tell me what’s going on,” but I just repeated, “BYE,” over and over, each time with an increasing tone of aggravation until I rolled up the window and drove off.

He called me later on, but I neither answered nor returned the call.

At that point, I realized I didn’t have much of a plan. I might have to hire a transport company to send Maggie back to Florida. To where, I didn’t know, maybe to the racetrack with my other horses until I could find a new spot. But I figured I’d play the match on Saturday at White Birch and then figure things out from there.

Day 191

I arrived at White Birch Farms which is a scenic, private polo field just across the street from the Greenwich Polo Club. The cars and trailers were parked close together right next to the field. I saw everyone sitting at the perimeter of the field so I geared up in my car so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. Ciro noticed this immediately and started gesturing aggressively for me to come over and join everyone. I don’t come when some idiot beckons for me so I just ignored it.

But eventually, I had no choice — I had to head to the field. As I walked over, Ciro approached, asking why I was by myself. I brushed him off, saying I was just getting my gear on. He then tried a different tactic, saying he didn’t want anything between us. He gave me a tight hug, told me he loved me and said he wanted things to go back to how they were before, even suggesting we go out to lunch soon to straighten everything out. I said “ok, sure” and got on Maggie to start playing.

During the game, I made an immediate foul, crossing over the line of the ball and cutting off my opponent. The umpire blew the whistle, and we repositioned. I overheard the umpire ask Ciro, “Do you want me to let her know what she did so she can learn the rules?” Ciro just waved it off, saying, “No, I’ll take care of it later.”

I rode back to my position and Michel rode next to me and said “Hi Wendy” And I just muttered “hey” quickly and rode off. The chukker completed without any real instruction or guidance from either of my two instructors, par for the course as I have experienced these last several months.

The umpire blew the whistle to signal the end of the chukker and for everyone to switch horses.

Since I always stayed on Maggie, I remained on the field, hitting the ball around. The umpire, an older Dominican man of small stature, probably in his 70s, rode up to me. He began giving me tips. “I want you to do a forward shot, near side,” he said. I gave it a try, barely making it, but he encouraged me, “Do it again.” He explained how to adjust my swing, and I repeated the shot. “Full swing this time,” he urged, and I finally connected with the ball in a full shot. He gave a hearty laugh and told me to do it again.

I realized this 3 minutes of teaching was more instruction or attention than I have gotten in the last 3 months.

After the match I talked with the umpire to thank him for his instruction. He introduced himself as “Sensei” and he told me he was once a polo player, he played for 36 years. We chatted for a bit and he seemed like an interesting guy, friendly with a bit of sass. I don’t remember exactly how I broached the subject but I mentioned needing to find Maggie a new place to live. He said “come to my farm, it is in North Salem, I think you will like it there.” I had no idea where North Salem was but I needed to find a spot for Maggie and quick so I agreed, and I was on my way shortly after the match finished.

The drive to North Salem wound through forests and along scenic country roads. I passed a placid lake with white swans and eventually arrived at the farm’s gate. The words on the gate read “Gotham Farm.” Now, I knew I had seen that word before…Gotham. I remember Michel being on a polo team with that name, but I figured maybe its one of those often used regional words. Kind of like “Arroyo” in California or “Mizner” in South Florida.

I drove into the farm and it had wide, green pastures, countryside, forests, horses and cows, and of course, a polo arena and fields. I drove up to a red barn and met with Sensei. He gave me a brief tour. Two men were playing polo at the arena down the hill and when they were done, they each gave their horses a shower. A sight I had never seen with Maggie under Ciro and Michel’s care.

Sensei told me all about the farm, and how they care for the horses and it was obvious this is where Maggie needed to be. I told Sensei I would like to bring her here and he agreed. He just said he needs to call the boss, the owner of Gotham first. Sensei got on the phone and asked him to come down.

A few minutes later an SUV pulls up, the window rolls down and I recognized the man inside, I saw him at Mashomack, it was Michel’s boss, the patron of Gotham Polo.

Of all the gin joints in all the world.

The Boss was very welcoming, and gave me a tour of the property, even introducing me to the babies, three young horses he was training to become polo ponies. He was a nice man and it was clear he loved horses, his farm and polo.

As he gave me a tour of the farm, I realized I needed to be honest. I didn’t want to start this arrangement under false pretenses, so I told him that Maggie had been under the care of Polo United. This did not seem to be an issue, and we arranged for Maggie to be picked up on Monday, just two days away.

As I drove home a sense of relief washed over me as I knew Maggie was going to be out of the grasp of Ciro and Michel very soon.

I sent Michel a message that evening that I met with [his boss], at Gotham farm and that Sensei will be picking Maggie up on Monday.

On Monday, Sensei and I drove to Brewster, gathered my gear, and took Maggie back to North Salem. The weight lifted off my shoulders as we drove away from Brewster and Polo United for good.

Later, a friend asked if I was worried about keeping Maggie at Gotham, given its connection to Michel. I thought about it, and it reminded me of a scene from The Dark Knight when Harvey Dent tells Rachel to go somewhere safe from The Joker. Rachel responds that now that the Joker is on the loose, Batman’s penthouse is now the safest place in the city. That’s how I felt about Gotham Farm.

The Brother and the Nazi Hunter

The next morning, I returned to Gotham early to watch a “hunt.” Members of the local hunter community, dressed in traditional fox hunting attire, had gathered at the farm, and, led by a pack of hounds, they rode off into the woods. As I watched them disappear, I struck up a conversation with The Boss’s brother, dressed plain as day, but a remarkably successful businessman with numerous ventures. He introduced me to his friend, “The Nazi Hunter”, who shared tales of tracking down and bringing some of history’s most monstrous figures to justice.

It was ironic, standing there listening to stories of justice served while reflecting on my dealings with the bad apples of Argentina — the very country that welcomed Nazi scum fugitives with open arms after the Holocaust. Here I was, meeting someone who hunted down those murderous vermin who cowardly fled justice and found refuge in a South American rathole. I liked him a lot for dragging them out.

The Brother was a good guy, and I opened up about my need to find a new place to live. Although I didn’t explain exactly why, it was because I was concerned about Michel knowing where I lived and possible retaliation. Now that Maggie was out of their clutches, I was going to notify everyone in the club about what I knew.

The Brother told me he had a spot, “very minimal” in a wooded property in Stormville, NY, about 30 minutes from the farm. I was intrigued, so the Nazi Hunter gave me a tour.

Minimal it was, but it was also perfect. A Stephen King-style cabin in the forest right on a lake on a beautiful rural property away from everyone and everything. The sleeping area was a loft above the kitchen and there was no cell phone reception inside. I left the North Stamford cottage and moved in.

My cabin in the woods

Training Day

The next morning, I went back to Gotham to see Maggie, and Sensei asked me to join him in the forest to exercise the horses. Sensei was an old cowboy who had grown up raising horses and cattle in the Dominican Republic, and at Gotham, he did much the same. Unlike Polo United, where the horses were kept in stalls or corrals, Sensei conditioned Gotham’s polo horses by taking them out into the forest each morning. But he needed help.

I got on Maggie and took hold of a lead rope attached to another mare, Gastona. Sensei led the way with three horses: Apaloosa, Macarena, and Gina. We crossed the polo fields and followed the trail into the dense forest.

The steep trails, with streams running alongside them, made me nervous. I hadn’t done this type of cowgirl riding before, but the challenge of keeping an eye on Maggie, making sure she didn’t step on a rock or stray too close to the stream, kept my mind occupied. Whenever there was too much silence, Sensei would glance back and ask, “How are we doing?”

As we passed through the tall trees, the morning sun filtered through the canopy. Sensei raised his hand and told me to grab it, then instructed me to stand up in the saddle. “I want your legs to be strong,” he said. It was a conditioning exercise to build strength for polo. I stood in the stirrups, balancing as best I could while we moved through the forest, leading the horses. I could manage about five seconds before coming back down, then tried again.

As we navigated a narrow opening between two trees, Sensei accidentally dropped Macarena’s lead rope. He asked me to grab it, but before I could, Macarena clamped onto Gina’s lead rope, and the two horses bolted off into the dense woods. “Let’s go!” Sensei shouted, and we tore after them. They quickly vanished from sight, forcing us to rely on the mud to track their movements. Sensei spotted the hoof marks and said they were heading back to the paddock. We charged through the forest, up hills, down narrow trails, weaving between trees, over piles of brush, and past streams. When we finally emerged on the forest’s edge, there they were, waiting calmly by their paddock, as if they’d planned their escape all along.

I was told to return to the farm at 4:30, and when I arrived, I saw that Sensei had arranged 30 polo balls in neat rows across the dirt arena. I mounted Maggie, and Sensei gave me simple instructions: “I don’t care if you miss every shot, as long as you keep going.” I took two laps around the arena to warm up, then approached the first ball and hit. I circled around and did it again, and again, until each ball had been struck and lay scattered in the grass beyond the arena’s perimeter. With every swing, Sensei provided feedback and encouragement, pushing me to improve.

Sensei and me in the Gotham arena

Afterward, we went back to the barn, shared a cold Modelo, and I led Maggie to her pasture, where her new best friend, Luna, another polo mare but with a bruised hoof, was waiting for her. I then returned to the cabin.

The cabin had no washer or dryer so I washed my clothes in the sink and hung them on these branches.

That night, I lay awake with a heavy burden pressing down on me. I knew things about Ciro and Michel that I couldn’t keep to myself any longer. The members of Polo United deserved to know the truth — that they were being scammed. What they chose to do with that information would be up to them, but I felt a duty to warn them about what they had gotten themselves into.

Paradise Lost

When I woke up that morning, I forgot I was sleeping in a loft, and as I rose too quickly, I slammed my forehead into the ceiling. The sharp sting in my head was nothing compared to the soreness in my back and legs from all the conditioning I’d done the day before.

When I arrived at Gotham, The Boss, Sensei, and JB wanted me to play a polo pickup game with them on the field. I was able to play for about two minutes before I felt like my muscles were going to secede from my spine and I had to tell them I would join them the next time. I was a bit ashamed of this because I wanted to show The Boss I could play fairly well and I felt like I looked like a wimp for giving up right away.

But no one seemed to mind, so I returned Maggie to Luna in the pasture. Then, I drove to the lake’s edge. It took a while to muster up the courage to send the messages. I was worried no one would believe me, or they would be angry with me. I took a few deep breaths and began.

I started with Karen, sending her a message saying I had seen some very disturbing things in Greenwich, including the neglect of Maggie, and that I was leaving the club. I waited for her response.

Next, I contacted Jennifer. I knew Skyler had bought a horse named Butterfly from Ciro, and just a few weeks earlier, I had witnessed Ciro trying to push a horse named Chaveta on Jennifer, despite her hesitations and concerns that Skyler should focus on college instead of polo. Although I wasn’t sure which horses Jennifer had or where they were stabled, I reached out because I was worried about their welfare. I told her I’d seen Maggie being neglected, that I had removed her from the Brewster farm, and advised her to relocate any horses she had with Ciro.

Then I reached out to Juan. I messaged him to let him know that he is not getting that horse in Argentina.

Juan responded right away, seemingly in shock. I told him there was no reason he shouldn’t have that horse he paid for by now. I was told by Cipher that Ciro lied to Juan and told him there was a quarantine for horses, barring their shipment out of Argentina, which was the reason he had not received his horse. I told Juan there was no such quarantine. I could tell he was surprised, caught off guard, but only thanked me for the information. He didn’t seem interested in learning more or in taking action to get his money back. He didn’t even question how I knew about his horse (he never disclosed this information to me). There was a kind of naivety in his response, a gullibility that I believe Ciro had long ago recognized and exploited.

I had even tried to warn Juan’s mother during her visit to Greenwich by casually mentioning that a “friend” had recently purchased 20 racehorses from Argentina and had been shipping them over for months, thinking it might spark some suspicion. When she just slack jaw gawked at me I flat out said that there was a good thing there is no quarantine in Argentina or my friend’s horses would never arrive. But it went right over her head. Even now, I suspect Juan still believes that horse is on its way.

