The Florida Bar v Invictus

kick out of. Today's episode is another one that isn't quite in the classic We're Little Guy's format, but it is about a guy a lot of you have been asking me about. Look, it's the end of the year. It's dark at four in the afternoon, but it's too cold to convince my dogs to go for a walk with me. Back when I had an office job, I could get away with pretending to look busy at my desk for the last week or so before any major holiday.

The problem with the job I have now is that you guys would definitely notice if I spent the week goofing off online and then quickly switching to a big spreadsheet on my monitor if somebody walked by. It's okay, though, I like you guys a lot more than I liked anybody who ever looked over my shoulder at an office, so I'll do my best for you. I had planned on doing a sort of reverse weird little guy thing

for the holidays. You know, I was gonna write an episode about a guy who is definitely a little odd, but like in a good way. But you know by now that I've never not once in my life sat down and written the thing I had in mind before I started. So that's not what this is. I didn't even start working on that. I'm not bound to this seasonal cycle. I can tell you a nice story about a different kind of guy some other time. We can

have moments of joy anytime of year. Instead, today I'm going to keep my promise from last week and tell you a little bit more about the other man who lost his job the same day Tyler Dikes did. Back in October. Last week we were talking about Tyler Dikes. He's running for Congress in South Carolina, hoping to win

the seat Nancy Mace's leaving. But before that, he was one of the nearly sixteen hundred people who received a presidential pardon for their actions on January sixth, twenty twenty one, and before that will it was mostly Nazi stuff, And in last week's episode, I opened with a funny little synchronicity. Tyler Diykes's campaign launched shortly after he tweeted on October twenty second that he'd just been fired from another job.

That was something that keeps happening to him because people won't stop calling him a Nazi, due in part to all the times he's been photographed in public giving Nazi salutes. And that same day, October twenty second, the Florida Supreme Court filed an order giving Augustus soul and Victus thirty days to offload all of his clients before his license

to practice law was suspended. But by the time I finished picking apart the congressional candidate's conspiracy theory podcast appearances, I had run out of time and we never got to the second guy. And I paired those two seemingly unconnected stories because they started in the same place. They're both still living with the consequences of a trip they

took to Charlottesville in August of twenty seventeen. It might seem like a strange preoccupation to you listener, how often a story that's winding its way in and out of side stories. We'll wind up here. I'm sure you've noticed comes up a lot, even if it's only in passing. Almost every one of these stories has some thread that connects it to Charlottesville, something that connects it to the Unite the Right rally here in August of twenty seventeen.

If you hadn't noticed it before, I'm sure you will now. It's always there. Gerald Drake, the Confederate reenactor who went to prison for threatening his former friends. He got the idea to pretend the bomb threats were from Antifa because he saw pictures of protesters in Black Bloc on the news after Unite the Right. Those fake grassroots marchigainst. Sharia rallies were organized by many of the same men who were planning the Unite the Right rally later that same summer.

The featured speaker at the American Freedom Party conference earlier this year were both men who had led their respective organizations on the ground here in Charlottesville in twenty seventeen. At a twenty eighteen Brightbart News town hall, the man asking Anne Coulter about white genocide was the leader of a group that organized Unite the right over and over and over again. In all of these seemingly unrelated places and times. These stories are all connected, and it's not

a coincidence. Part of that, to be fair, is that I live here. My own interest in figuring out how someone ends up marching in the streets at a Nazi rally started here. It was these guys in particular that sparked my interest in understanding the concept of the weird little guy as I write about them today. I have spent years reconstructing those events and trying to understand the

men who marched here. That then led to a need to understand the groups they came with, which led to a need to understand where those groups came from and what preceded them. And it's been one long rabbit hole that I haven't dug myself back out of for more than eight years. So that's definitely part of why it comes up so often. It is what I know best. But truthfully, everything is connected, and that rally in twenty seventeen is a central node. It comes up all the

time because everyone was there. It was the largest and most violent public gathering of white supremacists in the United States in decades. It was a pivotal moment in our collective understanding of political violence, and it didn't come out of nowhere. Every story I write about the present has a very clear relationship to that day, because the guy was probably there. But even in stories about the distant past, it's there, like the ghost of Nazi rallies yet to come.

