‘The Problem With Erik,’ Episode 3: “The Fixer” (TM Audio Exclusive)

Transcript

Katy Vine (voice-over): By his own account, Gilad Peled was a man who handled problems. 

He moved to the U.S. from Israel in 1999. Back in his homeland, Gil had served three years as a tank commander in the army. He’d trained alongside the special forces, though once he was in the U.S., he liked to tell people he’d been in the Israeli special forces—a little misleading, but he tended to get more jobs that way. 

In the States, he worked in private security, boasting that he’d negotiated hostage releases and extortion cases. His clients, he said, included a Russian billionaire and the Mexican government. He also worked as a bodyguard in Los Angeles, including a multiyear stint with Charlie Sheen. 

Charlie Sheen: Duh. Winning!

In 2014, Gil moved his family and his security business from L.A. to Austin. Soon afterwards, he landed a job providing security at one of Austin’s biggest car dealerships: Charles Maund Toyota. 

Gil was just supposed to prevent run-of-the-mill vandalism. It didn’t require a ton of expertise. But with the resume he’d built, Gil had no problem selling himself as more than your average rent-a-cop.

I mean—people who looked at him must’ve thought, “Here’s a guy who’d spent time in the Israeli special forces.” He was built like a bodybuilder, with a neck as wide as his shaved head, and protected a Hollywood celebrity who said he had tiger’s blood running through his veins.

So when Erik Maund had a problem, he knew just the guy to go to for help. Turns out, there was also a lot he didn’t know about Gil Peled. 

I’m Katy Vine, and this is The Problem With Erik, an original podcast created by Texas Monthly and Ana Worrel. This is episode three: “The Fixer.”

The private-security industry in the United States is lucrative, and it’s booming. By some estimates, it was worth about $48 billion in 2023, and has grown by $8 billion in the past decade. 

And private security covers a wide range of jobs. Some security professionals investigate internal corporate theft or industrial espionage, like if an employee is preparing to reveal, say, the secret recipe for Dr Pepper. 

Some are security guards who stand by a door all day, checking badges. Some are private eyes who investigate marital affairs, snapping pictures of the guilty parties leaving a hotel together. And some are bodyguards for the rich and famous. 

In the early 2010s, Gil Peled was one of those bodyguards, for none other than Charlie Sheen. It was a tumultuous time for Charlie—and for the people who worked for him. 

TMZ voice-over: There’s a drunken, cursing Charlie Sheen getting thrown out of a bar in a headlock. Or as he calls it, Saturday. 

We reached out to Charlie Sheen to talk about Gil. His team politely declined, but Charlie’s former personal assistant Steve Han, who worked closely with Gil, was open to talking. Steve wasn’t Gil’s biggest fan. 

Steve Han: He made me cry one time on an airplane, and—

Katy Vine: Gil did?

Steve Han: Yeah.

Katy Vine: What happened?

Steve Han: I think he was just being mean to me.

Steve was a paparazzo before he became Charlie Sheen’s personal photographer, and eventually his assistant. He thinks Charlie just liked having him around. 

In 2011, Charlie was in the news a lot, and Steve still remembers the night they realized they needed more security.

Steve Han: Just one night we were hanging out in the back—backyard—and this guy walks up. Nobody really knows who he is, and it turns out that he was just a random fan that drove from Kansas or something to come hang out with Charlie, and he snuck in the gates and just kind of appeared in the backyard with all of us.

The very next day, Gil was hired. Right away, though, it was hard for Steve to take him seriously. 

Steve Han: He was bald, like, he BIC’d his head, and he had gigantic muscles. He would wear sunglasses, and he would basically look like the Secret Service on casual Friday. 

But Gil did repel unwanted guests, and eventually he hired a handful of other guards to work under him. Steve just thought his methods were a little excessive. They’d speak into their shirts like Secret Service operatives. They’d speak Hebrew in case anyone was tapping their signal. 

Steve Han: I mean, it was smart, it was good, but was it necessary? I don’t think anyone’s eavesdropping on them to figure out what the next move for Charlie Sheen would be. Gil played the role of bodyguard protecting his client very seriously, but it’s like, “Who’s he protecting him from?” Like, a soccer mom that just wants a photo? It seemed like having SEAL Team Six doing the job that the Girl Scouts could have done.