Jennifer got back to me soon after. We spoke on the phone, and she confided that she had sensed something was wrong with Ciro and Michel. Members of the equestrian community had warned her to “not trust the Argentinians,” but she had gone against her instincts. She explained that the horses she purchased had significant issues — Chaveta had failed the vet check, and Butterfly had behavioral problems, making them unsuitable for polo. Despite these problems, Ciro had refused to refund her.

Jennifer was understandably upset, and I empathized with her. She had already been burned by the horse world when Skyler was involved in other equestrian sports, and she had approached polo with hesitation. But she gave it a shot, hoping it might bring her daughter peace. Instead, she found herself investing six figures into a scam.

Jennifer had been kind to Ciro and Michel, inviting them to her clubs, social events, and even her home. She didn’t deserve to experience this kind of betrayal again. I hated seeing a nice lady be taken advantage of like that.

I was relieved, however, when Jennifer told me she planned to take action. She seemed determined to get her money back and even considered going directly to Peter Brant, the owner of Greenwich Polo Club, to expose Ciro and Michel. But shortly after, I saw her attending a polo event at the Greenwich Polo Club, holding Ciro’s hand in a photo and cheering on a stage with Michel in another. It was disappointing to see her run back to them like that. I understand that she found companionship in Polo United, but I expected her to show more dignity than to seek attention from them again.

I heard back from Karen who expressed her existing concerns for the club. She had been pushed to purchase the $50,000 membership back in the spring. Ciro, she said, took her to a beautiful polo facility in Wellington, saying that he was going to be using that field for Polo United in the fall and he needed her membership paid for now so he could secure the field.

I remembered Ciro baiting us with tales of a beautiful polo facility back in the spring. I never saw the field.

Karen told me she’d been asking for a refund because Polo United was supposed to be back in operation, yet despite paying for a club that should have already been up and running in Wellington, Ciro and Michel were still lingering in Greenwich with no return date in sight. She also mentioned that they hadn’t secured a field in Florida — neither the new facility, Santa Clara, nor any other location. In truth, there was no club at all.

Then there was Sugar Daddy. What to do about him? He was living in a fool’s paradise, and I didn’t feel any obligation to inform him about what was really going on. Unlike the others, he didn’t have any horses in danger, or a child’s health at stake or a stolen retirement/college fund. To me, he was just a victim of his own vanity, someone who should have known better.

I checked Ciro’s location on my phone and saw he was at a restaurant in Greenwich. It wasn’t the usual Happiness Market, where he would spend hours alone every day — it was a nicer outdoor café. He must have been taken there. I knew he had a “match” with Sugar Daddy earlier that morning, so they were probably there together.

A few days earlier, my lawyer had sent Ciro a demand letter, instructing him to return my money. But I wanted to make sure he actually received it, I don’t know how reliable mail delivery is at the Comfort Inn, so I decided to deliver it in person.

I drove to downtown Greenwich and parked discreetly in an alley near the restaurant. Through my binoculars, I scanned the outdoor seating area until I spotted them — Ciro and Sugar Daddy — sitting at a small café nestled between two buildings. The tables were cramped and close to the street, leaving little room for privacy. Perfect for what I was about to do.

I gripped the large manila envelope under my arm and moved closer. Standing on the sidewalk, I was only about 20 feet away from their table, watching them go on completely unaware of my presence. Ciro’s back was to me, while Sugar Daddy sat across from him, deep in conversation. One of Sugar Daddy’s women was by his side, and next to Ciro was another man whose identity I couldn’t quite make out yet. I paused, letting the tension build, before making my move.

I paced for a few seconds and then I walked towards their table. As I approached, Sugar Daddy looked up, but must have been nervous to see me because instead of saying hi, he tried to talk to Ciro to alert him but couldn’t make out any words and just made a nervous head motion up to me. It was too late. I was looming over Ciro, standing right above him. Looking down at him. He then realized someone was standing next to him and he looked up right into my face.

Their entire table: Sugar Daddy, his woman, Ciro, and the man next to him, none other than former 10 goaler, Mariano Aguerre, all were looking at me. Mouths open, silent, wide eyed, wondering what I was going to do. All Ciro could muster out as he stared at me was a Tim Allen Home Improvement style “Uueeghhh?” I stared at him, he stared at me. I curled a little smirk and dropped my envelope in his plate. I turned around and like a phantom glided out of the restaurant.

The look on Ciro’s face was like this image of Tim Allen

As I was walking away the woman sitting at the table behind Ciro said “Oooh you got served buddy, you’re in trouble now!” It was really hard not to laugh.

Later, I tracked Ciro’s movements and saw that he scurried straight to the Greenwich Police. Not long after, I got a call from them. They told me Ciro had come in, claiming I was “scaring him” and that he wanted the police to protect him from me. But the officer assured me I hadn’t violated any laws and was well within my rights to deliver the letter the way I did.

Ciro and Michel underestimated me in more ways than one, including my connections in the polo world. They assumed that, because I was new, I didn’t know anyone beyond the circle they had created for me — but they were wrong. Every attempt they made to assassinate my character and spread lies behind my back came right back to me through the very people they confided in. Ciro even called someone in Argentina, unaware that I knew her, and claimed I had chased him and Michel into a van. I’m still curious to hear what I did to them next in this tale.

Van owned by Lawrence Bittaker

Meanwhile, Michel was spreading rumors that I left because I couldn’t afford their so-called membership “fee” and mentioned to someone that he was considering having The Boss to kick me and Maggie out of Gotham, as though he had that power. Of course, that person immediately relayed the information to me, knowing the real reason why I left. It was a classic tactic — fabricating lies to discredit anyone who threatened to expose their schemes.

What they also didn’t realize was that their reputation in the polo world was already in tatters. Everyone knew they were liars and cheats, despite all their efforts to maintain a facade of respectability. Somehow, they believed their past misdeeds hadn’t caught up with them — that the layers of deception could still cover the dirt. But the truth was already out there, long before I arrived.

I went back to the cabin, I had an early morning of training in the woods with Sensei and polo playing in the afternoon when my phone buzzed. It was Cipher, my informant. He had someone in California I needed to talk to.

Next time, Part V: As Tyrants Fall

Resources

If you have been victimized or were witness to a crime the following resources are available to report it

FBI Tip Line: https://tips.fbi.gov/home

Security and Exchange Tip Line: https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-resources/report-suspected-securities-fraud-or-wrongdoing

ICE Tip Line: https://www.ice.gov/tipline

IRS Tip Line: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-3949-a

Human Trafficking Hotline: https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en/report-trafficking

Disclaimer:

The resources provided are for individuals seeking to report crimes or suspicious activities. No assumptions or conclusions are drawn about the guilt or innocence of the individuals mentioned unless proven by a court of law. This information is intended to assist those who may have been affected in reporting their experiences to the appropriate authorities.

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme Part III: Archangel’s Return

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme

Part II of the story can be read here

The Informant

Cipher disappeared in May, he told me this was because Ciro promised him a work visa in lieu of payment, but never followed through. It forced him back to Argentina. Cipher didn’t know the term for this, if true, but I did: human trafficking.

And the revelations didn’t stop there. Cipher informed me that Ciro had taken thousands from Juan, a Polo United member who wanted to buy a polo horse, but the horse never arrived and he was left without answers.

Cipher also told me about Ciro’s lawsuits in California for defrauding members of his Taqueada club, his apartment eviction and his unpaid debts with the IRS.

He then told me that Ciro isn’t even Argentinian, he is from Chile. Which to those unfamiliar with polo, this is like claiming a handbag is from France but it’s really from Bulgaria. Cipher then disclosed that Ciro has no house or meaningful assets in Argentina, indicating that he may have lied about the ghost horse being transported to “his place.”

This was all bad, but then Cipher told me something that made my heart pound out of my chest, my blood boil and the capillaries in my eyes crack. He said Ciro was abusing the horses. He said Ciro would run out of money and fail to buy food, leaving the horses hungry. He’d keep them locked in their stalls for days, denying them access to pasture, which led to deadly gastrointestinal issues like colic. Ciro even neglected to shoe the horses for months to save money, causing painful hoof problems.

I had been tracking Ciro’s location for weeks. He shared it with me once in June to show me the location of a field, and he never turned it off. His location often didn’t match what he told me, which made me question what was really going on. He claimed to be “at work,” but he spent hours at the grocery store where we’d had our “lunch meeting,” even sitting in the parking lot long after closing. He said he checked the horses every morning and evening, but I never tracked him at the barn. He claimed to be staying in a big house with family in Greenwich, but he was holed up alone at a Comfort Inn in Brewster.

When I learned what he did to Maggie and the other horses, the strength of every known force in the universe was called upon to have me not go to that fleabag flop house he was staying in, crawl into the window and strangle him with his own large intestine.

No one hurts my horse. No one.

Showdown at Greenwich

The next morning we had a “match” and with the adrenaline from pure hatred coursing through my veins I played the best game of my life. I let Maggie run fast, I hit the ball hard and I aggressively targeted Ciro the entire match.

Afterward, while I was removing my equipment on the sidelines, Ciro called out to me in his nasally, whining tone, “Wendy!,” motioning for me to join him off to the side — though still within earshot of everyone else. He wrongly accused me of not having enough money to buy the horse in Argentina, claimed he was out a deposit because of me, and demanded I pay him immediately. I let him finish, then asked for the veterinary report. Ciro, as usual, deflected, insisting that I needed to trust him, that everything with the horse was fine, and that he needed the money now.

I told him I’m a CEO, and if I ran my business based on “trust” alone, it would have collapsed within three months. “Give me the veterinary report,” I said.

Ciro erupted into another tantrum, spouting the same circular logic. He then said “well if you aren’t going to give me the $10,000 I am just going to have to make you pay the $50,000 if you want to stay here.” My anger boiled over. Not only had he hurt my horse, not only did try to sell me a horse that may not even exist, but now he was trying to extort $50,000 out of me. When he finally stopped talking, I looked him dead in the eye and said, “Ciro, I know.”

He asked me what I meant. I didn’t want to expose my informant, I promised to keep him on Deep Throat Watergate style deep background for the time being until he said it was ok to open up about all of this. I said “Ciro, someone has been sending me anonymous messages about you, they told me everything.” Ciro at this point completely flabbergasted completely fell apart right there on the field, demanding to know what I was talking about.

I told him I knew about how he took money for memberships in Taqueada Polo and fled with the money and with the horses. I told him I knew that he was from Chile, not Argentina. I told him I knew he took money from Juan and never delivered a horse. I told him I knew that he wasn’t feeding or shoeing or caring for the horses properly.

Now, at this point I thought Ciro had been hiding all of his transgressions from Michel, and that Michel was completely innocent to Ciro’s past. A kind of don’t ask, don’t tell agreement between the two where they were just mutually using each other in this business to get money.

So I was surprised that Ciro, in this moment after I revealed what I knew, ran crying to Michel like a child who needed to hide under mommy’s skirt after being bullied on the schoolyard. Ciro pleaded for backup, mouth agape and eyes wide, he cried to Michel, “how did she know about Juan?”. Michel seemed caught off-guard, especially when Ciro disclosed the ghost horse deal.

Ciro then tried to blame the numerous past members of the club that left on bad terms, and when I said I knew it wasn’t any of them he had the look of wide eyed shock and mouth agape utter confusion.

“Wendy, you don’t understand” Ciro pleaded with me, “Juan’s family was too poor to afford polo, this horse sale was our arrangement so he could continue to play.” I knew this wasn’t the truth. How can you be too poor to afford polo but have enough cash to buy a horse and ship it from Argentina?

Then, as if searching for another scapegoat, he tried to blame “the lesbians” in California — two women he was seemingly obsessed with, always looking to blame for the trouble in his life. Before, he had accused them of causing dysfunction at Taqueada, and now he was trying to pin the anonymous messages on them.

I told Ciro that who sent the messages was irrelevant. What mattered was the content. Were these allegations true?