Just recently, I spent two months writing about the men whose lives intersected with the death of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Those stories mostly took place in the nineteen sixties, but that weekend in August fifty years later kept Elboyan's way into the story. That kind of white power march owed quite a bit to Rockwell, just in terms of the ideological lineage of that kind of event, but it's more than that. Some of his old friends

were actually there. Decades after Rockwell's death, the man who still keeps the Nazis' ashes in a white urn on a swastika shrine drove halfway across the country to be here, and he'd told reporters that Rockwell would have been pleased to see it. So while it is a funny coincidence that Tyler Diykes and Augustus Invictus both became unemployable on October twenty second, twenty twenty five. It's not a coincidence that they both attended the rally in twenty seventeen and

back in twenty seventeen. Tyler Dykes was just part of the crowd. He was some teenage nobody. Augustus Invictus, on the other hand, was here as a headline speaker. He had been part of the core group of organizers and was at the time a member of a group called the Fraternal Order of Alt Knights, which was a short lived subset of proud boys who were particularly committed to

engaging in violence. And the night before the main event to take place, they were both in the crowd lining up for the tiki torch march at the University of Virginia. There were hundreds of them there that night, torches in hand, chanting as they marched through the university grounds and then encircled a small group of counter protesters at the base of the Thomas Jefferson Statue. But I've told you that

part of the story before. This is an update. Of the hundreds of torch marchers, only twelve were ever charged under the Virginia law that makes intimidating someone with a burning object of felony. Tyler Dykes and Augustus and Vici were two of those unlucky twelve. Of those twelve, five pleaded guilty without taking it to trial. Tyler Dykes, of course, along with Colton Fears and his brother William Fears, and a pair of gigantic redheads from Texas named Billy Williams

and will Smith. Another four took plea agreements that reduced their charge to misdemeanor disorderly conduct, Ryan Roy, Jamie Troutman, Dallas, Medina, and Patriot Front founder Thomas Rousseau. One of the twelve got lucky. Jacob Dix took his chances at trial, and the out of town's special prosecutor handling his case fumbled it so badly that jurors who watched video footage of the crime couldn't reach a verdict and it ended in a mistrial. Augustus and Victus and a former marine named

Vassilios Pistols were both convicted at trial. And I think I will come back to some of these cases down the road, but today we're just talking about Invictus. As far as trials go, this one was as close to a slam dunk as I've ever seen. The charge requires that the defendant burned an object, that they did it in a public place, that their intent was to intimidate someone, and that the way they went about it would make

a reasonable person afraid of death or bodily injury. In this case, the defendant himself provided the best piece of evidence, a thirty minute video that he live streamed from his phone during the march.

their route, but the campus is pretty empty. But as the march reaches the top of the stairs at the rotunda and begins to walk back down the steps into the plaza on the other side, the marchers know they aren't alone anymore.

He was never charged for this night, but he would eventually serve a few years in prison for the violent assault he committed the next morning. And as the video continues, the marchers fill the little plaza. You can see the crowd consciously and intentionally form a ring around the statue, around the people who are now trapped at its base. It wasn't an accident, it wasn't organic it was the plan. You can hear Richard Spencer's bodyguard directing the marchers standing right next to Invictus.

ratifying the actions and the intent after the fact by saying you have no regrets, and you do it again. Testimony from one of those trapped counter protesters who says he feared for his life that night. It's pretty clear cut, and the jury thought so too. Augustus Invictus was convicted by a jury on that felony charge in Virginia in October of twenty twenty four. Coincidentally, it was the same week that Tyler Dykes reported to federal prison to begin

serving his sentence for his January sixth conviction. But Augustus and Victus did not report to jail. He didn't have to. He had been out on bond since his arrest in the summer of twenty twenty three, and he was allowed to return home again after his conviction in January of twenty twenty The judge sentenced him to five years, but suspended the majority of that time, ordering him to serve just nine months and two weeks in the local jail. But again, he didn't go to jail. He went home.

