What happens when Sheriff Deputies paid to protect you are secretly tracking your every move to run criminal activities for an ISIS terrorist from Iraq in Los Angeles California? When the badge itself becomes a cover for conspiracy? For Enzo Zelocchi, this wasn’t a plot twist—it was real life. And it became the catalyst for his most personal film to date: Checkmate.
The still-in-development thriller draws its inspiration from a chilling criminal and civil federal case now filed in Los Angeles: Case No. 2:24-cv-09601. The civil lawsuit lays out a story so surreal it could only be true. At its center are four celebrity targets—Steven Spielberg, Margot Robbie, Todd Philips, and Enzo Zelocchi himself. The original main target was Zelocchi. He was allegedly assaulted, kidnapped, victim of a murder attempt, stalked, surveilled, and defamed by a cyber-terrorist ring that reached deep into the corruption of U.S. law enforcement.
The chain of events began in 2018, when Zelocchi launched A-Medicare, a blockchain-driven, single-payer health care initiative. To build out the project’s white paper, he enlisted Troy Woody Jr., a self-described crypto specialist. But Woody was an infiltrator who had signed an NDA as a “advisor” and began secretly targeting digital assets.
Now named as a defendant, Woody Jr. was already affiliated with UGNAZI, a radical hacktivist group tied to cyber-terrorism. Alongside Mir Islam, another convicted UGNAZI hacker, Woody passed sensitive A-Medicare and digital asset information directly to ringleader Adam Iza (aka Ahmed Faiq): an ISIS sympathizer with a criminal record who has since pleaded guilty.
Shockingly, this operation wasn’t orchestrated from some far-flung bunker. According to court filings, Woody and Islam coordinated their efforts (with Iris Au and Adam Iza in the outside) while incarcerated for murder from inside Metro Manila District Jail in the Philippines, using contraband laptops and phones. They had help from the inside using local corrupted jail guards.
That help came in the form of corrupt members of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Official exhibits name a web of insiders:
Together, this rogue alliance turned state resources into tools of terror. Using StingRay cell simulators, tower-dump requests, DMV lookups, and fraudulent warrant applications, they geolocated their celebrity targets and monitored their movements with military-grade precision.
Their crimes weren’t just theoretical.
Court documents cite multiple attacks connected to the network:
And when those attacks didn’t silence him, they launched a full-blown smear campaign:
As a final tactic, two corrupt attorneys filed three meritless lawsuits, hoping to pressure Zelocchi into giving up his digital assets. All three suits were eventually dismissed.
Rather than retreat, Zelocchi went on offense. He filed his own federal suit invoking RICO (18 U.S.C. § 1962), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030), California Penal Code § 502, and a battery of defamation and conspiracy claims. Armed with chat logs, GPS data, and forensic evidence, he partnered with both domestic and international law enforcement to expose the syndicate from the inside out.
His courage didn’t just preserve his reputation. It helped unravel a complex web of criminal activity that had infiltrated public institutions.
This isn’t just a story about one man’s fight. It’s a mirror held up to a broken system: where badges can be bought by an ISIS terrorist, surveillance tools can be misused, and truth can be buried beneath a pile of warrants and clickbait.
Checkmate may be a movie. But its inspiration is all too real. And thanks to Zelocchi’s unwillingness to back down, we may now see what happens when the system turns on itself—and one man has the receipts.
