An alleged serial grifter who briefly opened a restaurant in SF's Castro neighborhood back in 2019 is back in the news for crimes elsewhere, and the whole story with this guy is very, very crazy.
Opening a restaurant, promising to open another across the street, and spending a bunch of money doing so doesn't exactly seem like a smart sort of long con, just given how difficult and often unprofitable running a restaurant can be. But that was the apparent scheme concocted back in 2019, when two seemingly unknown restaurateurs with fake-sounding resumes snapped up the former Chow space on Church Street near Market.
And now it seems like this was just one in a long string of shady businesses launched by a serial scam artist, maybe just for short-term cash and the use of a business partner's credit card.
Fans of Chow were still reeling from its abrupt closure in March 2019 when, very quickly, a restaurateur using the name Mark White said he had leased the space and was planning, within a month, to open something called Cook Shoppe. The dumb spelling aside, this should have been the first red flag, given that both this and the restaurant White had already announced in a space across the street, Gramercy Park Brasserie, were semi stolen from prominent restaurants in New York — Cookshop and Gramercy Park Tavern.
Suffice it to say, Gramercy Park Brasserie never made it open, but Cook Shoppe did in May 2019, and the plan seemed to be replicate Chow's success by offering a fairly similar menu at slightly higher prices — a menu that included a burger, lasagna, and steak frites.
The still live Yelp page shows some professionally shot photos of the food, which didn't seem half bad, and someone with some semblance of pastry talent was at work with things like this fun caramel popcorn cake. But I digress.
Within three months, Cook Shoppe had closed, getting dinged by California Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) for failing to get a liquor license — yet they were still serving beer and wine. White then told Hoodline he was pivoting to a fast-casual concept, claiming he had only been a passive investor in the operation, with a man named Lawrence Tonner actually running the place. Tonner was, at that point, sitting in jail for a felony warrant out of New York. (The Cook Shoppe/Chow space is now home to The Rustic/Tavola Rustica.)
About a month later, Hoodline reported on the dubiousness of the whole enterprise, with both vendors and employees claiming they were stiffed out of money they were owed going back a month or more. And it seemed that White had been up to something similar previously in Los Angeles, with a business called Zen Craft, and using the alias Michael Esposito.
White, also, was an alias, for a man who turns out to be named Carl John Butcho II. Butcho became the subject of a podcast in 2023, The Wedding Scammer, in which host Justin Sayles described first meeting Butcho, going by Esposito, in Los Angeles in 2016. The scam at that point was a fledgling news site called Newsaratti, and as Sayles explains, he was hired to work for the site, which was operating out of a WeWork, and the energy with Butcho/Esposito was off from the start.
"What had started as a pleasant conversation between me and Newsaratti’s general manager became ground zero for a human cyclone," Sayles says. "Michael spoke a mile a minute, and he wanted me to know one thing above all else: that he was unfathomably rich."
Butcho claimed to be the son of a Pennsylvania coal tycoon, and liked to tell strangely braggy stories about how amazing it felt to pull up to luxury stores like Gucci in a private car and have security guards clear the sidewalk so that you walk in and spend thousands of dollars on a watch.
The podcast finds that Butcho's grifter-y escapades began in New York in the early aughts, with at least one case of a dating-app date reportedly having his credit cards stolen. Back in 2008, when Butcho was a young chef and caterer about town, it seems that an ex-boyfriend took him to court for running up $361,000 in credit card debt on that boyfriend's corporate credit card, as the NY Post reported, while staying at the Ritz-Carlton. These charges included "renting limos and scooping up luxury goods via the Ritz’s personal-shopping service." And, according to an employer at a Greenwich Village restaurant where he'd been working, he'd been telling people he lived in an $8 million apartment and "was buying a $10 million apartment."
"Some real Anna Delvey shit right there," says Sayles.
Butcho also apparently bailed on the restaurant job, perhaps to shack up with the boyfriend at the Ritz, telling the restaurant he had "intestinal cancer."
According to court documents, Butcho told the boyfriend he was going to swap the corporate card for his mother's credit card, and nothing else would be charged to him. Butcho ended up pleading guilty to grand larceny and going to jail. And he was then indicted for grand larceny again in upstate New York in 2012.
It seems plausible that Butcho met Tonner while doing that jail stint — Tonner was reportedly let out of jail in New York in 2014, also on larceny charges. Tonner's name then pops up on Page Six in 2015, with a story about him and a partner, who may have been Butcho, going by the hilarious alias Siro De Medici, attempting to have some kind of phony charity gala at Grand Central Terminal, and they'd been going around town meeting with philanthropists telling them they'd gotten Lady Gaga and Elton John to agree to perform. (They had not.)
Here's Butcho showing up in a "power couples" issue of Los Angeles Magazine in 2018, alongside his then-boyfriend Barrett Walters. They were described as "Southern California's premiere catering and event specialists," operating under the business name Zen Craft, and they were later both hit with lawsuits over unpaid rent and wages.
After his sojourn in San Francisco, Butcho apparently went on to try to start a catering business with a couple in Oakland who say that he scammed them out of over $100,000 before disappearing. (That is all in Episode 3 of Sayles's podcast.) The Alameda County DA's office ultimately declined in 2021 to charge Butcho with any crime.
Then, he headed to Texas, where he posed as someone named Lance Miller, the owner of a Willis, TX wedding venue called Charleston Lane. Willis is a town about 50 miles north of Houston, and the venue sits on Lake Conroe.
Butcho allegedly ran this venue for a couple of years, and scammed at least 17 couples out of around $200,000, promising things like fireworks displays, catering, and more, which was never delivered. It seems that some weddings must have gone on successfully, but at least one bride had to scramble last minute when she found the venue chained shut and closed the night of her rehearsal this past May.
Despite Sayles reporting on all this back in 2023, Butcho was apparently still up to this same grift this past spring, and an investigation into the wedding venue didn't start until May of this year (likely the reason it was abruptly closed). And it was only last week, on August 15, 2025, that Butcho was arrested in Austin and charged with property theft, in connection with the wedding venue scam.
"This individual was deceiving from the very beginning," says Lt. Scott Spencer with the Montgomery County (TX) Sheriff’s Office, speaking to local station KHOU. “We have way too many victims that have been out way too much money."
Charleston Lane has reportedly been taken over by a new owner, and is now called The Lake Venue.
Sayles makes the point in an introduction to his podcast that scam artists like this, while blatantly wronging people, can be hard to get brought to justice, with the onus typically falling on the victims to file civil suits if a criminal charge isn't brought.
And this Butcho guy seems to have left a lot of victims in his wake, with grievances both large and small.
Previously: Former Cooke Shoppe Team Allegedly Has History Of Quickly Shut Businesses In Los Angeles