It's not that unusual to allow a defendant to delay their report date. It gives them a little bit of time to get their affairs in order. You don't get remanded directly into custody in most cases if you're out

on bond already at the time of sentencing. There's not much harm in letting you go home that day, and his attorney made it very clear from the moment the verdict was in that they planned to appeal, so it was no surprise when they asked for an appeal bond, which the judge granted, allowing him to continue to kick out that report date while he was appealing his conviction.

So all year checked in from time to time. I just added it to my mental list of dozens of other ongoing little matters that I check in on when I'm sitting at my computer. The sentencing order was finally entered in March, followed by the defense filings for their appeal to the State Court of Appeals, and he remained out on bond, and he kept practicing law. Despite rules governing the practice of law in Florida that specify no uncertain terms that suspension from the bar is automatic and

immediate following a felony conviction, it didn't happen. The months dragged on. The appellate courts moved pretty slowly, but there was no indication that the Florida Bar intended to enforce their own rules. He continued practicing law for over a year after his conviction at trial. Again, the rules regulating the Florida Bar are remarkably straightforward on this subject, which isn't always a given from a rule book written by lawyers.

If a lawyer in Florida is convicted of a felony, they are suspended from the bar immediately and automatically, even if they're appealing. The Conviction Rule three to seven point two, sub Section J says the suspension will remain in effect during any appeal of the determination or judgment of guilt of a felony offense in the criminal proceeding. But I guess someone of the bar was feeling generous because he was still practicing law. Just weeks after his own felony conviction.

He was in federal court at the sentencing hearing of one of his clients, a January sixth defendant named Anna Letchnowski. Based on available records, it's not clear how much of her forty five day sentence she ever served. The President's pardons came not long after this. Augustus and Victus worked on Lichnowski's case as co counsul with his own lawyer. That's a confusing arrangement. Let me explain. She was indicted on January sixth charges in the summer of twenty twenty three,

not long after Augustus. In Victus's own arrest here in Virginia. He then hired a Maryland attorney named Terrell Roberts to work on his criminal case, and a few weeks later

they were both hired by Miss Lichnowski in her case. Now, Invictus isn't a member of the bar in DC Federal Court, and he hadn't shown any particular interest in j six cases before this, but it wasn't Terrell roberts first January sixth case, And given Invictus's apparently pretty dire financial situation, it kind of looks like he may have been paying his own lawyer by providing legal assistance on one of his other cases. But that's just me spitballing. I can't

prove that. In the two years between his arrest and June of twenty twenty three and his suspension from the bar in October of twenty twenty five, he had a small but steady case load. Aside from the January sixth cases he worked with his own lawyer, he had a handful of clients with domestic violence charges, a few divorce cases, a dui case, pretty typical stuff. Perhaps there were others, but I don't have access to any fancy legal databases.

I just love wasting my own time enough that I checked in with half the county court clerks in the state of Florida, according to statements he offered the court here. Some of those clients were referred to him through his volunteer work with his church. Obviously I couldn't tell you which case, as he worked pro bono, but it does seem to be true that at least some of these clients he's represented in the last two years were unconnected

to white nationalist political causes, and that's noteworthy. I mean, today isn't the day we get all the way into it? Do you have my word? I'll cover the whole story eventually, but his career as an attorney has been a real roller coaster. After graduating from law school in twenty eleven, he passed the bar in several states in twenty twelve and was eventually admitted to practice in Massachusetts, Illinois, New York,

