The British de Havilland DH-112 Venom is one of the most iconic combat jets of the Cold War, with a distinctive two-pronged tail design that stretched out far behind the main body of the aircraft and a striking red and black paint job. It also gained a reputation for handling issues at high speeds. And yet, that was the aircraft 50-year-old Marty Tibbitts flew one summer afternoon at a Wisconsin air show in July 2018.
Tibbitts, a millionaire who made his money launching call center businesses, regularly flew, and bought, historical aircraft like the Venom. He ran the World Heritage Air Museum in his home state of Michigan, which housed his collection of around a dozen planes.
Sat in the Venom’s cockpit, Tibbitts maneuvered the plane along the runway behind another aircraft. The first plane took off. About eight seconds later, two seconds sooner than he was supposed to, Tibbitts pulled the Venom’s stick back and brought his craft into the air.
Immediately something was wrong. People on the ground saw the Venom’s wings rock back and forth shortly after its sluggish takeoff, a sign that it might be caught in the wake of the first plane. One video showed the Venom started to make a shallow left turn, and the plane’s engine sound decreased and then rapidly increased. Black smoke billowed. The plane stalled. As the aircraft barely reached 200 feet, it started to descend with its nose still pointed upwards.
Tibbitts crashed into a nearby barn with another two people inside. Flames engulfed the plane and set the barn and other nearby buildings on fire too.
“We got a plane down!” a man yelled in a 911 call. “Building’s on fire!” Tibbitts died in the crash.
A day later Tibbitts’ brother, JC, gave a statement to local media: “Our family is devastated by the loss of Marty. To say he was passionate about all things in his life—family, business and aviation would be to immensely understate the case. He died pursuing one of his passions,” it read. “Beyond his family, friends and business associates, many will miss this unique and special person.”
As news of Tibbitts’ death spread, his wife received a phone call from one of those business associates. He was crying on the other end of the line. “It can’t be true, it can’t be true,” the man said.
The man in tears on the phone was Ylli Didani, a now convicted cocaine trafficker who orchestrated massive shipments of drugs into the UK and multiple European ports. Tibbitts, it turned out, had a secret life. Without the knowledge of his family, Tibbitts worked closely with Didani to become an aspiring international drug lord. The pair commissioned the construction of an elaborate underwater drone that would be stuffed with cocaine and latch onto ships with magnets. Tibbitts was the money and brains behind the operation, funding the submarine’s design and development. In messages with Didani, he referred to himself as Tony Stark, the alter ego of the millionaire inventor and superhero Ironman. According to investigators, Didani’s cocaine trafficking business was worth tens of millions of dollars. Didani had now lost his business partner and friend.
Extensive interviews with Didani, including over the email system of the prison he is currently incarcerated in, and thousands of pages of court transcripts reviewed by 404 Media reveal the story of a millionaire who, even with his massive fortune, wanted more and more. Tibbitts wanted to pillage Egyptian tombs for artefacts, and become an ambassador to Albania. He allegedly invested in a company making flying cars, tried to source Black Hawk helicopters to sell to other countries, and arranged a massive load of cash to be flown on his private jet to buy bulk cocaine. Tibbitts, who was at one point a primary target during the investigation into the cocaine group’s operations, left a gaping question with his death: why did he do it? Why did the man who had everything lead a secret double life as an international drug kingpin?
“It was perplexing,” Detective Brandon Leach, from the Farmington Hills Police Department, who was part of a narcotics task force and one of the agents who investigated the group, later said in court.
POWERHOUSE
Tibbitts made his money in perhaps the most boring industry possible: providing back office support and a 24/7 live answering service for small businesses at the start of the millennium. An executive bio included in legal filings tried to make it sound more exciting by saying Tibbitts had years of experience “managing high-technology businesses and providing dynamic direction and oversight to start up companies and emerging technologies.” Tibbitts’ companies, Back Office Support Systems and and Clementine Live Answering Service, ultimately made him a very rich man. The Stanford graduate was invited to join the Young Presidents’ Organization, a group for successful entrepreneurs. “Business doesn’t stop,” a narrator says in one of Clementine’s promotional videos.
