All Charges Dismissed: Ryan Bloom’s 18-Month DOJ Nightmare

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

I got a phone call from my wife. She was traveling with two of our children. She said, “Ryan, someone has called my phone over and over again. He says that he’s an FBI agent and he is coming to arrest you.” That’s how Ryan Bloom’s 18-month nightmare with the DOJ began. No warning. No target letter. Just FBI agents in his front yard with a nine-year-old boy watching from inside the house.

Ryan had built a utility construction company in Oklahoma from nothing. Over seven years, he and his business partner did $60 million in sales and paid out $30 million in wages. When the business failed and went through bankruptcy, Ryan thought he’d moved on. He was wrong. That’s when things went from bad to worse.

The Arrest That Made No Sense

“I had no earthly idea,” Ryan told me when I asked if he saw it coming. The FBI agent on the phone said he had a warrant and was posted outside Ryan’s neighborhood. Ryan needed to come out with his hands in the air. “What? How many iTunes gift cards do you need me to go get? This has to be a scam,” Ryan responded. But when he looked outside his window, there were three silver sedans and six FBI agents in navy blue jackets with yellow lettering.

The worst part? His nine-year-old son was with him alone in the house. “I’ll never ever ever ever get over is my nine year old son was with me alone. And I looked at him and he’d kind of heard all this play out. And he thought it was a big practical joke. And he had the biggest smile on his face,” Ryan said. The agents wouldn’t let Ryan explain to his son what was happening. They just put him in the back of an FBI sedan and drove off.

During the drive to booking, the FBI agent started telling Ryan he never did projects in Omaha or Lincoln, rattling off specific projects Ryan’s company had actually completed. Ryan had pictures and documentation of all of it. The agent was telling him he’d “lived in a made up fairytale world.” Ryan started giving him witnesses and asking questions back. According to his attorneys later, Ryan began interviewing the agent instead of the other way around.

The Bogus Bank Fraud Case

The charges centered around Ryan’s company’s relationship with a local bank. The bank had loaned them money for equipment and purchased accounts from them through something called the Business Manager program. It was marketed as working capital for the business. Only after the company was dead and gone did the bank turn around and accuse Ryan of abusing that program to commit felony bank fraud.

Ryan later discovered why the bank was so motivated to make this a criminal case. They had insurance that would pay out if they could prove fraud. Making Ryan the scapegoat meant they’d get funded and he’d be gone.

When Ryan’s attorneys got the first evidence from the FBI investigation, they found something stunning. The FBI had interviewed exactly three witnesses the week before the sealed grand jury indictment. That was it. That was the entire investigation that led to Ryan being dragged out of his house at gunpoint.

The Shocking Conflict of Interest

As Ryan dug into the case, he uncovered connections that made his attorneys’ hair stand up. The prosecutor, Assistant US Attorney DH Dilbak, had his name on the press release. Ryan’s friends started reaching out, saying they knew Dilbak, that he was Ryan’s age and went to the same church.

Then Ryan found something bigger. On the bank’s website, prominently listed as a board member and shareholder was Joseph Harris Jr., who also happened to be the president of the University of Oklahoma. Dilbak’s wife, Mackenzie, worked for that same university and had directly reported to Harris for most of her 10 years there. During that time, her salary had jumped from $50,000 to $310,000.

“If there was somebody who had been instrumental in my wife or me personally, going from $50,000 to $310,000 a year over a very short period of time, I would have a significant loyalty. My judgment would be clouded by how influential that person had been,” Ryan explained.

Fighting Back With Facts

Ryan didn’t sit back and wait. When his attorneys told him to organize a factual basis for every transaction his company had done, he spent hundreds of hours pulling together documents. He even went to job sites with a friend to dig up rock samples because the prosecutor was claiming they’d charged for rock work where there wasn’t really rock.

The 302 reports (FBI interview summaries) kept coming back with obvious errors. In one, the FBI claimed Ryan drove a witness down a specific street in January 2023 in a Tesla Cybertruck. The problem? That vehicle didn’t exist yet and wouldn’t be available to anyone for another year.

Ryan’s employer stood by him throughout the ordeal. When he told them about the arrest, expecting to lose his job, the CEO called back and said they believed in innocent until proven guilty. “We believe that innocent people can be targeted by the justice system for unjust reasons and go build this thing,” they told him. That support was a game changer for Ryan and his family.

All Charges Dismissed

After 18 months of fighting, something almost unheard of happened. All charges were dismissed. Even more remarkable, the assistant US attorney was disqualified from the case. That happens in less than 1% of federal prosecutions.

When I asked Ryan how he felt when it was over, his answer surprised me. “I thought I’d feel relieved, I’d feel just this weight lifted. Yeah. I might feel happy. I might feel sad. I didn’t know what, I didn’t feel anything. I just felt completely numb. I mean, I just, it was, I felt like a, I felt like a zombie.”

Ryan’s story shows what can happen when someone refuses to be steamrolled by a system that assumed his guilt from day one. He did the work, found the right attorneys who were willing to fight, and never stopped pushing back against a case that should never have been brought. The nightmare that started with FBI agents in his front yard ended with complete vindication, but not before putting him and his family through 18 months of hell they’ll never forget.