The rise and fall of America's flashiest dealer in luxury watches. Just after dark, the most wanted man on Reddit slipped into his secret lair: a storage locker behind a Gold's Gym in Venice, California. Chiseled and steely like his hero Mark Wahlberg, whom he resembles enough to have earned the nickname Marky Mark in high school, the year-old Texan was wearing long black shorts, a tight black T-shirt, and a snappy black TPG cap on his closely shorn head.
Amassing tens of thousands of fans on Instagram and YouTube, he opened up the notoriously shady world of watch sales, showing viewers how he evaluated watches, made deals, and busted counterfeit sellers.
But stacked neatly on a far shelf were tokens of his current, considerably less glamorous reality: cans of tuna fish, bars of soap, a couple of pillows, and a sleeping bag. Farrer was on the run. According to the FBI, the Timepiece Gentlemen financed his lavish lifestyle by running a "luxury watch Ponzi-type scheme. A foster kid from backwoods Texas, Farrer had broken into the rarefied world of luxury timepieces, defying its unwritten rules and exposing its sleaziest secrets.
But in the process, he had relied on techniques that were dubious at best and criminal at worst. Small wonder that the sleuths on Reddit, who had been working for years to bring him down, had given him a nickname befitting a scam artist: the Wolf of Watch Street. The next day, FBI agents stormed the locker and arrested Farrer on 11 counts of wire and mail fraud. Farrer got his first watch around the time he pulled two butcher knives on his dad.
It was and Farrer, 17, was living with his foster parents in the cowpoke town of Sherman, Texas. The knives, one in each hand, were of unknown provenance. According to the police report, Farrer insisted he'd pulled the knives in self-defense after his father hit him in the face for not fixing a fence. It was, he told me, a reaction to years of recriminations and restrictions from his dad. Farrer was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, resulting in another of his many stints behind bars.
