Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters
An entity affiliated with exiled Chinese tycoon and Steve Bannon ally Miles Guo claims it has been stiffed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties for more than a dozen pop and hip-hop songs the accused billion-dollar con artist recorded before ultimately finding himself in handcuffs.
Guo, a darling of the MAGA crowd, has been jailed at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center since March as he awaits trial over what the Department of Justice called a “complex conspiracy to defraud thousands of his online followers out of over $1 billion dollars.” Among other things, prosecutors say Guo used the ill-gotten funds to buy himself a 50,000-square-foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, a $4.4 million Bugatti, a Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Roadster, a Rolls-Royce Phantom EWB, a $62,000 television, Chinese and Persian rugs worth nearly $1 million, a pair of $36,000 mattresses, and a $53,000 fireplace log holder.
The 52-year-old fled to the U.S. in 2014, as Chinese authorities prepared corruption charges against him. Since then, Guo—who is also known as Ho Wan Kwok, Guo Wengui, Brother Seven, and “The Principal”—has remade himself as a cryptocurrency evangelist, become a member of Mar-a-Lago, and helped perpetuate a blizzard of disinformation about, variously, COVID-19, the 2020 presidential election, and Hunter Biden. He also dove into the entertainment business, according to his organization’s official website.