Green Rush: What Went Down in Adelanto

The city of Adelanto sits 85 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles and may be best known for its prison — now a privately-owned immigration detention center. It's also where cannabis startup Genius Fund was pouring tens of millions of its investor's dollars last year.

Genius Fund's state-of-the-art cannabis production facility sits at the intersection of Muskrat Avenue and Rancho Road on a dusty stretch of the Mojave Desert, guarded with 8-foot-high fencing and razor wire.

Inside, shiny black tiled floors, chrome utilities and floor-to-ceiling glass walls give the facility a sleek, antiseptic feel. A table in the shape of a large aircraft wing spans its conference room.

The site has three buildings. One was used for CBD extraction, another was for THC extraction, and a third was for storage, according to local government planning and corporate documents.

A video promotion for Heli's Adelanto production facility, which was rebranded as Purest Biotech, shows the facility's interior.

The Agreement with Heli

Genius Fund, an L.A.-based startup, was run by Ari Stiegler and Gabriel Borden, two twenty-something friends who had lofty ambitions of dominating the cannabis market, first in the U.S. and then internationally. Funding it all was a more than $160 million bet from a Russian coal oligarch, Dmitry Bosov, according to corporate and court records.

To get it done, Genius joined up with Joseph "Joey" Ohayon and his business partner Evan Kagan to form multiple "Heli"-branded entities, in which Genius held a majority stake, according to court records and interviews.

Former employees described Ohayon, 31, as a smooth talker who often wore a designer shirt, baseball cap and tight jeans and traveled nearly everywhere in a cream-colored Rolls Royce with his head of security. They said he talked a lot about his criminal record of assaults. Arrest and court records in Florida show a conviction for felony battery.

To rapidly scale up their fledgling company, Genius Fund invested big into Heli's ventures, agreeing to spend over $21 million. Much of that would go to purchase THC and CBD biomass for Genius Fund's line of products, according to records later filed in an arbitration between Ohayon and Kagan on one side and Genius Fund on the other. Their 2019 business agreement — which was submitted in those arbitration proceedings — gave Genius Fund first priority for manufacturing THC and hemp products, as well as first dibs on the marijuana flower, pre-rolls and other products.

A video for Francis Racioppi's "Aim Small Big Miss" YouTube series.Video embedded from YouTube.

Enter Racioppi

As Genius Fund's ambitions grew, so did its management team.

Francis Racioppi wowed the executives at Genius Fund with his background as a U.S. Special Forces officer and an executive at Snap Inc. Former employees describe him as a tall, intense guy with an athletic build. He was hired in April 2019 as the chief security officer. At the time, the company was moving in several directions at once to get its lab, grows, products and manufacturing processes off the ground.

He quickly rose up to the executive rank, convincing Borden and Stiegler that the marijuana business, which heavily depends on cash because it is illegal under federal law, had multiple security vulnerabilities that required new protocols.

Former employees said Racioppi placed cameras everywhere at the company's headquarters. They described him as relentlessly focused on his goals and often short with people and said he rubbed many employees the wrong way. He gained a reputation among the rank-and-file as someone to avoid, former employees said. They added that he surrounded himself with allies along the way.

"He was very textbook about pulling himself all the way up to the top," said one former employee.

Neither Racioppi nor his attorney replied to requests for comment on this story.

Within a month of his arrival, he was flying to Russia with Stiegler and Borden to meet with Bosov, two former employees said.

Racioppi hired a large group of employees — many were friends from his days at Snap or former military. They were paid hefty salaries, according to multiple former employees and corporate records.

At its height, at least 40% of Genius Fund's direct employees were security, accounting for at least half of the company's payroll costs, according to people familiar with the company books.

"I'm like, 'This guy [Racioppi] is literally about to stage a coup'," said an ex-employee, whose sentiments were independently echoed by his former colleagues. "He hired at least 20 of his military friends, all making exorbitant amounts per year. That's when I knew, this guy is going to take over."

Former employees also wondered whether executives, so taken by Racioppi's Special Forces background, failed to do even a Google search to find out why he left Snap.

