There’s something deeply unsettling about a con artist who becomes your best friend before he ruins your life. Dennis Schuler Jr., who renamed himself Kota Youngblood, didn’t hide behind fake emails or crypto wallets. He showed up at your kid’s hockey practice, brought flowers to your house, and prayed over a Bible before telling you the Mexican cartel had marked your family for death.
This wasn’t some faceless scammer operating from a call center overseas. Youngblood lived in north Austin, drove a BMW, and knew exactly which emotional buttons to press. He studied his victims like a psychologist analyzes patients, identifying the anxious father, the loyal friend, the eager investor. And then he destroyed them systematically, pocketing roughly $12 million over two decades.
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Youngblood’s entire identity was fiction. He claimed to be a Delta Force veteran, a Purple Heart winner, a man with connections reaching the highest levels of government. He said he had a master’s degree in quantum physics. None of it was true.
His only real job had been selling used cars in Ohio before he moved to Texas. He never served in the military at all, his application to join the Marines in 1990 ended with a medical disqualification. But the persona he created was so compelling that grown men with business savvy and life experience handed him their retirement savings without questioning his story.
What made Youngblood particularly dangerous was his patience. This wasn’t a smash-and-grab operation. He spent years building relationships, showing up consistently, becoming indispensable. By the time he asked for money, victims felt they owed him.
The Cartel That Never Was
The backbone of Youngblood’s scheme was fear. Specifically, fear of Mexican cartels operating just across the Texas border. He convinced multiple victims that the Zetas or Sinaloa cartel had placed contracts on their lives, that their children would be kidnapped, that only his government contacts could save them.
Eric Perardi, a successful real estate developer and part-time hockey coach, met Youngblood at the Chaparral Ice rink where both their sons played. What started as casual dad chat evolved into something darker. Youngblood told Perardi that his estranged wife had taken out a hit on him to cash in his life insurance policy and cover a $6.1 million cartel debt.
It was complete nonsense, but Perardi believed it. Why wouldn’t he? Youngblood knew intimate details about Perardi’s finances, his divorce proceedings, his insurance policies. He even knew what Perardi’s son was wearing at the running track one afternoon. The illusion of omniscience made the threat feel real.
Perardi wrote 17 checks totaling $900,000. He slept with a gun next to his bed. He and his girlfriend fled Texas, driving through New Orleans, Nashville, and Miami while looking over their shoulders for sicarios who didn’t exist.
The psychological torture was intentional. Federal prosecutor Dan Guess later said he’d never seen cruelty like this in a fraud case. Youngblood didn’t just want money. He wanted to watch people suffer.
The Clock Repairman’s Nightmare
James Holloway was a retired clock enthusiast who ran Chapter 15 of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors. His home in northeast Austin doubled as a workshop filled with oil, screwdrivers, and half-dismantled timepieces. Wealthy retirees dropped by to tinker and talk.
Youngblood first appeared in 2018 as a customer needing a four-glass mantel clock repaired. He paid cash, seemed cultured, and spoke vaguely about connections and private deals. When he asked Holloway for $20,000 to cover his sister’s funeral expenses, the clock repairman didn’t hesitate.
That loan was never repaid. Instead, requests multiplied. Between 2018 and 2019, Holloway wrote 55 checks worth nearly $250,000. Youngblood offered business partnerships in rare antiques as repayment, coins and furniture and Tiffany jewelry that would make Holloway whole.
None of it materialized. What did happen was Youngblood integrated himself into the Holloway family so completely that when Holloway’s own son Seth warned him it was a scam, the father chose to believe Youngblood instead.
By 2020, Youngblood had convinced Holloway that his oldest son Lane was in trouble with the cartels. Lane’s wife’s family had gotten involved in drug trafficking, Youngblood claimed, and now Lane’s young daughter would be kidnapped unless they acted immediately. Holloway believed him. So did Gary and Dale Snider, close friends of the Holloways who eventually lost more than $1 million to the scheme.
The Sniders had to sell their home and rent it back just to keep funding what they thought was a rescue operation. “We were just stupid, but you’re in so deep,” Dale told me. “I wish we could have stopped at $235,000.”
The Son Who Vanished
Lane Holloway actually was in danger, just not from any cartel. Youngblood had isolated him completely, convincing Lane that his own father was buying guns for drug smugglers and that Lane’s family appeared on a cartel death list.
Lane quit his six-figure job at Amazon. He legally changed his name to Will Elessedil, a reference to a fantasy trilogy Youngblood loved, and tattooed it on his hand. He moved his family to Florida, bouncing between anonymous hotel rooms, keeping his kids out of school. Money arrived sporadically via Walmart vouchers sent by Youngblood.
And then came the tasks. Youngblood ordered Lane to create fake social media accounts attacking people Lane had never met. Posts accusing Rachel Herrera, Perardi’s ex-wife, of affairs and drug use. Later, posts targeting Perardi himself with claims of money laundering and sexual misconduct.
Lane complied because he believed his family would die if he didn’t. This wasn’t some technology-enabled catfish scam. This was a man controlling another man’s life with nothing but words and fear.
The FBI Closes In
Perardi’s breaking point came in March 2023 when he discovered the Civil War flag Youngblood had given him as collateral, supposedly worth millions, had actually been purchased at auction for $13,500. He contacted criminal defense lawyer Steve Toland, who immediately saw what was happening. “A very dangerous person is conning you, and we need to jump on this quickly,” Toland told him.
