JOHNNY SOMALI JAILED, TICKETMASTER IS A MONOPOLY & THE MAN WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS

0:03 Kalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I'm Garrett Fisher. Friday, April seventeenth, twenty twenty six. Let's do this quickly, because there's a lot to get to. Soul, South Korea. An American live streamer who spent months harassing locals, disrupting public transit, vandalizing a convenience store, and in the moment that got the whole world watching, grinding on a bronze memorial to women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War Two, sentenced this week six months of hard labor. Convicted on all charges. His mother begged the court for mercy.

0:45 The court said no. For once the system worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Manhattan Federal Court, five weeks of antitrust trial, a jury of twelve ordinary people has now concluded what hundreds of thousands of concert fans already knew. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are a monopoly. They use their dominance to lock out competitors, force venues into exclusive deals, and charge fans one dollar and seventy two cents too much on every single ticket. The question now is what a judge does about it. Breakup, divestiture, we'll walk through all of it, and then there's Santacon. Every December, tens of thousands of New Yorkers dress up as Santa Claus and stagger through Manhattan bars, paying between ten and twenty dollars for a ticket, under the impression their money is going to charity. The man who ran that operation for years was arrested this week on federal wire fraud charges.

1:45 Prosecutors say he spent more than half of the money raised over two and a half million dollars across six years on himself, luxury apartments, lakefront renovations, fine dining, ski vacations. The f called it stealing Christmas. I'd call it something worse and Tiger Woods. A brief update because his case keeps moving even while he does not. I'm Garrett Fisher. This is Daily Crime and Justice. His real name is Ismael Ramsey Khalid. He's twenty five years old. He's from the United States, and for the past several years, his job, his actual monetized job, has been to travel to foreign countries and do things that get him hurt, chased, arrested, and in some cases beaten unconscious on camera, then post it to YouTube for views. I want to give you the full picture before we get to the verdict, because context matters here. In twenty twenty three, Khaleig traveled to Japan under the persona Johnny Somali, a name he apparently chose to provoke. While there, he taunted locals with comments about the bomb of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was arrested for trespassing on a construction site in Osaka. He disrupted a restaurant by blasting loud music and was find the equivalent of about fourteen hundred dollars. He drew widespread condemnation.

3:14 He left Japan. He moved on. In twenty twenty four, he was in Tel Aviv during a protest and was detained briefly after making inappropriate remarks toward a female police officer. He was released. He moved on. Then he went to South Korea. The incident that changed everything happened when Khalid approached a statue in Soul known as the Statue of Peace, a bronze figure of a young woman seated in a chair with an empty chair beside her. The statue was commissioned by activists to memorialize the comfort women of World War II. That's the euphemism used at the time. The reality an estimated two hundred thousand women, most of them Korean, were taken by the Japanese military and forced into sexual slavery.

4:01 Many of them spent the rest of their lives fighting for acknowledgment and reparations that most of them never received. The statue is one of dozens across South Korea. It is not a decorative landmark. It is a grave marker for the living. Collein posted a video of himself performing lap dances on the statue, kissing it for content. The backlash was immediate and severe. South Korean lawmakers raised it in parliament. Local residents began organizing to find him. A former member of the South Korean Special Forces located him on the street and knocked him unconscious. The video of it spread across social media almost immediately. He was still challenged to fights, chased through neighborhoods, and confronted repeatedly in the weeks that followed. South Korean prosecutors charged him with public nuisance in November twenty twenty four and barred him from leaving the country. What unfolded over the next several months was not a story about a man who went quiet and waited for the legal system to process him.

5:03 He continued streaming. He challenged locals to fight him. He was charged with additional offenses disrupting business operations at a convenience store and on a city bus, live streaming North Korean propaganda. And this is the charge that ultimately carried the most weight, distributing sexual deep fakes. At his first hearing, he appeared late. He was intoxicated. He was wearing a Maga hat. That's not a mistake, that's a choice. At his final hearing this week, he told the court, I did some foolish things under the influence of alcohol, and I realized the consequences. I sincerely apologize. He also told the court that some of what he did would not have been illegal in the United States. He said he did not understand how serious the consequences could be. His mother submitted a separate written petition asking for leniency. The court considered it. The court rejected it. The sentence six months in prison hard labor. He'll be held in a specialized facility where he will have no access to a cell phone. He'll be marked as a convicted criminal in the Korean system. The court's language was direct. He repeatedly committed crimes against unspecified members of the public to generate profit via YouTube, and distributed the content in disregard of Korean law. Prosecutors had asked for three years. The judges went lower, citing the absence of severe harm to individual victims.

