The British de Havilland DH-112 Venom is one of the most iconic combat jets of the Cold War, with a distinctive two-pronged tail design that stretched out far behind the main body of the aircraft and a striking red and black paint job. It also gained a reputation for handling issues at high speeds. And yet, that was the aircraft 50-year-old Marty Tibbitts flew one summer afternoon at a Wisconsin air show in July 2018.Tibbitts, a billionaire who made his money launching call center businesses, regularly flew, and bought, historical aircraft like the Venom. He ran the World Heritage Air Museum in his home state of Michigan, which housed his collection of around a dozen planes.Sat in the Venom\u2019s cockpit, Tibbitts maneuvered the plane along the runway behind another aircraft. The first plane took off. About eight seconds later, two seconds sooner than he was supposed to, Tibbitts pulled the Venom\u2019s stick back and brought his craft into the air.Immediately something was wrong. People on the ground saw the Venom\u2019s wings rock back and forth shortly after its sluggish takeoff, a sign that it might be caught in the wake of the first plane. One video showed the Venom started to make a shallow left turn, and the plane\u2019s engine sound decreased and then rapidly increased. Black smoke billowed. The plane stalled. As the aircraft barely reached 200 feet, it started to descend with its nose still pointed upwards.\u00a0\ud83d\udca1Do you know anything else about Marty Tibbitts or Ylli Didani? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.Tibbitts crashed into a nearby barn with another two people inside. Flames engulfed the plane and set the barn and other nearby buildings on fire too.\u201cWe got a plane down!\u201d a man yelled in a 911 call. \u201cBuilding\u2019s on fire!\u201d Tibbitts died in the crash.A day later Tibbitts\u2019 brother, JC, gave a statement to local media: \u201cOur family is devastated by the loss of Marty. To say he was passionate about all things in his life\u2014family, business and aviation would be to immensely understate the case. He died pursuing one of his passions,\u201d it read. \u201cBeyond his family, friends and business associates, many will miss this unique and special person.\u201dAs news of Tibbitts\u2019 death spread, his wife received a phone call from one of those business associates. He was crying on the other end of the line. \u201cIt can\u2019t be true, it can\u2019t be true,\u201d the man said.A screenshot of a U.S. court record including photos of Didani.The man in tears on the phone was Ylli Didani, a now convicted cocaine trafficker who orchestrated massive shipments of drugs into the UK and multiple European ports. Tibbitts, it turned out, had a secret life. Without the knowledge of his family, Tibbitts worked closely with Didani to become an aspiring international drug lord. The pair commissioned the construction of an elaborate underwater drone that would be stuffed with cocaine and latch onto ships with magnets. Tibbitts was the money and brains behind the operation, funding the submarine\u2019s design and development. In messages with Didani, he referred to himself as Tony Stark, the alter ego of the billionaire inventor and superhero Ironman. According to investigators, Didani\u2019s cocaine trafficking business was worth tens of millions of dollars. Didani had now lost his business partner and friend.Extensive interviews with Didani, including over the email system of the prison he is currently incarcerated in, and thousands of pages of court transcripts reviewed by 404 Media reveal the story of a billionaire who, even with his massive fortune, wanted more and more. Tibbitts wanted to pillage Egyptian tombs for artefacts, and become an ambassador to Albania. He allegedly invested in a company making flying cars, tried to source Black Hawk helicopters to sell to other countries, and arranged a massive load of cash to be flown on his private jet to buy bulk cocaine. Tibbitts, who was at one point a primary target during the investigation into the cocaine group\u2019s operations, left a gaping question with his death: why did he do it? Why did the man who had everything lead a secret double life as an international drug kingpin?\u201cIt was perplexing,\u201d Detective Brandon Leach, from the Farmington Hills Police Department, who was part of a narcotics task force and one of the agents who investigated the group, later said in court.POWERHOUSETibbitts made his money in perhaps the most boring industry possible: providing back office support and a 24\/7 live answering service for small businesses at the start of the millennium. An executive bio included in legal filings tried to make it sound more exciting by saying Tibbitts had years of experience \u201cmanaging high-technology businesses and providing dynamic direction and oversight to start up companies and emerging technologies.