and Florida. He was just shy of thirty, a proud father of four married and settling in as a defense attorney at his father's law firm outside of Orlando. By twenty thirteen, he was divorced. That spring, he dropped all of his clients and quit his job at his dad's law. He sent a letter to some of his former law school classmates announcing that he was a powerful, successful genius, but he'd grown bored of society and was going to

leave it behind. And that's not an exaggeration. So many people got this letter, and the letter was so fucking weird that it was published in full and roundly mocked. In an article by Elie Mastahl on the blog Above the Law, the letter is addressed to the gray world of man. He's boastful, He's accomplished everything a man could dream of. He's better than you, and he wants you to know that. It reads, in part, witness Yee, the

glory of my life. At twenty nine years of age, I have four children, each of whom should be the envy of every parent in the world. I have attained a baccalaureate degree in philosophy with honorsained a doctorate in law cum laude. I have acquired licenses in the profession of law in the states of New York, Illinois, and Florida. I am scheduled to acquire two more such licenses in North Carolina and Massachusetts. I am editor in chief of

a poetry journal. I run an independent publishing company. I have opened my own law office in downtown Orlando. I am an MBA candidate, and I have accomplished a few other things that will remain off the record for now. I am of genius, intellect and cultured, well educated and creative, well mannered and refined. I am God's gift to humankind where the English language is concerned. I also happen to have a basic knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, and Italian.

I am musical and artistic. I am athletic and possessed of militant self discipline. I am many other things. I have a Cadillac and a poodle, multiple computers, and a personal library. I live in an apartment downtown right across the street from the courthouse. I have been to Paris and Vancouver, to Cairo and Dubrovnik, to Mexico City and Syracusa. I dress better than all of you, pronounce my words perfectly, and have a winning professional handshake. I am everything you

ever wanted to be. I mean, can you argue with that? A Cadillac and a poodle and an apartment. But he's sick of it. He's so sick of this world, and the world makes him sick. He has nothing but contempt for it. He renounces his law license, his diplomas, his Catholicism, his citizenship, and all of his material possessions. He wants none of it. He's walking away, and he ends the letter with this, hear, ye, my final words in peacetime. I have prophesied for years that I was born for

a great war. If I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself. Mark well, that day is fast coming upon you. On the new moon of May, I shall disappear into the wilderness. I will return bearing revolution, or I will not return at all. War be unto the ends of the earth. Augustus Stulenvictus or Land of Florida, USA, twentieth of April twenty thirteen. Some of the people who got this letter emailed it to a funny blog about news in the

legal profession, but some of them called the FBI. According to his self published memoir about this time in his life. He then drove out to the mountains and Carolina wrote a goodbye letter to his family, which he left in his car, hoping whoever found the abandoned vehicle would drop it into a mailbox for him. He then spent several months hitchhiking across the country before returning home and resuming

the life he'd just so dramatically renounced. He went back to being a lawyer from twenty fourteen until twenty seventeen, and then he publicly announced that he was retiring from law to focus on politics. And by politics he meant both his run for US Senate as well as a punishing schedule of headlining white supremacist rallies all over the country. A year later, though, in twenty eighteen, he announced that he was unretiring from law to focus on taking clients

he referred to as political dissidents. He wanted to be a movement lawyer, and he tried. He took on a couple of cases and he'd lost them all, but he made a good public show of being the hard rights go to guy for legal advice. He ghost wrote lawsuits for Nazis who were angry at the city of Charlottesville.

He sent a cease and desist letter to a journalist on behalf of members of Adam Waffen, and he founded a nonprofit that solicited donations for members of the Rise Above movement who faced federal charges for beating counter protesters at several rallies in twenty seventeen, And like I said, I don't think you won a single case. By twenty twenty, he was dealing with his own problems. His father was

arrested for sex trafficking. He was arrested for domestic violence, although the jury could not convict him at trial because the victim failed to appear. I think of him primarily as a movement lawyer, but that was really such a

brief period of his life. Financial affidavits he filed in various cases of his own during this time period show he was reporting just one thousand dollars a month in income from his law office, And after twenty twenty, a surprising number of the cases I can find him working on are just divorce and domestic violence cases against guys.