6:34 As a condition of his eventual release, he has been barred from working with organizations that serve minors or people with disabilities. Let me be precise about a few things, because this case is being discussed in some corners of the Internet as either a free speech martyrdom or an international overreach. It is neither. What Kelly did was not misunderstood tourist behavior. It was a systematic business model. Travel somewhere, do something to say, designed to provoke and humiliate, capture the reaction, monetize the outrage. The deep bake charge distributing sexualized AI generated images is a serious offense with real victims under Korean law and increasingly under law in many countries.

7:15 He did not accidentally disrupt a convenience store. He streamed himself doing it. His YouTube account has since been terminated. I will also say this, there's something clarifying about a system that looked at all of it and handed down a sentence, a statement, and a set of conditions. It didn't give him what he wanted. It didn't make him famous in the way he was hoping. It just held him responsible. That is genuinely what accountability is supposed to look like. Six months, hard labor, no phone, no audience for once, exactly right, welcome back. I want to take a moment before we get into the mechanics of this verdict to say something that I think gets lost in the legal language. If you have bought a ticket to a concert in the last fifteen years, you have felt this the face value of the ticket, then the facility charge, the service fee, the order processing fee, the convenience fee, the fee for printing it yourself. By the time you check out, you're paying twenty thirty forty percent more than the listed price for a fee structure that exists not because it costs that much to sell you a ticket electronically, but because the company selling you that ticket has almost no competition, so it can. This week, a federal jury in Manhattan said, yes, that is what was happening, and

8:49 it was illegal. Let me walk you through this Live Nation Entertainment is the largest live events company in the world. It owns or controls hundreds of venues, amphathea arenas, clubs, theaters. It employs the majority of the major touring concert promoters. Its subsidiary, Ticketmaster, is the world's largest ticket seller, handling the majority of major concerts, sporting events, and live performances in the United States. The companies merged in twenty ten during the Obama administration over the objections of consumer advocates and artist groups who said the combination would be anti competitive. The Justice Department approved it anyway, with conditions. Those conditions, critics argued almost immediately, were not being enforced. There's a playbook for this. The lawsuit that led to this week's verdict was filed in twenty twenty four by the Department of Justice and approximately forty states, alleging that Live Nation had used its dominance over venues, promotion and ticketing to lock competitors out of the market. The claim that venues were pressured to use Ticketmaster exclusively, that artists who worked with rival promoters found their access to Live Nation venues restricted, and that the combination of all of this control across every layer of the live events industry constituted an illegal monopoly under federal antitrust law. The trial ran five weeks.

10:14 It brought in testimony from top music industry executives. It put Live Nation CEO Michael Rappino on the stand, where he was questioned about, among other things, the twenty twenty two Taylor Swift ticketing disaster, when Ticketmaster Systems collapsed under demand for her Heiress tour presale. Rapino blamed a cyber attack. The States argued it was a symptom of a company that had no incentive to invest in its own infrastructure because it faced no meaningful competition. Then came the internal messages. A Live Nation executive named Benjamin Baker had in private communications described certain ticket prices as outrageous, called customers so stupid and and this is the phrase that is going to follow this company for years. Both did that the company was robbing them blind baby. Baker testified that the messages were immature and unacceptable. He was apologetic the jury heard them anyway. Live Nation's defense was essentially, we are big, and that's legal success is not against the antitrust laws in the United States. Their attorney told the jury in closing, the company controls eighty six percent of the market for large concert venues and seventy three percent of the overall ticketing market when sporting events are included. They argued those numbers reflect excellence and consumer preference, not illegal coercion. They argued the States had not proven Live Nation acted as a monopolist. They can't, and they didn't, their lawyer said.

