A year before Sirhat was arrested, the filmmakers Zebraia Newman climbed out ...
in the parking garage of Sirhat's clinic.
“This was as close as Zeb and his camera were allowed to come to the building itself.”
In the dim light, he spotted his friend, Jeffrey Drew, waiting for him. Jeffrey was about to undergo yet another blood draw at Sirhat's clinic. It had been almost two years since Jeffrey started his HIV trial, had been getting his blood drawn regularly, and each time he was told that his HIV levels were undetectable. The experimental treatment seemed to be working.
But Jeffrey was starting to get impatient. He wanted to know if Sirhat's donor cell injections had re-trained his immune system to fight the virus.
As Zeb turned on his camera that morning in the parking garage, Jeffrey was having trouble
summoning his usual charisma. He's annoyed, he's lacking patience, he even says that morning on film like I'm feeling bratty, I don't want to be here to do this anymore. Eventually, Jeffrey got up and trudged inside, alone. When he came back out, his mood wasn't any better.
The two men sat in Jeffrey's car, talking. Jeffrey doesn't cry, he's not a very emotional person, but he was very emotional and he got angry, and he felt a little used and abused. If it was a cure, then Sirhat stood to make a lot of money.
“He said I think that they might make a billion dollars and I didn't get anything.”
He said I didn't even get a fruit basket. But Jeffrey kept going on with the trial, had been risking his life now for nearly two years. It was too late to stop now. Even if someone else made billions from it, he was still hopeful his contribution could
make a difference in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Then one day, Zeb heard from Jeffrey, he had gotten some good news. There was this idea that Jeffrey was going to go to Washington, D.C. and sit with Dr. Fauci and have a conversation about HIV and he's going to sit before some organization. They're going to look at his data and they're going to either grant us the money to do
a nationwide government-funded trial or not. But there was something even more exciting in the works. And they're either going to say Jeffrey is HIV/Cure or not. Jeffrey waited to hear more about the trip. He kept reaching out to the clinic, but they kept putting him off, eventually in the spring
of 2022, Zeb heard from Jeffrey. I think Dr. Sir Hudson trouble. That was a serious understatement. And Jeffrey would soon have a lot more than a trip to worry about. Like, was anything he thought he knew about the doctor?
Actually, real.
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The data are the data. Over 5,000 miles away from Los Angeles, and Nokia and investor Le Abelgo sat in his home in Denmark, staring at an email had just received. His mouth hung open in shock. On his screen was an article saying that the company co-founder had been arrested on murder for higher charges. As he told the Danish podcast, Dr. No.
"I walked out to the bathroom and threw up. At first I didn't believe it."
Abelgo was used to the boom and bust roller coaster of investing and had stared down major losses in the past without even blinking.
This arrest was different.
He found the many sides of the company's scientific founder hard to square, as he told the podcast.
It is difficult for me to understand that you can call yourself a doctor without being one. You can be arrested for participating in and hiring assassins, and at the same time be a genius. Abelgo turned off his phone and locked himself in his bedroom. He knew many people would be calling him with questions. And he wouldn't be able to answer any of them.
What's at stake from a no-kin at this point is, it's absolute survival.
The Hindenburg team was scrambling to finalize their story after news of serhat's arrest.
The market was watching a no-kin, but that could change any day, so they needed to get their report out as quickly as possible. They worked around the clock checking and re-checking every claim in their article, making sure that every accusation was backed up with evidence. Anything short of that meant.
“All you have to show for your 12-month investigation is an investment loss on top of all the research”
expenses, on top of the legal bills, and in a case like Nokia, you might also have an incredibly wealthy murderer psychopath who's not very fond of you. It wasn't enough for the report to be true. It had to be ironclad. Thomas from Hindenburg knew he needed to put the team's findings to a Nokia's executives before the story published. You have the privilege of putting in a final phone call that you've got the
bank to write. Hey, your top scientist has been arrested on murder for higher charges. What if you got to say? I mean, that is a real real buzz. But this time, things weren't quite that cinematic. That fee of trying to get anybody on the company on the record was an absolute nightmare. The CEO, Mark Diable, wouldn't take Thomas's calls. Neither would a key member the Board of Directors, Carol Brossguard, or the man who brought Serhat into the company.
