A Harvard-bred scion in a posh Connecticut town accumulates a “harem” of “sugar babies” whom he treats like his property, until a married couple seeks justice. Greed turns everything inside out.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Some names have been changed for privacy reasons.

The young woman’s jewelry glimmered in the brilliant light of the lobby atrium as she scanned everyone in sight, having to will herself not to turn around and run right back out the doors. The four-story atrium was filled with lush jungle-style vegetation stretching toward the massive skylights. It was the kind of place rich people liked as if to say: you think we can’t have a full forest inside the lobby of a building, just watch us.

It might have been another planet compared to the barebones motel where she was staying in an adjacent town, much less the Rust Belt city where she’d spent her whole life doing the same things with the same people. Here in this indoor jungle complete with a waterfall and brook, well-heeled couples with perfect-looking lives consulted concierges for high-priced dining and theater reservations, while business execs in tailored suits closed megadeals over drinks. This hotel was a crown jewel of Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, an enclave that attracted an equal number of blueblood New Englanders as hotheaded New Yorkers.

She spotted the man who had come to meet her. He appeared inconspicuous, even harmless. In fact, he was a millionaire a hundred times over. Beneath his staid expression lay dark secrets. She knew his M.O. How he’d ogle women like her, telling them they were knockouts, and then get even pushier when he found out they were married because it was a power trip to think they’d still succumb. She would appear to be an empty-minded object who existed for pleasure.

Prey. That’s what she was to him.

She also knew how many women the centi-millionaire had instructed to meet at this hotel, and his expectations for them.

On this day, she brought along her own expectations: She was going to take him down.

One afternoon the previous year, Hazel Barlow was home watching TV, and the more she watched, the more intrigued she became.

Rarely does an episode of Dr. Phil represent a turning point in a woman’s life. But on this day in 2008, Hazel, 27, and her husband, Ethan, 28, caught a segment featuring “sugar daddies” (wealthy, often older men) who paid “sugar babies” (willing young women) to spend time with them——and usually to have sex. The sugar daddies profiled by the talk show host acted as though they owned the young women, and that their wealth entitled them to be worshiped and catered to. Dr. Phil talked about a new website brazenly called SeekingArrangement.com that facilitated these matches in cyberspace on a national scale, using technology to objectify and commodify women.

Hazel knew something about being objectified. She was attractive with dark oval eyes and straight blonde hair that cascaded to her waist. She worked part-time as a collection agent. She had married Ethan, a truck driver for one of the large cable companies, the year before, and they now shared a small apartment they rented in Mansfield, Ohio, where both grew up and watched career prospects vanish as manufacturers fled. Instead of working for local companies with deep roots that had employed their parents and grandparents, Ethan worked for an impersonal corporation headquartered on the East Coast, and Hazel’s job was to call people and harass them about bills they could not afford to pay.

Hazel and Ethan had never had anything handed to them. Not even their marriage had come easily. Both Hazel and Ethan had previously married young to other people only to see those relationships crumble under day-to-day pressures and disappointments. From that marriage, Hazel had two children, now a toddler and an elementary schooler. Hazel wanted to give them the stable home life they deserved, and the Barlows both hoped their bond would prove stronger than their previous ones.

But now she found herself distracted. She could not stop thinking about the subculture they saw on television casually promoting and glamorizing infidelity via crass capitalism. Ethan shared his wife’s disgust with the sugar daddies. Something gelled, a realization that there was an opportunity to get closer to their dreams of a better life —— partially awakened by those “sugar babies” on Dr. Phil’s sofa who believed they could get security and comfort from those men. In those young women, Hazel could see a more naive version of herself. She could be angry on their behalf yet also be resentful of their access to money.

Hazel had gotten into trouble as a teenager for low-level drug charges while trying to scrape by, and now she had a job that, at best, could leave her feeling hollow. Why should men with money like those sugar daddies get whatever they want handed to them?

Hazel and Ethan decided they ought to find a sugar daddy and swindle him out of money, making their lives easier while gaining a measure of sweet revenge on behalf of all the women who ever found themselves being taken advantage of by a certain kind of man. Men who believed money made them attractive——and that the lack of it made women disposable. The idea started as a lark and ended up transforming the newlyweds’ lives.

Hazel and Ethan knew just where to look for their target: SeekingArrangement.com, the same website profiled on Dr. Phil. “Hazel,” Ethan said, “let’s get on the computer and see what this [website] is about.” He had thick dark hair and a big, chummy smile. Through her role as a collections agent, Hazel had ample experience on the internet, which she used to find people who didn’t want to be found.

