Okay, we are alive. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey Investigates on today's show. I have a very special guest. He comes to us from Texas. His name is Chris Bentley. And he just published a book came out April 6, 2020. Title of the book is Burning Bellatorum, the story of a $40 million fraud and its priceless lessons for investors and entrepreneurs.

Really fascinating book. A lot of these events happened very recently, leading up right before the pandemic.

And he's written this book to advise people and how to watch out for circumstances where there may be fraud involved. So he can

talk more about that. So Chris Bentley, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, William. I appreciate it.

And it's a honor to be here. Awesome. Well, for people who may not have heard your name, I think this is your first book.

Can you talk about your background?

You've done a lot, had military service.

And can you kind of talk about your background and what led you up to putting together

Barletorum and what the consequences of that business that you created?

What happened?

Yeah, so I grew up in Texas and then I enlisted in the Marine Corps

right after I graduated high school in 1999 and served about 14 and a half years,

did six tours of duty overseas in support of the global war on

terrorism. So that was several tours, so Iraq, several tours to Afghanistan, and then a couple of

other, you know, a few other countries around the world. And then I got medically discharged in

on December 30th of 2013 and didn't know what I was going to do with my life.

I thought I was going to be a lifer in the Marine Corps.

So I moved back to Texas and got into the oil and gas industry as what we call a landman,

which is short for petroleum land manager.

That's basically like real estate for the oil and gas industry.

We acquire assets, leases, land assets, mineral rights, easements, things like that. And so I really cut

my teeth in the industry in 2014, 2015. Oil and gas industry went downhill in 2015.

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