When I demanded he explain his lawsuits in California, he denied any knowledge of them. I said Ciro, an affidavit for one was just filed a two weeks ago, and theres one in Florida and one in Arizona. Ciro deflected and said “I have never been to Arizona” and when I wasn’t buying the excuse he said “Wendy you don’t understand, [Sugar Daddy] has a mountain of lawsuits, his are worse than mine.”

Ciro then threw Mariano Aguerre under the bus claiming ‘Mariano always has lawsuits,’ insisting that Mariano, not him, was the dishonest polo player and more deserving of scrutiny.

When I said I knew he was lying about being from Argentina, again he deflected back to Sugar Daddy, claiming he gave his passport to him so this disclosed his true nationality.

Ciro kept saying over and over and over again “Wendy, I do not owe money to anyone. To ANYONE.”

I had enough of this clown, I had enough of his lies. I stepped forward, an inch from his face, and I said in a guttural tone “I know what you did to the horses. You didn’t shoe them properly and thats why Maggie keeps tripping and losing her shoes. You starved them, thats why they all look so thin and have no energy. Back at Santa Clara, you left them in the stalls for days”. At this point Michel broke things up.

I knew I needed Michel on my side, so I shifted tactics, leaning into the melodrama. I told him I wanted Polo United to succeed, that I was genuinely concerned about the rumors swirling around, and we needed to clear everything up so we could move forward. Though I was playing a part, there was one thing I truly meant: I wanted to help Michel. I knew the kind of trouble Ciro had gotten himself into, and I didn’t want Michel to get dragged down with him.

This entire time Michel had presented himself as the nice one, the light counterpart to Ciro’s darkness. Or was he the “good cop” in a carefully orchestrated Good Cop Bad Cop routine? The more I thought about it later on, the clearer it became: Michel played his role perfectly, stepping in to soften the blow after Ciro’s harshness, offering comfort and reason after Ciro’s erratic outbursts. But was that truly kindness, or just part of the manipulation? I began to wonder if Michel’s empathy was a mask, a strategic act in their con to make sure people like me stayed loyal, stayed pliant. Maybe Michel wasn’t the innocent bystander to Ciro’s tyranny — maybe he was the two-faced puppet master behind the curtain.

After the revelation at the field, I asked Michel to come over because I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to talk to him, alone. But when he came over, he didn’t have truth on his mind, he had his clothes on my staircase. He avoided the topic at first, acting like the world didn’t just come crashing down in public forum an hour before. But eventually he asked me as he was about to leave if the anonymous person said anything about him, and I said no, not really.

Michel, seemingly relieved then said that Taqueada is still alive an well and he convinced Ciro to keep the club still in operation.

Hell opened its gates, not to cast out, but to welcome home its rightful heir

A few days later I went back to the field. I grew angrier in those days.

When I arrived at the Greenwich Polo Club I drove right to the trailer where Maggie was, instead of uphill to the field. I stood there and looked up the hill where the Polo United folding chairs were arranged in a horizontal row right behind the boards of the polo field. Sitting in the middle chair was Ciro, alone.

With my mallet in my hand I marched up the field, silently and stopped three feet behind his chair. Ciro was watching a music video on his phone that sounded like Whitney Houston. I waited there and watched him as he sat there. Then after enough tension had built, I said “Hello, Ciro.”

He jolted out of his seat, startled, and turned to face me. His face was a mix of surprise and an attempt to play it cool. He put on his best act, pretending to be happy to see me. He asked me to sit down, how I was doing, if I needed a water — laying on the pandering usually reserved for the “Patrons.”

I moved my chair to face him and just stared at him, Ciro could sense the shift and then began the theatrics. He said “Wendy, lets talk.” And then said how I got everything all wrong, he did nothing wrong in California, everything over there is fine, and again, that he didn’t owe any money to anyone.

I said in a robotic tone, “thats good, its important to run a business smoothly.”

And I think my neutral response threw him off. He was looking for an argument or a reaction, something to latch onto, but I gave him nothing. He backtracked, his words scrambling for control, while I just stared at that face. That face of a liar, a con man, an animal abuser.

Carlitos brought Maggie up to me and I just got on her in the middle of one of Ciro’s sentences and rode her off to the outer edge of the field. I started riding Maggie, fast, around the perimeter of the vast polo field. I felt that Maggie was feeding off my energy because I barely cued her to go that speed. After another lap we stopped on the far side of the field. We stood there, I was catching my breath from the exhilaration as my eyes focused in on a figure in blue standing on the field several hundred yards away. It was Ciro with his back turned engaged with a new “customer” on the field.

The hate filled rage boiled and festered within me as I stared at that stupid fat fuck. That worthless sack of human garbage who lied to me. Who hurt my Maggie, my sweet little girl. My eyes wouldn’t relax, they were bulging out of their sockets, fixed on him, I was the predator hunting its prey. I couldn’t stop the psychopathic grin from curling across my face. The world around me blurred, drenched in a blood-red haze.

He had no idea what was coming.

In that moment, I felt something ancient stir inside me, something that had been waiting to return for 6,000 years. My name is Wendy Ouriel, Ouriel is the Archangel of divine justice and light, second in command to God who guarded over the gates of Eden with a flame throwing sword. Ouriel was the punisher of the damned, the destroyer of evil. The watchman of paradise, who brought righteous vengeance upon those who defiled what was pure.

I am the punisher of the damned, the destroyer of deception, the protector of nature’s balance. The one who exposes darkness with searing light. I am the mother of animals, the guardian of creation’s innocent.

I am the archangel and I am here to do the archangels work. I have returned.

I leaned forward, and kicked Maggie to go. She went fast, I kicked her again, she went faster, and again and again, one more kick and she did it. We did it, the one move in polo that has eluded me until now: the full speed charge. Ciro’s figure got bigger and bigger as we got closer and closer to him. He was no further than 5 seconds away, Maggies hooves were pounding harder than I had ever felt before, I raised my mallet high in the air and with all the strength of the hand that once held that flame-throwing sword I swung as hard as I could.

At the last second, I yanked the reins and swerved Maggie left. Ciro whipped around in shock.

“Sorry,” I said. “Maggie’s a little hard to control today.”

And I rode off.

Don’t bother with that barn door, the horse has already bolted.

I let things stay quiet for a few days and played it cool. Each day, Ciro seemed to grow more fearful of me. It must have been killing him, not knowing what I knew — what the anonymous messenger had told me, or what I was planning to do.

Up until this point, Ciro had been my main point of contact at Polo United. He was the one who messaged me to arrange field times, discuss matches, and keep me updated about Maggie. But suddenly, Ciro informed me that Michel would now be handling all those duties.

I noticed that when Michel started contacting me from then on, everything had a business like tone to it. Matter of fact, and to the point, which was a stark contrast to earlier messages, which consisted of him stating where he wanted to put certain body parts of his into certain body parts of mine.

Michel Dorignac, a gentleman.

At first I didn’t think much of it, and just assumed he was trying to be professional, but there may have been another reason for the change.

During this time, my informant fed me more intel. Up until then, I had trusted Ciro’s excuses about Maggie — her nose injury was an accident on the field, her leg got busted during transport, her thinness was intentional to improve her muscle tone. But now, with what I knew, I had no reason to believe any of it. It was time to visit the farm in Brewster where she was kept.

I picked up my friend Ron, who came with me to Mashomack, for backup. I was preparing for the worst and came prepared for the worst. We drove through the rain, along the winding country roads of upstate New York to the stables. We reached the old driveway which went uphill, the main house to the right looked like the Norman Bates Psycho house but with white paint and shamrock green shutters. Ahead was a large shed with an area to park.

We got out of the car and looked around. The farm was kind of dumpy with kids toys strewn about, ducks and geese waddling around, chickens scratched at the ground near a run-down coop. Past the old horse stalls was a long path leading to what looked like a wide-open pasture. I told Ron to scope it out while I walked around.

“A hobby is supposed to pass the time, not fill it.” -Norman Bates

As he walked off, I spotted a pickup truck parked off to the side. Inside was Carlitos, Ciro and Michel’s groom. He didn’t seem to notice we’d pulled in. I walked up to the driver’s side window, which was rolled up because of the rain, and tapped on it. Carlitos looked up.

“Hi Carlitos, take me to Maggie,” I said.

Now up until this point I had never seen Carlitos not smile. He smiled so much I thought maybe he didn’t have a central nervous system. A happy, upbeat and sweet guy. Well in this moment he looked like he saw a ghost, like he wasn’t excited or happy to see me at all. He quickly picked up on his own behavior and put on a forced smile and said sure, but he needed to go to the shed really quick. He walked off while I waited for a minute or two, then led me to the path Ron had just walked down a few minutes prior. Ron caught up to us and we headed to a wide open field. At the end was a paddock area and Maggie was there. She seemed fine.

Carlitos was oddly insistent on showing me that she was okay — that she had enough hay and grain and everything was fine. I nodded, saying, “Uh-huh, thank you. She looks fine.” He walked away, checking his phone, glancing at me and Ron, still seeming off.

Ron and I petted Maggie. I was about to say we could leave when I heard a voice in the distance, that familiar, nasally, high-pitched tone calling out, “Wendy!”

I turned around to see Ciro, hurrying toward me, out of breath, wearing a Polo United windbreaker and a forced smile plastered on his face. He hugged me and acted overly happy to see me, asking if I liked the farm, if Maggie looked good, and if everything was alright. I told him she looked fine. Like Carlitos before him, Ciro began a big show, pointing out the hay, emphasizing over and over how much hay there was.

After several minutes of this, I told Ciro that we needed to go because Ron has diabetes. Ciro awkwardly said goodbye, and he and Carlitos shuffled off toward a side field, watching us as we left. As we made our way out, I noticed Ciro’s Mercedes parked diagonally across the entrance, lights on, engine still running

“Of course he drives a Mercedes.” -My lawyer

On the drive home, I was reminded of Skyler, who had desperately tried to convince me that her thinness wasn’t due to starvation. Her insistence only made me more certain that it was. Similarly, Ciro’s frantic attempts to prove everything was fine at the farm made me doubt it even more.

I had been tracking Ciro’s movements for weeks, and not once had I seen him at the farm, despite his claims that he checked on the horses every morning and evening. His Comfort Inn was only minutes away, yet it was clear Carlitos had called him when I arrived. He had rushed over to stage the performance for my benefit. But why? Was it to create the illusion that he regularly visited, or was it to cover up something that had gone wrong?

At this point, I didn’t care. I just needed to get Maggie out. While things seemed fine for the moment, it was time to make my move and leave Polo United for good.

Next time, Part IV: Into the Forest

Resources

Related profile: Zoe Cookson

If you have been victimized or were witness to a crime the following resources are available to report it

FBI Tip Line: https://tips.fbi.gov/home

Security and Exchange Tip Line: https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-resources/report-suspected-securities-fraud-or-wrongdoing

ICE Tip Line: https://www.ice.gov/tipline

IRS Tip Line: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-3949-a

Human Trafficking Hotline: https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en/report-trafficking

Disclaimer:

The resources provided are for individuals seeking to report crimes or suspicious activities. No assumptions or conclusions are drawn about the guilt or innocence of the individuals mentioned unless proven by a court of law. This information is intended to assist those who may have been affected in reporting their experiences to the appropriate authorities.

Topics: Ciro Desenzani, Michel Dorignac, Polo, Polo United, Taqueada Polo

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme Part II: A Tale of Two Ciros

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme

Part 1 of the story can be read here.

The People of Mars and Greenwich

Michel by this time had gone up to New York, and for a few weeks, I didn’t hear from him. The silence was a stark contrast to what we had before. Since our initial rendezvous, he had been coming to my home in Delray Beach. The last time we were together, we swam in the ocean at midnight. I remember him holding me in the Atlantic Ocean, under the moonlight, looking up at the stars. He pointed out a red object in the sky and asked me what it was, and I said “it’s either a red star or Mars” He paused for a moment and then asked me something I’ll never forget: “Oh wow…Do you think there are people living there?”

At that moment, I remembered how many times I’ve been accused of being shallow because I’m only interested in men for their looks or for only wanting one thing. It took a second for my mind to have thoughts again, and I replied, “On Mars?…No, no there aren’t.” I didn’t want to say I thought he was stupid, but I did wonder if maybe he had just forgotten how to operate a cellphone, and that’s why I hadn’t heard from him.