11:46 The jury disagreed after five days of deliberation. They found Live Nation and Ticketmaster operated as an illegal monopoly. They found Ticketmaster had overcharged consumers by one dollar and sex seventy two cents per ticket. The jury was not asked to calculate a total damages figure that will be determined by the judge. But when you multiply one dollar and seventy two cents across the hundreds of millions of tickets sold annually by the largest ticketer in the country, the number gets very large, very quickly. There is a complicating wrinkle here, and it matters. Weeks into the trial, the Department of Justice under the Trump administration quietly reached a settlement with Live Nation. That deal had the company agreeing to allow competitors like seat geek or stub Hub to sell tickets to its events, capping service fees at fifteen percent at some amphitheaters, and paying two hundred and eighty million dollars to the handful of states that signed onto the agreement. It did not require Live Nation to break apart from Ticketmaster, and critically, it was reached just weeks after the administration removed the DOJ's Antitrust Division chief Gail Slater, who had been pushing for the more aggressive approach. More than thirty states refused the settlement. They proceeded to trial, and they won. The jury verdict does not instantly undo any of that Live Nation has already said it will appeal.

13:12 The DOJ settlement still requires the judge's approval. What happens next is a remedyes phase, a separate proceeding where the states will propose what they want the court to order. That could include forcing Live Nation to divest venues it owns or to sell Ticketmaster outright, or the judge could order more modest structural changes and call it done. New York Attorney General Letitia James called it what the states long knew to be true. California's ag Rob Bonta said the verdict showed how far states could go to protect consumers when federal enforcement retreats. Senator Amy Klobashar, who has spent years on this issue, said the court must ensure any remedy actually opens the market, meaning lower prices, more competition, and real consequences, not a deal that falls short. Live Nation, for its part, released a statement Wednesday saying the verdict is not the last word. They are probably right that there will be more proceedings, but there are also now twelve jurors who heard five weeks of evidence, saw the internal messages and said, monopoly, you were doing it wrong, you were costing people money, and you were doing it on purpose. Accountability doesn't have a legal department. The remedies phase will determine what all of this actually means in practice for concert fans. The honest truth is that even in the best case scenario divestiture, breakup, competition restored, it takes years for structural changes in a market to translate

14:43 to lower prices at checkout. So don't hold your breath waiting for cheap tickets next summer. But the foundation of the argument that their dominance is just success, that it's legal, that nobody proved otherwise. That foundation now has a federal jury vertic sitting on top of it. Let's see what they do with it. Welcome Back. Santacon is a tradition every December, on a predetermined Saturday, tens of thousands of people dressed as Santa Claus descend on the bars and restaurants of Manhattan. They buy tickets ten to twenty dollars each that grant access to participating venues. The venues agree to donate a percentage of their sales to charity. The whole thing is presented loudly and repeatedly as a charitable event, a fun one, one where you can drink heavily while also feeling good about yourself. Your donation goes to charity, and it is only a few bucks, and that good feeling will warm your heart faster than whiskey and gingerbread.

15:52 That is a direct quote from a Santa Con email to an attendee. It was read aloud in a federal indictment this week. Defan Pildas is fifty years old. He lives in Hewitt, New Jersey. He has been the president and organizer of Santacon for years, running the event through a nonprofit he controls called Participatory Safety. He was arrested Wednesday in Manhattan and charged with one count of federal wire fraud. The indictment covers conduct from November twenty nineteen through this past April, six and a half years of the Christmas bar crawl. Prosecutors say that across those six and a half years, Santacon raised approximately two point seven million dollars of that pield, as allegedly directed only a small fraction to actual charities. The rest, more than half of everything raised, went into what the indictment describes as a personal slush fund. He used it to renovate a lakefront property in New Jersey to the tune of three hundred and sixty five thousand dollars. He leased a luxury apartment in Manhattan for one hundred and twenty four thousand dollars of Santacon money. He took vacations to Hawaii, Las Vegas, and Colorado. He bought a luxury vehicle. He invested one hundred thousand dollars in a boutique resort in Costa Rica that happened to be founded by a friend of his, and he reportedly charged a three thousand dollars dinner at a Michelin starred Manhattan restaurant to the fund. The twenty twenty five beneficiaries listed on the Santacon website, according to the indictment, included City Harvest, the City Parks Foundation, and

