By James Vlahos, GQ
A million dollars richer after a buyout of his advertising company, Chris Smith e-mailed his family in June 2010 with an audacious plan to celebrate his windfall. He and a former Playboy Playmate named Tiffany, were taking off to sail the world. Smith, a ringer for the actor Chris Pine, had been a professional wakeboarder before launching his business career. Now, at the age of 30, he was cashing out. He and the Playmate had met in Las Vegas, the e-mail explained. They chartered a 45-foot yacht, complete with a captain and a cook, and were headed for South America.
The news came as something of a surprise but not as a total shock to people who knew Smith, who for years had been talking about something he called "the Moo." To Smith, people too often behaved like cows. They plodded through life, dumbly believing the government's lies, swallowing Big Pharma's poisons, and ignoring the obvious conspiracies all around them. People worked too much and played too little. Corporations bled you for profit and governments strangled liberty. The U.S. was careening toward economic collapse.
But you didn't have to be a cow. Smith figured that a person could outwit the pernicious forces of modern life. He affixed Post-It notes over his computer's webcam so that the CIA couldn't spy on him. He invested in gold. Most of all, he hatched plans to escape—preferably with friends in tow. They would unplug from the Matrix and live more meaningful, adventurous lives. Maybe they could set up shop in Tahiti and spend days surfing. Or buy a farm in Costa Rica.
Now Smith was making good on all that dreaming. After that first message, which arrived in June 2010, other missives from abroad began tumbling in. Typically short and riddled with typos, the e-mails glamorized Smith's new vagabond life. He sent his brother, Paul, a picture of the Playmate and a quick note: "This is the girl I am with." On July 10, Smith e-mailed that he had visited the Galápagos, Peru, and Chile and announced that he planned to hit 25 more islands. "I love it down here, might never come back," he wrote in an August 4 e-mail. "HA. Just kidding."
A few weeks later, though, an e-mail sent to his parents, Steve and Debi, abruptly struck a darker tone. Smith wrote that he was thinking of doing "the unspeakable." A month later, the family's anxiety cranked up when they received a similarly alarming note. Smith wrote that he was feeling bad, taking drugs, and thinking again about killing himself.
Chris had never before mentioned suicidal thoughts, so the messages were hard to digest. But Paul knew the sort of pressure that his brother had been under before the trip, as he had been finalizing the buyout of his company. Smith feared being sued. And he worried that the IRS was going to pounce for back taxes. Paul had initially figured that his brother's trip meant he was beyond all that—that Chris, as he says, was able to "just throw all the stress in a bucket and say, 'I'm done with it. I'm out.' "
But now the suicide threats made clear that Smith's Playmate vacation wasn't turning out to be the cure he'd hoped for. And maybe his problems were bigger than anyone knew. "It felt like he was going off the deep end," Paul says. "Something was very wrong."
Business problems or not, fleeing for some tropical Eden had long been Smith's plan. "He was always trying to figure out ways to make enough money to leave the United States," says one of his best friends, Grady Jackson.
Jackson and Smith had grown up together near Santa Cruz, California, where Smith had gotten good enough at wakeboarding to compete professionally. But water felt like concrete when you crashed on it at 60 miles per hour, and after Smith blew out his Achilles tendon, he decided to retire. The goal was clear for Smith, but a financial game plan was elusive. By 2004, he was crashing on Jackson's couch, driving a Honda CRX and pining for a Ferrari. He liked to surf and party, but he was determined to not become just another beach burnout. Instead, he worked long days and late nights pursuing his dream: to become a technology entrepreneur.
When a rich friend told him that he owned a warehouse full of unwanted junk, Smith came up with the idea to start selling what he could at a flea market. While hardly the seeds of the next Google, the business inspired Smith to launch a site called Localprofit.com, a search engine for wholesale shoppers that, at its peak in 2006, netted him $72,000 in a single month. Around the same time, Smith also created a social network for surfers called Swellster. The site never got much traction, but pursuing tech riches spurred Smith to move to southern California and to start making connections in advertising and marketing. Finally, in 2008, Smith met a man named Edward Shin, who would become his business partner and the missing key to the fortune Smith sought.