Katy Vine: Yeah. Did Charlie ever think that Gil was scamming him, basically? Was either playing up threats or fabricating extortion attempts—anything like that just to make himself indispensable?

Steve Han: Charlie was more pliable at that time. It was probably easier for Gil to get what he wants during that time.

Katy Vine: Because it was just a really vulnerable time for Charlie, you mean?

Steve Han: [Laughs] Yeah.

Gil worked for Charlie Sheen for three years, until 2014. Then, according to court testimony, Charlie took some advice from his fiancée, who didn’t like Gil, and let him go.

Looking for a fresh start, Gil and his family moved to Austin, where a few relatives lived. He and his wife, Jana, raised their two young sons in a suburb called Lakeway. Jana opened a hair salon, and Gil went looking for new opportunities. 

John: I don’t remember the exact year, but it must’ve been around 2016 or ’17.

This is a law enforcement officer who got to know Gil in Lakeway. We’ll call him John. He asked us not to use his real name because he doesn’t want to be associated with Gil anymore. 

John: I was at a restaurant, meeting a friend for dinner, and saw one of our city maintenance guys there. And anyway, chatting it up with him, and he says he was there for some big event with all his friends from California, and one of those friends was Gil. 

I talked to him a little bit. He was in the military in Israel and I said, “Oh, yeah, I was Army,” and we hit it off. And I think it was a good year, or maybe two, after that, we ran into each other at a day care when I was dropping my boys off, and he was dropping one of his off. And my understanding was he still had a security company out in California, but that he was looking to try to replicate the business he had in California here, and he said he was a bodyguard for some celebrities. And, my whole thing was like, “Well, it’s going to be a little tough. There’s not a whole lot of celebrity-protection jobs in Austin, as compared to Hollywood, but who knows?”

John didn’t see much potential for Gil’s security firm in the area at first. That changed, though, in November 2017.

CNN anchor: Welcome back; we continue to follow breaking news out of Texas. Multiple people have been shot at a church in Sutherland Springs, located east of San Antonio. 

That’s when a gunman killed 26 people in a church in Sutherland Springs. It was the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history. 

John: And then Sutherland Springs happened, and he reached out to me, and he was like, “You know, man? With your experience, you could run the investigation side of it.” Because I was teaching active shooting at the time, active-shooter preparedness and all that.

And so everything kind of lined up, and I started entertaining the idea of joining forces with him. I had no hesitation. My contacts with him were always professional; he was a likable guy.

To John, Gil seemed like a disciplined and accomplished family man. 

John: You know, observed his family dynamic, and saw him as a father in action, so there was nothing to give any red flags or anything like that. I assumed that he had a really good business head on his shoulders. His wife and him are very successful. I know she has her own salon, and he had his own company out in California. And they really did have a nice lifestyle, and that was very attractive. I’ve got almost thirty years as a cop, and I don’t know that I’ll ever have a house as big as them. Not that I want it, but the financial freedom part of it was pretty attractive.

It was attractive enough that, eventually, John agreed to join forces with Gil and help him expand his business in Texas.  

John: He sent me pictures of some office he leased out, and started having walls painted, and logos. And I was like, “Man, this is really going to happen.”

Except John started to have mixed feelings about their business model. He did feel that shooter training was valuable. But, at the same time, he didn’t want to rush to make money off of communities that had just been victims of tragedy.

John: There was something really ambulance-chasing about that—that kind of feeling about that type of business for me. He was the guy that would say, “It doesn’t matter how you feel about it; there’s a money-making opportunity off this.” But my whole thing was like, “I don’t want to be running to these churches or these schools after a shooting.” It was just very sleazy.

The job also required more availability on short notice than John was able to give. And so, before they even really got started, he told Gil he was going to have to part ways. 

John: And he was cool about it. He was like, “Yeah, no problem.”

Gil wasn’t finding a ton of security work in Austin, but luckily, around that time, he caught a break. Charles Maund Toyota had experienced a rash of break-ins, and the management hired Gil to help put a stop to them. Gil went to work, providing physical security and making sure executives at the dealership knew all about his skills and experience. 