\u201d Tibbitts\u2019 companies, Back Office Support Systems and and Clementine Live Answering Service, ultimately made him a very rich man. The Stanford graduate was invited to join the Young Presidents\u2019 Organization, a group for successful entrepreneurs. \u201cBusiness doesn\u2019t stop,\u201d a narrator says in one of Clementine\u2019s promotional videos.But in essentially every other aspect of his life, Marty was an adventurer. He invested in companies across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and ran his own security firm with a base in the United Arab Emirates. He got his pilot\u2019s license, developed a deep interest in historical aircraft, and opened the air museum.\u201cHe was just always learning something new,\u201d Tibbitts\u2019 wife, Belinda Tibbitts, later said in court. \u201cHe spoke like four languages and taught himself to play the banjo, and he flew all of these planes. He was just very brilliant, and he was also a good businessman.\u201d Belinda called Tibbitts \u201ca genius.\u201dIn around 2008, Belinda had a personal trainer at her local gym called Donald Larson. Twice a week, Larson trained Belinda, and she introduced the trainer to her husband. Eventually Larson trained Tibbitts as well, and the pair became friends.He saw Tibbitts was very precise on what he wanted people to know about\u2014his eclectic and expensive tastes\u2014and what he wanted to keep secret, such as suggestions he may have seen women other than his wife while she was out of state. He deliberately compartmentalized his life. \u201cHe hid things that he didn\u2019t want anyone to know about,\u201d Larson later said in court.Larson had a checkered past, having served 18 years for cocaine possession. He also knew Didani, the drug trafficker, who used the same gym. The trio then started hanging out, and soon Didani and Tibbitts became friends, with Didani even staying over at his home. Belinda didn\u2019t like that, she later said in court. One reason was that sometimes Tibbitts would let Didani borrow Belinda\u2019s Porsche Cayenne SUV, put his feet up on the dash, and return it stinking of cologne.A screenshots of a U.S. court record.Didani grew up with very little money. In private messages reviewed by investigators and read in court, Didani\u2019s father reminded him of times when the family didn\u2019t have enough money for bread. Like Tibbitts, he dabbled in all sorts of businesses. He owned a car wash in Detroit; may have owned a car dealership in Dubai; looked into the medical marijuana industry, and tried to run an ATM business. He travelled a lot, living in Europe and South America in between going to Chicago to see his sick mother. Videos appeared to show him building shelter and giving food to the needy overseas. He liked to party and wore a rainbow-faced gold Rolex.Didani was not particularly careful with hiding the fact that he was also a drug trafficker. He later boasted to friends in text messages about moving drugs from South America, and sent his family related news articles when shipments were seized by the authorities. He was also sloppy with his security. Didani used encrypted phones to conduct his business, sometimes juggling four cellphones at once. But he often took photos of those messages with his normal iPhone, which uploaded backups of those images to iCloud making them accessible to the authorities.In a way, Tibbitts and Didani were kindred spirits; two men constantly looking for the next thing to invest or expand into. There may have been an ulterior motive to Didani becoming such good friends with Tibbitts, however. Didani was looking for someone with money, Larson later said, and so that was the original reason for the introduction. Drug trafficking, it turns out, needs some upfront investment.The trio then travelled in various combinations, or sometimes Didani and Larson went on trips on the billionaire\u2019s behalf. Didani and Larson met in Albania in an unsuccessful attempt to get Albanian Air Force planes for Tibbitts. Then the pair went to Egypt, where a family allegedly had a house connected to an ancient tomb belonging to the grandson of a Pharaoh, and were selling golden artifacts from it. Tibbitts was interested in buying the artifacts, but his associates never went inside themselves.\u00a0Tibbitts and Didani travelled to Antwerp, Belgium, together, a port that has become the cocaine gateway to Europe. Didani later suggested in court that the pair repeatedly visited Washington D.C. They went to Didani\u2019s native Albania together because Tibbitts was looking into starting an over-the-counter medication distribution company. The pair explored somehow making Tibbitts an ambassador in Albania; Tibbitts\u2019 wife later testified in court that he sent her a video of himself running on a beach with the president of Albania.\u201cMarty had his hands everywhere,\u201d Detective Leach later said in court. He described Tibbitts\u2019 various escapades as the billionaire \u201cattempting to spiderweb out.