I prepared for what I initially believed would be a brief departure from OUMERE by building up as much inventory as I could. I personally make all of OUMERE’s products — mixing, bottling and boxing each bottle. In anticipation of my time away, I made gallons of product and bottled hundreds of units so the online orders could be fulfilled. A trusted friend took over the shipping duties while the OUMERE boutique closed until my return.

Me in the OUMERE Boutique on the right, one of my serums, Serum Bioluminelle, on the left.

While I was in Florida preparing for my departure, Ciro, now up in Greenwich, sent me a message claiming he had something for “my eyes” only — a “good investment.”

He wanted me to invest in Polo United’s latest venture: the bulk purchase of Argentine horses to be sold in America. He urged secrecy, claiming it was “entirely legal” and would provide “income forever.”Polo United wasn’t even a registered LLC at the time, and wouldn’t be until July 1st, 2024 despite having been in operation since January. Even if it had been registered, it was only authorized to conduct business related to playing polo, not to sell investment shares in horses. This made the offer both unauthorized and illegal.

Articles of Organization for Polo United, Filed July 1, 2024

His insistence on secrecy and assurances of legality were deeply troubling. The lack of transparency, coupled with false promises of perpetual income, raised clear red flags of fraud and potential violations of securities laws, as no legitimate investment should be conducted in secret or under the guise of “forever” returns without proper registration or regulation.

On June 20th I arrived in Greenwich. I was staying in a charming, fully stocked cottage on the forested property of a North Stamford manor, surrounded by dense woods. I told Ciro I was in town and to have Maggie ready for me at 5PM. My drive to the Greenwich Polo Club from the cottage was only about five miles, but the winding, single-lane roads, flanked by creeks and dense forests, stretched the journey. The sharp, steep turns through the hilly terrain made the drive feel much longer, each twist revealing another hidden lake or stream nestled in the woods.

I pulled up to the guard gate of the Greenwich Polo Club, an exclusive and expansive country estate owned by the industrialist Peter Brant. Though Peter Brant has never met me, I have met him. For over a year, I had been involved with his racehorse trainer, a man I refer to as Satan, in what could only be described as a psychosexual relationship with the embodiment of pure evil.

Like Peter Pan, Satan was deeply insecure about his image and made a point of letting me know whenever Peter called. He would put him on speakerphone for me to listen, flaunting his connection. Satan also took pride in showing me the strange pieces of modern art Peter gifted him each year — a nod to Brant’s famous art collection that didn’t impress me. In fact, of all of the “art” Satan had in his collection, the only true piece worthy of admiration was a Leroy Neiman I convinced him to buy that depicted racehorses running on a track.

I ended things with Satan around 10 days after I ended things with Peter Pan because a friend told me he choked out a woman in upstate New York. Again.

I drove along the farm road, passing a large stone building on my right — the private museum housing Peter Brant’s art collection. Around the bend, a white mansion appeared on my left, framed by a pristine white wooden fence. And there they were, the polo fields. The fields sat at the heart of the club, bordered by grandstands that could seat a few hundred spectators. I made my way down the hill toward the trailers, where I spotted Ciro and his new groom from Argentina, Carlitos.

The Greenwich Polo Club, Greenwich CT

I got out of my car and saw Maggie tied to the trailer with the other horses. As I approached her, my stomach dropped. Her nose was torn up, lacerations covered her face, and body and she was bleeding. I immediately asked Ciro what had happened. He brushed it off casually, saying she had run into a fence, but assured me that he was applying iodine and that she’d be fine in a couple of days. “Don’t worry,” he added. “You can ride Brisa today.”

I tried not to let it bother me. I’ve owned racehorses for years and know horses tend to get themselves injured, so I gave Ciro the benefit of the doubt instead of jumping to accusations of neglect. I made sure her wounds were being treated and I rode Brisa that afternoon. But the lack of any mention or warning about Maggie’s injury gnawed at me. Why had no one said anything?

Brisa and Me, Greenwich Polo Club

The next day, Ciro invited me to ride in the morning and asked me to lunch afterward. I rode Brisa again because Maggie was out of commission due to her injury. After riding, Ciro asked me to meet him at a grocery store about five minutes north of the club. Normally, when someone invites you to lunch, it’s at a restaurant where the host pays, but with Ciro, things were always a little off. Instead of a restaurant, he took me to a grocery store, The Happiness Market, then casually told me to grab whatever I wanted, which, as I realized, I was going to pay for myself. I sat at a table with a friend I brought along and we had our lunch while he paced around the store, still on his phone. When he finally sat down, his lunch was a junk food feast consisting of three large bottles of sugary watermelon juice, a giant container of chicken salad, a giant serving of pasta and a lemon he cut in half and ate like a hand fruit.

As I sat there, something didn’t feel right. It was that sense of foreboding dread that always seemed to loom over me with Polo United. He handed me a folder and told me it was confidential. Inside the folder were papers labeled “Polo United Horse Business”, it was the three-page “investment opportunity” he proposed to me earlier. It wasn’t just lunch I was paying for. The whole interaction was a microcosm of Ciro’s manipulative patterns — making things appear casual or business-like but always with the angle of getting money.

The papers outlined a plan for purchasing, maintaining, and selling 15 horses over the course of a year. The numbers seemed ambitious, with an estimated $915,000 in income and costs conveniently streamlined to make it look like a profitable venture. What bothered me wasn’t just the inflated figures, but the fact that Polo United wasn’t even a registered business in Florida, Connecticut, or anywhere else in the U.S. A fact I kept to myself. It was clear he hadn’t gone through the legal channels to formalize any of this. Ciro, however, assured me this was all legal. And the value he placed on this venture? $1,300,000.

Polo United Investment Scam

I said no, so Ciro didn’t get the money from me, but it seems he may have found a different investor in Sugar Daddy. A month later Sugar Daddy’s company filed a lien with Ciro named as the debtor — a strange move that left me wondering what kind of deal had really taken place.

After saying no, like a reflex, Ciro pulled out another sheet of paper — this time, an invoice. He had been pushing for me to join Polo United on an Argentina trip in November, and this invoice reflected that: thousands for the trip, plus thousands for my “membership” into Polo United at the Greenwich Polo Club. On top of that, there was another $2,000 per month to board Maggie. He said Zoe would be in touch with me to arrange the payments, which she was.

The Rains of Pine Plains

On Saturday, June 22, 2024, Ciro asked me to go up to Mashomack Polo Club, which was hosting its big annual international polo event. He wanted me to help with the horses and watch Michel play his match. Michel’s been playing for a team based out of Mashomack for about 20 years — let’s call them “Gotham Polo”.

I hadn’t seen or heard much from Michel since arriving in the area, aside from a brief welcoming text a few days prior. Mashomack itself was a vast polo ground situated in the middle of nowhere in Pine Plains, NY — about an hour’s drive north of Greenwich along a scenic parkway. I brought my friend Ron with me in case the event turned out to be lame.

When we arrived, I met up with Ciro, who asked me to help Carlitos with the horses. It was a hot, sunny day, and I was sweating through my yellow crop top and white polo jeans. As I looked over to the gravel road, I saw Michel riding his bike toward me, dressed in his team’s polo uniform. He greeted me with his usual flirtatious kiss on the cheek, but we only talked briefly before he asked if I needed to use the bathroom.

I did, and Michel led me to a secluded area off the side of the barn where the restroom was. He waited for me in another room while I went in. When I came out, there was this palpable tension, like he wanted to make a move but was holding back. He kept looking out the window like he was watching out for someone. Since this barn was his “office”, I didn’t push for anything , I figured he was just worried we would run the risk of getting caught by a wandering groom again, so we headed back outside. Michel then rode off to the field to play his match.

I had to bring Brisa to the field where two “guests of honor” were playing in the match. Just as the match was about to begin, heavy rains came through, causing a brief delay. I assumed, with the winds picking up, that the match would be called off, and I’d finally be able to go home. Apparently, others had the same idea. Players were scrambling off the field in the chaos when an older man shouted, “Let’s get out there! These guys came all the way from the Philippines to play!”

The guests of honor, playing on Team Philippines, were the sons of Speaker of the House of the Philippines, Ferdinand Martin G. Romualdez. Ciro, clearly starstruck, was giddy with excitement. Once the rain let up, I was helping Andrew get on Brisa when Ciro, eager to impress, looked up at him and said, “Michel is my best friend, we’ve been playing together for years.” Andrew barely reacted, simply asking for his stirrups to be shortened before riding off for the match. To add insult to injury, while Ciro was tightening the girth strap for another player, he looked down at Ciro and said, “oh yeah I have heard of you…you’re the Instagram guy with all the polo ads.” Ciro gave an embarrassed “uhhhh?” and the player cantered away.

When the match finally ended, I wandered over to the barns to find Ron, hoping we could leave. The event had turned into one of those typical, pretentious polo gatherings, with more people drinking under tents in fancy clothes than actually watching the match. I found Ron, and as we were walking to the car, Ciro called me, asking us to join him under the big main tent where everyone was gathering.

Mashomack Polo Club, Pine Plains NY

The tent was large, filled with about 30 tables, most covered in used plates and empty wine glasses, signaling the event was winding down. Players and their families were lingering and chatting. We sat at a table closest to the edge of the tent, the nearest seating to the parking area. Then Ciro came over, grabbed my arm, and said, “Come here, I want you to meet someone.” As he pulled me up, he pointed toward a woman in a red jumpsuit across the tent and said, “That’s Michel’s wife, I want you to meet her.”

At that moment, everything went black, the room fell silent. I felt the universe zoom in on my face and I stuttered out, “…Wife?” Michel, in all the time I’d known him, had never mentioned being married. Now, Ciro was dragging me by the wrist straight toward her — I was being led to my execution. She was at the far end of the tent, arranging something on a podium that might as well have been a guillotine. Everything was in slow motion like I was in an evolutionary flight or fight kill or be killed prehistoric scenario. I chose flight.

Without thinking, I just stopped my feet, and shouted out: “RON HAS DIABETES.” Ciro stopped, confused, and stared at me. “What?” he asked, but I was already pulling my wrist away saying, “I gotta go.” I rushed over to Ron, grabbed him, and blurted out, “You have diabetes RIGHT?” Ron, confused just repeated back slowly “I. Have. Diabetes. ” And as I was yanking him towards the edge of the tent viewing that as my exit to freedom, thunder crashed, lightning flashed, and a wall of rain poured down, trapping us inside. The rains had come back.

Thankfully, Ciro didn’t seem to notice the absurdity of all of this and wandered off elsewhere.

Ron and I eventually escaped and decided to go to the racetrack to place a few bets, only stopping for me to pick up a pack of cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked in two years.

On the drive home, I told Ron I was done with Michel. I realized I had seen his wife before — she had been at a few of our parties, but I had assumed she was just someone’s friend. Michel never so much as glanced in her direction, let alone acknowledged her existence. And those kids I saw with him at Mashomack? Those were his kids — children he had never once mentioned.

A couple of nights later, on the evening of June 30th, I had a dream that a snake and I were in love. One day while we were in the jungle the snake told me to let it go into the trees. I said no, knowing that if I released it, it wouldn’t come back. The snake insisted it would just sit in the branches, so I let it go. But as soon as I did, it reached for a distant branch, high in the trees, and vanished into the jungle. I just stood there as it stretched out and slithered off until it disappeared. The dream was so hauntingly clear that I created an illustration to get it out of my mind. The next morning I felt like I was mourning a loss.

The Weeping Willows

A few days later I went back to the Greenwich Polo Club to ride. Maggie’s nose was still not fully healed and then something happened that made me suspect that this was not fully an accident. I was standing at the top of the hill with Michel waiting for Maggie to be brought to me. A woman, who must have been a long-time employee, drove up in her golf cart and chatted with Michel. When Carlitos brought Maggie to me as we stood on the hill at the edge of the field, the woman looked at Maggie, then at me, and asked, “What happened to her?” I repeated what Ciro had said: she ran into a fence. But Michel looked down, shuffled his feet, and turned away. It was the same look of shame I saw on his face when Ciro tried to sell Maggie to me at an inflated price.

