Wanna-be buyers of ‘hypercars’ say Longmont lawyer stole millions

“Good morning Guillaume, this is Brandon Belt,” the first baseman for the San Francisco Giants texted to Guillaume Chabin, the manager of Mercedes-Benz’s “hypercar” division.

It was Oct. 18, 2021, and Belt needed help. A fire at his home had torched some documents, including his contract to buy a custom Mercedes-AMG Project One for $2.5 million.

“We will prepare the documents and forward them to you,” Chabin texted back soon after.

But something was amiss. The man on the other end of the text chain was not Brandon Belt but Traveon Rogers, a fraudster now behind bars in Texas. Rogers then altered Belt’s contract, replacing the player’s name with his own and Belt’s company with Rogers’ company, to make it appear as if Rogers had hypercar build slots to sell, according to a federal search warrant.

Luxury European automakers produce only a few hundred hypercars per year and offer the right to buy a custom car, known as a build slot, to a select clientele of celebrities and athletes. Those chosen few sometimes sell their build slots to less famous rich people for a premium.

Soon after acquiring and altering Belt’s contract, Rogers reached out to a former Formula 1 race car driver known only as Victim 2 in a 2022 affidavit written by Special Agent Luther Selby of Homeland Security Investigations. The racer saw a familiar name on the purchase paperwork for a $2.6 million AMG Project One build slot: Scott Oliver of Longmont.

The Formula 1 driver had previously paid Oliver, a lawyer, to help him sell a Ferrari 599 GTO, and that transaction had gone off without a hitch. But something apparently felt off this time.

“Victim 2 told Oliver that he believed Rogers was a fraud,” according to Selby. “Oliver stated he did feel something was unusual about Rogers. … However, Oliver told him it is not his business to find out if Rogers is real or not. Victim 2 told Oliver what he was doing was wrong.”

While Victim 2 took a pass on the hypercar offer — as did an Indy car driver known as Victim 1 — because of his suspicions about Rogers, Michael Mente did not. In late 2021, the wealthy founder and CEO of Revolve, an online fashion retailer, was put in touch with Oliver, who said he represented a French car dealer, Jean-Pierre M.R. Clement, who could sell Mente a built slot.

Mente paid $5.4 million for a car he never received, according to a lawsuit he has filed against Rogers, Oliver and Oliver Law, his sole proprietorship firm. Oliver denies wrongdoing.

“I was retained by Mr. Rogers to review documents and help close what I believed to be a legitimate business deal,” Oliver wrote in an affidavit last year. “At the time Mr. Rogers contacted me, he represented himself to be working with Jean-Pierre M.R. Clement. It was only after this (lawsuit) arose that I came to learn that … Clement was in fact Mr. Rogers.

“I did not engage in this deal under any false pretenses. I did not know of the alleged fraudulent scheme and did not knowingly participate,” Oliver wrote, adding that he had spoken to Selby, the special agent. “I was told that I am not the target of a criminal investigation and I have not been charged.”

But a second lawsuit filed last month raises some doubts about those innocence claims.