The Wall Street Journal reported he was fired as Snap's head of global security in late 2018 after an investigation uncovered an inappropriate relationship with a contractor. Her contract was ended around the time she stopped seeing him.

As his prominence in the company grew, employees said they saw Racioppi try to gain Bosov's trust, in part by warning Genius Fund's principal investor of the company's financial situation. In his more than $3.5 million whistleblower retaliation lawsuit filed in April in federal court in L.A., Racioppi details his efforts to try to inform Bosov of mismanagement at the company.

One place where he saw the company's losses piling up: the compound in Adelanto.

Illustration by Candice

Evicting Ohayon

As he cracked down on waste, Racioppi and the company's finance team pushed Heli Ventures' Ohayon to provide more transparency on spending, and the alliance with Heli grew rocky. Arbitration records filed by Genius Fund accused Ohayon and Kagan of embezzlement and unjust enrichment.

Genius Fund executives purchased the Adelanto property for $7 million, according to documents submitted as part of Racioppi's lawsuit. One former employee told dot.LA the purchase was partly made to ensure Genius Fund could access the site should relations with Ohayon deteriorate further.

Kagan agreed with that latter assessment, telling dot.LA he tried to distance himself from the business as the drama unfolded.

"They bought it out of necessity to take control," Kagan said. "They were going to use that to evict [Ohayon]."

Roughly a year into working with the company, Ohayon allegedly threatened to go after Stiegler in a September 2019 conference call, saying, "I'll beat his ass up," "I'll fuck him up" and "I'll kill that kid," according to an application for a temporary restraining order filed by Stiegler and other Genius Fund executives later that month. Ohayon denied the allegation to dot.LA.

In a sworn declaration filed in court to obtain the restraining order, Stiegler said he grew increasingly worried about his safety and that he added round-the-clock personal security and bumped up security at all Genius Fund offices and at the Adelanto facility.

Bosov terminated Ohayon and Kagan's agreement with Genius Fund two days after the conference call.

As the company's legal team went through Heli's books, they were unable to locate more than $4.5 million in cash that had been listed on Heli's balance sheet just a couple of weeks earlier, according to documents filed in support of the restraining order.

Separately, arbitration records also allege the company could not find an additional $2.5 million and further alleged that Ohayon used some of the company's money to pay himself.

"Despite repeated requests for an accounting by Genius Fund," those documents state, "Ohayon has failed to provide one and failed to explain the reduction of $2.5 million in the cash log."

The filings also accuse Ohayon of contracting with several entities to pay $4 million to purchase 150,000 pounds of hemp. The market price at the time would have put the value at $259,500. One of those entities then purchased 3.5% of Heli Holdings, "which is merely an operational company with minimal assets and no revenue to date," for $4 million in cash. "Thus, effectively," the arbitration documents allege, "respondents paid themselves $4 million with Genius Fund's money."

Also in the documents: Genius Fund accused Ohayon of using the company's American Express card to pay for dogs, dentist visits and personal travel. They accused him of providing a company credit card to a friend unrelated to the business who used it for personal expenses.

Ohayon's partner, Kagan, told dot.LA that Ohayon had purchased dogs on the American Express to serve as security for the compound. He had originally wanted wolves, he said, but was talked down.

Ohayon initially declined to comment for this story. Later he sent an email response.

"These statements are false," Ohayon said, referring to the application for a restraining order. "They made these accusations solely to exert leverage and try to push me out and deprive me of my interest."

Ohayon said all hemp purchases were disclosed and approved by Genius, Bosov and his representative. He added that he never used his business credit card for personal expenses.

Ohayon said he sold the dogs and returned the money. The arbitration claims, he added, were settled.

Security footage shows Joseph "Joey" Ohayon and his security detail being let on to the Adelanto facility's grounds by the head of Heli's security.

Lockdown

Genius Fund appointed one of its own as a new interim head of Heli. A message to all Heli company employees reviewed by dot.LA told them that previous management had failed to make payroll and that Genius Fund would pick up the entity's tab. The next day, which was typically payday, the new interim CEO stood outside the company's Adelanto gate so that employees could pick up paper checks.