We need more time for discovery. Both parties are comfortable extending the deadline. And then, almost as an afterthought, he adds quote respondent's counsel was arrested and detained on false charges in relation to a Virginia political rally and is currently an Orange County awaiting extradition to Virginia. Respondent's counsel

anticipates being released by the end of July. That motion was granted, and he was indeed out on bond by the end of July twenty twenty three, but not before he missed a hearing in a domestic violence case against one of his other clients. That particular client must not have been too upset that his lawyer didn't show him to court, because that man, after being convicted of strangulation and witness tampering, hired Augustus and Victus again, this time

to represent him in a movement case. Jason Brown was one of four members of the anti Semitic group, the Goham Defense League, who were arrested for hanging swastika banners from a highway overpass near Orlando. One of those four defendants, Amanda Rains, cut her losses and pled guilty. The the other three are still hoping to depose Governor Ron DeSantis as part of their case. They feel the state of

Florida is being unconstitutionally unfair to Nazis. Aside from those Goham Defense League cases, though, he wasn't really trying to bolster his reputation as a movement lawyer by taking on high profile white rights cases anymore. Being a movement lawyer got him a lot of attention, but you can't pay your rent if you only take movement cases. And based on a brief suspension of his driver's license, he was getting behind on child support. Shortly after his arrest, he

was working on one other white civil rights case. He had a client who felt he'd been fired from his job as a baggage handler for American Airlines. Simply for being white. But in Victus messed up the paperwork and missed a deadline to correct it the appeal, so it was dismissed a technicality, I guess, But I think even if he'd filed the paperwork correctly, the Eleventh Circuit would

not have ruled in their favor. I mean, first of all, the client hadn't sought the proper administrative remedy through his union and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But even if you set all of that aside, even if everything had been done correctly procedurally, I think the whole situation had less to do with anti white racism and more to do with the fact that you can't refer to your black coworker using the N word in the work group chat.

So that case was dismissed. And these swastika banner cases were moving pretty slowly and Augustus and Victus seemed mostly

focused on his own problems. There was an ongoing battle in the court with his second ex wife, a custody battle in New Jersey with a different woman, his own lawsuit against various Florida law enforcement agencies alleging a conspiracy against him, his own lawsuit against that woman in New Jersey, his lawsuit against a different woman that he had a sexual relationship with during his marriage, His attempts to get his computer back from a police evidence locker because he

was using it in the living room at his dad's house when that house got raided the day his father was arrested for sex trafficking. I mean, he had a lot going on. Even one of those divorce cases he was working on was a little bit personal. He took great offense when opposing counsel accused him of having a romantic relationship with his client, but if you read the

filings closely, he doesn't actually deny it. But he also doesn't mention that in addition to being her divorce lawyer, he features prominently in her upcoming wedding as the groom. So he's busy focusing on his own problems, which is why I was so surprised to see his name on a brand new lawsuit filed in June of twenty twenty five. That lawsuit was the subject of an episode of this

show back in June. The complaint is, I mean, you can listen to the episode, but this short version is it is consistent with the kinds of legal work I've seen from him in the past. Right, he doesn't win cases, But in Enrique Tario, Ethan Norden, Zachary Real, Dominic Pozzola, and Joe Biggs want the United States government to pay the Proud Boys one hundred million dollars as an apology for being so mean to them about the whole sedition thing.

It's a stupid lawsuit, but we live in stupid times, so there is a non zero chance that the government will simply nod and agree to a settlement that puts millions of dollars into the hands of the leadership of an extremist organization. The betting odds are on that specifically, but I imagine the kind of cut of that settlement

their lawyer would get made it a pretty attractive gamble. Unfortunately, for Augustus and Victus, he'll never see a dime of any potential payout to the Proud Boys, at least, not anything official, nothing on the books as far as attorney's fees.

