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When he arrived in London in late January 2022, Kyle Roche was riding high. Just 34, he had established himself as one of the biggest players in the burgeoning field of cryptocurrency litigation. He boasted a law firm bearing his name, lawsuits filed against more than a dozen crypto companies and a huge verdict against the man who claimed to have invented bitcoin . Now a new opportunity beckoned. Two businessmen had flown Roche over from Miami to discuss investing in a business venture he was forming. A waiting car whisked him from Heathrow Airport to meet the men in a plush town house in Mayfair. Kyle Roche’s world came crashing down last year. Credit: Gili Benita/The New York Times. That evening, Roche went to dinner with one of the men, who identified himself as Mauricio Andres Villavicencio de Aguilar. Villavicencio, who said he was from Argentina, had picked one of London’s fanciest restaurants, Jean-Georges in the Connaught hotel. When he woke up the next morning, Roche said, he felt groggy. He couldn’t remember much aside from being pretty sure he had spotted Villavicencio’s business partner, a Norwegian named Christen Ager-Hanssen, lurking at a nearby table. The brain fog was odd because he didn’t think he’d had all that much to drink. As he flew back to Miami a few days later, Roche couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. Months passed. Then, one day in the middle of last year, Roche’s world detonated. A website called Crypto Leaks posted two dozen videos of him that had been secretly recorded during his meetings with Villavicencio and Ager-Hanssen. Loading The videos portrayed Roche and his law firm, Roche Freedman, as being in the pocket of one of their crypto clients. In one clip, Roche revealed that the client, a company called Ava Labs, had granted him tens of millions of dollars’ worth of its digital tokens, making him beholden to the company and its founder, whom he likened to a “brother.” In other clips, Roche made it sound like his sole concern, even when representing other clients, was to promote Ava Labs’ interests. He bragged that he had managed to distract regulators from looking into Ava Labs and suggested that his lawsuits against other crypto companies were designed to harm Ava Labs’ competitors. In the videos filmed at Jean-Georges, Roche looked intoxicated, waving his hands, cursing and referring to jurors as “idiots.”
Read more: watoday