Something else disturbed me that day: the new addition to our club, a girl I’ll call Skyler. She was young, talkative and very thin. Although she never admitted it, she gave indications that made me assume she had an eating disorder. From day one of us meeting, she seemed desperate to prove how much she had eaten that day, showing us all pictures of a large meal she’d made and saying her low body weight was due to various medical conditions that I didn’t believe she actually had. Her insistence on convincing us she wasn’t thin from starvation only made it more obvious that she was.

What bothered me even more was how unbothered Ciro and Michel were by her appearance. When I saw her riding, I was concerned for her safety, she did not look well at all. I was even more concerned when she told me she just had surgery for breast implants and was riding against the instructions of her surgeon. This behavior of underweight riding after a major operation was both reckless and dangerous with potentially deadly consequences. When the three of us were alone, I told Ciro that she shouldn’t be riding in the club. “Why?” he asked. I looked at Michel for backup, he was always portraying himself as the nice one of the two, but all he offered, in a tone of excitement like he was answering a game show question was, “oh, I know why! She’s anorexic.”

Ciro, unfazed, shrugged and said, “Polo will help that.” When I told Ciro she could go into cardiac arrest on the field his response was “I made her sign a waiver.”

Skyler’s. mother, I’ll call her Jennifer, came to the field to watch her daughter ride a week or so later. She was friendly, funny and upbeat, but I could tell she was concerned about her daughter. I was led to believe that they were from an affluent New England family because they reminded us of their wealth and connections frequently —not in a boastful way, but in a manner that suggested a deep need to belong.

That boasting wouldn’t fall to the wind, Ciro started sniffing around immediately when he picked up their money’s scent.

The Patron Trap

When it was just Ciro and me one evening at the field, after Skyler and her mother had left Ciro sidled up to me and said “how much do you think I can get out of them? I think I can get $200,000. I’m going to charge her $200,000 to be in the club.”

After that, I started hearing Ciro call Skyler “patrona” behind her back, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she realized she was essentially sponsoring the entire club or if she’d been misled into believing polo was simply that expensive. Ciro and Michel quickly began enjoying the perks of their new patrona, much like they had with Sugar Daddy, who was set to join us any day now.

Skyler and Jennifer seemed to thrive on their newfound attention in the club, and I believe Ciro and Michel picked up on this and exploited it. Skyler had told us all on many occasions that she had no friends. From what I saw, her and her mom used Polo United for more than an extravagant polo club; it seemed this was their opportunity to belong somewhere, to be part of something that made them feel important. They started inviting Ciro and Michel on outings, to their private clubs, and likely on weekend trips to Manhattan.

What Ciro and Michel also enjoyed was a self-imposed professional fee for Skyler to play in their pseudo-matches. To justify the price of her membership, they orchestrated private matches at the Greenwich Polo Club, with no spectators, where they starred alongside Skyler and one other chosen polo professional who Ciro hooked into this venture. One of these professionals was Mariano Aguerre.

Mariano Aguerre, once a 10-goaler — the highest level in polo — was a name I had never heard before coming to Greenwich. Though he was once among the best players in the world, his handicap had since dropped to a 6. A legendary player but as everyone remarks, “he’s older now.” Still, Ciro capitalized on Mariano’s reputation. Ciro offered me the “opportunity” to play a private match with Mariano on the pristine fields of Greenwich Polo Club, first for $7,000 and then for $10,000. And of course Ciro didn’t miss the opportunity to shoehorn himself and Michel into a match on their favorite field, for $5,000 each.

$20,000 is a lot to just hit a ball for an hour with three people I hadn’t even heard of six months ago. And while Mariano might be a legend to Ciro, to me he’s no more significant than the person standing next to me in a grocery store checkout line. I did end up playing a match with him one time, but I have reason to believe it may have been on Skyler’s dime because I certainly didn’t pay for it.

Neither Skyler nor I needed to play in a star-studded match like this. What we needed was consistent, quality instruction from the men we had already paid memberships to. But the inclusion of these high-profile players wasn’t about improving our skills; it was about crafting an elite illusion. Ciro used these celebrity players as bait, justifying astronomical fees and perpetuating the idea that we were part of something prestigious and exclusive. In reality, as beginners, playing with elite professionals did little to help us progress in the sport. From what I saw, these matches were not about learning; they were about creating a spectacle — a justification for the enormous sums of money they could charge.

At this point, I began to understand how Ciro had navigated from being a no-name 2-goal player, struggling to find a spot on a professional team, to positioning himself within the elite circle of the Greenwich Polo Club. I recalled when we first arrived at the field some weeks ago, Michel gazed across the pristine grounds and said to all of us, “Wow! How did Ciro get us here?” But the truth was, he knew — it wasn’t a mystery. It was a calculated move, a concerted effort on Ciro’s part to bring wealthy clients, “Patrons,” to a failing operation.

Out of the rathole and into the palace

Understanding Ciro’s strategy required looking back at his earlier moves, particularly how he brought Sugar Daddy into this. With his deep pockets and eagerness to play the role of a polo patron, Sugar Daddy was exactly the type of client Ciro targeted to give Polo United an air of exclusivity at the Greenwich Polo Club.

As Skyler and Sugar Daddy, the two ‘patrons’, emerged, it became clear that the goal wasn’t to elevate the club to a professional standard. The lack of structure, pricing tailored to each client’s perceived financial threshold, and the blatant preferential treatment made me suspect the aim was to fabricate the appearance of an elite operation, luring those willing to pay for the illusion of prestige — and making large sums of cash in the process.

But Skyler and Sugar Daddy were not true patrons in the traditional sense. A real polo patron owns a team, selects the players, funds the operations, and often owns the horses. They control the matches and tournaments their team participates in. Skyler and Sugar Daddy, by contrast, were simply customers — paying for an expensive illusion. They didn’t control or own a polo team any more than a kid playing fantasy football owns the Dallas Cowboys. Instead, they were paying exorbitant fees for what amounted to little more than a vanity project.

An example of this was how Ciro charged Sugar Daddy thousands just to rent his horses for sporadic matches. A typical horse rental would usually be a couple hundred dollars, often including a lesson, but Ciro was exploiting Sugar Daddy’s ignorance to the highest order. I knew about the fee because Ciro boasted to me directly that he was charging Sugar Daddy “40k rent.”

Sugar Daddy’s involvement was a textbook case of manipulation. He was granted a veneer of prestige — designing his own jersey and naming it after his company — while being showered with artificial accolades for his polo “career” in press articles, which I believe Ciro funded using his Polo United dues. This manufactured recognition was less about genuine achievement and more about crafting a charade to inflate his ego. The so-called “team” and likely staged press coverage were calculated moves to convince him he was part of something elite. However, from what I saw, he and Skyler were just being used to fund the operations of Polo United and bolster Ciro and Michel’s lifestyle.

A Game of Vanity

When Sugar Daddy arrived at the polo club in July, the spectacle reached its peak. A match was arranged between Sugar Daddy’s and Skyler’s “teams”. Each patron’s team consisted of professionals whose trailers of horses lined the field, and a photographer was hired to capture the event. Private and without spectators, Ciro made sure to play up all of the fanfare of a prestigious tournament — minus any real competition. The professionals gently tapped the ball to their patrons, who rode around, oblivious to the actual rules of the game. Even the referee seemed indifferent.

What stood out in this otherwise dull match was Ciro’s inability to stay in the background. Despite this being the patrons’ moment, he couldn’t resist making it about himself. On more than one occasion, I watched him dash off with the ball, leaving his patron struggling to keep up. Ciro had to be the star of the show, even when it was supposed to be about the patrons.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the great 2 goaler, Ciro Desenzani

Outside of these staged private matches, the rest of us in Polo United participated in what were called “test matches” or “coaching chukkers.” These matches were sold as learning experiences where we’d play together as a club, “patrons” included, but in reality, they were just another way to cater to Skyler and Sugar Daddy. The rest of us were there to support their vanity, playing a secondary role in their fantasy.

During these test matches, it was obvious who was prioritized. The ball was constantly fed to Skyler and Sugar Daddy, and they were always set up for easy, staged goals. When they’d tap the ball in from a few feet away, Ciro and Michel would heap on the praise, making it seem like they were achieving something great. Meanwhile, when I managed a complex trick shot or an assist, it went completely unnoticed.

We ride alone

But the differential treatment wasn’t just in the praise — it was in the harshness, too. One day, I had to console one of the younger members, a child, after Ciro had berated her so belligerently during a match that she started crying. I told her, “Don’t worry. Ciro is a sniveling little asshole.” She tried to justify his psychopathic abuse by saying instructors can be tough, I pointed out the double standard: “Do you see him talking that way to Skyler or Sugar Daddy? You’re a much better rider than Skyler, and her and Sugar Daddy make far more mistakes than you, and dangerous ones at that, but he never yells at them.”

After that, Ciro and I got into an argument on the field. Ciro doesn’t seem to grasp how to instruct during a match, so when he started shrieking nonsensical bullshit at me like a banshee on her period, I stopped Maggie and just stared him down. He nervously asked why I was doing that, but I didn’t respond. When the match was over, I got an inch from his face and told him to watch his tone with me — this was his final warning. He tried to justify himself, claiming that shouting was part of his “teaching method,” and needed so I could hear him from across the field, like my issue was just about volume. I told him to find a new method when it came to me. Then he said if I didn’t like his “teaching style,” I could always get instruction from Michel, but warned my polo playing would suffer because, in his words, “Michel isn’t half the teacher I am.”

When I simply replied, “Good, that’s exactly what I’ll do,” and turned to walk away, Ciro immediately backtracked, apologizing and begging me to reconsider, pleading for me to stay.

These issues just made it clear in my mind that these test matches weren’t designed to help us learn or improve. They were staged for the patrons — catering to their egos. We were there to prop them up, nothing more.

Within Polo United, Ciro and Michel had seemingly crafted a near-perfect pyramid to structure their polo scheme. At the top were their wealthy “patrons”, paying exorbitant fees for an experience that, despite the fancy packaging, was essentially the same as what everyone else received, save for a vanity match here and there. Beneath them, supporting the structure, were the rest of us — still paying steep prices but nowhere near the inflated sums charged to the patrons.

This wasn’t polo; it was a farce. The lack of instruction or structure, combined with the inherent dangers of the sport, revealed the truth: Polo United was about one thing — extracting as much money as possible from people while delivering a hollow and dangerous experience.

A Lame Lie

After playing along with Ciro’s charade for months, my patience reached its breaking point when I saw what he had done to Maggie. After telling Ciro Maggie was declining mentally and physically and needed some of that alleged professional training I was supposed to be getting for free, Ciro had told me he was going to play her in a match at White Birch Farms. When I arrived at the farm, I saw Maggie standing next to the trailer, and my stomach wrenched. Her leg was all busted up — swollen, bruised, and clearly in pain. Neither Ciro nor the groom, Carlitos, seemed to notice or care. Carlitos was even preparing to ride her to warm her up. I stopped him immediately, saying, “You’re not riding her like that.”

Ciro walked over, acting as if nothing was wrong. I turned to him and said, “You don’t seriously see anything wrong with her leg right now?” He brushed it off, and I asked the same thing again, and finally, he asked me to walk her. After a few steps, even he had to admit she was lame. He bent down, palpating her leg in a dismissive manner, and in a sneering tone, said, “Your horse is in a lot of pain.”

I felt the rage build inside me at that moment, I bent over getting an inch from his face, my eyes about to pop out of my head, “WHY is she in a lot of pain?” Ciro, quickly backpedaled. “Ok, ok,” he stammered, “one of the horses probably just kicked her in the trailer, it happens all the time. Just go to the store and get a specialized cream called Furacin, and I’ll put it on. She’ll be fine.” I rushed to the store, bought the cream, and brought it back and put it on Maggie.

