Dreamtown: The Story of Adelanto · Dreamtown: The Story of Adelanto

Chapter 5: The Audit

June 28, 2023·30 min·2 clips

The audit uncovered a $5.5 million deficit, not the $400,000 surplus Adelanto's former leaders had bragged about.

1. Dreamtown Chapter 5 covers Stivana Evans's first months as an Adelanto city councilwoman and the financial and regulatory chaos she inherits from the prior administration. 2. David Weinberg hosts and narrates; key interview subjects include Stivana Evans, cannabis entrepreneur Adam Wilkes, journalist Tammy Abdullah, and newly elected Mayor Gabriel Reyes. 3. The episode's central question is whether the new Adelanto council can impose real accountability on a city where the cannabis boom masked deep financial mismanagement. 4. At the December 2018 swearing-in ceremony, Stivana delivered her inaugural speech wearing a white grid-pattern dress, describing her feeling of 'overwhelming gratitude' for supporters who knocked on doors. 5. Both Bug and former Mayor Rich Kerr lost their seats badly in the election; Bug finished sixth. 6. Stivana describes reading the city budget for the first time and finding 'a bunch of made-up numbers that they pulled from God knows where and put into a book and called it a budget.' 7. The 2014-2015 fiscal year audit, received a few months into Stivana's term, showed a $5.5 million deficit — nearly half the city's total budget — where the prior council had projected a $400,000 surplus. 8. Stivana's reaction to the audit finding: 'Y'all just lost $4 million, and we all just cool with that. Just write it off. It's cool.' The shortfall was not lost money but money that had never existed. 9. Stivana describes the learning curve of government as uniquely steep — unlike a job at Staples with two weeks of training and a supervisor, elected officials are handed complex decisions on their first day with no preparation. 10. A city employee named Kathy Bishop, working in the Department of Cannabis Control, spent three to four months conducting legwork that revealed Adelanto actually had 100 cannabis operators, not the 47 the city believed it had. 11. Adam Wilkes, CEO of Tyson 2.0 — a cannabis company founded by boxer Mike Tyson — explains that cannabis margins are 'so small' and competition is fierce, despite popular assumptions of easy profit. 12. Tyson's most viral product is a gummy ear shaped like the bite mark he left on Evander Holyfield's ear during their 1997 World Boxing Association Heavyweight Championship fight. 13. Russian oligarch Dmitry Bosov invested approximately $164 million into Genius Fund, a cannabis company with a major operation in Adelanto's Green Zone, described by people who visited as a 'James Bond-style building' with an airplane-wing conference table too large for the number of attendees. 14. Bosov hired two USC college friends — Ari Stiegler and Gabriel Borden — to run the company; Borden's father is TV producer Bill Borden, who created Disney's High School Musical; neither Stiegler nor Borden had cannabis industry experience. 15. Genius Fund made early mistakes including operating without proper permits; according to sources, executives panicked and burned plant seedlings when law enforcement arrived to ask about the plants. 16. Journalist Tammy Abdullah describes the company's culture as 'a boys club' with 'a frat mentality,' featuring catered lunches every day, last-minute business trips, and high-flying spending by those at the top. 17. A Genius Fund initiative to place weed-ordering kiosks in liquor stores failed because the kiosk contained no cannabis — it was an ordering terminal requiring delivery, replicating what a phone app could do. 18. When Genius Fund collapsed, 300 employees were called into a layoff conference call so garbled no one could understand it; the line went dead; employees discovered they'd lost their jobs when their work accounts stopped working, with a formal notice arriving a week later. 19. On 6 May 2020, less than two years after founding Genius Fund, Dmitry Bosov was found dead by gunshot in his home gym; Russian officials ruled it suicide or accident but his family disputes this; he was scheduled to testify against a former partner charged with hiring hitmen. 20. The episode closes with a cliffhanger: weeks into the new council's term, a scandal emerged involving Stivana herself.

As heard by us

A weed-boom audit that turns civic bragging into hard numbers.

This episode does its best work when it treats Adelanto's weed boom less like a slogan and more like a bookkeeping problem. The city had been talking up a $400,000 surplus, but the audit showed the budget was full of mistakes and the money was never really there.

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Why you'd press play

You want the money story behind Adelanto's weed boom, where audits and city books matter as much as the green zone.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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