As a young man, prideful of his upbringing, there was a time when I thought building something great for kids and families was the surest way to strengthen our communities. That was the dream my father passed down to my brother and I, one in which my dad and I chased when we created Legacy Sports USA — a truly one-of-a-kind sports and entertainment complex in Mesa, Arizona. What we didn’t realize was that in today’s modern America, if you host the wrong rally, support the wrong President, or hold the wrong beliefs about fairness in sports, you might end up not just losing your business, but your freedom.
In October 2022, Legacy Sports hosted a rally for President Donald J. Trump. Close to 15,000 people attended, and for one day our park became a celebration of faith, family, American values, and patriotism. Two weeks later, our lives changed as did the tone surrounding our public perception. We became the target of negative media coverage, online death threats, and eventually, a federal investigation from the Southern District of New York, a jurisdiction 2,400 miles away from Arizona that had never seen or set foot at Legacy Sports Park.
By June 2025, my father and I were bullied into accepting plea deals due to numerous threats made by the Southern District, plea deals that were littered with fallacies. We are two entrepreneurs whose only “crime” was that our ambitious project didn’t survive the combined headwinds of COVID, broken promises from our corporate partners, and political bias. We built something real. Ask any athlete or family member who’s fought through the thousands of cars and traffic lines to visit the Park on a busy weekend just how real it is. We employed 517 people. In 2022 alone, over 5.1 million visitors came to Legacy Sports Park making it the second-most visited destination in the state of Arizona behind only the Grand Canyon. Yet, somehow, we ended up in handcuffs at dawn, with our children watching.
This isn’t justice. It’s lawfare.
From the start, the Southern District made it clear they weren’t interested in the facts or the truth. We offered hundreds of documents, dozens of 3rd party sworn affidavits, and financial records proving that every dollar of bond money was accounted for, and that third parties — not us — failed to deliver their contractual obligations. They refused to listen. They wanted a story that would capture headlines: a father-son criminal pair to parade in front of the media as symbols of “Trump-world corruption.” They got their narrative, but not the truth.
The truth is, Legacy Sports delivered on every measure of participation and community engagement. In the end we received over 822 sports contracts, far exceeding what was projected. We built the foundation, but others including Oak View Group, Ziegler, and Legacy Cares were responsible for funding, operations, ancillary revenue, and day-to-day management decisions that went sideways. When their promised $35 million in operational support never materialized, we stepped up with personal funds to cover payroll. When the park struggled, we offered restructuring plans to protect bondholders and save the project. Instead, those plans were ignored, and the park was forced into bankruptcy and sold for pennies on the dollar.
No investor lost money because of fraud. They lost money because a bold idea launched during the height of COVID collapsed under impossible conditions. Anyone who’s been involved in a startup or has built something from scratch knows the difference between failure and fraud. But prosecutors in Manhattan from the same office that has repeatedly targeted President Trump and his supporters decided to erase that distinction for political gain.
We have been punished not for what we did, but for who we are and what we believe. Despite facing numerous lawsuits and pressure to adopt perverse ideologies from certain political groups, we stood against allowing biological males to compete in women’s sports and made it our policy that all individuals would use the locker rooms and restrooms of the gender they were assigned at birth. We hosted a Trump rally. We spoke openly about fairness, hard work, and family values. We didn’t hide the love we have for our Country or President Trump, we embraced it and proudly put it on full display. Unfortunately, that was enough to put a target on our backs.
America used to be a place where taking a risk, even one that failed, was something to be respected, not criminalized. Entrepreneurs used to be heroes, not suspects. Today, the message is clear: build something meaningful, but if you stand on the wrong side of the political spectrum, the system will come for you.
President Trump has made it his mission to expose and reverse the weaponization of our justice system. My father and I are living proof that this problem is real. We are not asking for special treatment. We only ask for fairness, and the same opportunity for redemption given to countless others who never stopped believing in America and its founding principals.
We still believe in that America. The America where a man’s intentions matter, where failure is not a felony, and where justice is blind to politics or opinions. That’s the America we tried to encapsulate at Legacy Sports. And with President Trump’s help, maybe it can still be restored.
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