Shin was the Alex P. Keaton to Smith's Spicoli. Growing up in conservative Orange County, Shin had played the violin in high school, joined the Key Club, and been on the golf team. Unlike Smith, who struggled through high school and never went to college, Shin graduated from the University of California, San Diego, in 2001 and was the president of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. The brooding, handsome Smith cycled through girlfriends, while Shin was a married father of three and an active member of a Christian megachurch. Smith traveled light and wore white undershirts as his uniform; Shin strutted about in suits or designer jeans. For all the apparent differences, the two were alike in at least one profound way. As Shin would later recount: "We were very ambitious and wanted to make a lot of money."
The business they launched, in April 2009, was called 800Xchange. It was an advertising and technology firm, though at the opposite end of the glamour spectrum from Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley. The company competed in a netherworld of marketing known as "lead generation" and created ads that shilled for generic services with pitches like: Refinance your mortgage! Lower your credit card debt! Beat the IRS!
People who heard or saw the ads—on TV, online, or especially on AM radio—would call an 800 number and leave their names. The 800Xchange then sold those leads to mortgage companies, debt consolidators, or whoever else paid Shin and Smith to gin up potential customers. Mad Men it wasn't. But the 800Xchange minted money. "The first five months that we were in business, we made like one million in revenue, and 80 percent of it was profit," Shin would later boast. "By the second year we were in business, it was like two or three million, and then the third year we did like five to eight million."
Shin was succeeding as a startup entrepreneur, but the truth was that he was not nearly as G-rated as he outwardly seemed. For starters, he was embroiled in a nasty embezzlement dispute involving a past employer, a lead-generation firm called LG Technologies.
Shin had met Joseph Gray, who was the CEO of LG Technologies, through The Nest, a church fellowship group. Their families became friends, and Gray says that he even helped Shin, who was struggling financially, to buy a house. Gray also gave Shin a job, making him vice president, and later president, of LG Technologies. Shin responded to Gray's helping hand by kicking him in the nuts. He doctored account information so that payments owed to LG went directly into his personal checking account. "I failed to see that Shin was a wolf in sheep's clothing," Gray says now.
Shin allegedly even fleeced a World Series of Poker winner. The poker player was supposedly so enraged that he considered hiring a contract killer to take out Shin.
Gray was hardly the only business partner who claimed to have been hosed by Shin. In 2007, a publishing company that had printed a sports-memorabilia magazine for Shin won a $117,000 court judgment against him for unpaid bills. Shin allegedly even fleeced a World Series of Poker–winning card player for a debt that went well into the six figures. The poker player was supposedly so enraged that he considered hiring a contract killer to take out Shin.
In contrast with the family-man image that he cultivated in Orange County, Shin played the part of a high roller in Las Vegas, which he frequently visited. Facilitating Shin's good times was a man named Tom Ramey. Ramey says his talent is for arranging certain services that casinos "wouldn't or couldn't" directly provide for celebrities, sports-team owners, politicians, and other big spenders like Shin. He remembers Shin as a deep-pocketed gambling addict and says he once watched him lose $140,000 in an hour of blackjack. Court records from the LG embezzlement case show that Shin wrote at least $185,000 worth of checks to the Wynn Casino in 2008 alone. A gambler who bleeds that much cash is highly coveted, and Ramey says that casinos would use private jets to fly Shin to town, where he was a "full comp"—his meals, entertainment, and luxury accommodations all covered by the house.