But in essentially every other aspect of his life, Marty was an adventurer. He invested in companies across the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, and ran his own security firm with a base in the United Arab Emirates. He got his pilot’s license, developed a deep interest in historical aircraft, and opened the air museum.
“He was just always learning something new,” Tibbitts’ wife, Belinda Tibbitts, later said in court. “He spoke like four languages and taught himself to play the banjo, and he flew all of these planes. He was just very brilliant, and he was also a good businessman.” Belinda called Tibbitts “a genius.”
In around 2008, Belinda had a personal trainer at her local gym called Donald Larson. Twice a week, Larson trained Belinda, and she introduced the trainer to her husband. Eventually Larson trained Tibbitts as well, and the pair became friends.
He saw Tibbitts was very precise on what he wanted people to know about—his eclectic and expensive tastes—and what he wanted to keep secret, such as suggestions he may have seen women other than his wife while she was out of state. He deliberately compartmentalized his life. “He hid things that he didn’t want anyone to know about,” Larson later said in court.
Larson had a checkered past, having served 18 years for cocaine possession. He also knew Didani, the drug trafficker, who used the same gym. The trio then started hanging out, and soon Didani and Tibbitts became friends, with Didani even staying over at his home. Belinda didn’t like that, she later said in court. One reason was that sometimes Tibbitts would let Didani borrow Belinda’s Porsche Cayenne SUV, put his feet up on the dash, and return it stinking of cologne.
Didani grew up with very little money. In private messages reviewed by investigators and read in court, Didani’s father reminded him of times when the family didn’t have enough money for bread. Like Tibbitts, he dabbled in all sorts of businesses. He owned a car wash in Detroit; may have owned a car dealership in Dubai; looked into the medical marijuana industry, and tried to run an ATM business. He travelled a lot, living in Europe and South America in between going to Chicago to see his sick mother. Videos appeared to show him building shelter and giving food to the needy overseas. He liked to party and wore a rainbow-faced gold Rolex.
Didani was not particularly careful with hiding the fact that he was also a drug trafficker. He later boasted to friends in text messages about moving drugs from South America, and sent his family related news articles when shipments were seized by the authorities. He was also sloppy with his security. Didani used encrypted phones to conduct his business, sometimes juggling four cellphones at once. But he often took photos of those messages with his normal iPhone, which uploaded backups of those images to iCloud making them accessible to the authorities.
In a way, Tibbitts and Didani were kindred spirits; two men constantly looking for the next thing to invest or expand into. There may have been an ulterior motive to Didani becoming such good friends with Tibbitts, however. Didani was looking for someone with money, Larson later said, and so that was the original reason for the introduction. Drug trafficking, it turns out, needs some upfront investment.
The trio then travelled in various combinations, or sometimes Didani and Larson went on trips on the millionaire’s behalf. Didani and Larson met in Albania in an unsuccessful attempt to get Albanian Air Force planes for Tibbitts. Then the pair went to Egypt, where a family allegedly had a house connected to an ancient tomb belonging to the grandson of a Pharaoh, and were selling golden artifacts from it. Tibbitts was interested in buying the artifacts, but his associates never went inside themselves.
Tibbitts and Didani travelled to Antwerp, Belgium, together, a port that has become the cocaine gateway to Europe. Didani later suggested in court that the pair repeatedly visited Washington D.C. They went to Didani’s native Albania together because Tibbitts was looking into starting an over-the-counter medication distribution company. The pair explored somehow making Tibbitts an ambassador in Albania; Tibbitts’ wife later testified in court that he sent her a video of himself running on a beach with the president of Albania.
“Marty had his hands everywhere,” Detective Leach later said in court. He described Tibbitts’ various escapades as the millionaire “attempting to spiderweb out.”
Many of these did not pan out. But Tibbitts continued to funnel money to Didani. According to Larson, that amounted to millions of dollars. He said the drug trafficker “conned” the millionaire.