\u201dMany of these did not pan out. But Tibbitts continued to funnel money to Didani. According to Larson, that amounted to millions of dollars. He said the drug trafficker \u201cconned\u201d the billionaire.PROJECT RAMORA\u201cEverything begins with an idea,\u201d the website for Peregrine 360, a small engineering design firm in Montreal, Canada, read. \u201cSome of the greatest inventions we see today were once just a few lines on paper.\u201dThe company offered to take customer\u2019s concepts and turn them into real designs. Peregrine 360 would not only make a prototype of a customer\u2019s device, but also connect them with factories to mass produce it, according to the company\u2019s website. Usually they produced things like 3D-printed models of T-Rexes. In around 2016, a man called Dale Johnson asked the company over email to make something a little different: a long hollowed out underwater drone that had enough room to store items inside.\u00a0Peregrine 360 had no problem with that, and got to work. A company representative sent Johnson an invoice.Johnson was in fact Tibbitts, according to court records. Investigators figured that out because Tibbitts copied and pasted the exact text of Johnson\u2019s email to Didani and directed him to pay the company. Tibbitts told Didani he would make the drone for him, Didani later told me.\u00a0In one of his notebooks, Tibbitts sketched out his and Didani\u2019s idea. It showed a rough drawing of the bottom of a boat. The idea was to create what investigators would later call a \u201cparasitic\u201d underwater drone. The device would have enough room to store a large amount of cocaine, and clamp onto a ship with magnets. Once near its destination, the torpedo-shaped drone would release from the ship, and co-conspirators would come and retrieve the its contents.A photo of the drone from U.S. court records.Around the sketch of the boat were a list of questions that Tibbitts\u2019 addressed to himself: \u201cInspect ship first to look for right attach spot?\u201d; \u201cSend one in case this one fails, should I put it in the wake?\u201d, and \u201cShould I have two rows of magnets or one?\u201d Another part noted to put spikes on the device so \u201cno birds.\u201dThe notebook said the drone should be between 20 and 25 feet long with a one ton capacity. Tibbitts contemplated whether a drone that big would really be as stealthy as needed for smuggling cocaine without getting caught.\u201cYou have any worry about size of drone and getting it into water quietly?\u201d Tibbitts wrote in a 2018 message to Didani, using the moniker Toni Stark. \u201cFor 1T it is almost 20 feet long.\u201d\u201cNo brother,\u201d came the reply.The submarine drone was \u201cvery ahead of its time,\u201d Didani later told me.With her husband\u2019s constant jet setting, Belinda Tibbitts sometimes played assistant, booking hotels and flights for Marty. Even with that involvement, Belinda did not know anything about the drone, or her husband\u2019s moves into drug trafficking, at the time. But she later recalled in court coming across one of his belongings mentioning the \u201cRemora Project.\u201d A remora is a type of fish that uses suction to stick onto the body of larger animals.\u00a0TAKE THE JETIn encrypted messages, Didani\u2019s associates showed they were excited about the drone. Didani said they planned to build a few of the contraptions, and later went on to discuss potentially using them off the coast of Barcelona. Messages stored in Didani\u2019s iCloud account showed he was dealing directly with Colombian traffickers, investigators said.Marty had a red line, though: he didn\u2019t want anything to do with cocaine in the United States. Any business would need to be overseas.While the pair\u2019s high-tech plan came into focus, they faced a very old school problem: how to move cash around. Tibbitts had access to a fantastic amount of wealth, including in his personal bank accounts. But getting that money to Didani, and in a relatively secure way, had its challenges.\u00a0Part of the solution often came down to Larson, the personal trainer, who acted as a middleman between Tibbitts and Didani to shift money around. In December 2017, the group needed to move $450,000 from Michigan to Washington D.C., where Didani was staying. By investigators\u2019 description, it involved Tibbitts writing out multiple checks to Larson, who then cashed them out, and flew the money down in secret in the middle of the night on Tibbitt\u2019s private jet in a duffel bag. The purpose of the cash was to buy cocaine in bulk, prosecutors said.It started with Tibbitts calling Larson and telling him to pick up a bunch of checks to cash. Larson went to Tibbitts\u2019 home, let himself in with the code, went up to the second floor office, and grabbed the signed checks from the desk. Tibbitts had left them blank for Larson to fill out.Tibbitts was travelling with his wife in China at the time. He appeared to have trouble with his bank clearing such a huge series of withdrawals. Belinda later recalled hearing Tibbitts on the phone on the bank, clearly annoyed, telling the clerk to do just what he said.Eventually Larson exchanged the personal checks for cashier checks, cashed them out, and boarded Tibbitts\u2019 private jet, which Tibbitts had arranged with a pilot. In the air, Larson texted Didani on the ground. Didani warned his co-conspirator to be careful because D.C. was crawling with police.