Shin sometimes brought friends along to Vegas, and this was how Ramey met Chris Smith—and how Smith met Tiffany, the Playmate, according to Ramey. Shin would get Ramey to hire women to hang out with his entourage at nightclubs; the gig is known as "atmosphere modeling" or "arm candy" work. Some of those women, for additional money, might do more in private. "Ed would surround himself with beautiful women and make sure the women took care of Chris and his clients," Ramey says. Shin instructed Ramey to never tell his buddies that the women were being paid. "The illusion was that this guy was so cool that he would just show up and women would flock to the table and f**** everybody there."
What Smith knew of Shin's background as a dodgy business partner—or the extent of his profligate spending in Vegas—is tough to discern. What is clear is that by 2010, Smith wanted out and had arranged to sell his stake in the business to Shin for a million dollars. Eager to ditch the Moo, he wanted to finally be free.
Five months into Chris Smith's voyage, the tone of his messages perked up and the worrisome talk of suicide disappeared. It sounded like he was staging his own version of The Amazing Race. Having apparently forsaken his Playmate and the yacht, Smith wrote from India. "I'll be on the road for the next few weeks," he said, "heading to Turkey, Cyprus and making my way to Egypt and Morocco." On November 1, he followed up with a message saying that he planned to sail with a man he just met to Egypt, and then continue southward over land to the Serengeti.
Jackson, who received several of Smith's trip e-mails, says he felt "stoked" to hear that his friend was finally living out his dreams. Smith boasted of exploring the pyramids and visiting places like Rwanda. He even claimed to have found a "conflict diamond" in the Congo. "I went sand boarding it was epic," he wrote in a December 19 message to his brother, Paul. "...It's just dunes of soft sand. You can get up to 40 mph on it, wipe out and it's softer than powder snow."
In the same message, Chris updated Paul on his travel plans. "I'll make my way north, to Egypt, cross over to Spain and then head to the Rica [Costa Rica]. Meet me there in Feb so we can surf and talk about everything?"
Paul wrote back with a promise to join his brother; he was excited to "kick it for a while" in Costa Rica. Paul then got another message on December 26, in which Chris mentioned selling Krugerrands, a South African gold coin. "I'm headed back up through the Congo," Chris had written. "I found a dealer in Rwanda that will pay 30 percent markup on krug's."
Chris never e-mailed again.
Paul and Chris had a favorite crash pad in Costa Rica, and Paul contacted the property manager to check if his brother had made any arrangements for a February surf trip. Chris hadn't. In March 2011, Smith's parents reported him missing to the U.S. State Department. After reviewing passport records, a State Department administrator shared an astounding piece of information. "There is no confirmation he actually departed the United States," the administrator told the family. The matter should be investigated by the local police, the federal official said.
Paul had always tried to stay cool about his brother's strange trip, even when Chris mentioned suicide or dangerous places. He figured that if he started asking what-if questions, then fear would enter his heart. But when Chris stopped e-mailing, Paul's anxiety started to boil. "All of those questions were now like little beach balls underwater, trying to come up. Like, 'Okay, we've got to address this. We've got to really pursue all this, the possibilities.’ ”
The Smiths filed a missing-persons report with the police in Laguna Beach, California, where Chris had been living before he took off on his global odyssey. His father launched his own investigation as well. Steve traveled to Orange County in mid-March and met with Shin. He gave Steve a possible explanation for why authorities had no record of Chris's passport being used: Chris was traveling under an assumed name. Before departing, Shin said, Chris had obtained a fake passport with the help of a contact in Nevada, who in turn hooked Chris up with a fixer in southern California.
Shin said he had seen the fixer but didn't know his name. "I remember he was about 5'9" stocky/well-built and had dark hair," Shin wrote in a follow-up e-mail to Steve. Shin seemed to share the family's worries about Smith's silence, and he was sure that this fixer could give them answers. "It is urgent we speak to [him]," Shin wrote to Smith's father. But that wasn't going to be easy. "Here's what I've just discovered," Shin told Smith. "The guy we need to find has gone MIA and his phone is disconnected."