Seeking Arrangement’s backstory made its existence even more infuriating. The creator was Brandon Wade, an MIT graduate who had once felt invisible in his own dating life and wanted to do something about that for other men. Wade might have used his technological skills to change the world! Instead, he had chosen to empower men on the hunt for vulnerable women to date. He was unapologetic about how the site embraced and reinforced an uneven power dynamic and the notion that rich men should be able to get attractive young women at the snap of their fingers.

To get started on Seeking Arrangement, Hazel and Ethan opened an account under the username CandyLynn. On the site, a woman or “baby’s” account was free, whereas men or “daddies” paid a monthly fee, one of many reasons women far outnumbered men, a fact that made the men on the site giddy. The site did gesture toward embracing “sugar mommas,” wealthy women looking for the company of younger men or “sugar cubs,” but they were rare.

Their new account allowed Hazel and Ethan to scroll through the sugar daddy profiles, to whom they could send messages of interest, and also gave them access to message boards in which sugar babies traded thoughts about their experiences and “college babies,” the lingo for women new to sugaring (they could actually be working their way through college, but not necessarily) could get advice from “angel babies,” those with experience. Angel babies gave guidance on how to avoid the pitfalls of categories of people such as Salt Daddies, who found ways to avoid paying regardless of their resources, and Splenda Daddies, who claimed to be wealthy but were not.

This was a golden opportunity to earn easy money from someone who wouldn’t miss it, but Hazel and Ethan would only proceed if they could target the right person.

They wouldn’t pinpoint just any POT——the shorthand for “potential partner” in sugaring. This wasn’t just about finding someone with money, which the site was overflowing with once the phonies were weeded out. They needed someone indiscreet enough that they could dig up dirt on them to hold over their head.

They settled in, taking turns doing a deep dive into the online subculture. They wanted the sleaziest, skeeviest, most arrogant, undeservingly rich sex-crazed creep in the whole sugar daddy ecosystem. Turned out not only was he out there waiting to be found, but that he was practically wearing a sign.

Five hundred-thirty miles east of Mansfield, Ohio, in quaint Greenwich, Connecticut, heavy snowfalls in late winter made even hearty New Englanders groan as they reached again for shovels, but not Weston Davis. The 52-year-old relished fresh piles of powder, particularly since he could pay people to clear the driveway. Hell, he could pay so many people that they could shovel the snow ahead of him in real time as he drove. So he would climb right into his Davismobile——he was a huge Batman fan, thus his sports car’s nickname a la the Batmobile——and with his snow tires in place he would barrel past the giant iron gates that stood at the end of his driveway on his way to the ski slopes. He loved skiing and chatting up new acquaintances on the ski lift, and though the hobby was notoriously expensive, the price was no object.

Price was never an object. Not for Weston. He was one of the heirs to the DuPont chemical and manufacturing fortune. The sheer multitude of DuPont heirs around the world diluted each family member’s share of the fortune, but in a family estimated to be worth around $16 billion, there was plenty to go around when Weston’s ancestors emigrated from Paris to the United States circa 1800. Weston’s personal worth was estimated at $100 million. He was the king of Greenwich.

Some people born rich are uneasy with other people being aware of their wealth. Not Weston, who flaunted it awkwardly. When asked by friends to recommend his favorite vacation spot, he could have said Nantucket or Palm Beach, where he went frequently, but he would be just as likely to answer DuPont, Washington, a small town named after his family’s company after it set up an explosives plant, certainly not many people’s idea of a vacation spot. He’d make sure to recommend Davis’s Sugar Shack in that same town for chocolate, named after his family. Then there were the tone-deaf comments that could stop a conversation cold. Around Thanksgiving, he’d tell people he looked forward to “feasting like an heir,” not a known idiom in any language. Asked for his favorite band, he would say, Heirs of Fortune, an indie band (named as a tribute to a deceased friend, nothing to do with inheritances). Weston tellingly mistitled the band as “Heir of Fortune.” Being an heir was his identity.

If there was a cliched trajectory for a fellow with inherited wealth, Weston followed it. He attended a northeastern prep school before going to Harvard, which had DuPonts on campus going back to the early 20th century. Weston lived in Havard’s student residence Eliot House, which at the time was largely reserved for the wealthy and boasted a reputation for pretentiousness. The students would raise their glasses in the chandelier-lit dining hall and shout “Floreat Domus de Eliot!” or “Long flourish Eliot House!” referring to their red brick collegiate home but also to its values of elitism. Weston studied English literature, then added an MBA from Harvard Business School before suiting up for Price Waterhouse and Morgan Stanley on his way to starting his own investment firm on Wall Street, advertising itself as “specializing in leveraged buyouts,” a lucrative corner of finance involving aggressive business acquisitions plagued by ethical questions.

