The whistleblower who uncovered a VC-backed Ponzi scheme

What follows is based on an exclusive interview with Dean Newton, co-founder of Relevance Ventures -- the largest Native American-owned venture firm not backed by a tribe. He hadn't wanted to tell his story until after Swiftarc Capital's Sid Jawahar was sentenced.

Backstory: Fred Goad was a successful Nashville-area entrepreneur and investor, and in 2013 agreed to make a modest (for him) investment in Swiftarc Capital, a Texas-based hedge fund investing in frontier markets.

• Goad also was affiliated with Relevance Ventures, a health-focused venture firm led by brothers Cameron and Dean Newton (their uncle is singer Wayne Newton).
• He and Cameron were kindred spirits — chrismatic optimists. Dean Newton, meanwhile, was a pessimist and curmudgeon who didn't know Goad well on a personal basis, despite Relevance operating within Goad's family office space.

January 2023: Goad, then 82 years old, walks into Dean's office and says, "I think I need your help with something."

• Newton replied: "Don't take this the wrong way, Fred, but I think you probably want to talk with Cameron. He's more your style."
• Goad said: "I know whose office I'm in," and then shared his fears about Swiftarc, which by then he'd learned was almost entirely invested in a flailing Pakistani cigarette maker.
• Goad's primary concern was that he'd introduced some friends to Swiftarc's Sid Jawahar, who was soliciting them for funds.

The next few months: Newton thought it was possible that Goad's fears were unfounded, perhaps the byproduct of sloppy bookkeeping. But alarm bells began ringing when he asked Jawahar for materials.

• First, there was no reply. Then, after numerous requests, Jawahar sent over hundreds of pages via PDF in which were buried just a few pages that were responsive to the actual request.
• Jawahar would set up meetings with Newton, but kept canceling. Newton just kept asking for paper, and eventually began to receive documents — including some details of the Pakistan transactions and several VC funds that Jawahar was in the midst of raising.
• "We found that the Pakistan transaction had happened, although we didn't really know if someone had kicked back money to Sid on the back end," Newton says. "We also started seeing all these other funds, some were VC funds in which Fred's network had probably invested, and saw that Sid was borrowing millions of dollars from them at preferred interest rates."
• He adds: "There also were a couple instances where Fred's name popped up in cap tables of funds that Fred had no knowledge of."

April 2023: Newton knew that Jawahar was unethical, but wasn't sure he'd done anything illegal.

• He also wanted to get some investor money back, and convinced Jawahar to basically turn over operations of a Swiftarc VC fund to Relevance. The books on that one were relatively clean; there wasn't much personal borrowing, and the portfolio companies were in Relevance's wheelhouse.
• But, more importantly, it gave Relevance access to LP lists and a valid reason to contact them.
• "We started getting questions we didn't expect, like, 'What happened to my investment in SpaceX or The Boring Company?' Suddenly we started to see what we'd suspected all along but couldn't prove."
• Newton began calling companies that Swiftarc investors thought they were in, only to consistently find out they weren't.

Decision time: Newton and several Swiftarc investors decided the information should be turned over to the feds, despite lawyers telling them it would probably be a waste of time. Such cases are rarely prosecuted.

• But Newton had a friend-of-a-friend who was an FBI agent, and spent a week at the Bureau's office in Atlanta —including lots of phone time with field offices in St. Louis, Charlotte, and New York.
• In December 2023, Jawahar was indicted. Last week he was sentenced to 11 years in prison and ordered to pay $31.35 million in restitution.
• Fred Goad died in July 2025.

Final thoughts: As the saga was nearing its end, Dean Newton had a conversation with Jawahar. We'll let him tell it:

• "He told me he made only one mistake: 'It never occurred to me in a million years that Fred would have someone like you ... Fred is nothing but a good man. You're an asshole and seem to enjoy it.' Clearly I underestimated him.'"
• "I actually laughed, because it cast such a light on his character that he thought his mistake was more about how he got caught than the people he'd hurt. It pretty much told me everything I'd ever need to know about him."