“We feel he must have met a corrupt gold-coin-exchange dealer who either robbed, killed, or kidnapped him.”
Steve turned Shin's info over to the police—the names of the guy in Nevada and Tiffany, the ex-Playmate, as well as the description of a well-built fixer. Chris's mom, meanwhile, sent pictures of her son to the State Department, hoping that facial-recognition scanners might have captured his image at a security checkpoint somewhere. She also shared the family's emerging theory: "We feel he must have met a corrupt gold-coin-exchange dealer who either robbed, killed, or kidnapped him."
The officer leading the investigation for the Laguna Beach Police Department was Louise Callus, and she followed up with the State Department herself. There were no new leads. Nothing from from facial-recognition scanners or from contacts at hospitals and police in Chile, Crete, Rwanda, or South Africa. Updating the Smiths via e-mail on May 12, Callus sounded perplexed. "The thing I really have a hard time understanding is Chris's decision to leave the country using a false passport," she wrote. "What was he running away from?"
The man in the best position to know what Smith might have been trying to escape was, of course, Edward Shin. And so, in June 2011, Laguna Beach police brought him in for questioning. "Since you were obviously the last person to spend time with Chris, I'm hoping you can give me the details as to how this all started," Sergeant Callus said as the interview began.
Shin, dressed in a dark suit and a monochromatic tie that matched his pale blue shirt, acknowledged the LG embezzlement case against him, for which he had been convicted and ordered to pay $805,000 in restitution and legal fees. Shin explained that the case might be related to Smith's decision to take off: Chris, who had been a consultant for LG, had also been named in the criminal complaint. The charges against him had ultimately been dropped, but Smith still felt threatened by the possibility of civil litigation, Shin said. "Honestly, I think he is on the other side of the world, and I think he doesn't want to be found."
Shin's theory squared with some of what Chris had written in his trip e-mails. In September 2010, he told his attorney that he had heard that one of the parties in the LG case might be trying to nail him for embezzlement, too. "I won't be back until I absolutely need to," Smith wrote. Detective Callus seemed to accept that Chris was purposely hiding out abroad. A couple of weeks after questioning Shin, she wrote to Steve Smith that "I do feel that Chris left the country of his own accord... I believe he did this because of the lawsuit he was finding himself named in."
Shin may have had a solid theory about what had happened to Chris, but he also had a terrible habit of skipping out on his debts, which meant that he, too, was the subject of people's inquiries.
In January 2011, Shin had packed up the 800Xchange offices and disappeared, allegedly stiffing the landlord on $40,000 in rent. The owner of the office park wasn't pleased with being screwed over and asked another tenant of his, a private investigator named Joe Dalu, to help him find the absconders who owned 800Xchange, Shin and Smith. Dalu and his partner, Chris Heuberger, who ran a firm called Premier Group International, thought it was awfully strange that Smith had been missing for so long.
Dalu didn't just work in the same office complex that Smith had; he literally walked past the old 800Xchange office every day, which was in suite 123, just a few doors down from his own office in 127. Dalu was talking to the property manager one day in July 2011 when an idea struck him. "Is it still vacant, that office that they occupied?"
"Yeah," the property manager replied, according to Dalu. "I offered the Laguna Police to look in there, and they declined."
The manager unlocked the office door and Dalu and Heuberger walked in, flicking the beams of their flashlights around the dim, carpeted space. Then the detectives saw the marks on a light switch and on the door jamb of the office that had belonged to Chris. They were small, dark stains, and they looked like blood.
The Laguna Beach Police and Orange County Sheriff's Department, tipped off by Dalu and Heuberger, searched the former 800Xchange office and confirmed that the smudges on the light switch and the door jamb were indeed blood. And that wasn't the only evidence of violence. Blood stains were detected on the walls of the break room and the hallways. They were on Chris's office door and spotted the carpets inside and outside his office. Drops even dotted the ceiling above his desk. Officers dabbed the blood and sent it off to a lab. When the results came back, the mystery of Chris Smith's fantastic voyage only deepened. The blood was Smith's.