Weston developed enough of a reputation as a ladies’ man around Manhattan by his late twenties that journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, later a household name for her study of working poor Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, included him in a 1984 New York Times profile of “The New Man.” These “new men” of the 1980s, in Ehrenreich’s view, had little focus on seeking traditional marriage. Weston confirmed this notion when he told Ehrenreich’s assistant that he focused instead on making money “because that’s how the score is kept.” Sure, he wanted women in his life, he said, but did not want to spend time facilitating it, limiting himself “to an efficient five minutes a day” of calling women to arrange dates.

Outside of those five minutes, Weston said he worked for more than 10 hours a day and set aside a half hour for running and calisthenics.

“Sensitivity is very important to being a man,” Weston mused. “Being able to appreciate things that girls appreciate. Like being able to window-shop, for example. An insensitive guy probably won’t stop and look at a dress in a window.” After the publication of the interview, one skeptical columnist for another newspaper ridiculed Weston’s approach to love, wondering if he “occasionally comes up empty after five minutes of frenzied dialing and has to go home and watch reruns of ‘The Bob Newhart Show.’”

However much Weston may have relished representing a new breed of man indifferent to marriage, within two years he had made a traditional match for the scion of a wealthy family, marrying Victoria, a granddaughter of a United States congressman. While preparing for the wedding, Victoria was completing the rigorous membership process to the Junior League of New York, an exclusive civic club for women. Weston and Victoria settled in Connecticut and had two sons.

Now that he was in his early 50s, he could be spotted around affluent Greenwich hugging the curves of the streets in his bright orange sports car, his balding head peeking out showing a round face with dark eyes behind oval glasses. Mannerisms that had projected goofy earnestness in his youth now suggested oblivious eccentricity in middle age. He took pride, describing himself in the third person, in pointing out “Weston Davis always takes care of his friends,” by which he meant paying for things like trips and meals. His Davis Investments issued amateurish press releases, almost certainly written by Weston himself, gloating (again in the third person) that Weston was “undoubtedly one of the smartest individuals working in the investment banking industry.”

Weston’s Greenwich estate could have been a stand-in for the famed fictional Wayne manor of his favorite character’s secret identity, billionaire Bruce Wayne. Weston’s almost 6,000 square foot home of stone and hand-cut slate rose up from a perfectly manicured lawn, dominating the property like a castle and sitting right on the water. His prize billiards room was complete with a wet bar, with plenty of space to display his extensive collection of historic guns (the DuPont Company was a gunpowder manufacturer in the early 1800s). Outside sat a pool with a waterfall.

Away from the family enclave, Weston had his own secret life, as Bruce Wayne did as Batman, but in Weston’s case, his alter ego revolved around extramarital sex. Perhaps unsurprising for a man who in bachelorhood claimed to set up a full calendar of dates with women in a few minutes of phone calls, he was drawn to the idea of young women looking for wealthy men to give them gifts and allowances in return for affection.

Weston used Seeking Arrangement frequently, even obsessively. He engaged in cybersex and paid a couple thousand dollars to meet up with sugar babies for sex, and soon he was paying for so many encounters with so many sugar babies that he was spending hundreds of thousands.

Even within the often weird world of transactional sugar dating, with Weston, things then got weirder.

The sugar daddy profiles that Hazel and Ethan scrolled through under their CandyLynn account seemed to represent the range of humanity, at least of the lascivious malewho-had-too-much-money variety. Short, pudgy, balding, married men posted photos of themselves trying to look taller, thinner, and less bald——the married part didn’t matter much, not for this website’s moral code. Many men posted about their desire for emotional companionship, which usually really meant sex, while others posted about their desire to be mentors, which also really meant sex. A few of the men were simply lonely and thought money could cure that. Occasionally, when Hazel messaged with potential sugar daddies, they would send money unsolicited, clouding what otherwise seemed to be set up as a transactional model. “These rich guys are sending us money for nothing!” Hazel marveled to Ethan.

The site’s message boards provided a forum for “babies,” colloquially known as a “sugar bowl” or just a bowl, a sugar baby community. Included among the posts were complaints. In many cases, friction would arise from how much money daddies promised, and how those financial promises changed if they did not get what they wanted once they met up with the “babies.” This was made more fraught because many of those expectations were left unspoken to try to avoid the arrangement being thinly disguised prostitution. Some women, meanwhile, wanted fixed cash “allowances,” while others preferred being “spoiled” with surprise gifts, simply known among those in the bowl as sugar. Most of the men and women went to great lengths to make the dynamics appear respectable and mainstream.

But Weston, it became clear, was up to something different, what the Barlows quickly realized was “pretty weird stuff.” He was paying one woman, deemed a “head slave,” to oversee a “harem” of sugar babies he called his “slaves.” The terminology was offensive on so many levels including its ties to race, while also laying bare the financial servitude of young women trying to scrape by enough for rent and college tuition.

