This child actor became a crypto billionaire. But a big gamble is starting to unravel

On sun-drenched days in 2022, cryptocurrency entrepreneur Brock Pierce liked to take his friends sailing to the island of Vieques, about 120 kilometres from his home in Puerto Rico. Pierce wanted to show off a property that he described as “the most important passion in my life”: a once-glamorous beachside resort that he had recently bought for more than $US15 million ($22.6 million).

The local backlash against Brock Pierce started almost as soon as he arrived.Credit: NYT

In its heyday, the resort, a W Hotel, boasted a 557-square-metre spa, restaurants run by a Michelin-starred chef and sweeping views of the ocean; it was a key source of tourism jobs in Vieques. Then, in 2017, the hotel was damaged by Hurricane Maria, forcing it to close. Pierce planned to reopen it, using his crypto riches to revitalise both the glistening property and the local economy.

A former child actor, Pierce knew how to put on a show. On the trips to Vieques, he would anchor his Italian-made yacht at a local harbour, then lead his guests to the gates of the shuttered W, along a stretch of beach where wild horses roamed.

“This was my massive personal bet,” Pierce said recently. “This was where my heart was.”

But Pierce’s display of opulence was something of an illusion. Like many other grandiose projects that he has started in Puerto Rico, the hotel’s revival is now mired in unpaid bills and legal quarrels. Last northern autumn, Pierce lost the W in a dispute with another investor. The hotel is still closed, its windows smashed and its floors covered in mould and horse dung. A $US17,000 lounge chair is collecting dust in the empty atrium.

When he moved to Puerto Rico in 2017, Pierce, an investor in a range of experimental crypto ventures, made headline-grabbing promises to revive the local economy, with the help of a tech-bro brain trust. Best known for his role in the creation of tether, one of the world’s most popular digital currencies, Pierce led a wave of industry migrants to Puerto Rico, many of whom started buying land and trumpeting a project they called Puertopia — the transformation of the US territory into a hub for crypto investors and technology startups.

Puerto Rico was a convenient place to cash in on crypto profits. In 2012, the local government passed legislation to turn the archipelago into a tax haven for wealthy transplants. Under a law now known as Act 60, people who move there can apply for a benefit that allows them to pay nothing in capital gains taxes. The measure was aimed at increasing investment in the Puerto Rican economy, which has struggled to overcome two decades of financial crisis.

But Pierce’s vision of a crypto-fu economic turnaround has yet to materialise, according to hundreds of pages of court records and interviews with more than two dozen people familiar with his efforts in Puerto Rico. His business partners have turned on him, and some colleagues say he is running out of cash. There is no clear evidence that the arrival of tech entrepreneurs has helped the local economy. Instead, the Act 60 arrivals have become symbols of a new era of exploitation.

With the arrival of Pierce and other wealthy newcomers, Puerto Ricans observed a new rupture, as housing prices surged, especially in coastal towns, displacing local families. On a stretch of wall outside the W, a group of local artists has painted a mural that shows Pierce, dressed in a crimson tunic, holding a sign shaped like the bitcoin logo. “Colonialismo,” the caption reads.

Pierce was a child actor in The Mighty Ducks movie franchise, playing a young Gordon Bombay.Credit: DISNEY

On a recent Friday evening in Old San Juan, Pierce, 43, settled down for a cup of coffee at the Monastery, a masonic lodge-turned-hotel that has served as an unofficial home base for crypto migrants in Puerto Rico. He wore a wide-brimmed orange hat and an oversize white T-shirt, emblazoned with the words “bruised never broken”. With a sweeping gesture, he pointed out the window, which overlooks a bustling cobblestone thoroughfare called Calle del Cristo.

“This is some of the first colonial Spanish conquistador infrastructure that was developed,” he explained. “The first formal road with bricks in all of the western hemisphere.”

Now, the view belongs to Pierce: he bought the Monastery in 2018 for $US4.8 million.

Pierce arrived in Puerto Rico with an eclectic resume: the son of a home builder and a church officer in Minnesota, he was a child actor who had a short-lived career in the Mighty Ducks movies and starred in a film called First Kid with comedian Sinbad. As an adult, he became an early investor in several prominent crypto projects, ultimately achieving a net worth estimated at $US700 million to $US1 billion.

