J. Nicholas Bryant

Between 2020 and 2021, J. Nicholas Bryant lived the life of a rich young businessman: partying on private jets, buying high-end vehicles and taking a yacht for a spin around Miami.

But Bryant was living a lie. Prosecutors say the Texan’s employees were fake, the companies he claimed to be affiliated with either didn’t exist or didn’t employ him, and the payments he promised to deliver for his millions of dollars worth of bills never showed up.

Bryant had broken the law before, but by the time authorities caught up with him in late 2021, he’d reached another level: defrauding dozens of victims out of more than $1 million. An aviation company in Cody was among those to lose tens of thousands of dollars to the young man from Lubbock, Texas.

Chad Meacham, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, likened Bryant to a couple of the country’s most infamous con artists.

“Without the interference of our law enforcement partners, this defendant would be well on his way to becoming Lubbock’s Anna Delvey or Frank Abagnale,” Meacham said last year. A news release from the prosecutor's office credited the Cody Police Department as being one of seven agencies that assisted with the investigation.

Bryant, who is now 27, pleaded guilty to felony wire fraud and was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison in March. The punishment from U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of Lubbock went well above the sentencing guidelines, with the judge noting in part that Bryant appeared to have continued reveling in his notoriety after his arrest.

“You defrauded the people in our community who are just trying to make it as a small business or individuals, pay the bills, give people jobs that allow them to put food on their table, and yet, you never hesitated,” Hendrix told the defendant. “Victim after victim, fraud after fraud, you did not stop. You just continued to just double-down and double-down and double-down. The only thing that stopped you was being caught.”

Bryant appealed the stiffer-than-expected sentence, but his defense attorney couldn’t find any legal basis to overturn it, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his case earlier this month.

A lengthy spree

Bryant’s run-ins with the law started when he was 17. Court records show he entered 2020 with at least three pending criminal cases and already had felony convictions for forgery and theft of services. But things escalated that year.

Bryant began claiming that he owned multiple companies and was the son of an oil tycoon, court records say, but some of those supposed companies didn’t even exist and he didn’t work for the ones that were real. 

Bryant did have actual experience in the oil and gas industry, and prosecutors say he used it to convince a former coworker to front him $150,000 to reopen an oil well. 

“He created fictitious email addresses, a fictitious internet site, created fictitious persons — a foreman named Slade; a bookkeeper named Allison, I believe — and basically talked the talk,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ann Howey said at Bryant’s sentencing. He even went as far as to bring people to the site, but there was no well; the site was simply a piece of property owned by Bryant’s uncle, who had no idea what was going on, Howey said.

“He [Bryant] never intended to open the oil well,” the prosecutor said. “He just wanted money to use as he pleased.”

At his peak, Bryant has said he was burning through $50,000 to $100,000 a day; prosecutors said he either received or tried to get more than $3.5 million worth of items and services over the roughly 18-month span.

Those efforts included hiring a contractor to build him a new home with a pool, booking a $70,000 guided wildlife deer hunt and purchasing or trying to purchase more than $540,000 worth of vehicles. In each case, however, Bryant failed to pay his bills. The deal for his new house and workshop fell apart when his supposed $980,000 payment failed to clear — though only after the contractor had put in a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of work.

The government ultimately identified 56 different victims of Bryant’s schemes, which Howey called “an astounding number.” Nine different charter flight businesses were among the victims, including Choice Aviation of Cody.

A crime in Cody

On the morning of Nov. 15, 2021, Bryant contacted Choice and requested a flight from Las Vegas to San Angelo, Texas, that afternoon.

“Bryant explained his jet was down for maintenance and he needed to get to Houston that evening,” Cody Police Officer John Harris wrote in an affidavit.

Choice Aviation wound up flying Bryant and his four passengers from Sin City to the Lone Star State on a Cessna Citation CJ3.

Bryant indicated he would have his secretary, “Bill Williams,” take care of the $29,922 bill for the half-hour flight, but Choice was ultimately unable to reach the supposed secretary; a man who answered the phone at the number Bryant later provided “was apparently confused and hung up,” Harris wrote.

The bill appeared to have been settled the following day, however, as Bryant provided an eCheck via Quickbooks’ payment platform. He then requested another flight — an hour-long trip from San Angelo to Midland, Texas — on Nov. 17, 2021, and prepaid the $19,350 bill with another eCheck. A Choice pilot picked up Bryant and ultimately took him on to Lubbock, adding $3,225 to his bill for the extra flight plus another $775 for a limo.

Bryant’s eChecks initially showed up as deposits in Choice’s account, but on Nov. 19, the company discovered that the payments had bounced due to insufficient funds; Officer Harris said it appeared that Bryant had “disputed” the two transactions.

Choice immediately tried to get in touch with Bryant to collect on the now-$53,272.50 debt, but repeated calls and messages went unanswered.

Through some online sleuthing, Cody police and Choice personnel were able to learn Bryant’s full identity. According to the affidavit, it turned out that one of the passengers had posted a picture of him and Bryant in the cockpit of the Choice Aviation aircraft.

On Bryant’s own Facebook page, “There were numerous other photos of Bryant in and outside of different private jets,” Harris added. In a comment he posted just days before booking the flights with Choice Aviation, Bryant wrote that “I fly private almost daily.”