PROJECT RAMORA
“Everything begins with an idea,” the website for Peregrine 360, a small engineering design firm in Montreal, Canada, read. “Some of the greatest inventions we see today were once just a few lines on paper.”
The company offered to take customer’s concepts and turn them into real designs. Peregrine 360 would not only make a prototype of a customer’s device, but also connect them with factories to mass produce it, according to the company’s website. Usually they produced things like 3D-printed models of T-Rexes. In around 2016, a man called Dale Johnson asked the company over email to make something a little different: a long hollowed out underwater drone that had enough room to store items inside.
Peregrine 360 had no problem with that, and got to work. A company representative sent Johnson an invoice.
Johnson was in fact Tibbitts, according to court records. Investigators figured that out because Tibbitts copied and pasted the exact text of Johnson’s email to Didani and directed him to pay the company. Tibbitts told Didani he would make the drone for him, Didani later told me.
In one of his notebooks, Tibbitts sketched out his and Didani’s idea. It showed a rough drawing of the bottom of a boat. The idea was to create what investigators would later call a “parasitic” underwater drone. The device would have enough room to store a large amount of cocaine, and clamp onto a ship with magnets. Once near its destination, the torpedo-shaped drone would release from the ship, and co-conspirators would come and retrieve the its contents.
Around the sketch of the boat were a list of questions that Tibbitts’ addressed to himself: “Inspect ship first to look for right attach spot?”; “Send one in case this one fails, should I put it in the wake?”, and “Should I have two rows of magnets or one?” Another part noted to put spikes on the device so “no birds.”
The notebook said the drone should be between 20 and 25 feet long with a one ton capacity. Tibbitts contemplated whether a drone that big would really be as stealthy as needed for smuggling cocaine without getting caught.
“You have any worry about size of drone and getting it into water quietly?” Tibbitts wrote in a 2018 message to Didani, using the moniker Toni Stark. “For 1T it is almost 20 feet long.”
“No brother,” came the reply.
The submarine drone was “very ahead of its time,” Didani later told me.
With her husband’s constant jet setting, Belinda Tibbitts sometimes played assistant, booking hotels and flights for Marty. Even with that involvement, Belinda did not know anything about the drone, or her husband’s moves into drug trafficking, at the time. But she later recalled in court coming across one of his belongings mentioning the “Remora Project.” A remora is a type of fish that uses suction to stick onto the body of larger animals.
TAKE THE JET
In encrypted messages, Didani’s associates showed they were excited about the drone. Didani said they planned to build a few of the contraptions, and later went on to discuss potentially using them off the coast of Barcelona. Messages stored in Didani’s iCloud account showed he was dealing directly with Colombian traffickers, investigators said.
Marty had a red line, though: he didn’t want anything to do with cocaine in the United States. Any business would need to be overseas.
While the pair’s high-tech plan came into focus, they faced a very old school problem: how to move cash around. Tibbitts had access to a fantastic amount of wealth, including in his personal bank accounts. But getting that money to Didani, and in a relatively secure way, had its challenges.
Part of the solution often came down to Larson, the personal trainer, who acted as a middleman between Tibbitts and Didani to shift money around. In December 2017, the group needed to move $450,000 from Michigan to Washington D.C., where Didani was staying. By investigators’ description, it involved Tibbitts writing out multiple checks to Larson, who then cashed them out, and flew the money down in secret in the middle of the night on Tibbitt’s private jet in a duffel bag. The purpose of the cash was to buy cocaine in bulk, prosecutors said.
It started with Tibbitts calling Larson and telling him to pick up a bunch of checks to cash. Larson went to Tibbitts’ home, let himself in with the code, went up to the second floor office, and grabbed the signed checks from the desk. Tibbitts had left them blank for Larson to fill out.
Tibbitts was travelling with his wife in China at the time. He appeared to have trouble with his bank clearing such a huge series of withdrawals. Belinda later recalled hearing Tibbitts on the phone on the bank, clearly annoyed, telling the clerk to do just what he said.
