The Way of the Pen

The Way of the Pen

The Garden started as a memoir. What happened when we started checking the memories against the record became something else entirely.

There is a scene at the beginning of The Way of the Gun that tells you almost everything you need to know about the movie before the story has really begun.

A confrontation outside a bar turns into an escalating festival of profanity, threats and performative toughness. Everybody has something to say. Everybody is going to destroy somebody. The threats get bigger, uglier and more ridiculous until one man finally asks whether the other side wants to do “the man dance.”

It is crude. It is uncomfortable. It is also strangely useful as a metaphor.

Because eventually talking ends.

Eventually somebody has to dance.

Then There Was The Garden.

For years, Brittini Flatley has been writing The Garden, her memoir series published through F’nAround.

And Brittini writes a lot.

That isn’t an insult. Anyone who has read The Garden knows exactly what they’re getting. It is personal, profane, truthful, funny, and unapologetically written from the perspective of somebody describing what she says she witnessed and experienced.

But something interesting happened as the years went by.

We started accumulating records.

And suddenly the question wasn’t simply whether Brittini could tell a truthful narrative.

The question became:

What happens when you start checking the story?

She wrote about death threats.

We have recordings relevant to those allegations.

She wrote about police intimidation.

We have recordings, along with witness accounts and records that can be compared against what officials said occurred.

She wrote about efforts to influence or bribe her as a witness by Patrick Coats(Mophie Partnerships) and Jacob Lebo(Society Group), Jacob later then contacted her minor daughter when that wasn’t successful.

We obtained financial records and sworn testimony concerning payments involving people connected to the underlying dispute. The explanations given for those transactions including explanations invoking work performed under color of law money laundering can now be examined against the timing, testimony and documentary record.

Those distinctions matter.

A memoir can make an allegation.

Evidence can establish that an event occurred.

A witness can provide an account.

A deposition can lock somebody into sworn testimony.

A government record can show what an agency knew, what it was told, what it did, and sometimes what it conspicuously did not do.

And a jury can decide the claims actually placed before it.

Those things are not interchangeable.

That’s precisely why what happened next matters.

Twelve People Had to Dance.

In July 2026, after seven days of trial in Cook County, twelve jurors were asked to evaluate competing accounts arising from the dispute surrounding nuEra Cannabis.

On Count V, breach of contract, the jury returned a verdict for Joseph Phelan prevailing and against Robert Fitzsimmons II, NuMed Partners, NuMed Managers and IESO, jointly and severally.

The defendants Laura Jaramillo Bernal, Robert Fitzsimmons II/III, IESO, and the nuEra Cannabis dispensaries had also brought counterclaims for defamation per se, false light and tortious interference arising from public statements by Phelan and Juan Finch Jr.

The jury found in favor for Phelan and Finch on those counterclaims.

All twelve jurors signed the verdict forms.

That does not mean twelve jurors issued a criminal conviction concerning every allegation ever published in The Garden, F’nAround, a podcast, a court filing or anywhere else.

We aren’t going to pretend that it does.

It means something narrower and enormously important.

When actual claims based upon these competing accounts reached a courtroom, went through testimony and evidence, and were placed before twelve jurors, the verdicts returned on those claims did not vindicate the parties accusing us of wrongdoing.

That distinction is exactly how we’re going to approach what comes next.

Because we’re done asking readers to take anybody’s word for it.

Including ours.

Welcome to the Research.

Over the past several years, what began as a business dispute gradually produced something much larger: court records, depositions, recordings, public-records requests, agency correspondence, inspector-general materials, regulatory responses, financial records, witness statements and an expanding chronology crossing institutional boundaries.

Those records created another question.

Not simply:

What happened?

But:

What happens to institutions when documented allegations arrive at their doors?

Who investigates?

Who refers?

Who delays?

Who says there are no records?

Who possesses information another agency apparently does not?

Who changes an explanation after contradictory evidence appears?

And what happens when the same procedural behaviors begin appearing repeatedly across agencies, jurisdictions and years?

Those aren’t memoir questions anymore.

They’re research questions.

So this is where The Garden begins connecting to something considerably larger.

We are going to start publishing the research.

Not by declaring every disputed allegation proven.

Not by calling every unexplained transaction a crime.

Not by deciding for ourselves that every inconsistency constitutes corruption.

We’re going to do something considerably more difficult for the people involved:

We’re going to show the records.

We’ll separate allegation from documentation.

Documentation from inference.

Inference from established fact.

Civil findings from criminal conclusions.

And individual conduct from institutional behavior.

Then we’ll compare what the records show with existing research on regulatory capture, administrative delay, institutional self-protection, information asymmetry, bureaucratic fragmentation, procedural burden, principal-agent problems and the organizational mechanisms through which institutions can protect themselves from accountability.

Eventually, that trail leads into Phelan’s dissertation and the broader theoretical work that grew from studying these systems longitudinally.

In other words, The Garden told you what it felt like inside the story.

The next phase examines the machinery surrounding it.

Brittini had her memoir.

The defendants had their version.

The agencies have their records.

The witnesses have their testimony.

The jury has now spoken on the claims it was asked to decide.

And we have several years of receipts.

In The Way of the Gun, eventually somebody has to stop talking and do the man dance.

We’re academics.

We’re media.

We’re considerably less interested in fists.

So we’ll do it differently.

Document by document.

Recording by recording.

Deposition by deposition.

FOIA by FOIA.

Citation by citation.

And when people fabricate about what those records mean, we’ll give the public enough of the underlying evidence to make the facts evident for themselves like it was in trial.

Welcome to the Way of the Pen.

Have you seen our F’nResearch?

Let’s dance.