Three months ago, a mysterious website was taken offline on the order of a Florida judge. The site seemed like the work of an amateur; clusters of low-quality images crowded the homepage, and a bright red banner garishly lined the top. Yet the creator had been savvy enough to conceal their identity; they had registered the site with an encrypted email account and paid with bitcoin to host it.
The website’s domain name—realmpatrickcarroll.com—referred to Patrick Carroll, a prominent real estate investor based in the Southeast whose firm manages $7.4 billion in assets. Carroll is a master of self-promotion. He boasts 1.1 million Instagram followers, has participated in charity auctions ).
Carroll has generated more favorable press for giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in free sneakers to children at Boys & Girls Clubs as part of a program called Kicks for Kids, which he says is just one of numerous charitable endeavors. (His LinkedIn profile cheerfully proclaims, “Patrick is incredibly philanthropic.”) Carroll’s lawyer added in his statement to The Daily Beast that Carroll “grew up with nothing and is entirely self made. He’s a very successful man who gives back millions of dollars to those in need and dedicates his time to make a difference in the world.”
Carroll’s Instagram presence has also been cleaned up, perhaps in light of news that he is considering selling all or part of his company. Most of his old posts have been deleted, save for 27 that convey a more erudite, professional persona. Earlier this spring, for instance, he posted an image of himself reclining in a plush chair and peering into a book about Basquiat. “I love to learn,” he captioned it, “and art has certainly been one of the most interesting things I’ve studied.”
But to some in the industry, Carroll remains the same as ever. In April, The Real Deal reported that he had been banned from a restaurant in Miami after he appeared to make moves on a woman who was seated with another man, leading the manager to intervene. Later, as Carroll was leaving the restaurant, the manager “extended his hand as if to make peace.” But as a video of the encounter captured, Carroll instead appeared “to spit in his face.”
Carroll’s spokesperson told The Real Deal that Carroll had only “pantomimed” spitting. The real scandal, the flack suggested, was that the manager had tried to bait Carroll into a conflict, supposedly by saying, “I know who you are. I want you to hit me so I can get paid.” (The manager denied this.)
Carroll sent a letter of apology to the manager the day after the incident. But was he truly remorseful? In a since-deleted comment on The Real Deal’s Instagram post about the story, he claimed—in apparent contrast to the video evidence—that the manager had told him “to go F [himself]” when Carroll went to shake his hand.
“And,” Carroll added defiantly, “I got the girls number.”
