The Couple Who Scammed Berkshire Hathaway For Millions

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Jeff Carpoff had a lot to celebrate as friends and business associates gathered at his company’s Christmas party last year.

The one-time auto mechanic and his wife, Paulette, had started a solar company about a decade earlier that was doing remarkably well -- so well that it could count Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. as an investor. Their business, making mobile solar generators, had afforded them lavish goodies. They owned more than 90 cars, from classic Fords and Plymouths to Bentleys, at least 20 properties, and even a professional baseball team in Martinez, just northeast of San Francisco.

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And now as the year came to a close, here was Pitbull, the rapper from Miami, headlining their Christmas party at a swanky Fairmont hotel, according to people familiar with the matter. The event, tweeted Kyle Larson, a race-car driver once sponsored by a Carpoff company, was the “best holiday party I’ve ever been to by far!!”

A few days later, when FBI agents showed up at their front door, the Carpoffs’ extravagant life came crashing down. It was an edifice largely built on an alleged fraud — a Ponzi-type scheme, in essence, say federal authorities — that was as elaborate and brazen as their spending habits.

Their company, DC Solar, is now out of business, most of its 100-strong workforce unemployed. Their home in Martinez, a sprawling 4,100-square-foot affair, is in foreclosure, the swimming pool littered with leaves. When the agents came knocking on that day in late December, they took many of the luxury cars. They also seized a pile of cash -- $1.8 million in all -- that had been secreted away in one of the couple’s offices.

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