He had no choice but to wow them—he needed the money. Though John had been impressed with Gil’s house and his lifestyle, things weren’t all they appeared to be. Gil’s security business was, predictably, doing worse in Texas. And by March 2020, his financial situation was dire. He had not one but two businesses to worry about. His own business account was overdrawn, and his wife was concerned about how COVID would affect her salon. He was facing home foreclosure, and according to court testimony, he had just eleven dollars in his bank account. 

But then, an opportunity just fell into his lap. Erik Maund, a partner at a huge car dealership, needed his help. And Gil was not in a position to say no. So Gil met Erik at the dealership, and they discussed what to do about Erik’s text. 

Here’s federal prosecutor Rob McGuire.

Rob McGuire: The first thing for these men to have to figure out is who was extorting them, because the text didn’t say who it was. Erik Maund didn’t know Layla Love’s real name. So that was the first thing they kind of had to figure out.

Right away, Gil decided they needed to enlist someone else.  

Rob McGuire: Gilad Peled, in turn, then hired another security consultant named Chad Brockway, who essentially works with and for a company that gathers information about individuals that’s accessible from public sources, on the internet, social media, those kinds of things.

Chad Brockway: Yeah, so . . . I knew Gil from my brother. 

This is Chad Brockway. 

Chad Brockway: I had met him a couple times, just through visiting my brother in Austin, Texas. Gil would come over to the house. We’d go to coffee; Gil would show up. Always seemed like a nice guy, no concerns or issues, anything like that.

Chad had served in the Marine Corps and worked with the Department of Defense. When Gil reached out, Chad was working at a private security company whose focus was protecting their clients with, as their website says, “artificial intelligence, machine learning, military grade analytics, and cyber intelligence techniques.” 

Their clients are high-profile names we’d all recognize: pop stars, professional athletes, actors—people who get harassed, stalked, and, sometimes, blackmailed.

Chad Brockway: I remember that night, Gil called me at home on my cellphone and started explaining a client requirement that he had, which, again, was normal for the company he ran and the services he provided. But essentially, at the time, he had said that he had been retained by a family who believed that their daughter was possibly a victim of human trafficking.

Just to be clear: Chad’s saying that when Gil asked him to figure out Layla Love’s real name, he didn’t say it was related to an extortion threat. He said it was because she was missing. 

Chad Brockway: In that same conversation, he was like, “All right, just so you know, the family does not have a lot of money. What can you do for me on pricing? Just to—we want to help them.” Our CEO is always, “If we can help someone, we’re going to help them.” I told him, “No problem. We’ll take care of it.” I think we discounted those services to about a quarter of the normal price.

Gil was asking for a discount on this work so he could maximize his own profits with Erik. Of course, Chad didn’t know this, and he didn’t question Gil. He didn’t have any reason to. So he got started. 

Chad Brockway: All we were provided at the time was a camera picture of a printed-out escort page. And along with that, he also sent me a phone number and said, “We think this phone number is involved. Can you help us see if there’s anything regarding her and this phone number?” So, yeah, we absolutely said we would. I got ahold of one of my intelligence analysts, and we started working on it that night.

We did some language-pattern analysis, and we were able to identify other escort pages that she was also utilizing. Then, within that, someone had referenced her by her real name in the comments. In going through her social media, we identified her—what we would normally refer to as “estranged boyfriend,” on-again, off-again boyfriend. In her social media, she made several references to domestic abuse: the police arresting him; her charging him with domestic abuse; that he had killed her dog, thrown it in traffic in front of a car; or stuff like that. So when we started putting together this intelligence report, the very first thing we said was, “If she is missing, you need to make the police aware of this guy immediately, because from everything we’re able to identify, this would be my first start in trying to find this supposed missing female.”

In missing persons cases, because the clients are usually distressed and anxious, Chad typically talks with them directly. But he noticed something unusual about the way Gil was conducting business.

Chad Brockway: I mean, Gil wanted to control the flow of everything. Normally, I would almost always speak directly with the clients—at least a couple times, right, to have that initial connection, to explain what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it, make sure they understand, see if they have any questions. In this particular case, Gil wanted to handle all the conversations, all the connections. Everything would go from me to Gil to his end client, from his end client to Gil and back to me.

Maybe Gil wanted to control the narrative because he needed to keep up the lie that Holly was missing. Or maybe it was because he desperately needed to impress Erik, to be seen as the ultimate fixer. Either way, in Erik, Gil must have seen a compromised rich man who could offer unlimited work. And work is exactly what Gil needed. So he had to look indispensable from here on out. 