Maggie’s swollen leg

A few days later, I arrived at the Greenwich Polo club in the mid afternoon. I complained to Ciro and Michel about the situation with Maggie. I told them how Maggie is my only horse and how I wasn’t happy with how in 2 weeks she has had two major injuries. I was considering taking her back home to Florida and joining a new club.

They responded with a mix of explanations and assurances. Horses get injured all the time, they said, a statement that mirrored my experience as a racehorse owner. They acknowledged being short-staffed and suggested this might have contributed to Maggie’s injuries, but they were quick to apologize and promised they were addressing the issue. They assured me procedures were being put in place to prevent it from happening again.

Even with their reassurances, I remained uneasy, torn between my growing concern for Maggie and a reluctance to act impulsively. Maggie and I were alone, far from home, and any decision to leave would be neither simple nor quick, and I kept questioning myself if I was overreacting to what I was promised was an isolated accident.

To leave or not leave, that was the question.

After riding a horse that wasn’t mine for my practice I arrive back at the cottage around 5PM, I wanted to think about everything that was going on, and start researching other polo clubs, but then I received a message from Michel, the first one since I arrived in Greenwich 2 weeks ago

“Hey you at home?”

What a gentleman.

Later that evening as Michel was leaving and I was putting my clothes back on, he asked me if I would be at the field tomorrow. I said yes.

The Ghost Horse of Argentina

Maggie’s injuries weighed on me and I became anxious about my future in polo. I told Ciro bluntly, “If anything happens to Maggie, I’m done.” The school horses Polo United offered were subpar — clumsy, needing constant kicks, with boxy canters that made riding a chore. They required more skill than I had. Without Maggie I had no will to continue.

I decided to extend my stay in Connecticut because I did not want Maggie up there alone, and my landlord lengthened my lease at the North Stamford cottage for another four weeks.

Maggie healed, and I kept a vigilant watch on her treatment to make sure no future “accidents” occurred. I made sure she was loaded last on the trailer, and first to get off and that she was away from the other horses when on the field. I was in a predicament because I was an outsider to polo with few connections, so packing up Maggie and leaving was not a simple task, horse transport takes weeks and thousands of dollars to arrange, and we had nowhere else to go at this point. So all I could do for the time being was to make sure Maggie was being cared for, and since I confronted Ciro and Michel, it seemed for now everything was fine.

A couple of weeks later, Ciro sent me an image of a horse. “Better than Maggie,” he claimed, “the perfect horse for you.” She was in Argentina, resting on a farm, but could be brought to me in Greenwich for $25,000 plus about $10,000 shipping. Ciro assured me that if she were in the U.S., she’d easily fetch twice that or more.

Ciro told me the horse was located on a farm owned by Alfredo and Facundo Goti, two names that meant nothing to me, much like when he dropped Memo Gracida’s name while trying to sell me Tully. He said he’d speak to them to discuss the sale.

I wanted another horse. Playing more often would help me improve faster, and the idea of owning a horse even better than Maggie was tempting. I told Ciro to get me the veterinary check to ensure the horse was sound, and once that happens I’d have the money for him by the end of the week. He assured me he’d organize the vet check to prove the horse was healthy. That was Monday, July 22.

By Tuesday, Ciro claimed the sale was confirmed. He said he was “sending some money” and would pick up the horse for exams, which would cost $500 — though he assured me it wasn’t really necessary. But I knew better. A vet check is always necessary when buying a horse.

Friday, July 26, Ciro said the horse was going to “his place” in Argentina, and the vet would prepare the report, which would be ready the following week.

Later that day, Ciro claimed he had already paid a $10,000 deposit and that the vet report was done, with everything coming back fine. But despite his earlier promises, I had yet to see any documentation — not a vet report, not a bill of sale, nothing to prove this horse even existed. All I had were Ciro’s words and a few photos. I asked for basic documentation: a bill of sale, the vet report, and a written agreement on when the horse would ship.

Ciro fired back that this “wasn’t what we agreed on.” He insisted he’d sent a $10,000 deposit and that if I needed paperwork, I should’ve asked earlier. He claimed he couldn’t get a bill of sale but said if I wanted paperwork, he could get it to me in an hour — though we had to act fast because the horse was about to be loaded onto a trailer “to his place.”

But then, the story shifted again. Now, he said he had only paid $3,000 but needed to send $10,000 immediately. The urgency was growing more suspicious by the minute.

He continued to twist things, saying he didn’t understand why I was asking for paperwork now, claiming I was “surprising” him with this request. He complained that needing a contract was complicating things and delaying the sale, as he owed the Gotis $10,000. He brushed me off, saying we’d discuss it after our match the next day.

The more I thought about it, the more bizarre it all seemed. Asking for documentation when purchasing a horse — or anything for that matter — is completely normal. It’s the first thing I requested when the horse was offered: get me the vet report, and we’ll move forward with the sale.

Two things didn’t add up: If the horse was just resting on a farm with no pressing timeline, why the rush to put down a $10,000 deposit? She wasn’t in any league play or active training, and wouldn’t be for months. And if the vet check was already in motion — as Ciro had led me to believe all week — why was there now confusion about needing the report?

Stranger still, when I examined the pictures he sent to me of the horse, it looked like he sent me photos of two different horses, claiming it was the same one.

The horse on the left has a star on its face, while the one on the right has a white blaze

Adding to the confusion over the identity of the horse, Ciro was not able to conclusively provide me with a name for the horse. He said “we have been calling her Varita” but the lack of certainty was another concern for me.

It felt exactly like the lie about the house in Greenwich all over again. The pattern was the same: “I’m getting it,” then “it’s done,” and finally “I never did it, and I don’t understand why you need it.”

And then it hit me… is Ciro trying to scam me on a horse?

I was pacing around my room, asking that question over and over again, and then I stopped when my phone buzzed. It was a message from Cipher, the groom who had mysteriously disappeared back in May. His message was long but clear — there was more to Ciro than I knew. And what he had to say was enough to bring everything crashing down.

Next time, Part III: Archangel’s Return

Resources

Related profile: Zoe Cookson
If you have been victimized or were witness to a crime the following resources are available to report it

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The resources provided are for individuals seeking to report crimes or suspicious activities. No assumptions or conclusions are drawn about the guilt or innocence of the individuals mentioned unless proven by a court of law. This information is intended to assist those who may have been affected in reporting their experiences to the appropriate authorities.

Topics: Ciro Desenzani, Michel Dorignac, Polo, Polo United, Taqueada Polo

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme Part I: Seduced by the Flames

I Took 3 Months Off of OUMERE to Hunt the International Con Men Behind an Elite Polo Ponzi Scheme

In January of 2024, I was dating a man who I would characterize as attractive, mildly successful, deeply insecure and profoundly immature. I called him “Peter Pan” because of his refusal to grow up despite being 52 years old. Peter Pan and I met in September of 2023 in Palm Beach when I was walking my dog, Gigi, and he broke the ice by complimenting her great beauty. Peter Pan was a banker, and then became my banker. And then he became a visitor in my life for a few months.

Peter Pan talked a lot. Peter Pan talked a lot about playing polo. He had an old picture of himself on a horse in a polo player’s get up as his phone wallpaper. To me, he was a chameleon who changed to fit in with his environment. One day, he was the banker. The next, he was the drummer. Then he was the polo player. He slipped in and out of roles, taking off one costume and putting another one on. He wasn’t grounded in any identity. It seemed he cared more about the look of a life than living it.

Despite that, I said sure, because I thought it might be hot to see him on a horse. We arrived at a sprawling, beautiful polo facility in Wellington, Florida, called the Santa Clara Polo Club. The club Peter Pan found was renting a field there, a new club, called Polo United.

Standing in the polo fields of the Santa Clara Polo Club

We were approached first by a short, stocky, balding middle aged man who introduced himself as Ciro Desenzani, one of two owners of Polo United and claimed he was a professional Argentinian polo player and coach. I was immediately disturbed, not because Ciro didn’t look like he could play polo with that George Costanza physique, but because he looked like a short version of my dad. Although, Ciro had a much smaller nose. Then reaching his hand to mine was the other owner of Polo United, Michel Dorignac. Michel had grey hair, piercing eyes, and the yellowest teeth I had ever seen.

Michel also introduced himself as an Argentinian polo player, and his family name, Dorignac, famous in the polo world, along with his polo-playing history, gave credibility to this new venture. Michel’s resume was why Peter Pan chose them. He said he never heard of Ciro.

I stood on the sidelines and what I saw, riding fast on a horse, swinging a mallet, running down an open field, made me want to be out there. I had limited riding experience, but a $9,000 custom French saddle that I had been dying to dust off. I broke up with Peter Pan a week or two later for reasons that I will mention at the end, and sent Ciro a text message asking for a lesson.

No longer collecting dust

Day 1 of 191 Days

I arrived for my lesson late in the afternoon in February. Ciro and Michel were sitting under a blue Polo United tent on the side field at Santa Clara. Waiting for me was a little chestnut mare with a white blaze named Maggie. She was mine for the lesson. When I got on, I didn’t want her to move. Not a trot, not even a walk. Just stand still. There’s some disease festering in me that causes my brain to always go to the top shelf with any concern. I was sure that any sudden move from her would be the last of mine. But it wasn’t. The lesson was conducted by Michel. We walked, and I swung at the ball a few times.

After the lesson, Ciro and Michel sat me down under the tent, and the mood shifted from lighthearted to serious. Ciro did most of the talking. He explained that if I wanted to continue with their club, I needed to purchase their clinic package: 10 lessons for $5,000. $500 per lesson seemed on the high side of normal, and I was caught off guard by this fee increase since my first lesson was $300. But I would soon get accustomed to and overlook things that seemed to be outer fringes of normal with Polo United. I asked if I could pay as I went, since I was new to polo and still unsure about them. But Ciro insisted that they required a commitment if I wanted to be part of their club. Trust was a big issue for Ciro, as this demand foreshadowed. So, I showed my commitment and sent the money — though it went straight into Ciro’s personal bank account.

Snakes in the Grass

I averaged one to two lessons per week, and I noticed my comfort level on the horses improve with each session. Michel’s comfort level also improved with me. It began with him squeezing my legs suggestively, claiming it was to show me how to grip the saddle, but soon escalated to touching areas that didn’t require such cues, eventually leading to something more serious.

One evening after a lesson, Ciro and Michel sat me down again, and once more, the mood shifted. This time, Ciro told me I should buy a polo horse. I knew the horse sales pitch was coming — Peter Pan had warned me. “What about Maggie?” I asked, even though I hadn’t ridden her since that first lesson, she was still on my mind. Ciro spoke for a while about her virtues. Michel stayed quiet the whole time, sipping his mate (a kind of Argentinian tea), as he always did. When I asked how much, Ciro responded, $50,000. Michel finally spoke, almost guiltily, he looked down at his drink and said, “That’s a good price.” Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t, but I already owned three racehorses, and I wasn’t about to spend more money on another horse. I said no.

Saying no to Ciro never seemed to stick. A few days later, he texted me again, opening with flattery about how happy he was to have me on the Polo United team and how we could finally connect OUMERE, my cosmetics company, to the polo world through him, a favor I neither asked for or needed.

He shifted quickly to pitching another horse: a mare named Tully, he attempted to boast about her origin by claiming she was purchased from a man named Memo Gracida, a name that meant nothing to me because I didn’t know who he was. Ciro claimed Tully was even better than Maggie and would fast-track my polo progress. The price? $50,000, though he really wanted $70,000. If I trusted him with my future in polo, he’d bring her from California.

The [attempted] sale of Tully

Something seemed strange about this sale. I found it odd that Ciro would drop the price by $20,000 so quickly. I wondered why he wasn’t selling her to a professional, which raised questions in my mind about the sale. I said no, sensing that there was more to the story than I was being told. Later, I would discover I was right — Tully wasn’t his to sell.

I didn’t hear anything more about the horse after that. A few days later, Ciro texted, asking for my company website. Soon after, he texted to me an advertisement he made, featuring himself, in a polished sponsorship pitch for an upcoming “tournament” Polo United was supposedly hosting. He was offering me the chance to put my OUMERE logo on a prize-giving podium and polo team shirts — for $10,000.