It got worse: Weston was to be called Master. Through his head slave, Weston imposed a set of rules, requiring his slaves to send nude pictures on a regular basis and “improve” their appearances, including in some instances receiving breast augmentation he would pay for. His collection of sugar babies locally and around the country represented trophies to him. He would fly the sugar babies to Connecticut and meet in hotel rooms. In a warped moral stance and a sign of his fear of being discovered, he insisted he would only meet when his wife was out of town. He would offer to pay to relocate the sugar babies to Greenwich and pay for their living expenses——that was, if his “slaves” pleased him.

There was no doubt about it. Hazel and Ethan had found their target, a man ripe for exploitation. They could collect information from the sugar babies who had been with Weston who exchanged data points on the message boards, including allegedly “vile” treatment and sex acts.

“It was sickening,” Ethan said later, “the stuff that he was doing and saying to these girls.”

In addition to his behavior, Weston, the man who dropped the name DuPont into every other sentence, made no secret of his bottomless funds. “He [could turn] out just to be a gold mine to us,” Ethan described their realization.

That DuPont connection presented a giant target for a righteous takedown. After the company’s early 19th-century gunpowder business expanded into manufacturing dynamite, the DuPont labs began investing in innovating new chemicals and materials, such as nylon, Teflon, and insecticides, through the first half of the 20th century. In the run-up to and during World War II, the DuPont leadership supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, while playing both sides by making materials for the Manhattan Project’s creation of the atomic bomb. Away from the battlefield, major lawsuits have appeared at a steady pace into the 21st century with now familiar fact patterns alleging that DuPont facilities poisoned water supplies with “forever chemicals” in various locations around the United States allegedly causing cancer and other illnesses. (One of these cases was depicted in the movie Dark Waters starring Mark Ruffalo.) DuPont was deemed “the most evil business in the world.”

Closer to home, officials in the Barlows’ hometown of Mansfield, Ohio identified DuPont as contaminating their natural resources with chemicals, leading to years of legal proceedings. DuPont also repeated patterns over the decades in which they industrialized small towns and cities with their facilities, only to deindustrialize and abandon them to unemployment and debt when they left, not unlike what Mansfield experienced upon the loss of its own plants and factories.

Hazel and Ethan went to work ingratiating themselves with Weston’s so-called head slave, whose username was Megs. Part of Megs’ role was to be a gatekeeper, vetting prospects for Weston, a Ghislaine Maxwell of sugaring.

Once Hazel and Ethan convinced Megs of CandyLynn’s appeal, they were soon exchanging messages directly with Weston. It was a thrill, an exhilarating bonding experience for the young married couple together posing as an eager sugar baby. When Weston got frustrated with not being able to meet CandyLynn, Hazel and Ethan switched to new usernames, including Miss Dee Dee and Rachelle, which was Hazel’s middle name. Rachelle was soon promoted to being one of Weston’s virtual slaves. Weston sent a grammatically challenged message that Rachelle had “to learn the values of enslavement.” To do this, she had to send explicit photographs and participate in raunchy chats. His motives were transparent: once he possessed compromising photos, he had leverage over a woman’s life. For the photos, and with the expectations of meeting up in person, Weston would put her on an allowance of $10,000 a month.

They complied with his command to send photos——but they weren’t actual photos of Hazel, they were photos they pulled from the internet. Ethan got so into the scheme that he became “Rachelle” in the chats more often than Hazel and played up Rachelle’s raunchiness. Weston’s payments, meanwhile, started to appear in their accounts in $5,000, $6,000 and $10,000 chunks. Hazel and Ethan decided to take their gambit to the next level. “Rachelle” asked Weston to send lewd photos in return for the ones she sent.

There was risk involved with this move. Even with all they had learned about him so far, they could not know everything about Weston Davis. They could not yet know, for example, that Weston had a small army of private detectives on call. People with the wealth of the DuPonts learned to be singularly cautious about the intentions of others. Plus, not only was Weston a Harvard graduate two times over, but he had reached the academic level of cum laude in English literature, with preeminent professors inculcating in him fine-tuned judgment in analyzing rhetoric others might not notice; that was before he also progressed through the university’s world-class business school where students were to drill down on maintaining the upper hand when dealing with captains of industry. He would not guilelessly and carelessly take their bait, and once they asked for photos he would instantly be able see through their scheme.

In theory, at least.

Hazel and Ethan soon opened their inbox to a message from Weston Davis. 1 New SeekingArrangement.com User Message: Photos Attached.

The FBI’s cyber crimes division was adapting and evolving six years after it was launched in 2002 to monitor terrorist threats.

Technology had changed rapidly even in that relatively short period of time. Smartphones were introduced, giving people access to social and financial platforms wherever they went, multiplying the ways malefactors could cause problems.