Gil relayed Chad’s information about Holly and Bill back to Erik and moved on to the next phase of the project: making sure the texting stopped as soon as possible. 

Perhaps, Gil suggested, someone could approach Bill and Holly in Nashville and negotiate with them, have a conversation. The encounter would be totally aboveboard: nothing violent, nothing illegal. It would mostly require more surveillance.

This would, of course, cost more money: Gil figured $60,000 for the operation, plus the $15,000 he was already getting paid—chump change for Erik, who told him to go ahead. 

Ground surveillance was not Gil Peled’s area of expertise, so he decided he’d need to put together a team. He wanted “the best money can buy,” as he later said—a group he didn’t have to “second-guess or micromanage.” An A-Team.

Gil turned to a friend in Austin named Bryon Brockway. Bryon was Chad’s brother. They both worked in private security, but since they were busy, they didn’t always talk about what they were working on. It was weeks before Chad would learn that this was never a missing persons case. 

Bryon was a slim guy in his mid-forties, fit like a rock climber or a runner, with a bearded face anchored by alert, perfectly almond-shaped eyes. 

He served in the Marines for nine years, including four years conducting force reconnaissance—special-ops intelligence-gathering work behind enemy lines that sounds straight out of Mission Impossible. Key words on his LinkedIn include “parachute,” “submarine,” and “rappel.” His voicemail greeting said he couldn’t answer because, quote, “I’m currently taking over the world right now.” 

Bryon’s call sign—which is kind of like a military nickname—was “Ink,” because he was a tattoo artist.  

Chad Brockway: He’s probably tattooed hundreds and hundreds of Special Forces, GRS guys all over the world. So that’s how he got his call sign.

Here’s a video of Bryon talking about it on his LinkedIn. 

Bryon Brockway (in video): I recall this one time, tattooing one of our boys named Zeeb, still just at the end of the war. I started putting in a few lines, got some shading going. All of a sudden we started taking indirect fire, IDF. Siren goes off, and we look at each other like, “Yep, tattoo’s canceled for now. We’ll continue later.”

As Bryon got older, he started to take on a more managerial role in his private security jobs. 

Chad Brockway: I would say that the standard process of aging in general, you know—he started becoming a little bit more calm, a little bit slower, a little bit more, “I don’t want to be out in the field doing the cool-guy stuff anymore. I want to be more of the coordinator, and that type of function.”

And Bryon was a good coordinator, because he knew everybody. He could reach out to his network and find guys who were home from deployment, and hire them for contract security jobs. 

Which is why he was the perfect man to stay in Texas and remotely manage the surveillance in Nashville. 

Bryon’s first job was to hire two guys to be on the ground. Each one would get a few thousand bucks, for a job expected to take around three days. All they had to do was keep tabs on Bill and Holly. 

His first hire was Adam Richard Carey, a.k.a. ARCo. 

Adam Carey was 29 years old, six foot two, and lanky, with a dirty blond buzz cut and hollowed-out cheeks. He spent eight years in the Marines, including time as a special forces sniper. When Bryon contacted him, he was working as a firearms instructor and dealer in North Carolina. 

Bryon looked out for Adam. In Adam, he saw a kid who was eager for action, looking for a mentor. 

Next, Bryon hired a retired Army Ranger, who we’ll call Red. That’s not what anyone calls him, but the government has asked us not to identify him, for his protection. 

In 2018, Red was working for the government as a contract security officer in what the Army calls “austere environments”—places with little access to clean water and electricity. 

Red was 37, bearded and built like an ox, with a ruddy complexion. Red was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan six times, where he’d been (in his words) “blown up” by IEDs a few times and somehow walked away. 

Bryon reached out to Red through a mutual friend. 

And this was Gil’s A-Team. Bryon Brockway, Adam Carey, and Red. Their mission? Figure out who was blackmailing Erik and get them to stop.  

Here’s federal prosecutor Brooke Farzad.

Brooke Farzad: So the way the surveillance members described the job, it was to go to Nashville to conduct surveillance on this woman, Holly—they had her information, and they knew she had a boyfriend—and to conduct surveillance on the two of them: find out if they were living together; if they seemed to be in on this together, or whether it was the boyfriend. That was really the initial job description.