17:25 the Children's Heart Foundation. Those organizations presumably thought they were getting donations. What they got, if prosecutors are right, was whatever was left after Pildas took his cut. The FBI's New York Assistant director put it plainly, piled has allegedly stole Christmas from tens of thousands of victims and deprived local charities of more than one million dollars. The FBI, he added, continues to root out scrooges that greedily exploit the goodwill of New Yorkers. I will say this for the FBI, when they find the right metaphor, they commit to it. This is not it turns out a brand new revelation. In twenty twenty two, the new site Gothamist published an investigation finding that Participatory Safety had raised more than a million dollars through Santacon programming over several years, but that less than a fifth of that money had reached registered nonprofits. The same investigation found that a significant portion of the giving went to organizations tied to burning Man.

18:26 That same year, the nonprofit had lost nearly eighteen thousand dollars investing in cryptocurrency. That investigation ran in twenty twenty two. The indictment covers conduct through April of this year. Someone should have said something. Pildis pleaded not guilty. At his arraignment Wednesday, he was released on a three hundred thousand dollars bond secured by his New Jersey residents. If convicted, he faces up to twenty years in prison, which is a very long time and a very long way from a lakefront renovation and a Costa Rica resort in vestment. This is, I want to be clear precisely the kind of crime that works. Because it is small. Ten dollars twenty dollars people in Santa Hats a good cause, Nobody checks, nobody asks hard questions, because the whole event is designed to feel festive and frictionless and charitable. That's not an accident.

19:23 That's the model. Make the giving feel good, and nobody audits the result. He ran a con at a con con that's not a joke. That's the structure of the fraud before we close Tiger Woods. We've been following this case since the crash on March twenty seventh, Jupiter Island, Florida. His land drover on its side, a truck trailer clipped, a breathalyzer that came back zero, and a refusal to submit to a urine test that may complicate the prosecution's case significantly. The charges driving under the influence with property damage and refusal to submit to a lawful chemical test.

20:03 He has pleaded not guilty. His arraignment is scheduled for April twenty third. This week, the case developed in a specific and revealing direction. Prosecutors filed notice of their intent to subpoena Woods's prescription drug records, the names of what he was prescribed, the dosages, the quantity, and any warnings attached to those prescriptions, including whether any of them advise against operating a motor vehicle. That makes sense as a prosecutorial strategy. Woods told officers at the scene, when asked about substances, that he had taken a few meaning medications, no specific names were given, no drugs were found in the vehicle, and because he refused the urine test. Prosecutors have no chemical evidence of what was in his system.

20:48 The prescription records are the next available thread. Woods's legal team filed a motion fighting the subpoena this week, citing his constitutional right to medical privacy. They are not arguing that the right is absolute, they acknowledge it isn't, but they are asking for an evidentiary hearing, where prosecutors would have to establish the record's relevance to the case before they can obtain them. They've also asked that if the records are ultimately turned over, they be covered by a protective order limiting who can see them. No hearing has been scheduled. The case continues to move forward methodically, the way most dui cases do, paperwork, motions, discovery disputes before anyone has to stand in a courtroom and answer for anything.

21:33 Here is what Friday looks like. A man who built a brand on humiliating people in countries he was visiting is now in a South Korean labor prison with no phone and no audience. A federal jury has said out loud after five weeks of testimony, that the company that controls most of the live concert tickets in America was doing it illegally. The president of a charitable Christmas bar Crawl allegedly took two and a half million dollars from revelers in Santa Hats and spent it on himself. And Tiger Woods is fighting a subpoena for his prescription records before a court date that hasn't happened yet. Some of these stories end cleanly, some of them are just beginning. I'm Garrett Fisher. Have a good weekend. We'll be back Monday.

22:14 Do better. Daily Crime Injustice is a production of Calaroga Shark Media. This episode contains AI assisted research. All information is drawn from publicly available sources, including court filings, law enforcement statements, and credentialed news reporting. Nothing in this broadcast constitutes legal advice. We report the facts as they are known at time of recording. Legal proceedings are ongoing and outcomes may change.