However, authorities were closing in.

Approaching the end

On Nov. 18, 2021 — the day after Choice Aviation flew Bryant back to Lubbock — he headed out again, this time pulling the scheme on a charter company based in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

Court records say Sales Hangar Flight Ops agreed to fly Bryant and his friends from Lubbock to Houston and on to Miami for $33,000. Another $5,000 was added to cover alcoholic beverages during the flight — Bryant “required that the planes were stocked with vodka,” federal court records say — limousine transportation and a tip. It would cost the same for the flight back, for a total of $76,000.

“Send me that email so I can have my secretary pay ya buddy,” Bryant texted the Sales Hangar Flight Ops representative.

Bryant then relayed that his secretary had paid the invoice, but “well knew he did not have a secretary … nor did he have money to pay for the flights,” says a factual resume Bryant agreed to as part of his guilty plea. Instead, just as he had with Choice Aviation, Bryant manipulated QuickBooks’ Payment platform to only make it appear as though the invoice had been paid.

After arriving in Miami, Bryant rented a 90-foot yacht and spent a half-day sailing with his friends — demanding steak dinners, champagne and more vodka while on board.

“As with the other schemes, the victim never received payment,” the factual resume says. He later even tricked a driver into paying for his expensive hotel room.

Meanwhile, three days passed before Sales Hangar Flight Ops received notice that Bryant’s eCheck had failed. He promised to wire the money instead and on Nov. 23, 2021, the company agreed to fly him back to Texas, but eventually grounded the plane. Bryant told The Daily Beast that he bought a Porsche SUV and fled the state; he was arrested the next month when he tried buying an Audi and a Maserati, Bryant told the publication.

“It was fun, but I definitely do regret it,” he said of the spree. 

Offering an apology

Many of Bryant’s victims were small businesses that were struggling to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic and desperate for cash, prosecutor Howey said at March’s sentencing hearing.

Personnel at one aviation company were “thrilled” when Bryant booked a flight with them, but when the bill went unpaid, “that excitement just morphed to despair,” Howey said, “and they were not able to recover.”

She called the damage — to colleagues, friends and former employers in the oil and gas industry — “heartbreaking and overwhelming.”

“And he did it for the purposes of ostentation, pretension, and Instagram moments and to feed his ego,” Howey said.

The allegations also went beyond finances, with Bryant accused of making “very serious threats” against the mother of his child.

At March’s sentencing, Bryant gave a brief statement to the court, in which he apologized to his victims and his family. He said drugs and alcohol had caused the “chaos” in his life.

“The seriousness of my actions had zero impressions on my drug- and alcohol-induced mind,” Bryant said, explaining that he’d only realized the devastation of his choice during his time behind bars.

“I hurt so many people trying to be someone I am not,” he said. “I was a greedy, unremorseful monster, hurting everybody in my path.”

Bryant described himself as ready to pay his debt and restitution and come out of it as a better man and father.

Judge Hendrix said he appreciated the statement, but said it was hard to believe Bryant was being sincere.

Unflattering comparisons

Prosecutors and media outlets likened Bryant to the famed fraudsters Frank Abagnale and Anna (Delvey) Sorokin — whose exploits were turned into the major Hollywood projects “Catch Me If You Can” and “Inventing Anna,” respectively — and Howey said that Bryant “reveled in the comparisons.”

For example, Bryant told The Daily Beast that “my story might be more wild than theirs! I can almost guarantee it!”

Bryant’s court-appointed attorney, David Sloan, argued that his client had been manipulated by the reporter.

“I think with somebody who has obviously got insecurities and an ego problem, getting him to boast, I don’t think, was much of a challenge,” Sloan said. He said his client was “a 23-year-old alcoholic kid who [was] desperate for attention” and trying to impress others when he went on the crime spree.

However, that argument was undercut by Bryant being heard on jail phone calls talking about the money he could make from his story; he even reportedly asked a friend to forward The Daily Beast’s article to a different publication, “Inside True Crime,” which seeks to turn criminals’ stories into movies.

“There’s no doubt he wants to profit from this crime. There’s no doubt that he is proud of these crimes,” Hendrix said. The judge noted one jail call in which Bryant can be heard laughing about a victim being out thousands of dollars.

An unreasonable sentence?

Statutory guidelines called for a prison sentence in the range of seven to nine years, but Hendrix said that wasn’t enough, given the number of victims and a long record of failing to respect the law.

“I hope today is the day that you decide enough is enough,” the judge said, “but you have lost the benefit of the doubt from everyone because of your own choices.”

Sloan called the sentence unreasonable, and an appeal soon followed. However, Bryant’s court-appointed appellate attorney concluded in June that the judge had followed the law and there was “no non-frivolous basis for appeal.” The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and dismissed the matter on Oct. 2.

Bryant is still serving a state prison sentence in Texas for various crimes, with that time generally counting toward his 14-year sentence in the federal system. Once he gets out, he’ll need to complete three years of supervised release. 

Bryant has also been ordered to pay more than $1.18 million in restitution to 30 victims — including the $53,272.50 he owes to Choice Aviation. He must pay at least $250 a month once he’s released, though at that rate, it would take Bryant nearly 400 years to make everyone whole.