Sometimes, what goes on the Playa should stay on the Playa.
A company whose board is chaired by one of America’s most decorated military men has been caught up in a $5 million crypto fraud lawsuit of some guy he allegedly met at Burning Man.
Retired General Wesley Clark is a Rhodes Scholar, former supreme commander of the NATO forces and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient who made a run for the White House in 2004.
But he embarked on reinvention of Madonna-like proportions in 2013, when he attended the famously out-there festival and Page Six reported he was spotted hanging at legendary, now defunct, Meatpacking night spot Provocateur.
It seems that on one such sortie to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, Gen. Clark — as one does at these things — became best friends for life with Alex Martini-Lo Manto, a New York-based Silicon Valley type who got in on the Blockchain boom by launching a company called Blockfusion.
Another tech firm, Bit Digital, invested $5 million to help Martini-Lo Manto get Blockfusion up and running.
Then Martini-Lo Manto decided to try to merge Blockfusion with tech investment firm, Blue Acquisition Corp., where his old Burner bro Gen. Clark is chairman.
Now Bit Digital accuses Martini-Lo Manto in court papers, filed in New York, of intentionally setting up the merger in such a way that it would make its $5million investment disappear like dust on the Black Rock wind — without Bit Digital getting a cent back.
Gen. Clark is not named as a defendant in the suit, but a source familiar with the filing alleges he put “his gravitas behind” the Blockfusion-Blue Acquisition Corp deal “as a favor to some friends he met at Burning Man.”
The suit is intended to stop the merger and get back the money that Bit Digital says its owed.
“Wesley goes to Burning Man to let his alternative side come out a bit, and then gets involved with these guys,” sniffed a source.
Martini-Lo Manto and a rep for Clark did not comment.