Eventually Larson exchanged the personal checks for cashier checks, cashed them out, and boarded Tibbitts’ private jet, which Tibbitts had arranged with a pilot. In the air, Larson texted Didani on the ground. Didani warned his co-conspirator to be careful because D.C. was crawling with police.
“Got to be careful, there’s a lot of cops around here at night, we got to be discreet,” Didani wrote.
Upon landing, Didani was waiting at the airport to take the money. It was dark, and Didani told Larson to just leave the duffel bag on the ground.
After the money was delivered to Didani in D.C., he laid it out on a bed and took photos. He drove the cash to New York, gave it to a Chinese money launderer in Flushing, and the money disappeared. Investigators later found Didani’s phone connected to the wifi of the Trump Tower hotel while he was in New York.
In all, Tibbitts wrote around a million dollars worth of checks to Larson, prosecutors later said.
In court, Larson said he understood the $450,000 was for the purchase of cocaine. Didani later told me that money had nothing to do with drugs; instead it was for politicians in Washington, Europe, and Albania, he said.
Regardless, by this point investigators had taken notice of Didani. He originally came to the attention of the authorities in part because he kept taking short trips overseas with a man already on Border Patrol’s radar. That association and the suspicious flights put Didani in the crosshairs too. Authorities also received intelligence that Didani was trafficking cocaine in Europe, with the money coming from Detroit.
After seizing Didani’s phone at an airport in the U.S., law enforcement steadily sent Apple search warrants to access the trafficker’s iCloud backups. From that, the investigators realized Tibbitts played a much deeper role in the broader drug trafficking conspiracy. There were photos of the two together. Didani even had copies of Tibbitts’ Michigan drivers license and passport. One of the investigators later said he couldn’t wrap his head around why Tibbitts would get involved in something like this.
In November 2017, authorities seized 140 kilograms of cocaine in the Netherlands. In text messages, Tibbitts and Didani reacted to the seizure.
“Hmm. Let’s talk when u get back,” Tibbitts replied. He signed off the message as “Stark.”
“We just F’d up,” Didani wrote back.
“We will fix, brother,” Tibbitts wrote.
“Not like this, brother, we need to clear heads.”
“Yes, definitely. Ok, brother, talk to you later.”
From the text messages, Tibbitts appeared much more relaxed than his drug trafficking co-conspirator.
Didani sent Tibbitts a media report about the seizure, in which police arrested six Albanians and a Polish man.
Those drug trafficking ambitions came to a screeching halt the following year when Tibbitts died flying his Venom. With Tibbitts’ death, so too died the idea of the torpedo drone. Investigators said the group never succeeded in building a working prototype. The money was gone. Peregrine 360 stopped work on the project and dismantled it for parts.
“It was not just an idea. It was an idea that took multiple steps to get to the beginning of a prototype, the design, financing, purchasing parts for the prototype and then conceptualizing the prototype,” detective Leach said in court. Tibbitts just died before it could be launched.
In April 2019 investigators executed search warrants at Belinda’s homes in California and Michigan. On Mr. Tibbitts’ Surface Pro, they found an article about money laundering.
Although he was never charged because of his death, Leach said in court “Mr. Tibbitts was a financier and conspirator that helped in the design of the parasitic device to help transport cocaine.”
It appears Tibbitts’ moves into the drug trafficking world were not for money. Belinda said in court that the couple were doing fine financially at the time of his death. She acknowledged she was not aware of a number of sizable transactions out of her husband’s account, though. Representatives of Belinda did not respond to a request for comment.
“That’s the only thing, reason, I can think that he got involved with Lou [Didani] is—you know, like, rich people, they want to climb mountains when they have too much money in the freezing cold and possibly die. I want to drink a Piña Colada on a beach; I don’t want to get stung by a manta ray,” Larson said in court. Tibbitts wanted to “live on the edge.”
Tibbitts “love adrenaline,” Didani told me. “Very smart and ambitio[us].”
“That’s the way Marty was. That’s why he flew those planes,” Larson added.
Correction: this article originally said Tibbitts was a billionaire. This was a mistake, the copy has been updated to say millionaire.