But things worsened. The following week no one showed up to work at Adelanto. Heli's new interim CEO surmised that Ohayon had threatened the employees or told them not to go in, according to documents submitted to the court in support of Genius Fund's application for the temporary restraining order.

"I never threatened them," Ohayon told dot.LA "They decided against working for Genius due to their conversations with other Genius employees."

Security footage from Sept. 26, submitted as part of the same application showed Ohayon's security staff attempted to take over the property. The video showed Ohayon and his security detail being let onto the Adelanto facility's grounds by the head of Heli's security. A minute-by-minute account in the court documents describes the company's vans barricading entrances and the apparent theft of "high terpene extract material" from the facility's refrigerator while more than a dozen armed security followed Ohayon around site.

Ohayon traveled to Italy to negotiate a settlement with Bosov, which was signed by Stiegler on behalf of Genius Fund, according to a copy submitted to the court in Racioppi's whistleblower retaliation lawsuit.

"We disagreed on some stuff, but at the end of the day Dima said: 'Hey, Joey gets to run this and Ari run that, let's just see what happens,'" Stiegler said.

As part of the settlement, the company renewed its relationship with Ohayon and Kagan, who agreed to decrease their membership shares in the Heli partnerships from 49% to 39% and withdraw their security operations from the Adelanto compound, according to court records in Racioppi's lawsuit. The settlement left the facility's security in Genius Fund's hands. The request for a temporary restraining order against Ohayon was partly granted in October, but was dismissed by the court 10 days later because none of the plaintiffs showed up for the next hearing.

Genius Fund's current owner, Gary Shinder, did not reply to repeated requests for an interview, but said in a letter that after significant examination, "I did not find anything that could support any allegations of embezzlement, theft, or mismanagement by Heli Holdings or its principals." He wrote that he instead found what was likely "the only successful project in the Genius Fund portfolio."

Genius Fund ended up pouring tens of millions into the Heli operation, but it was never profitable, according to Kagan and corporate records.

An image of the land Genius Fund purchased in Santa Barbara County.Photo submitted from a source who prefers to remain anonymous.

Cannabis in Wine Country

The company's relationship with Ohayon and Kagan went beyond the Adelanto property. In 2019, Genius Fund executives had also signed an agreement with them that included purchasing a 350-acre plot of land in Santa Barbara County's wine country — known locally as the Domingos family ranch — for $23 million. Most of it was paid in cash upfront, county and corporate records show.

Just a year earlier, the land records show the property had sold for nearly $655,000. It was appraised at the time of Genius Fund's purchase at roughly $5.5 million, according to court documents filed in Racioppi's lawsuit.

It was another hefty expense for the company that required Bosov to wire over cash infusions so that the company could meet payroll while vendors went unpaid, according to Racioppi's lawsuit, as well as several former employees and vendors.

Genius Fund called the Santa Barbara enterprise Genius Farm 2, according to property and corporate records. With proper permitting, it could have complemented Heli's other operations and helped fulfill the company's vision of creating a full ground-up supply chain for Genius Fund.

But according to former employees and court documents submitted as part of Raccioppi's lawsuit, Genius Fund went into the deal without a land use permit to grow cannabis — in a region protective of its wine crop.

Ohayon told dot.LA that was the result of infighting at Genius Fund. "Genius management sabotaged the project hoping to eliminate us prior to getting the final LUP [land use permit]," he wrote in an email.

"They had the seller and all consultants involved in that project sign NDAs to ensure that they didn't communicate with us" at a critical time in the permitting process. "Due to a personal vendetta, Stiegler was willing to 'burn the house down'," Ohayon said.

The company would never get the permit to plant cannabis in Santa Barbara. Months later, it would sell the land for millions less than what it was purchased for, according to property and county records.

Soon, Bosov would grow tired of just dreams.

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This is the fourth in dot.LA's "Green Rush" series looking at the rise and fall of cannabis-related startup Genius Fund. Read part one, part two, part three and part five, and sign up for dot.LA's newsletter to be notified about new stories.

Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter @latams. You can also email me at tami(at)dot.la, or ask for my contact on Signal, for more secure and private communications.

Lead art by Candice Navi.