They came for him in boardrooms, back alleys, and browser tabs. And when those angles failed, they tried handcuffs forged in a courtroom. The upcoming thriller Checkmate re-creates that gauntlet, but the real screenplay lives in a 157-page federal complaint—Case No. 2:24-cv-09601—now moving through the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Its exhibits read like a nightmarish dossier: hacked hard drives, falsified warrants, wiretapped prison calls, armed kidnaping attempts, murder conspiracy, armed home invasion and more.
The Trojan Coder
The prologue begins in 2018, inside a WeWork in West Hollywood. Producer-entrepreneur Enzo Zelocchi was assembling A-Medicare, a blockchain-driven, single-payer health platform bundled with its own crypto token. He hired “full-stack genius” Troy Woody Jr. to polish the project’s white paper. Woody signed a strict NDA—then tunneled straight into the servers.
According to the lawsuit, Woody’s access to internal comms became the syndicate’s roadmap: he siphoned digital currency wallet addresses, Slack backups, and dev keys, forwarding everything to fellow UGNAZI hacker Mir Islam (at the time a fugitive for the US authorities). The pair—serving time for murder in the Metro Manila District Jail in the Philippines—used contraband phones and laptops to beam intel to ringleader Adam Iza (a/k/a Ahmed Faiq, now a guilty plea on record) and his girlfriend Iris Au (guilty plea). That cache became a blueprint for extortion—and a hit list topped by four Hollywood names: Steven Spielberg, Margot Robbie, Todd Philips, and Enzo Zelocchi himself.
Badges for Rent
To hunt A-list prey in Los Angeles, Iza’s cell needed local muscle. The complaint names a rogues’ gallery inside the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department:
- Eric Chase Saavedra – detective, now felon (guilty plea)
- Richard Dudgeon – ex-deputy
- Dean Bryan Rawlings – active deputy (suspended)
- Christopher & Michael Quintero – deputy & civilian brother
Working with Private Investigator Kenneth Childs of Paramount Investigative Services in Los Angeles, the deputies pulled StingRay dumps, tower-dump dragnets, and DMV data under fraudulent warrants. Judges—unknowingly misled—signed off, handing the syndicate real-time location pings for every target. It’s alleged that Kenneth Childs of Paramount Investigative Services was used by Adam Iza to spy the victims prior the criminal attacks and more.
From Surveillance to Shotguns
The first strike came in November 2021: a botched kidnapping and armed robbery at an Arco gas station on Zelocchi. Next, the March 30, 2022, home-invasion attempt—three gunmen breaching Zelocchi’s door before fleeing under return fire.
Physical terror bled into digital warfare:
- Summer 2022 Disney-Instagram hack: racist slurs posted under @DavidDo to frame Zelocchi’s freelancer, David Do.
- TMZ payoff: editors accepted payments for smear headlines against Zelocchi using a bogus lawsuit.
- Wikipedia purge: paid insiders yanked Zelocchi’s page overnight.
- YouTube barrage: a Las Vegas creator (now a defendant) dropped three defamatory and slanderous videos to run a criminal extortion.
- IMDb infiltration (in 2024): Woody, using fake credentials and a smuggled laptop, deleted film credits and injected sabotage trivia.
The Legal Squeeze
With reputations wobbling but wallets still closed, Iza’s crew weaponized paperwork. Two unethical attorneys filed three meritless civil suits, hoping discovery subpoenas would expose Zelocchi’s digital assets keys and use the court system as a weapon to continue the extortion. Judges dismissed every claim, but the clock kept ticking.
Counter-Move: RICO on the Table
Zelocchi counter-punched. His own filing cites RICO (18 U.S.C. § 1962), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), California Penal Code § 502, plus defamation and conspiracy counts. He handed agents chat transcripts, GPS strings, decrypted jail calls and more. The evidence cracked the inner circle: Saavedra flipped; prison forensics tied Woody and Islam to live criminal activities while incarcerated; Iza’s guilty plea cemented the ISIS–UGNAZI connection.
What This Film Really Shows Us
This saga is a case study in how state surveillance tech can collapse into a black-market service when crooked officers sell their access and get hired by an ISIS terrorist from Iraq with a domestic criminal record. Four marquee artists were seconds from becoming headlines; countless others never knew they were pinging across a dirty deputy’s laptop.
Checkmate (now in development) will dramatize the chase, but remember: the jump-cuts and dolly shots are shadows of genuine transcripts, sworn under penalty of perjury. By refusing ransom—digital or literal—Enzo Zelocchi forced a criminal enterprise out of the dark and into a docket. In doing so, he protected Spielberg, Robbie, Philips, and perhaps the next name that might have surfaced in Iza’s Telegram chats.
When the film finally rolls credits, the audience will head for popcorn refills. In real life, the story keeps scrolling through PACER filings, asset-forfeiture ledgers, and the long audit of every badge that blinked red instead of blue.