The problem was, this “tournament,” as far as I could tell, would be nothing more than the Polo United students, a few beginners, playing at our “school” with no real audience or meaningful media coverage. Ciro presented the sponsorship as prestigious, but based on what I saw, I doubted whether it would attract the major exposure he promised. It seemed to me that Ciro wasn’t just running a polo club; he was running a hustle.

Again, I said no, and Ciro said he would “think of a plan”.

Well, that plan was to now have me pay $7,000 for another month with Polo United, marking the second of many increases in fees. Like before, this seemed on the outer limits of normal. Framed as along the lines of , “You’ve graduated from the clinic; now it’s time to get serious about polo” which seemed strange to me.

I wasn’t sure about the payment, but one night after practice a few days later it was just me and Michel, alone. The sky darkened and only the moon lit up the field. As we packed up the Polo United tent, Michel started telling me a story about how a woman once invited him to her mansion under the guise of a party. When he arrived, it was clear there was no party — it was a setup, and he was the only guest. The woman had invited him there to seduce him. Michel described, in graphic detail, how much he enjoyed certain sexual acts but insisted he wasn’t interested in doing them with her. However, he hinted that if it had been someone else, he would have gone along with it. It was at this point I felt that the purpose of this story was to test my boundaries, now I was the one being set up and seduced. I could see Michel making a forward gesture to pull me in and at that very moment the bright lights of a truck beamed onto the field as it pulled right in front of us. It was Ciro and the groom “Cipher” there to pick up the tent.

The Unseen Hand

I sent the payment, but I didn’t send it directly to Ciro. A woman named Zoe Cookson messaged me through WhatsApp to arrange the payment. The odd detail about Zoe was, I had never met her. None of us in Polo United had. She never came to the field, never called anyone (as far as I knew), and only existed in these quick, transactional WhatsApp messages. It was strange that someone who seemed to handle all the money for Polo United was so elusive. She was a looming figure I couldn’t quite place in this growing puzzle.

Message from Zoe Cookson after my first Polo United lesson

A week later, I was thrown into a match with another beginner, Karen, the only other member of Polo United that I had any meaningful interaction with at that point. Everyone else on the field was a professional. Throughout my lessons, I did whatever they asked, but I had one rule: I use my saddle. When Ciro told me to get on a grey horse, I said the horse needed my saddle, and he shot back that there wasn’t enough time to change equipment. I told him that was ridiculous — this “league” was supposed to be for Karen and me to learn, and pointed out how everyone was on the sidelines tacking their horses at the moment.

That’s when Ciro cracked. He threw a full-blown tantrum, the first time he let the mask slip in front of me. He cried out in his high pitched nasally voice about how he makes the rules, flailing his little arms and making a scene. I let him finish his fit, and then I said “ I use my equipment or I’m leaving.” As soon as I started walking away, he begged me to stay and told the groom to tack the horse with my saddle.

Once I was on the field, Michel rode up to me and I told him, “I shouldn’t be here” Michel just scoffed and said, “It’s fine.” They gave me a horse that wouldn’t move.

They didn’t want to let me use my equipment, they didn’t give me a horse that I could ride, and they didn’t teach me the rules. This match wasn’t about learning, it was about putting on a show to justify the price hike and to give Ciro and Michel an opportunity to play at a prestigious club. Even the pros on the other team and referee noticed the lack of structure, they gave Karen and me tips on hitting, cantering and where to go. Meanwhile, Ciro and Michel were on the other side of the field, off in their own world, playing with each other.

The two of them seemingly went off into that world for a couple days, because after the match I didn’t hear from either of them. Then out of the silence, a message from Ciro. It was another one of his slick image advertisements, this one was titled the “Pro-Pool League” and the new cost to stay in the club: $50,000.

I responded back, can I sleep in the barn too?

We Meet Again, My Friend

Instead of spending that $50,000 on a 7 month “annual membership” I decided to buy Maggie, albeit for a lower price than originally offered. I had been riding other horses for almost two months, and I always thought of her, even though I only rode her that one time, my first time. I wanted to get better at polo quicker, I wanted to play matches better, and I wanted to be faster. Maggie was the answer.

April 11th, Maggie was waiting for me at the field and at that point, I hadn’t cantered yet. Cantering is a big step in riding — it’s faster than a trot but slower than a sprint, and it represented a psychological barrier for me. I just hadn’t been able to do it. I got on Maggie, trotted her to the far corner of the field, and stared across to the other side where the Polo United tent stood, with Ciro sitting there, not paying attention, scrolling away on his phone. I wanted to do it.

I held the reins in my left hand, the mallet in my right, and decided it was time. I leaned forward, squeezed my legs, and she took off. The thought of cantering moved from my mind to her legs, and we were on the run. I realized as she’s going about 15 mph, the fastest I have ever moved on a horse, that I didn’t exactly know how to get her to slow down, so I just figured she is either going to stop or keep going. The blue tent got closer and closer and I thought we were going to go right through it, but she just naturally slowed down and stopped a few feet from the tent. Ciro looked up at us from his cell phone, and we turned around and did it all over again. Although he said nothing at the time, months later Ciro told me he got goosebumps watching that moment.

When we first took flight

What marked the last day of riding any other horse also marked the end of anything that could be characterized as meaningful instruction I would receive in my remaining four months with Polo United. From that day forward, it was just Maggie and me, riding every day — just the two of us. Maggie became my teacher, showing me how to play polo.

“Don’t Leave.”

Michel at this time seemingly decided to stop teaching me polo and start teaching me something else: his sexual history. One evening, we were sitting around — Ciro, Michel, Karen, a younger member in his 20s named Juan and me — when Michel pulled his chair close and asked if I wanted to hear a story. He then shared how, a few years ago, a woman invited him to join her and her husband for an “experience.” That experience, as he described it, was her taking him to the backseat of her car for oral sex while her husband watched from the front seat mirror.

Later that night, Michel and I were chatting on WhatsApp and he asked me if I liked sex, which led to him admitting he wanted to “jump” on me that night when we were alone in the dark and that he felt that we would have an amazing sexual connection together.

Sunday, April 21st marked the last big professional match of the polo season in Wellington: La Dolfina vs. Valiente. Our group — Karen, Ciro, Michel, myself, and Andi, another woman in the club — headed to the National Polo Center. It was a hot, humid day in South Florida, and by the last chukker (period in polo matches), my red dress was soaked from a passing sun shower.

National Polo Center, Wellington Florida

After the match, Michel asked me to drive over to his barn. Not only had he been staring at me the entire match, the sexual tension between us had been building for weeks.

I think he wanted to know the answer to his earlier question. I thought this was it. But then, he told me to have Andi come along too, which threw me off the scent.

When I arrived at the barn, I expected something to happen, but instead, he just showed me around like he was giving a tour. Then Andi arrived, and Michel suggested dinner at a nearby restaurant.

I suffered through this meal that lasted just short of an eternity, and it was getting late. Michel drove us back to his barn, and now it was close to 10:30 p.m. We were standing outside, the property was pitch black, no lights, just the moon and stars above and the dirt road near the trailers. Andi said she was ready to head out and offered to lead the way from the dark and isolated barn. I figured it wasn’t going to happen, shrugged and said “ok” quickly. Michel stood there, scowled, then walked off into the dark toward the pasture. Andi drove off, expecting me to follow. I walked to my car and my phone buzzed. It was a text from Michel: “Don’t leave.”

1 a.m., I drove home on an empty country road. The drive was about 35 minutes, and my mind didn’t have one thought. My brain had become an old TV left on after midnight, stuck on a channel that had run out of programming, just broadcasting static.

Three days later, I went to the field. Michel wasn’t there, but Ciro was. After I rode Maggie alone, as I had gotten used to doing, Ciro sat me down. He told me that he and Michel had decided to give me the $50,000 club membership for free, framed as a reward for my effort in polo and because, in his words, I was “nice with a good heart.” At first, I was beyond flattered. I thought it was an incredibly generous gift — $50,000 for a polo membership, something everyone else had to pay for, but not me.

Then I started to realize the timing of it all. My mind had a flashback to Sunday night, I think I pulled a piece of hay still stuck in my hair. Then I thought to myself, $50,000…not a bad stud fee.

And that was the complicated dynamic between Michel and me. He made himself available to me when there was a payment needed, or when there was a horse to be bought, or eventually when I discovered his and Ciro’s deep dark secrets. But other times I may have been given a “gift” seemingly in exchange for sex, like the $50,000 membership into the club. Throughout my entire time with Polo United, I never could quite figure out who was the prostitute in the whole situation, me or Michel.

Sugar Daddy

Ciro kept bringing up Polo United’s need for a “patron.” The patron embodies the very essence of what polo is. Polo isn’t just a sport; it’s an elite, money-driven universe that operates on a level of exclusivity and wealth beyond any other sport. Unlike most sports, where athletes are selected based on talent alone, polo allows wealthy patrons to essentially buy their way onto a team. These patrons don’t just fund the team — they play on it too, often regardless of skill. In high-level polo, the patron doesn’t just fund the team’s operations; they invest in horses, fields, and sometimes even full-time staff like grooms, veterinarians, and coaches.

This unique arrangement gives the patron a kind of prestige that can’t be bought in any other sport. Polo allows them to bask in the glory of not just business success (or whatever else made them wealthy) but athletic triumph as well. Polo is the oldest sport — the sport of kings — and the patron is, in a way, a modern-day king on the field.

At first, I didn’t understand why Ciro appeared so fixated on finding a patron for Polo United. We weren’t a professional team — we were a learning club. If anyone here was good enough to play at a professional level, they wouldn’t be taking lessons from Ciro — they’d be out there getting paid to play. And a real patron, one with the wealth and ambition to fund a team, wouldn’t waste their money on a club filled with beginners. They’d hire legitimate professionals to win high-profile matches.

Ciro, from what I saw, was a coach, not a player. He was always on the sidelines, yelling and critiquing, but never actually playing in professional matches. I never saw him in any big name tournaments or heard of him belonging to a team. I assumed he simply wasn’t good enough to play professionally — unlike Michel, who still occasionally played in real matches. As the saying goes, those who can’t do, teach.

But then Ciro let something slip. One day, while venting his frustrations, he admitted that he wasn’t being contacted to play — only to coach. He seemed genuinely dismayed by this, as if it had become a personal failing. I suspect, though, that this was a performance. I doubt anyone was contacting him to coach either. It felt like he wanted us to believe he was still desirable in the polo world. That’s when I realized it wasn’t likely that his obsession with finding a patron was about making Polo United a successful business. How I saw it, Ciro didn’t want a patron to fund the club — he wanted one to fund him, to get him back on the field, not stuck on the sidelines. Polo United seemed to be his vehicle to find a wealthy benefactor who could make that happen.

The ever increasing fees started to make sense, this was Ciro’s search for the highest bidder, the person to sit atop the tip of the pyramid. I believed he was looking for someone to bankroll his dream of playing in high-level polo matches, traveling the world and putting him in the spotlight as a star player. And along with that dream, he needed someone to finance his entire lifestyle — just like he had tried to get me to do with his sponsorship pitch. How I saw it, Ciro wasn’t just looking for a patron. He was looking for a sugar daddy.

Sugar Daddy, whose real is name Alex Meshechok, came into Polo United from, what seemed to me, a mysterious background. 50’s, tall, an accent that sounded eastern European and with a mood that switched as often as the woman on his arm. The women cycled frequently, and every week he brought a different woman to the club. The women in Polo United disliked Alex Meshechok for many reasons, this being one of them. I actually never had a problem with his free love polyamorous lifestyle because, from what I could tell, they were all consenting adults, and it seemed mutually beneficial: the women got to ride in his (my opinion financed) Bentley, go to the polo field and on fancy trips, and he got the benefit of their “company”.

It seemed like Ciro quickly seized the opportunity to cater to Sugar Daddy Meshechok’s alleged wealth, offering him special treatment. We had a practice match on the field on Saturday and after everyone left Ciro mentioned to me that he had charged Sugar Daddy $6,000 for that hour of us running around on the field. The rest of us paid far, far less for the same thing.