Special Agents Lindsey Wilkinson and Justin Noble listened to Perardi’s story with growing disbelief. Cartels, antiques, clocks, a car dealership, an ex-wife supposedly hiring hitmen. It sounded absurd until they ran Youngblood’s name through federal databases.
He’d done this before. A California dentist had accused him of stealing more than $5 million between 2010 and 2017 using the same playbook. That case had been referred to the FBI’s L.A. office in 2019 but never resulted in charges. Youngblood had simply moved to Texas and started over.
The Austin FBI set up an undercover sting. On May 1, 2023, at a Carrabba’s restaurant, Perardi introduced Youngblood to “Joe,” supposedly a potential investor but actually an undercover officer wearing a wire. Youngblood never vetted him. He just launched into his usual pitch about Rachel Herrera, the cartel debt, the life insurance payout.
“It does not matter if he knew about it,” Youngblood told Joe. “Shit flows downhill, and you’re tied to it.”
The recording captured nearly everything. Around 50 subpoenas followed, issued to banks, casinos, airlines, military offices. Every claim Youngblood made fell apart under scrutiny. No Delta Force service. No Purple Heart. No degrees. No government work.
When agents searched Youngblood’s house expecting valuable antiques, appraisers delivered a blunt verdict: “It’s all fake.”
Where the Money Went
For more than 200 days throughout 2022 and 2023, Kota Youngblood sat at video poker machines in Las Vegas casinos, feeding in hundred-dollar bills. He usually arrived just after dawn when the floor was empty. His fingers, covered by black gloves, moved with mechanical precision. Feed in cash, tap the screen, pause, repeat.
Casino employees found him odd because he didn’t fit the high-roller stereotype. He never went to clubs, never ordered bottle service, never sought companionship. When he hit his biggest win, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he insisted on taking it in cash instead of a wire transfer.
Youngblood later claimed he was a professional poker player backed by investors. “It’s not my money being gambled. I work for somebody, too.” But FBI agents who reconstructed his gambling records saw something different. He was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. And almost all of it came from friends who’d acted in moments of panic and misplaced trust.
The cruelty wasn’t just psychological. Youngblood was literally gambling away their life savings while telling them their children would be murdered if they didn’t send more.
The Trial That Explained Nothing
In April 2024, Youngblood went to trial on four counts of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. He never accepted responsibility. Instead, he remade himself for the jury.
He said he’d been “born Dennis J. Schuler Jr.” but legally reborn as Saint Jovite Kota Jadenne Youngblood, a Roman Catholic name. He claimed he hadn’t spoken to his father in 37 years. He downplayed the Special Forces persona, insisting “I never said I was an agent.”
He pushed back hard on the cartel storyline. “To paint me in the light with the cartel is a joke.” He suggested Perardi had only reported him to hide money from his ex-wife during their divorce. He claimed he’d never taken a penny from Gary Snider despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Everyone was lying except him. “It’s disgusting,” he told the jury. “And if I don’t stop it, who’s going to?”
The jury deliberated and found him guilty on all five counts. Judge Robert Pitman sentenced him to 40 years, calling the case “particularly disturbing,” a scheme that fed a “sick psychological need to see other people suffer.”
The Letters From Prison
In July 2025, Youngblood sent me a letter from FCI Victorville Medium II in California. Written in curly handwriting, he opened clearly: “I did not do this.” He claimed the FBI had held a grudge against him for 23 years, that he’d passed seven polygraphs, that prosecutors destroyed his chance to defend himself.
He asked me to find his wife and sons and tell them he loved them, “no matter what they did.”
In follow-up correspondence, Youngblood tried to pin everything on Perardi and Holloway. He claimed no checks were written directly to him, so how could he be guilty of wire fraud? The logic was delusional. The email to his lawyer ended ominously: “I’m either innocent on all five counts and get another shot at these people or rot in here and burn in hell. I did nothing wrong.”
I sent him a list of allegations through the prison email system. He promised answers but instead flooded my inbox with frantic messages about running out of time or money, as if guards were dragging him away from the tablet. Plenty of theater, no substance.
Eventually he removed me from his contact list. I mailed him several letters, the final one in January 2026, asking to hear his side. He never responded.
When I mentioned these exchanges to Perardi and the Sniders, they all shared the same bemused, knowing look. What did you expect?
The Damage That Remains
More than a year after Youngblood’s conviction, the damage is almost impossible to undo. The Sniders sold their home and now rent it back from the new owner. “It’s as if we’re living parallel lives,” Gary told me. “One in which everything is normal and as it was, and the other where we’re suffering behind the lie.”
Rachel Herrera, Perardi’s ex-wife who became collateral damage in Youngblood’s scheme, describes the period as one of profound hardship. “These narratives caused enormous harm to me and my family. My life, my family, my work, and my ability to parent safely were disrupted for years by allegations that were not true.”
For Perardi, there are still credit card debts and personal loans to repay. Money that will likely never return. The snide looks from people who know what happened. “I’ve recently had to take a job at a bar,” he told me, embarrassed.
Still, Perardi tries to measure his life differently now. His children come first, not the ideal of a successful businessman he spent years chasing. He seemed in search of forgiveness, not for the man who conned him, but for the version of himself who fell for it all.
“As for Youngblood,” he said, “I pray I can find mercy for him one day.”
Americans lost more than $10 billion to fraud in 2023, but most of those scams happen at a distance, through screens and phone calls from strangers with thick accents. Youngblood’s scheme was different because of its intimacy. He looked people in the eye while he destroyed them, and somehow that made it worse, the realization that evil doesn’t always announce itself with a mask and a weapon but sometimes shows up at your kid’s hockey practice asking how your week has been.