As part of their cyber task forces, the FBI partnered with various agencies, including the National White Collar Crime Center, surveilling electronic pathways for suspicious activities that could lead them to destructive hacking or economic espionage, among other problems.

“Sophisticated computer fraud schemes continue to flourish as financial data migrates to the Internet,” Shawn Henry, assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, noted. He was a 20-year veteran with a thousand-yard-stare and a nose for finding cases hidden in plain sight. He saw himself as having a “passion for protecting good from evil.”

Agent Henry’s teams as well as the joint task force with the National White Collar Crime Center, which was called IC3, monitored various financial transactions that ricocheted around cyberspace. They noticed a seemingly random pattern of wired deposits all originating from the same person in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the pattern didn’t follow the expected algorithms of their computer software.

The red flags were passed to New Haven-based Special Agent Joshua Farlow. The agent had come from the private sector a couple of years earlier and had a growing expertise in understanding the evolving range of cybercrimes.

Weston Davis became even more controlling and what Hazel called “bizarre” with his so-called slave Rachelle. He ordered her to get breast implants and to quit her job. This would make her be beholden to him. Just as had happened with CandyLynn, he began running out of patience when Rachelle dodged meeting up, especially after Weston sent explicit photos and more than $50,000. He ordered Rachelle to come from Ohio to Connecticut, presumably for the purpose of sleeping with him. When no visit was scheduled, he put a stop to his payments.

They could have walked away at this point. But now it felt personal, his attempt to order Hazel around. They would not let him decide when they were finished with him. They would not cede that control in letting him think he could just discard Rachelle, even if she was a figment when she no longer served his purposes. They didn’t just want money, they wanted justice against this rich bastard and all like him, using money as an instrument to teach a lesson about mistreating people based on their net worth.

Though the lewd photos they had sent Weston were not really of Hazel, Weston had not taken the same precautions, having sent actual compromising photos of himself. Because of this, they could now turn the tables and make him pay for the disgusting “values of slavement” he imposed on young women who were desperate for money as the economy crashed in 2008. SeekingArrangement.com knew how to play on economic insecurities, as when they put up a billboard reading “Don’t get screwed by ObamaCare/Find a Sugar Daddy.”

Hazel and Ethan sent Weston a new message, this one with no pretense of flirtation or intimacy: send $25,000 or they would expose him to his beloved Greenwich community as a participant in prostitution. As Weston later recounted, the couple threatened to send “damaging emails, photographs, and other information… to my wife and office employees if I did not pay.” Weston wired the money. Then “Rachelle” asked for another $25,000, then $50,000 more. He sent all of it. As the 2008 holiday season rolled around, Hazel and Ethan could celebrate in style. The gold mine had been cracked open. They bought themselves a gray Land Rover Discovery in cash via eBay. They dined out at the nicest restaurants in Richland County, Ohio. They moved out of their $400 rental apartment into a $ 1,000-a-month ranch-style house, which they decked out with flat-screen TVs and new computers, as well as ample toys for the children. Hazel went on a shopping spree for beautiful new jewelry. They weren’t just carving out a con, but also building their own love nest, bringing them closer to each other with every success in their scheme.

As satisfying as living the good life was for the newlyweds, equally satisfying was the fact that they seemed to have lit the match that started a fire around the “Slave Master.” Word spread quickly about rumors and events in the “sugar bowl” centered around the SeekingArrangement chat boards. Multiple “slaves” who had sexual trysts with Weston turned on him, extorting him for thousands. In communications, Hazel and the other sugar baby “slaves” referred to each other as “sis” or “sister,” an impromptu replacement for the infantilizing term “baby.”

Weston’s “head slave,” Megs, began to suspect what was going on. At first, Megs confronted “Rachelle,” accusing her of running a scheme and being a “fake baby,” a term in the bowl for women trying to pilfer money from men. Hazel surprised her by coming clean, explaining who she was and why she was taking down Weston. Instead of turning against Hazel and Ethan and defending Weston, Megs seemed inspired. Offline, Megs was a 44-year-old grandmother in Michigan named Patricia who would talk about her struggle with cancer. She had reached her own breaking point with serving Weston’s appetites for lining up and controlling young women. Her father had recently passed away and, thinking of Weston’s malicious identity as a “daddy” to women he mistreated, she “sorta lost it.” In an unexpected twist, she began helping the Barlows coordinate their extortion of Weston.

One sugar baby who had gone from New York to a hotel in Connecticut to meet with Weston now turned on him. There was no allegation that their sexual liaison wasn’t consensual in legal terms, but the “slave” had felt demeaned and used, and with the help of her husband now demanded $40,000 from Weston, though her husband handled the task clumsily, claiming he was part of the Russian mafia in hopes this would intimidate Weston into complying.

Still, the “Master” could no longer hunker down inside his castle-like fortress and his country clubs.

