Bick: ‘Unguided ambition’ as teenage promoter led him to mess up ‘big time’
Roger Brooks has been retired from the Danbury Police Department for about four years, but can still vividly recall a young man named Ian Bick, whom he investigated and helped prosecute for bilking investors out of nearly half a million dollars.
Brooks said he encountered the then-19-year old once after police received numerous complaints. While sifting through his old case files, he noted about 37 people came forward with complaints about Bick, leading him to bring the young man in for questioning.
Brooks remembers him maintaining an “aloof ” demeanor as his lawyer spoke for him.
“He seemed to think he was a pretty good businessman,” Brooks said, but he was “lawyered up,” and his attorney did not allow him even a syllable during the interview.
Yet, years later, after being sentenced to a year in prison and three years probation, Bick is prominently telling his tale to HBO. The media company picked up his story and is featuring it in a new HBO Max series called “Generation Hustle,” which begins airing April 22.
The 10-episode series delves into stories of youngsters who took their hustles a little too far, often culminating in reluctant meetings with police or federal investigators.
According to Bick, HBO did not buy the rights to his story. He still possesses those rights and “volunteered to do the documentary at no charge for exposure for the sale of the rights,” which he plans on
shopping around for the highest bidder, with the intention of using the money from any sale to pay off the rest of his court-ordered restitution.
In 2013, Bick started several companies — one called W&B Wholesale and another, Planet Youth entertainment — using money from investors to pave his way. Bick took about $480,635 from these people and lost it, often using it to pay for his own lavish lifestyle, including trips, shopping, personal watercraft and more, records show.
Bick told Hearst Connecticut Media his “unguided ambition” and success as a teenager promoting parties made him “really cocky and overconfident,” eventually leading him to screw up “big time.”
“I wanted it to work so bad that I strayed away and started doing things the wrong way or not asking for help, which led to eventual fraudulent behavior,” he said, but “to say I’m a run-of-the-mill con artist, I wouldn’t think that’d be an accurate assessment.”
“Did I intend to set up a Ponzi scheme and defraud people? No. Did it turn out to be that way? Yes,” he later added.
Danbury’s local investigation of Bick goes federal
As complaints against Bick continued funneling in, Brooks said it appeared to be “either a pyramid or Ponzi scheme,” but since Danbury didn’t have a Ponzi statute, he had to approach them all as larceny cases.
“You’ve got to remember one thing in larceny cases, any larceny can be resolved civilly, they don’t have to be charged … because the court’s rationale is that the remedy for larceny is restitution,” Brooks said.
“That would have been the same situation with Bick, but when I looked at the dollar amounts, that wasn’t going to happen. There was no way he was going to come up with all that money,” he added.
With 37 victims and hundreds of thousands of lost dollars on his hands, Brooks decided it’d be best to consult a state attorney, who urged him to escalate it to a U.S. Attorney.
The case, along with a couple of boxes brimming with Brooks’ files, landed on Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael McGarry’s desk. The two worked together to prosecute the case and amid their investigation, arrested and flipped Bick’s not-sosilent partner, John Wrobel.
The U.S. Attorney’s office struck a plea bargain with Wrobel, according to Brooks, letting him plead guilty to a misdemeanor in Danbury for lying to bank officials in exchange for his cooperation and testimony.
John Wrobel did not return Hearst Connecticut Media’s request for comment.
Brooks said Wrobel “thought he was not doing anything wrong,” when he got involved in Bick’s affairs. Court records show Wrobel did testify against Bick and received a suspended sentence for lying to banking officials as part of his deal.
Bick’s not-so-silent partner sings like a canary in court testimony
Bick said he had met Wrobel in high school when Wrobel was trying to get into a house party of his. The two got to talking and discovered they had been “hooking up with the same girl,” an unforeseen connection that made them “best friends instantly,” he said.
“We did everything together, we were inseparable that whole year of 2013,” he added, explaining they later became “50/50 partners” in an electronics business.
But today, the men are distant acquaintances. Bick said he still speaks to Wrobel from time to time but that he harbored “a lot of resentment” toward him.
“Our agreement was, when the whole investigation started, I knew he wanted to go to college and everything, so I said listen, man, I’ll take the fall, the blame, but you got to stay in my corner,” he said. “He held his end of the bargain all the way up until like a week before the trial and then he flipped.”
Under oath, Wrobel testified that he did indeed make money from his and Bick’s business, W&B Wholesale, by buying and reselling electronics with investors’ money. Wrobel testified Bick would tell investors the plans were to buy wholesale electronics, resell them online “and a percent of the profits from the sales were going to go back to them,” while he spoke to them about “logistics.”
However, when the two men discovered some of their inventory was counterfeit, the venture stalled, coming to a halt, the testimony remarked.
They continued taking money from their “investors,” — employees at the Matrix Corporate Center where Bick worked, fellow Danbury High School classmates, friends and their parents — after their accounts were shut down, according to the testimony.
The money was spent on trips and dinners as well as used to pay back other stakeholders, the testimony indicated.
In one example, a friend’s father who entered into a loan agreement with Bick and Wrobel was sent fake spreadsheets of falsified sales and told his money was being used to purchase palettes of iPhones even after the business had stopped, according to emails introduced during the testimony.
Bick admits he wouldn’t take it all back
Bick said had he known what a Ponzi scheme was at the time, he’d never have done it. In looking at his actions, at who he is today, he’d be sure not to make the same mistakes but still wouldn’t take it all back.
“I look at who I am today... and I wouldn’t take that back. I went through so much, I suffered a lot and I think I became a much better person,” he said.
“I’m sorry that people lost money, but they’re going to get it back eventually. I know it’s not the answer everyone wants to hear, but it’s a work in progress,” he added.