Chairman Renee Sendlove. They were stonewalling, and the strategy was working. Because each day that Thomas failed to get someone to comment, and Nokia's stock was climbing back up. By May 27th, two days after Serhat's arrest, the stock had almost erased its losses. And if it kept climbing, it could be financially disastrous for Hindenburg. Two days before Hindenburg planned to go to press, Thomas was still trying to find someone to talk to
at a Nokia. I just kept trawling and trawling through SEC filings, and other documents,
“and finally came across a US phone number. Probably several years old, but I think it was a”
Florida number from recollection. And so I think, wow, well, what the hell, put in the call. Diances the phone. Hey, is this Renee? Yeah, yeah, it's Renee. It was the Renee Sendlove, the chair of a Nokia. The man who had merged his company with Serhat. Thomas said he was a journalist, and Renee stayed on the line. I said, "Did you know at the time that you did this merger deal at the time that you announced it,
that you were dealing with a fella?" In 2017, Serhat had been arrested on 14 felony counts
relating to fraud and theft. It had never been clear how much Renee and Anokian knew about Serhat's
criminal charges. Renee's response caught Thomas off guard. And he said, "Yes, we knew." But he only had to pay a fine of 400 bucks, and I knew exactly what that was about. And I didn't see that there was any need to discuss that. He also said that he didn't think Serhat had been convicted. Thomas didn't think that was the whole picture. If anyone looked at the case file, then see a series of high-value financial thefts and frauds that might concern
“any potential business partner. So we tried again. Why didn't you stop it?”
You know, Renee Sendlove said to me, he says, "Regardless of anything that's happened,
I still have to admit he's a genius, whether he's a doctor or not.
Renee's belief in Serhat's abilities had not changed.
"Is like, how do you square that circle?" You know, just how do you do it? You hired him because you thought he was a doctor. Everything pointed the fact that he's a doctor. He can't be a genius, whether he's a doctor or not. He's either a genius and a doctor or he's an absolute con man that you've fallen for, but sin left sin to believe that both things were possible.
Thomas Prestron, a about Serhat's arrest in the murder for higher plot. He said, "I don't care whether he's guilty or not."
If he is guilty, he needs to be punished for it. And if he's not guilty,
“well, good for him. How is chairman of a US-listed company?”
Can you be telling me that you do not care if your founder and scientific founder is guilty or not of conspiracy to murder? We reached out to Renee Sendlove for the story, but he declined to comment. It was June 1st, 2022, a week since Serhat was arrested. The markets were going to open in just over an hour, and Anoki and Stock was down just 60 cents
from where it was before. Nate sat in his office chair reading the story one last time. We focused largely on his background, so we focused on how he had apparently fabricated
“every bit of his educational background that we could find that he didn't graduate with multiple”
PhDs, that he didn't have any medical degrees or license. He was, in fact, a low-level Turkish street magician who had fled the country after charges of defrauding locals in Turkey. And we also highlighted, of course, his massive white collar crime spree that he undertook right when he got to the US just really a buffet of various different flavors of white collar fraud. The article also detailed his treatment of cancer patients from Denmark and Pennsylvania.
We really focused on his history to date to show that this is not the Michelangelo you think you have. This guy is a complete con artist. Nate checked in with his team, and when everyone gave the all clear, he pressed the button to publish their investigation into Sir Hakkim Ruktu. And just went outside and took a long walk and smoked to cigarette. And the reaction when I came back was pretty much instantaneous.
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have you seen this article?" your podcast episode is referenced. I opened it up, and the title is
Miracle Curres and Murder for Higher, how a spoon-bending Turkish magician built a $600 million
NASDAQ listed scab based on a lifetime of lies, and boy was I, I was just blown away by this article.
“He thought back to Sarah Hunt's party had gone to, and the Hollywood Hills.”
Suddenly, all the magicians that were there made more sense, but nothing else did. The hiring of the hitman is some next-level shit for me. That is, and then those look the medical fraudulence and the degree of just, I mean, it's, it's, it's really baffling. The Hindenburg team began hearing from people all over the world. The reaction was like, holy shit. Like, what are you even talking about? Fake magician who lies about scientific
research is not the norm for criticism of a public company listed on the NASDAQ. Sure enough, a nokey and share price dropped again. Hindenburg's report had spooked investors, and their short cell had worked. Yes, in this case we did make more than the cost of research for our short. Nate won't say how much they made, but the risk had paid off. Sometimes you can even be right on facts, wrong on timing. There's all sorts of reasons why a stock can go up, so it
is often a very risky, I mean, always really a risky endeavor. But yeah, I don't know this one,
this one was one that that worked for us. And nokey ends reaction to the story was immediate. The day the story went up, it's CEO Mark Diable wrote a letter to a nokey and shareholders. I have spoken to some of you about the serious and disturbing news that broke last week about Sarah Hutkin ripped you. They tried tellers in the press release, there has never been a formal role
for Gum Ruchu in the company. And his remaining informal role as a scientific advisor has concluded, so they kind of say we stand by as credentials, but he's not going to hand in the day to the running of the company. This was damage control. So the company came out and said that they strongly refuted our findings, but noticeably in the press release where they claim that everything
Was great, they stopped referring to Sir Hut as Dr.