Since he moved to Puerto Rico, Pierce has bought at least 14 properties, according to real estate records. , including the boutique hotel Hacienda Tamarindo for $US3.2 million.Credit: NYT

After Act 60 passed, arrivals from the United States became a visible presence in restaurants and nightclubs throughout Puerto Rico. Pierce was easily one of the most recognisable. He could often be spotted walking the streets of Old San Juan – a short, energetic man in a T-shirt and leather vest, a chain dangling from his neck.

Pierce bought two houses in a gated community in Dorado, a wealthy enclave where he settled with his partner, an entrepreneur named Crystal Rose, and his mother, Lynette Calabro. Pierce hobnobbed with local politicians and hosted extravagant parties, where the guests sometimes took drugs, according to two people who attended the events.

For a while, Pierce managed to charm some of the locals with his openness and curiosity. He had the chameleonic instincts of a skilled actor. “If it was serious people, he’d act seriously,” said Hugo de la Uz, a local maritime expert who helped manage Pierce’s yacht. “If it was crazy people, he’d act crazy.”

Pierce expressed interest in nearly every world religion, cultivating a kind of hippie spirituality. “I feel connected to him because he has a spiritual depth,” said Carli Muñoz, a Puerto Rican pianist who has socialised with Pierce in San Juan.

But the good vibes only went so far. “I’ve made myself sure not to go into business with him,” Muñoz said.

Since he moved to Puerto Rico, Pierce has bought at least 14 properties, according to real estate records. Some, including the Monastery, were already functioning businesses. But Pierce also announced plans to convert much of his portfolio into new projects, including an art gallery and a community centre. None of those ventures has come to fruition. A hospital in the city of Humacao that he bought late last year has struggled.

Over and over, Pierce has found local Puerto Ricans to help him with development projects — only for many of those collaborators to later say that he exploited them, failing to pay bills or cutting them out of deals. At the same time, he has battled in court with another Act 60 arrival, Joseph Lipsey III, who seized control of the W last year, claiming that Pierce had defaulted on a loan.

Pierce has denied that he deceived anyone. But at least three lawsuits against him are pending in the local courts.

Pierce likes to present himself as a kind of geopolitical mover and shaker. In 2020, he ran for US president as an independent, collecting a little under 50,000 votes. He boasts of “engagements” in El Salvador and Panama, and one evening in June, his assistant announced that Pierce was joining a Zoom call with the president of Palau, a tiny archipelago in the western Pacific.

Pierce’s big plans for Puerto Rico are falling apart. Credit: NYT

But Pierce’s main focus is Puerto Rico, where he has become a leading spokesperson for Act 60. After he moved, he told Rolling Stone that he would rebuild the economy “with money that we saved from the IRS in a Robin Hood fashion.” The publicity helped turn Puerto Rico into a popular destination for the crypto set: These days, about 2600 people receive the Act 60 tax break.

The local backlash against Pierce started almost as soon as he arrived. “Gringo go home,” someone wrote in red paint on the side of a three-storey building Pierce took over that once housed a children’s museum in Old San Juan. But behind the scenes, Pierce was expanding his real estate empire. He recruited a prominent local hotel developer, Gonzalo Gracia, to help him find buildings in Puerto Rico that he could rehabilitate and convert into tourist attractions.

Soon, Pierce’s business dealings began to deteriorate into legal disputes with local partners.

On his walk in San Juan last month, Pierce sought to offer a visual demonstration of his success in Puerto Rico. He led two New York Times reporters to a building he had bought in 2019, a sparsely furnished space dotted with TV screens. The property, he declared, housed the world’s first art gallery dedicated to non-fungible tokens, the digital artwork known as NFTs. The images on display included a fluorescent dinosaur, perched amid a forest of giant cactuses, that Pierce said his 5-year-old daughter had designed using an artificial intelligence tool.

But what he failed to mention was that a luxury real estate firm had put up a notice listing the building for sale and had held an open house. Confronted with that fact, Pierce acknowledged that he had recently tried to sell the gallery.

It was never fully opened, he explained, and has struggled to make money.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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