Seed Money
during his time at the Agency other than Johnny Spann. Conveniently for Marshall, Spann had died in Afghanistan in November 2001. Cofer Black, Marshall’s supposed boss at the Agency, denied knowing him.
Marshall had indeed been in Iraq— not as a CIA agent but as a hired gun for Blackwater. Morgan Lerette, a Blackwater veteran, was familiar with two of the photos Marshall had shown Goguen from his alleged days with the CIA. The one from the village in northern Iraq had been taken in 2004, when he and Lerette were working at Blackwater, not the year before, when Marshall was allegedly conducting sabotage operations for the CIA. The photo of Marshall on the C-130 in Afghanistan was not taken in 2001 but in 2004.
Lerette had been fooled by Marshall as well. When they first met, on a shooting range at a Blackwater training facility in North Carolina, Marshall introduced himself as a former Force Recon Marine. Lerette had no reason to doubt him. “Heck, I even introduced him to a buddy who was a Force Recon Marine, and it didn’t throw off any red flags,” Lerette said. “I thought the guy was legit.”
In the fall of 2018, court records would show, Marshall started searching online for terms like “Stolen Valor Act Punishment,” “Crime of Stolen Valor,” and “Stolen Valor Act 2017.” During that time, he messaged Mary Beth Long asking if she could help dig up dirt on Goguen. He added that he had a lawyer who was a “rockstar” but “bound by keeping within certain lines.” They may need to “blur those lines a bit to get some shit done quickly and effectively,” Marshall wrote. One of the strategies Marshall seemed to have in mind was to recruit a credulous journalist—that would later be me, apparently—who would faithfully repeat the claims from the civil lawsuit against Goguen. (The New York and the Daily Mail did publish stories about Goguen’s alleged crimes in the months that followed.)
In July 2020, federal authorities indicted Marshall on ten counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. The government alleged that his purported secret international missions were all phony. For an operation to assassinate isis leaders, for example, Marshall had told Goguen that he would need to hire 15 private contractors and that the CIA would supply helicopters and armed drones in support. Goguen wired Marshall $750,000. The FBI and prosecutors said there were no missions and Marshall never left the country. When he was supposed to be in Syria killing terrorists, he’d gone to Miami with his girlfriend and bought jewelry and other gifts for himself and friends.
Marshall’s account of his first night out with Goguen at Spearmint Rhino—when he’d spent a tiny portion of the $5,000 while virtuously shooing off strippers— also didn’t go down as he’d related it. “It’s official,” he’d written Goguen in a text message at 2:44 a.m. “Your seed money for entertainment is now gone. Get some rest or pussy, hopefully pussy.”
Goguen still seemed shocked by the scale of Marshall’s deceptions. “As an investor who has to make really good judgment decisions in finding entrepreneurs and companies and all that, the most embarrassing part is, Hey, you got duped, ” he said. But Goguen said Marshall had skillfully reeled him in with his war stories, beginning at Spearmint Rhino. “I admire heroism. I admire those kinds of people,” Goguen said. “That’s what I remember that night, these amazing stories.”
MARSHALL’S TRIAL IN the fraud case was set to begin in November 2021. He had vowed to fight it out in court because he was wholly innocent of the charges, but days before the trial began, he cut a plea deal with prosecutors. In March, Judge Donald Molloy of the U.S. District Court in Missoula sentenced him to six years in a federal prison and ordered him to pay $3.2 million in restitution. Two months later, Molloy dismissed Marshall’s civil lawsuit with prejudice, saying its “torrent of accusatory factual allegations” lacked merit and the complaint that contained them was as easy to read as “completing a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of a polar bear in a snowstorm.”
Marshall and I began corresponding by email after he was sent to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. Each time he wrote, he insisted on his innocence. His lawyers were to blame for mishandling his case, he said. Goguen and the prosecutors had railroaded him.
After Marshall was sentenced, I caught up with Maguire, who was bitter and pissed off. He realized the scope of Marshall’s lies only at the sentencing hearing when he confirmed, with prodding by the judge, that he was guilty as charged of defrauding Goguen with the secret-mission stories. “I’m too old to be grifted,” Maguire said. He was sure he had met Marshall in post-invasion Iraq, but he had about 700 people under his command, and it was difficult to tell CIA and private contractors apart. He described himself and other Amyntor employees as “collateral damage” of Marshall’s con. “Two shitbags who got in a cock fight and one was better funded than the other,” was his verdict on the legal battle between his former friend and Goguen.
The portrait of Goguen that emerged from the whole mess was of a man who, though his life seemed to be dominated— and nearly ruined—by his affairs, wasn’t the supervillain Marshall made him out to be. But he was also no Bruce Wayne. Even as he mostly stuck to the truth in our interviews, he never strayed from the narrative that he was a perfectly conventional father figure, a billionaire Ward Cleaver. Sure, he was a slightly tarnished, four-times-married Ward Cleaver, but, in his telling, he was an ordinary family man nonetheless.
By some measures, Goguen has emerged mostly unscathed from the Marshall affair. His venture-capital firm is doing well, and last year he even did a deal with his old partners at Sequoia. In May, his wife gave birth to a baby. But the court cases and his local indiscretions have left their mark in Whitefish.
During a final trip to the town last summer, I dropped by a handful of bars and struck up conversations with customers and employees. When I told one man drinking a beer I’d heard good and bad things about Goguen, he laughed and asked, “What good have you heard about him?” No one would speak on the record, but their observations largely centered on his activities with women.
I thought of a text message from Goguen I saw, which a lawyer involved in the Goguen-Baptiste legal dispute provided me. In May 2014, he wrote to Marshall, “This is that nutty girl I just paid a zillion dollars to go away, & who I fucked one last goodbye time.” He included a picture of Baptiste in a bikini.
In every interaction, Goguen’s immense wealth seemed to have a gravity all of its own, a by-product of a society in which the tiny few control an obscene amount of money and more and more people struggle to get by. In this setting, when people meet a billionaire, many see only an opportunity to cash in. The billionaire, in turn, starts to believe that enough money can make any problem disappear. And who’s to say, in the end, that either side is entirely wrong? ■