Ciro and Michel gave Meshechok preferential treatment in the club such as choice seating at our parties and unlimited ass kissing whenever possible, and in exchange they enjoyed various benefits such as invitations to his parties, dinners and weekend excursions. The exclusivity of these invitations to just Ciro and Michel seemed strange. We were a club that Ciro and Michel pushed for a shared experience, yet they ran off to Meshechok’s fun outings on their own and purposefully excluded everyone else from the club. Karen later told me that at our end-of-season party, Alex shouted obscenities at her while Ciro and Michel stayed silent. This blatant imbalance of respect was permitted by the members at the top of the Polo United customer pyramid.

Dine with the devil, have a long spoon

Despite all the flattery Ciro and Michel lavished on Alex to his face, they were quick to criticize him behind his back — and eventually throw him under the bus. But it wasn’t just him — no one in the club was spared from their ridicule. They mocked Alex for his vocal habits while riding, and Ciro openly predicted that he would never improve at polo, claiming he’d eventually give up and just focus on toning at the gym once he couldn’t hit the ball far enough. In a moment of pettiness, Ciro even admitted he found Alex to be grossly unattractive and couldn’t understand why he got so many women. I think he missed the key detail of how they were acquired. Michel, not missing a beat, asked if I found Alex attractive, because his jealousy couldn’t help but slip through

A new rider, “Jax,” became the target of Michel’s jokes, mocked for being stiff on the horse and possibly homosexual. Karen was constantly criticized by Ciro for her heel position, and even a child wasn’t immune to their snide remarks as they poked fun at her for riding too hard on the horse. No one escaped their judgment.

Their derision was directed at the very things we were supposed to be learning and improving. And the ones who were supposed to be teaching us were the very ones ridiculing us. It was as though they resented us for being beginners that they needed to teach.

Their words weren’t just harsh criticisms, they carried an underlying message. Ciro and Michel made it clear — fall short of their expectations, and you wouldn’t just be ridiculed, you’d be out. The threat of exclusion loomed over everyone, a silent warning that your place in the club was never guaranteed.

I remember the first time they wielded the threat of exclusion to keep me in the club. Ciro mentioned how he and Michel had “kicked out” Peter Pan after his lesson package was up. According to Ciro, Peter Pan wasn’t serious about polo and just wanted to “stick and ball.” Michel added, with a smirk, that he was “so weird.” While I couldn’t argue with the “weird” part — everyone seemed to agree on that description of Peter Pan — I didn’t realize they were supposedly casting members out of the club.

Later, I found out that Peter Pan hadn’t been kicked out at all. He had quit because Ciro and Michel weren’t logging his hours (or anyone else’s for that matter, including my own) which he needed to maintain his handicap with the USPA and to play in actual tournaments. But Ciro and Michel twisted the story, likely to keep me in line. I believe the agenda behind this Peter Pan parable was to keep me on edge, to let me know that if I didn’t meet their standards — whether it was Ciro’s financial demands or Michel’s more personal ones — I could be the next to go.

A polo handicap is a passport to the world— Winston Churchill

Or maybe they wanted me to think someone else was always next to be cut. One day, after riding Maggie alone, I returned to the tent where Ciro and Michel were sitting, and the air felt heavy. Ciro sighed and said, “What are we going to do about Karen?” I asked what he meant, and he said he didn’t like Karen’s vulgar mouth, referring to some crude jokes she had made at a party the week before. Specifically, he seemed bothered by her talking about “the vagina,” a body part I suspected Ciro didn’t like for reasons beyond the joke itself — but more on that later.

Now, I know Michel had clearly enjoyed those jokes, but I played along. I told Ciro, “Karen’s nice, so if you’re worried about her making those kinds of jokes in front of potential clients, just talk to her about it.” Days later, Ciro informed me that Michel had convinced him to let Karen stay in the club. Karen later told me her husband had paid them the $50,000 membership fee.

A Secret in California

Ciro said he needed to go to California. He had briefly discussed with us all that he had a polo club there named Taqueada. In fact, many of my payments for Polo United were paid to the Taqueada account, per Zoe’s instructions. Ciro told us that many years ago, he had left Argentina to create this grand polo club in California. He claimed that, with the help of Michel’s visits to the club, it had grown significantly with many members, and throughout our conversations, he and Michel insisted that the club was still in full operation, just without Ciro leading it. He said he had left it in the hands of a manager while he focused on Polo United in Florida.

Michel Dorignac and Ciro Desenzani at Taqueada Polo, Gilroy California

Ciro didn’t speak fondly of the Taqueada club, referring to it as a burden he was trying to offload. He painted a chaotic picture, saying the club had been waged against by “angry lesbians,” disgruntled former clients supposedly waging a man-hating vendetta against him. He added that the club was rife with vulgar women who were unserious about polo, with one allegedly sleeping with everyone in the club and others causing so much trouble that the police had to be called. According to Ciro, the problems began after he left to start Polo United, suggesting that it was jealousy over his departure. He was going back, he said, one last time to sell the club and finally be rid of it.

I hadn’t thought to Google Ciro until now, but when I did, the first thing that popped up was a lawsuit by someone named “Midnight Rose”, who sued Ciro in 2020 for an unpaid debt. The name immediately sounded familiar. Back in April, Ciro had vented his frustrations with Karen for not paying that $50,000 membership fee when it was first proposed. He told me Karen and her husband had looked him up online and asked about “Midnight Rose.” Ciro was livid, repeating “Midnight Rose, Midnight Rose, Midnight Rose” in that nasally, high-pitched voice he uses when he’s frustrated. He didn’t explain the lawsuit to me and got angry that Karen didn’t trust him. He went on a rant about not wanting anyone’s business or money if they didn’t trust him. Trust is Ciro’s hot button, and he gets overly sensitive when people don’t blindly give it.

When I first saw the Midnight Rose lawsuit pop up on Google, I brushed it off. I had always believed that lawsuits were just the price of doing business, especially anything having to do with horses. But the more I thought about it, the more the lawsuit stuck in my mind. What really happened there, and why did he get so angry when Karen brought it up? Was the “talk” about tossing Karen out of the club a punishment for her bringing it up? For the first time I started wondering what else Ciro wasn’t telling us.

Ciro left for California and returned days later with several horses. One of those horses was Tully — the same one he had tried to sell me months before. Transported across state lines, possibly without permission.

Then Came the Last Days of May

Around this time, Ciro and Michel began talking about their plans for the summer. The polo season was winding down in South Florida as the temperatures rose, and most players were preparing to head to the Northeast. Michel, having played at Mashomack Polo Club for nearly two decades, followed his usual routine of migrating there in early June and staying through September. Now, it seemed, Ciro saw an opportunity to join this elite polo circuit. He mentioned that Polo United had secured a spot at the prestigious Greenwich Polo Club, home of the East Coast Open, marking his entry into one of the most high-profile polo environments in the country. Ciro boasted this was the first time an outside club would be permitted in, but he didn’t explain how he got Polo United, an unregistered unknown club, into Greenwich.

The Greenwich Polo Club

Ciro wanted me to go, and I said I would, not for the entire 3 months, but maybe for a few weeks. He was glad that I could go and said he would arrange for a house for me to stay in, likely with himself and a groom he was bringing in from Argentina, an alleged long time friend named Carlitos.

On May 25th, we had our final match of the season before Polo United packed up and headed north. Although I had come a long way in the past three months — now able to canter, hit the ball, score a few goals, and keep up in a faster-paced game — I still couldn’t shake this looming sense of dread that settled over me every time I approached the field.

Maggie and Me playing polo at the Santa Clara Polo Club

The match, meant to showcase our progress, felt more like a facade, with no one really prepared to play properly. As we lined up on the vast, Florida sun-scorched Santa Clara fields, the first chukker started at a slow pace, and I tried to focus on precision. By the second chukker, things escalated. Maggie grew more distressed, yanking at her chest and pulling forward. I struggled to control her as she bolted toward the boards, while everyone else rested on the sidelines. Later, I learned Maggie shouldn’t have played more than 2 chukkers.

In the third chukker, just as I stole the ball and was about to pass, another member cut across the line, a dangerous, illegal move. I had to pull Maggie up to avoid a collision. The referee blew the whistle, but Ciro and Michel, who should have been guiding the game, were on the other side of the field. After the match, I took care of Maggie while the other horses weren’t even hosed down.

Amid all the chaos, Ciro kept reassuring me about our move to Greenwich, promising that he was securing a house for me. He made it sound like everything was under control, offering vague but confident responses whenever I pressed for details: “We’re working on the house, it’ll be ready soon,” or “Just finishing up — I want it to be perfect for you.” I trusted him, thinking there was no reason to lie about something as straightforward as renting a house, especially since I would eventually find out the truth.

Then, just 10 days before we were set to leave, Ciro finally admitted the truth — there was no house. There never had been. And to save himself, he lied and said he never promised me a house in the first place, acting as though I was the one who had misinterpreted things.

Ciro’s manipulation stepped up when he asked me to come to the field one day — he wanted to show me the horses he’d brought back from California. It was clear in my mind he had another agenda: he wanted me to buy one of these horses and bring it up to Greenwich alongside Maggie. A sale would put money in his pocket, and boarding two horses meant even more. He was particularly eager for me to try a grey horse named Chardonnay, which he boasted was one of his best — smooth canter, quick turns, an all-around top polo horse.

As Cipher warmed the horse up, Ciro casually remarked, “He’s a terrible rider, he thinks I’m going to get him a visa, but I’m never going to.” This was just another glimpse of the pervasive dishonesty Ciro wielded so freely — one that would later unravel on a much larger scale.

To Ciro, everyone was a terrible rider. One day he told me that that Adolfo Cambiaso, the greatest living polo player, was a talentless polo hack, underserving of his fame who needed his instruction to improve. But it was Ciro’s remark about the visa that truly disturbed me. Cipher had mentioned to me weeks earlier that Ciro was supposedly working on getting him a work visa. The implication was that this was part of their arrangement — likely in lieu of proper payment. Ciro’s offhand comment about never intending to follow through sounded far more sinister, something that bordered on exploitation — if not human trafficking.

I got on Chardonnay and this clearly was not a top polo horse like Ciro described. Slow, older, lazy, boxy canter. I wanted off. I went back to the barn and told Ciro I didn’t want to buy Chardonnay. He lost his mind, first with the childish repeating of phrases such as “I thought you wanted to buy a horse” incessantly. Then crying that I ruined his day. Followed by a complete mental breakdown. I told him I wasn’t going to be spoken to like that and I left the field.

Cipher then disappeared. I didn’t see him at the barn the next day, or the day after that. I had seen him every day since I began back in February and now he was gone, without a trace.

The next day Ciro left for Greenwich and the horses went up with him.

I knew something was dark and wrong with the entire polo operation at this point. Strange horse sales, an odd “club” with an even odder price structure, the seduction of one owner, the psychopathy of another, and a vanishing groom to top it off. I didn’t know entirely what was going on, but I knew one thing for certain: Ciro was an abnormality: a deeply disturbed man that wasn’t to be trusted. And what was worse, was that Maggie was now there in Greenwich with him. I needed to get up there.

Next time, Part II: A Tale of Two Ciros

Resources

If you have been victimized or were witness to a crime the following resources are available to report it

FBI Tip Line: https://tips.fbi.gov/home

Security and Exchange Tip Line: https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-resources/report-suspected-securities-fraud-or-wrongdoing

ICE Tip Line: https://www.ice.gov/tipline

IRS Tip Line: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-3949-a

Human Trafficking Hotline: https://humantraffickinghotline.org/en/report-trafficking

Disclaimer:

The resources provided are for individuals seeking to report crimes or suspicious activities. No assumptions or conclusions are drawn about the guilt or innocence of the individuals mentioned unless proven by a court of law. This information is intended to assist those who may have been affected in reporting their experiences to the appropriate authorities.

Topics: Ciro Desenzani, Michel Dorignac, Polo, Polo United, Taqueada Polo