Hazel and Ethan could take pride in the spark they provided to a revolt, a Sugar Baby campaign of vengeance that took on a life of its own.

Weston, desperate for cover, cut off communication with “Rachelle.” Hazel and Ethan once again could have walked away at that point—— maybe even should have walked away. They had already received enough money to pay bills and essentials for the children. But there was the whole resistance movement they started. This was bigger than them. They had to see it through! Revenge in the name of the whole female gender! Besides, they were becoming used to the lifestyle that came with the money that had rolled in. Greed was creeping in and they could not yet walk away.

Besides, there was a surge of adrenaline in draining money from what they saw as a corrupt, undeserving one-percenter. “I tried to take justice into my own hands,” Ethan later recalled of his mindset. He admitted he felt rage at Weston at that point. In their eyes, Weston was a pervy Wizard of Oz, concealed behind curtains as he manipulated women and then discarded them——the ultimate manifestation of reprobate sugar daddy culture.

They had to finally show Weston Davis that the iron gates of his quasi-castle would not shield him. They had to go to Connecticut.

They drove the Range Rover through the night from Ohio to Connecticut on Tuesday, March 17, 2009. Their quest against the “Master” Sugar Daddy had overturned the doldrums of everyday married life. Previously, everything felt like a struggle. Between work and kids, they never had enough time to focus on their marriage. Their bond as a couple was stronger than they’d felt before. Now their wild gambit had even become a road trip, a belated honeymoon of sorts that took them through four states. By Wednesday morning they arrived in Connecticut, where they scoped out the Davis house, nestled away from the street. It was a symbol of the unearned, undeserved wealth that was used by an unofficial oligarchic class to keep down people like the Barlows for their whole lives.

They made a stop at an Enterprise Rent-a-Car and chose a silver Chrysler Sebring sedan. Ethan got into the Chrysler while Hazel took over driving the Range Rover, rendezvousing at a nondescript Hampton Inn in nearby Stamford to make plans. Then, they went to East Putnam Avenue to locate the address they had found for Davis Investments. They wanted to observe Weston in person, but they didn’t want to attract attention, and certainly couldn’t afford to have Weston see them.

They had to plan a stakeout. Typical married couples had to play board games, escape rooms, or jump out of airplanes to find this kind of excitement. They plotted out exactly what to do.

Hazel pretended to be a jogger, stretching and running in the area. Ethan first walked to the office address to confirm it, then waited out of sight. Ethan had photos of Weston they had printed from the internet and a pair of binoculars that he used while sitting in the car, while he and Hazel communicated over text. Finally, they spotted Weston in all his mundane glory, a vision of normality, entering his office.

Observing Weston’s entrance to his office accomplished two things besides familiarizing themselves with what he looked like: they knew which car was his, and they knew that Weston would be occupied for a while. Hazel left a handwritten note on Weston’s windshield. The note instructed Weston to call a prepaid phone they had brought with them or, in the droll language of the note, “I guess I will just stop by your house if you don’t call me by 4 pm.” Then they fled.

Returning to the Hampton Inn that afternoon, exhaustion caught up with Hazel. She threw herself into bed. She was woken out of her deep slumber by Ethan, who was holding one of their prepaid phones, which was ringing. Hazel answered it and heard Weston on the other line. He asked her to meet at the Hyatt Regency, one of the nicest hotels in Greenwich. She hesitated at the idea of meeting face-to-face. Sensing her hesitation, Weston went into “Master” mode, ordering her around. Hazel hung up.

Weston called again and this time Ethan spoke to him, agreeing to meet him at the Hyatt.

Ethan drove the Chrysler to the Hyatt, cased the lobby, and then drove back to the Hampton Inn, writing out directions on Hyatt stationery taken from the hotel in case they needed to leave in a hurry. When the time came for the meeting, they split up again and took both cars. Ethan parked the Chrysler near the Hyatt and hid the keys beneath a planter in the mulch. Hazel, meanwhile, parked the Range Rover. They waited until Weston was already inside before Ethan went in, while Hazel stayed in the Range Rover. She had over $9,000 in her purse–some of the funds wired to them by Weston previously.

Paranoia rose. Every car driving by could have been one of the private detectives whom Weston kept on retainer to resolve his personal problems. And it was not a stretch to think about Dupont, Washington, that city Weston always bragged about, a city started by the DuPont corporation—could the DuPont police department be used at the behest of the family as a kind of private force, investigating Weston’s enemies around the country? Every person at a casual distance from Hazel and Ethan around Greenwich and Stamford that day who happened to glance in their direction could have been a spy paid by Weston. Then there was the fact that Weston was a gun collector with an untold number of weapons, mostly antiques with ammunition that would be untraceable by police. What could they be walking into?

