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

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