Officers dabbed the blood and sent it off to a lab. When the results came back, the mystery of Chris Smith's fantastic voyage only deepened. The blood was Smith's.
Suddenly, the weeks leading up to his disappearance were cast in a new light. Back in May 2010, before any e-mails about sailing the world were sent, Smith had rented a pair of oceanfront rooms at a luxurious resort in Santa Cruz and invited his hometown buddies to stay, eat and drink, all on his dime. Smith had with him his beautiful, red-haired girlfriend, a professional dancer named Erika—and by the end of the trip, the two would be engaged. He was happy, Jackson recalls, and seemed flush with cash. But Jackson and another of Chris's old friends, Bill Kaemmerling, both recall a moment when Smith pulled them aside. " 'Look, dudes, there's some weird sh** going on with my [business] partner right now,' " Kaemmerling remembers Smith saying.
Smith had decided that he wanted out of the 800Xchange. When he returned to Orange County, he was going to finalize a buyout deal with Shin. Apparently Smith, aware of the LG case against Shin, was wary that he, too, might get swindled. Two months earlier, Smith sent up a safeguard that required signatures from both him and Shin for any company check over $500. For the 800Xchange buyout, Smith specified that Shin needed to sign the agreement and place $1 million into escrow before Chris countersigned. On the morning of June 4, 2010, the day that the deal was supposed to be consummated, Chris sent a cautionary e-mail to his attorney. "We need to make sure he [Shin] doesn't have room for fraud," Chris wrote. "He is itching to do it again."
Shin and Smith met at the 800Xchange office that afternoon. The company's other four employees had taken off early, which they typically did on Fridays. What happened next, Shin told detectives when they first questioned him, was pretty mundane—they signed the papers and finished the deal. Smith got his money and took off.
But now, given the blood and the unanswered questions, police thought that something very different had happened.
Smith never got his $1 million from Shin. He never chartered a yacht and sailed off with any Playmate. According to a police search warrant, the e-mailed photo of Tiffany had been lifted from the Internet. On August 28, 2011, officers arrested Shin at LAX, where he was boarding a flight to Canada, and charged him with “murder with special circumstances for financial gain.”
Shin, interrogated by the Orange County Sheriff's Department for several hours after his arrest, eventually revised his story. Things hadn't gone so agreeably that afternoon he met Smith in their office, he now said, according to testimony given in a preliminary hearing by Ray Wert, the case's lead investigator.
Shin admitted that he had confronted Smith about trashing the space during a drunken bender, Wert said at the hearing. The two men argued about who was responsible for the cleanup and started throwing blows. They charged at each other like rams until a punch or shove sent Smith tumbling backward. His head hit the corner of a desk and then he landed on the floor. Smith was bleeding heavily and barely moving.
Assuming the worst, Shin said he called a friend—a man named Johnny “Vegas” Koponen—for help with “garbage disposal.” Shin said Vegas told him to leave the office unlocked and to meet an associate of his in Los Angeles. For a fee of $10,000–$15,000, Shin told the cops, the body was supposedly disappeared. (Johnny “Vegas” later told investigators that this was all fiction; Shin never called him.)
As for the ruse about Chris Smith setting sail and leaving his worries behind, Wert said that Shin admitted that he'd concocted all of that. He hijacked Smith's e-mail accounts and crafted the narrative of a globe-trotting escape so that people wouldn't be suspicious about his partner's sudden absence.
Allan Stokke, one of Shin's attorneys, argued at the preliminary hearing that this elaborate fiction didn't prove that Shin had premeditated his crime, which he characterized as "a self-defense situation...a heat-of-passion or a sudden quarrel situation." Stokke wouldn't even concede that Smith was dead rather than simply missing. But even assuming the former, Stokke said, Shin was culpable for manslaughter, at most.
