I wanted to build something my family could be proud of. That ambition led me to Loyola University, then to John Marshall Law School, and eventually into entrepreneurship. It carried me from leasing apartments in Chicago and listing them on Airbnb to founding Crypto Dispensers. Through each of those chapters, I was trying to create a future through education, work, and a company of my own.
That matters because I had already seen what another path could cost. I was in sixth grade when my father was arrested. He spent seven years in federal prison. I grew up with the consequences of that experience, and I wanted my adult life to go differently. When I ask to be judged for myself, I am asking people to recognize that deliberate effort: I saw the mistakes in my family's history, learned from them, and tried to build a different story.
My father was born in Palestine, immigrated to the United States, became a citizen, and built a liquor-store business. His life here also included a federal criminal case and years away from his family. His brothers were caught up in that chapter too, and some were deported after serving their sentences. Those events shaped the world I grew up in before I was old enough to decide what my own place in it would be.
A child does not experience a parent's imprisonment as an abstract question about the justice system. He experiences the absence. He grows older while his father is gone, and the family has to find a way to keep going. When my father returned, we opened a grocery store and worked together for years. Rebuilding became something I participated in, through the ordinary responsibilities of a business that had to open, operate, and serve its customers.
I learned from both parts of that history. I understood the value of work because I had done it alongside my father. I also understood that choices could carry consequences far beyond the person making them. I loved my family, but I did not want to repeat the mistakes I had watched them make. I wanted to take the determination I knew and direct it toward something I could stand behind.
That is an essential part of understanding me. The history that now makes me feel vulnerable to suspicion was also the history that motivated me to choose a different path. It gave me reasons to pursue an education, to think carefully about my future, and to want a business whose success could become a better chapter in our family's life.
I attended Loyola University and then John Marshall Law School. Those schools belong in this story because they were part of the effort I made to establish a direction for myself. I was looking beyond the circumstances I had inherited and trying to decide what I could accomplish through my own abilities and work.
Along the way, I studied entrepreneurship and the people who built companies. I was drawn to founders such as Brian Chesky, Airbnb's co-founder. I wanted to understand how someone could begin with an idea and turn it into a business that changed the way people lived. I could imagine wanting that responsibility myself: creating something useful, developing it, and seeing it grow into a company with an identity of its own.
After I dropped out of law school, I started Five Star Vacation Rentals. I leased apartments in Chicago and offered them as short-term rentals by listing them on Airbnb. The business gave me a practical way to begin pursuing the ambition I had spent time studying. I was no longer only reading about founders. I was responsible for making a business work.
I wanted my own company, and this was where I started. The apartments were smaller in scale than the companies that inspired me, but the aspiration was real. I wanted to build through effort, learn through experience, and create the means to pursue something larger. To me, that was the American promise in a form I could act on: your beginning could influence your life without deciding how far it was allowed to go.
In 2016, federal authorities questioned me about people who had rented my apartments. As I understood it, that episode did not lead to a case against me. Still, it brought a familiar presence into a life I was trying to establish on my own. First I had experienced federal intervention as a child in my father's household. Now I was encountering it as a business owner because of people who had used my rentals.
In 2017, I founded Crypto Dispensers, operated by Virtual Assets LLC. I believed in Bitcoin and in the need to make it more accessible. Here was an opportunity to create a company around a problem I thought was worth solving. The ambition that had drawn me to entrepreneurship now had a new direction, and I committed myself to building it.
I have since been told that investigators were examining the business from its early years. From where I stand, it feels as though every attempt to move forward has brought me back into the same atmosphere of scrutiny. I build something new, take on new responsibilities, and try to establish a record of my own, yet I keep finding myself asking why the government remains so focused on me and my family.
I cannot know every reason behind those decisions. What I can explain is the question they leave me with: can the people examining my life see past what other members of my family have done? Can they recognize that someone who grew up around those mistakes might have learned from them and consciously tried to live differently? That possibility deserves serious consideration, because it is central to the life I have been trying to lead.
My intention was to build a legitimate, compliant, real company that people could be proud of. I wanted customers to receive a service they valued and my family to see something lasting come from years of effort. I wanted the kind of achievement that had inspired me when I studied founders: a business that existed because I had taken an idea seriously enough to do the work.
Doing that work meant dealing with circumstances that were much less orderly than the ambition itself. There were banks unwilling to work with a cryptocurrency business, cash-intensive operations that were difficult to sustain, compliance responsibilities, and the danger of people exploiting the service for fraud. As the company grew, decisions had to be made while the business was operating and the demands on it were changing.
Being the person in the arena means living inside those decisions. You have to act with the information you have, recognize problems, and respond while remaining responsible for what happens next. That responsibility is real, and so is the difference between experiencing a situation as it unfolds and reviewing it years later with knowledge that was unavailable at the time.
We put identity verification, compliance processes, and source-of-funds questions into the operation. As I came to understand more about scammers' exploitation of Bitcoin ATMs, I became increasingly concerned about continuing that part of the business. That concern was a major reason we shut down our ATM operation. These efforts and decisions are part of the record I want people to examine when they ask what I was trying to build and how I responded to the problems I encountered.
I am not claiming that everything we did was perfect. There are decisions and statements that deserve scrutiny, including how we dealt with banks. I maintain that our purpose was to operate a legitimate business, and that we were not knowingly trying to help scams succeed. Understanding the difference requires examining what we knew, what we intended, and what we actually did in the circumstances of each transaction.
I am not a criminal. I have no prior criminal history, and I reject the idea that my relatives' wrongdoing explains who I am. I have spent years trying to make choices that would lead somewhere different. My education, the businesses I started, the work I put in, and the measures we took to operate responsibly all belong in an honest account of that effort.
Over nearly a decade of building a company, there will be decisions to revisit and things that could have been handled better. That is why a serious examination has to do more than collect imperfections. It has to distinguish among mistakes, poor judgment, what someone knew at a particular moment, and what someone deliberately intended to accomplish. Those distinctions are essential to understanding a person's conduct.
If the only parts of a long history that receive attention are the things that went wrong, the resulting account will leave out the work that gives those events their context. It will leave out why the company was started, what its founder hoped to achieve, and the steps taken to address problems. I want the entire record considered, including the evidence of my effort to build and operate a legitimate business.
I am asking for the same care we understand in ordinary life when we say not to judge a book by its cover. A surname, a family connection, or a painful history can create an impression before someone knows the person in front of them. But an impression cannot tell you what that person has done. My relatives made their choices. I made mine, including the choice to learn from what I had seen and try to create something better.
I am thirty-seven now, and my son is seven. When I think about what I have been trying to accomplish, I think about the life I want him to have. I want him to be proud of his father’s work. I want him to believe that education, ambition, persistence, and honest effort can give him the ability to shape his own future.
I also want him to know that he is his own person. He should never have to begin an explanation of his life by defending every person who shares his last name. The same freedom I have worked to claim for myself should be something he can grow up taking for granted: the opportunity to be understood through his own character, choices, and actions.
That is why this story matters to me. I saw the damage that mistakes could do to a family, and I tried to turn that knowledge into a reason to build differently. I went to school. I studied people who created companies. I started a business, learned from the experience, and committed myself to another idea I believed could serve people. There is a positive, deliberate purpose running through those decisions, and I want it to be visible.
I still believe in that purpose. I believe a person can come from a difficult history and make something worthwhile of his life. I believe that is part of the American story, and it is the story I have been trying to write through my work. My family name tells you where I come from. Look at what I have worked to build if you want to understand where I have been trying to go.
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