Overthinking would only delay what they both knew in their heart they had to do: complete their crusade by seizing one last windfall out of Weston. After all, to quote Weston himself, money was “how the score is kept.”

Ethan entered the Hyatt Regency first, into the eye-popping four-story greenhouse atrium. At the bar, there was Weston Davis, far from the archetype of a financial titan or sexual master. Meek and nervous. Ethan sat down and got to the point. He and Hazel were ready to share all the incriminating information they possessed—— photos, messages, emails——with Weston’s wife, Victoria, and his employees.

“How much is it going to cost for you to go away and never contact me again?” Weston asked. He offered Ethan $25,000. Ethan refused. Weston went up to $35,000. After some negotiation, they agreed on $50,000. They turned to the logistical details.

For Hazel, continuing to wait for any word from inside the Range Rover was like watching water come to a boil. It was dark outside, and the temperature sank into the 30s. She texted Ethan to check on him. Ethan texted back that it was time for Hazel to meet them inside. Weston had been insisting on meeting directly with Hazel. In an echo of his mistreatment of his so-called harem, he “demanded to see her.”

Hazel worked up the courage to go inside the hotel and meet the man who had come to represent so much to her–so much that she detested when it came to his attitude toward women, so much that she aspired to when it came to his financial resources. There was a singular feeling that came with meeting Weston in the same hotel where he had commanded his trophy “slaves” to rendezvous with him in the past. Hazel’s presence accomplished something beyond the demand for more money. It forced Weston to be eye level with her, with a young woman who stood for so many he had claimed as part of his “harem,” a woman whom he had believed he had recruited to be one of them, a woman whom he had demanded to augment her body for his pleasure and to quit her job to hand him control. Her presence would prove that he was not above or beyond her. He would be forced to look upon the woman who was responsible for his comeuppance.

These were the early days of the MeToo movement, which trained most of its attention at the time on what happened on movie sets and in shiny boardrooms. In contrast, Hazel was personally handling retribution for her sugar sisterhood, those anonymous, invisible young women pressured to give in to rich men in dark hotel rooms as the economy faltered and jobs those women depended upon to live rapidly disappeared.

The time for reflection was short. In the busy atrium with so many vistas blocked by vegetation, Weston could be seen sitting at the bar. But she could not see Ethan. There was a man inside the hotel holding Ethan’ phone and texting on it–however, it was not Ethan.

Something was wrong.

In a blur of motion, a group of strangers swarmed Hazel. They were police, led by Detective Robert Brown. He was a strapping former Eagle Scout who had grown up in Greenwich and had achieved notoriety after defusing an armed confrontation in town. He was an officer always in control of any situation, and he handled the admittedly strange circumstances of this hotel sting with his signature poise.

There had been no secret police courtesy of Dupont, Washington, traveling around the country on Weston’s behest. Instead, after the FBI’s cyber division had flagged Weston’s money transfers for New Haven-based Special Agent Joshua Farlow, the federal investigators discovered the broad outlines of what was happening by questioning two of Weston’s private detectives. Details included one particular sugar baby’s husband’s claim of being part of the Russian mafia, which raised an alarm inside the federal government. Special Agent Farlow briefed the Greenwich Police Department a month and a half before the operation at the Hyatt Regency, which led to Detective Brown’s assignment to the case. At one point during his investigation, Brown showed up at a Greenwich judge’s house to get warrants signed to get access to the Barlows’ cell phones. At the Hyatt, Brown and his men had used high-tech listening and recording devices to hear the entire exchange between Ethan and Weston, then had nabbed Ethan, confiscated his cell phone, and texted Hazel to come inside.

As Detective Brown and his men arrested Hazel and Ethan and led them away, they could only watch the exotic glamor of the tropical lobby recede from view.

The biggest twist in the case, arguably, occurred simultaneously with Hazel and Ethan being placed in cuffs. Weston was left untouched. Hazel and Ethan were charged with extortion and conspiracy to commit larceny, but Weston faced no legal consequences.

In terms of major sex-related extortion cases, Detective Brown could think of only one comparable circumstance in 22 years of police work. Through the investigation, police discovered Weston’s “harem” of slaves, online and in real life, along with his system of rules and punishments for their compliance. Investigators found Weston himself “not entirely forthcoming” when they questioned him. However law enforcement officials could not identify specific laws Weston broke that were worth charging given their limited resources. Instead of a perp walk, Weston got to occupy the role of righteous undercover vigilante in bringing his blackmailers to justice by cooperating with the police in the sting against the Barlows, as well as in another undercover operation against another sugar baby at the Hyatt Regency. He had finally become Batman, after a fashion.