He was initially removed from the case back in June when the judge noticed that he wasn't allowed to practice in the federal court after his conviction, but He was inexplicably able to get himself readmitted to the bar in the Middle District of Florida a month later, but that victory was short lived. He was finally formally suspended from practicing in the state of Florida in October, and he was forced to withdraw representation from all of his active cases,

including this one. The Florida bar finally made their move in October after the Virginia Court of Appeals dismissed his appeal in his criminal case. I didn't bother asking the State Court of Appeals for a copy because I have a pretty good idea what arguments they intended to use on appeal based on the hours and hours of rambling

about what I sat through before the trial. I'm curious, though, how the appellate judge would have responded to the powerful argument that a lit torch is not a burning object. I wonder if they planned to put on their PowerPoint presentation about transitive verbs again. I found it tremendously unconvincing in pre trial hearings, but unfortunately for every one, the

appeal wasn't even heard. The Virginia Court of Appeals did not end up weighing in on whether or not a wall of flames is free speech under the First Amendment, or whether something that is on fire can be legally said to be burning. Hearings on this matter before the trial culminated in the prosecution putting the local fire marshal on the stand to offer his expert opinion on whether something that was previously on fire could be called burnt.

The fire marshal said yes for the record, but we never did get a semi auititian, a linguist, a physicist, or a poet to weigh in under oath on the nature of fire. Ultimately, the appeal was filed improperly, something of a theme in looking at a decade of Augustus and Victus's practice of law. He and his attorney failed to get their paperwork into the court on time, which

is an automatic dismissal. A subsequent petition for rehearing was promptly denied, and there's no indication on the record that he filed a petition for rehearing on bunk or a petition to the State Supreme Court, And at this point any deadline for those filings would have passed. So if you're just looking at the State Court of Appeals case

management system online. This case is over, so I'm not sure what he might have been referring to when he told a judge in Florida last month that he still expects to prevail in his appeal sometime in the spring of twenty twenty six.

some process for appealing that decision in particular. It is unclear to me, and I did ask several practicing attorneys in Virginia and they couldn't tell me either, So I'll just keep waiting. Augustus in Victus is due back in court in Albemarle County, Virginia in February of twenty twenty six for a hearing that if there's any sanity to this process should result in the judge setting a date

for him to begin serving his sentence. Even if he does find a way to get a second bite at the Apple and the State Court of Appeals, there's no reason the County Court should continue to extend that appeal Pond, considering the appeal has been dead since October. He's lucky enough to have gotten the hearing scheduled so many months out. The court granted his request to schedule it after January ninth. He was so insistent about that, not just in January

or in February. It had to be after January ninth. And he didn't say why. I'm not sure why he wouldn't just tell the judge he couldn't afford to miss his own wedding. When he does finally begin his nine and a half month sentence, he can expect to serve about six months of it, typically, assuming he doesn't have any conduct violations. For now, at least, he's still out

on bond and he can't practice law. With the wedding just weeks away, it's probably too late to warn his wife to be that Lake Rose makes great enameled cast iron, but their stainless steel pots are really nothing special. You're just paying for the brand you should have registered for the old clad if you ask me. Then again, if you'd ask me, I probably would have advised against most

of what's going on here. With jail on the horizon and his career in shambles, Perhaps he too will pivot to politics now that he has nothing else to do, and it wouldn't actually be his first time. But I'll save the story of his Senate campaign for another day. His suspension from the bar was an update I couldn't let pass us by without telling you about it affects that proud boy lawsuit that there was a whole episode about. But this is just a tiny peek into the life

of a very weird little guy. And if I don't end up writing at least a couple of episodes about him, I'll have wasted all those hours I spent tracking down a physical copy of the novel he self published under a pseudonym back when he still thought he was a very powerful wizard. Next year, I promise weird little guys to see production of Polsone Me and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me. Molly Coner. Our executive producers

are Sophie Lichtman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gaikan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard. You can email me at Ridle Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys