Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Three months ago, a mysterious website was taken offline on the order of a Florida judge. The site seemed like the work of an amateur; clusters of low-quality images crowded the homepage, and a bright red banner garishly lined the top. Yet the creator had been savvy enough to conceal their identity; they had registered the site with an encrypted email account and paid with bitcoin to host it.
The website’s domain name—realmpatrickcarroll.com—referred to Patrick Carroll, a prominent real estate investor based in the Southeast whose firm manages $7.4 billion in assets. Carroll is a master of self-promotion. He boasts 1.1 million Instagram followers, has participated in charity auctions alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, and has been interviewed on CNBC, CBS, Bloomberg, and Fox Business.
But this site was not designed to promote Carroll. It seemed intended to end his career.