Earlier in the police investigation, Detective Brown had traced two calls to the Hyatt Regency made to Weston threatening exposure of his “harem.” This occurred weeks before the Barlows came to Connecticut. Detectives rushed to the Hyatt that day, but they could not find any trace of the caller, nor did evidence point to the hotel’s number having been spoofed. The identity of that caller or callers remains unclear today, though may have been coordinated by Patricia (“Megs”), who was in touch with Weston’s circuit of “babies.”

In the Greenwich courts, Hazel and Ethan pled guilty, with Ethan sentenced to 18 months in a correctional facility in Connecticut and then three years of probation. Back in Ohio, the Mansfield police were notified by their Greenwich counterparts what had happened, and they hurried to check on Hazel’s children but found them well cared for by Hazel’s mother. At one point, Hazel’s mother was also charged, since her account had been used for the transfer of a $25,000 payment from Weston to Hazel and Ethan, but police later acknowledged Hazel’s mother had just been doing her daughter and son-in-law a favor and knew nothing about the source of funds.

After police techs analyzed the Barlows’ GPS, investigators interpreted the fact that the Barlows drove to Weston’s house in Greenwich as evidence of their “intent to harass and/or intimidate the victim.” After the arrest, Detective Sergeant Mark Zuccerella, part of Robert Brown’s sting team at the Hyatt Regency, suspected that the $9,000 in Hazel’s purse “was purposely carried to be used as a bond if they had been arrested,” a sign that the Barlows knew their confrontation with Weston could be a last stand.

In an attempt to lessen punishment for Hazel, Ethan insisted on taking the blame for the blackmailing scheme, saying he was the ring leader. It worked. Hazel received a five-year suspended sentence, avoiding going to prison. The climax of their misadventures, with the involvement of the FBI and police, also ended up entangling Patricia, Weston’s “harem mother,” whom authorities tracked down in Michigan. The investigation turned up the fact that Patricia had invented several internet profiles of sugar babies to use to blackmail Weston in a coordinated effort with Hazel and Ethan. Like Hazel and Ethan’s persona, the fabricated women created by Patricia were subversive extensions of Weston’s fantasy life controlling women: He had invented women in his mind as playthings and now invented women turned against him. Other sugar babies who demanded money from Weston were actual women who had been “slaves” and met up with him for trysts at hotels including the Hyatt. Both cyberspace and reality had turned against him.

In the wake of the arrests, all the main parties, including Hazel, Ethan, Patricia, and Weston, admitted through lawyers to having handled things poorly.

While Weston dodged charges, Hazel and Ethan had succeeded in pulling down the wall between his double life. His reputation was shaken as the community in Greenwich found out bits and pieces of what transpired. Consequences had finally come——though their impact was limited. Weston and his wife and children changed their surname and moved to Palm Beach.

The chasm between the fortunes of the haves and have-nots that Hazel and Ethan had tried to bridge only seemed to widen in the aftermath of the events. Weston and Victoria Davis remained married, but Hazel and Ethan’ marriage strained to the breaking point. Weston and his family continued to live in luxury and travel freely around the world on elaborate vacations, while Hazel and Ethan navigated strict probation restrictions and faced steep financial difficulties. The Barlows’ DNA and fingerprints were added to databases, while Weston got to continue playing his role as a secret, invisible collaborator to the FBI to nab his other sugar baby blackmailers.

Hazel had to watch the Land Rover being towed away. In order to compensate for the portion of the more than $200,000 Weston wired them that was considered a result of extortion, the Barlows had to pay restitution to Weston which amounted to about half of every paycheck she got. With others who had demanded money from Weston facing similar penalties, he had gained or regained control over some of his purported slaves, this time courtesy of the legal system. They were still under his thumb. They were his serfs.

Continuing his signature tone-deafness, Weston posted on a personal blog a few years after these events, “I love to talk about money-saving habits and avoiding scandalous financial deals.” That doozy was followed by: “Basically, I try to live a good, clean life, respect the earth and my family, and share my thoughts and opinions with the world to help others live the amazing life that I live!”

After police reports and statements trickled out to the press, Brendan Wade, founder of Seeking Arrangement, came forward, pointing out how strange the wave of sugar baby vengeance against Weston had been. Seeking Arrangement has since been rebranded Seeking, which might be mistaken for a more mainstream dating site if not for the marketing campaign depicting a group of bikini-clad twentysomethings chasing a silver-haired man in a business suit across a beach. Wade tried to reassure other users of the site that what had happened to Weston Davis was a fluke.

For a while, the sparks set off by the Sugar Daddy revolt seemed to end up in smoldering ashes. But inspiration takes various forms. In the “sugar bowl” of “babies” or to use Hazel’s preferred term, sugar sisters——stories were told, and since the time Hazel and Ethan invaded Weston’s privileged sanctum, there have been multiple high-profile examples of sugar babies blackmailing their sugar daddies, including several who met through Seeking.

For all rights inquiries, email team@trulyadventure.us.