that point. A nokey and called Hindenburg's article, "Miss Leading Propaganda," intended to drive
the company's stock price down. They said there had never been a formal role for Sir Hut in the company,
and that his informal role of scientific advisor had concluded. And they were insistent that their patents still had the potential to cure deadly diseases. In other words, they were saying that even if Sir Hut was a multiple fraudster and suspected murderer, his ideas still had merit. Dibal wrote, "The science is the science. The data are the data."
“But how could Sir Hut's medical miracles be believed if it lied about everything else?”
One of the people focused on that question was Zab. He was wondering what it meant for his friend Jeffrey.
The very first thing I was concerned with was his Jeffrey OK. I started to trace back in my mind
all of the times where he appeared sick or run down. I started to question like was his undetectable status real? It just everything started to flash in my mind, and Jeffrey was very quick to reassure me and everyone that he was OK. But I don't believe that he was super OK. Zab knew that Jeffrey didn't want to ruin the trial by going back on his old medication. Even when had been too sick to leave his house, he hadn't given up on Sir Hut's cure.
“So Jeffrey called Sir Hut's clinic and called and called, no one there could tell him what to do.”
So he went back on a regimen of anti-retroviral drugs and ended his HIV treatment trial. We reached out to Mark Diable from anokin about Jeffrey's treatment, and he responded, "We had no involvement in the administration of this treatment to Mr. Drew. Moreover, anokin had no involvement with any treatment conducted by Siraf Clinic and did not work with the Siraf Research Institute on any HIV treatment."
Mark Diable, however, was aware of Jeffrey's trial and anokin stood to benefit financially from any positive outcome. As far as Zab could tell, the whole thing was a huge loss for his friend. When we would do these press events and these Q&As, the just pride that he felt for potentially being a part of something that would help so many people was just massive for him. And so when all of that got taken away and suddenly he got put back on medication,
he was devastating. Jeffrey had spent two years of his life sacrificing his well-being in the search for a cure. Had it all been a sham?
We'll never know how much this is affected his physical body and what the ramifications of this will be
and will he be able to withstand, like cancer or some other type of sickness or disease that comes with life? It's incredibly infuriating. We did reach out to Jeffrey for this story, but he declined to comment. Not long after Siraf had to rest, Zab's documentary on Jeffrey was taken down by the streaming service that bought it. For Zab, that was tragic. I feel like in this entire tsunami of terrible bullshit, Jeffrey's story has been totally lost and his active service and his just
willingness to put his life on the line to honor his fallen brothers that have died from this disease has totally been lost. A month after Hindenburg's article came out, another statement was posted on a Nokia's website. The company said that had been reviewing Siraf's test results.
“"The results of this investigation verified key primary data for the company's HIV and cancer”
pipelines. But that wasn't all. The company also disclosed that Siraf had faked the results of
Animal studies for their COVID and hepatitis B treatments.
As a result, the company will initiate legal action against Gumbruk II over the falsified data.
“A Nokia was now taking to court its own inventor and co-founder. The man they described as a genius.”
They sued Sirha alleging that they had been duped and had no idea that it was just a big throttle along and how could this happen just such a horrific surprise. And my thought was that this was just entirely disingenuous to show if anyone asked like, "Look, we were also surprised by this. We had no idea. I mean, we were in line to make your tens of millions of dollars from these lies and there were red flags all over the place. But how could anyone have seen this?"
By the time the loss it was filed, a Nokia share price had fallen to $2.11 a share.
And the company and its investors had lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result. The largest holder of a Nokia stock was Sirha Gumbruk II himself and his family members and related entities. So the biggest loser in the stock market was Sirhat himself, which is exactly how it should be in our view. The CEO and several other executives and board members had stock, so they also lost significant amounts of their paper holdings.
The fallout from the revelations about Sirhat was worse for the patients and the people who loved them. Those who had placed their hope in Sirhat's hands.
“I think what he did was he prayed on vulnerability wherever he could find it and looked for”
the absolute most vulnerable people he could find. And came in with a smile on his face and a calm voice and credentials and the white lab coat and pretended that he was going to solve their most horrific problem and exchanged for a lot of money and people bought it. What was going through Sirhat's mind as he offered these treatments? It's tough to pinpoint the motivation for Sirhat. Certainly money. I think he was motivated also
by fame. I think possibly motivated by a desire for respect amongst peers or intelligent people. But perhaps there's something else. That same look that his old school friend saw in his eyes
long ago back in Turkey, that same hysteria when he first saw a magic trick, the delight of deception.
