WTF.. dont ever appear on TV even if you doing it for charity!
In the fall of 2006, he and two other ultra-marathoners took on an almost unimaginable challenge: they ran across the Sahara Desert, something that had never been done before. The run took 111 days, and was documented in a film financed by Matt Damon, who served as executive producer and narrator. Mr. Engle received $30,000 for his participation.
The film, âRunning the Sahara,â was released in the fall of 2008. Eventually, it caught the attention of Robert W. Nordlander, a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service. As Mr. Nordlander later told the grand jury, âBeing the special agent that I am, I was wondering, how does a guy train for this because most people have to work from nine to five and itâs very difficult to train for this part-time.â (He also told the grand jurors that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, heâll check to see if they make enough money to afford it. When I called Mr. Nordlander and others at the I.R.S. to ask whether this was an appropriate way to choose subjects for criminal tax investigations, my questions were met with a stone wall of silence.)
Mr. Engleâs tax records showed that while his actual income was substantial, his taxable income was quite small, in part because he had a large tax-loss carry forward, due to a business deal heâd been involved in several years earlier. (Mr. Nordlander would later inform the grand jury only of his much lower taxable income, which made it seem more suspicious.) Still convinced that Mr. Engle must be hiding income, Mr. Nordlander did undercover surveillance and took âDumpster divesâ into Mr. Engleâs garbage. He mainly discovered that Mr. Engle lived modestly.
In March 2009, still unsatisfied, Mr. Nordlander persuaded his superiors to send an attractive female undercover agent, Ellen Burrows, to meet Mr. Engle and see if she could get him to say something incriminating. In the course of several flirtatious encounters, she asked him about his investments.
After acknowledging that he had been speculating in real estate during the bubble to help support his running, he said, according to Mr. Nordlanderâs grand jury testimony, âI had a couple of good liar loans out there, you know, which my mortgage broker didnât mind writing down, you know, that I was making four hundred thousand grand a year when he knew I wasnât.â
Mr. Engle added, âEverybody was doing it because it was simply the way it was done. That doesnât make me proud of the fact that I am at least a small part of the problem.â