Shin's trial, which has been delayed numerous times as the lawyers on both sides haggle over evidence and motions, is scheduled to take place later this spring. The prosecutor's characterization of Shin's self-defense claim can be summarized with one word: b*******. If Smith had fallen and hit his head during a fight, there wouldn't be blood on the ceiling; the only way you would get that is if Shin had either stabbed Smith or hit him with a blunt object. "There is blood on the ceiling of the office, which we submit is a classic case of cast-off that is also totally inconsistent with Shin's story," said Matt Murphy, the Orange County prosecutor, in the preliminary hearing.
Prosecutors say Shin had a clear motive: not wanting to pay $1 million to Smith. He was already paying off the $805,000 to LG for the embezzlement, and Ramey speculates that Shin may also have had a six-figure gambling debt to pay off in Vegas. If Shin did in fact accidentally kill Smith during the "heat of passion," as his attorney postulated, Shin regained his composure quickly. At 7:10 P.M. on June 4—when Smith was likely already dead—Shin e-mailed a buyout agreement to Smith's attorney with terms that were significantly revised in his own favor: Instead of $1 million, the paperwork indicated that Smith was now willing to be bought out for a mere $30,000 and 10 gold coins worth about $15,000 total. Shin "cashed in on this murder," Murphy said.
If so, he apparently wasn’t very careful about covering his tracks. Police discovered that right after the crime, Shin rented a truck (despite his story about calling Johnny “Vegas” to help with the body). Reviewing his cell phone records, they discovered that he made a call to Enterprise for vehicle assistance at 2:30 A.M. on June 7. The location, based on cell phone tower pings, was a remote area east of San Diego along the Mexican border. "I believe it is possible that Shin was disposing of the MP's [missing person's] body in the desert when he made the call," a sheriff's investigator wrote in a search-warrant application.
The phone call wasn't the only screw-up. Shin instructed the 800Xchange's employees to work from home for the entire week after the crime so that he could have the office professionally cleaned. When a maintenance man for the office complex showed up at suite 123, he noticed "a lot" of blood on the walls and carpet; Shin told him that he had cut his arm while slicing an apple, according to police.
As a murder mystery, ultimately, Smith's did not befit Sherlock Holmes. It could have been cracked by Scooby-Doo. But if it weren't for the unlikeliest chance happening—a private investigator having an office a few doors down from that of 800Xchange—and Shin's penchant for not paying his bills, he might never have been arrested. Incredulous that detectives didn't probe Shin's lies more forcefully or even search the office before Dalu did, the Smith family considered filing a lawsuit against the Laguna Beach Police.
Two months before his arrest, Shin started a blog called "Mr. Shincredible." Its lone post mixed narcissism and self-justification with bromides about faith and forgiveness. "No matter if you are a hardened killer hanging on the cross just a few hours away from your death, or born into a good Christian home whose family guides you to Jesus before you even commit serious sins, we are all people," Shin wrote. "...So yes, I'm sorry. And yes, one day I will make good the best way that I can on the things I've done."
Shin had fooled the police and Smith's friends and family; the blog's show of remorse, arguably, demonstrated that he could even delude himself. This speaks to Shin's true talent—not as a particularly deft killer but as a masterful liar. An experienced con man, Shin knew that brazen plays better than sly. He knew that the solution to being caught in a lie was to lie again. And he knew that if he employed many bits of truth—like Smith's genuine desire to expatriate—he could get people to swallow a gargantuan lie. Among the people Shin conned was Paul Smith, who, as it happened, also worked for the 800Xchange and continued to do so, alongside Shin, for seven months after Chris disappeared. "This guy's a Christian?" Paul now says. "More like the devil. And he wears a mask."
James Vlahos is a writer in Berkeley, California. His book, Talk to Me: Inside Silicon Valley's Quest for Conversation, will be published later this year.
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