A lot of times with someone like him, they're also motivated by a joy in tricking people and using his words to get money from people, like a predator that feels a sense of joy from his prey. Hi, welcome back inside our proactive news room and joining me now is Dr. Mark Dibble. In late 2023, a Nokia and CEO was excited to make an announcement. He is the CEO of Renovarro
Biosciences and Dr. Dibble, great to see you. How are you? Great. How are you? Nice to meet you, Steve. Thanks for playing out. A Nokia had a new name and a new focus. Renovarro it means to renew is focused on platform approaches to strengthen our own immune system, to renew the immune system, to retrain it so that it can control diseases on its own. With a new name came a new focus on cancer. They were planning a merger with an up-and-coming AI
company to supercharge their cancer detection and that HIV treatment the Jeffrey went through so much for, in their annual report, the company announced they were dropping plans to make it into a clinical trial. In a separate statement to us, Mark Dibble said the result from the patient were promising, and that he's hopeful the approach will be evaluated. As a Nokia and went public with the rebrand, their stock surged once more.
“Nate has seen it all before. I think it's just a cheap tactic to try and sort of gloss over”
the fact that they had just run this massive entity filled with lies and just change the story a little bit and see if they can sell the new story to people. Sadly, I think it will work. I think it's already clear that they've managed to pump their stock back up. They've got people excited about this new AI venture that seems completely outrageous. And my guess is they will,
If they haven't already, dump stock on the people that are buying into the ne...
they'll probably just keep doing it over and over and over again until and unless they are actually
“stock. Meanwhile, one of the largest shareholders of Renavaro stock is behind bars.”
Serhat is still awaiting trial on murder for higher charges relating to the kidnapping and death of Gregory Davis. He has pled not guilty. If convicted, he faces up to life in prison. Serhat's trial isn't scheduled to start until October 2024. We reached out to him, his family, and his attorneys, but all declined to comment.
In the meantime, according to Serhat's friend Brooke Casey, he's making the most of his time
behind bars. He sort of sees this as an opportunity. He's been, you know, raising the consciousness of the people that he's met in incarceration, teaching meditation, teaching yoga. He's taking this as this moment to, you know, meditate and do, you know, have access to people that he wouldn't have had access to. People who might be looking for a guru or a magician or a genius who can make
“all of their problems vanish. I think, in that respect, I'm very fortunate. I can say pretty much”
over 90% of things I've come up with paned out, and the less than 10% that didn't pan out taught me a lot. Listen to Dr. Death, the cowboy, on the audible app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Dr. Death, the cowboy, early and ad-free right now. Join audible in the audible app, or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. I'm Leon Nefock, best known as the co-creator of Slowburn and Fiasco. I, of course,
heard of only fans, but always with a distant and quiet skepticism, a silent judgment you might say.
Who is actually using this platform? I am. Hi, I'm only fans creator and comedian, Gracie Cainan. From home, now I'm on only fans, and he sees you as your only fans as your husband. My journalistic curiosity got the best of me when I found out that my own sister had started it only fans account. I'm not a sister, just to clarify. It turns out, a lot of what I thought I knew about only fans was wrong. I felt like I wasted 3.5 years for
“something that wasn't real. What happens when connection comes with a price tag?”
Listen to only fans to see wherever you get your podcasts, or binge all episodes of only fantasy ad-free right now only on audible. Start your audible subscription in the audible app or on Apple Podcasts. From Wendry, this is episode 5 of 5 of Dr. Death, Bad Magic. I'm your host, Laura Biel. This series is written by Benjamin Gray. Producer is Nica Singh. Senior producer is Russell Finch. Story editor is Alison Wyne Traub. Senior editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Fact checking by
Jacqueline Coletti. Additional reporting by Gulsin Harman and Alyssa Jong Perry. Production assistance by Mariah Dennis and Emily Locke. Sound design and mixing by Kyle Randall. Senior managing producer is Latta Pandia. Coordinating producer is Heather Beloga. Produced by Story Force. Music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for FreeSonsync. Special thanks to Yesber Peterson to Ali Dashty and Guy Rokin of the fancy lab co-gealed podcast and to Nate Anderson and the staff
at Hindenburg Research for use of their reporting. Executive producers are Bly Pagan Foust and Cory Shepherd Stern for Story Force. Our executive producers are George Lavender, Marshall Louie and Jen Sargent for Wendry.