\u201cGot to be careful, there\u2019s a lot of cops around here at night, we got to be discreet,\u201d Didani wrote.\u00a0Upon landing, Didani was waiting at the airport to take the money. It was dark, and Didani told Larson to just leave the duffel bag on the ground.\u00a0After the money was delivered to Didani in D.C., he laid it out on a bed and took photos. He drove the cash to New York, gave it to a Chinese money launderer in Flushing, and the money disappeared. Investigators later found Didani\u2019s phone connected to the wifi of the Trump Tower hotel while he was in New York.In all, Tibbitts wrote around a million dollars worth of checks to Larson, prosecutors later said.A screenshots of a U.S. court record.In court, Larson said he understood the $450,000 was for the purchase of cocaine. Didani later told me that money had nothing to do with drugs; instead it was for politicians in Washington, Europe, and Albania, he said.\u00a0Regardless, by this point investigators had taken notice of Didani. He originally came to the attention of the authorities in part because he kept taking short trips overseas with a man already on Border Patrol\u2019s radar. That association and the suspicious flights put Didani in the crosshairs too. Authorities also received intelligence that Didani was trafficking cocaine in Europe, with the money coming from Detroit.After seizing Didani\u2019s phone at an airport in the U.S., law enforcement steadily sent Apple search warrants to access the trafficker\u2019s iCloud backups. From that, the investigators realized Tibbitts played a much deeper role in the broader drug trafficking conspiracy. There were photos of the two together. Didani even had copies of Tibbitts\u2019 Michigan drivers license and passport. One of the investigators later said he couldn\u2019t wrap his head around why Tibbitts would get involved in something like this.In November 2017, authorities seized 140 kilograms of cocaine in the Netherlands. In text messages, Tibbitts and Didani reacted to the seizure.\u201cHmm. Let\u2019s talk when u get back,\u201d Tibbitts replied. He signed off the message as \u201cStark.\u201d\u201cWe just F\u2019d up,\u201d Didani wrote back.\u201cWe will fix, brother,\u201d Tibbitts wrote.\u201cNot like this, brother, we need to clear heads.\u201d\u201cYes, definitely. Ok, brother, talk to you later.\u201dFrom the text messages, Tibbitts appeared much more relaxed than his drug trafficking co-conspirator.Didani sent Tibbitts a media report about the seizure, in which police arrested six Albanians and a Polish man.Those drug trafficking ambitions came to a screeching halt the following year when Tibbitts died flying his Venom. With Tibbitts\u2019 death, so too died the idea of the torpedo drone. Investigators said the group never succeeded in building a working prototype. The money was gone. Peregrine 360 stopped work on the project and dismantled it for parts.\u201cIt was not just an idea. It was an idea that took multiple steps to get to the beginning of a prototype, the design, financing, purchasing parts for the prototype and then conceptualizing the prototype,\u201d detective Leach said in court. Tibbitts just died before it could be launched.In April 2019 investigators executed search warrants at Belinda\u2019s homes in California and Michigan. On Mr. Tibbitts\u2019 Surface Pro, they found an article about money laundering.Although he was never charged because of his death, Leach said in court \u201cMr. Tibbitts was a financier and conspirator that helped in the design of the parasitic device to help transport cocaine.\u201dIt appears Tibbitts\u2019 moves into the drug trafficking world were not for money. Belinda said in court that the couple were doing fine financially at the time of his death. She acknowledged she was not aware of a number of sizable transactions out of her husband\u2019s account, though. Representatives of Belinda did not respond to a request for comment.\u201cThat\u2019s the only thing, reason, I can think that he got involved with Lou [Didani] is\u2014you know, like, rich people, they want to climb mountains when they have too much money in the freezing cold and possibly die. I want to drink a Pi\u00f1a Colada on a beach; I don\u2019t want to get stung by a manta ray,\u201d Larson said in court. Tibbitts wanted to \u201clive on the edge.\u201dTibbitts \u201clove adrenaline,\u201d Didani told me. \u201cVery smart and ambitio[us].\u201d\u201cThat\u2019s the way Marty was. That\u2019s why he flew those planes,\u201d Larson added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"