You could say he tried to go straight to the top. Federal prosecutors say Indiana defendant Joshua M. Culver—who also goes by “Maverick A. Young”—filed what looked like a Supreme Court order tossing his own criminal case, reports Bloomberg Law, complete with a forged signature of Chief Justice John Roberts and a bogus court seal. Culver was arrested in Colorado after a federal grand jury charged him with impersonating federal officials and using a forged federal judge’s signature and court seal, reports Fox News.

The indictment describes a months-long pattern: It alleges that Culver posed as an NSA agent to pressure an Indiana sheriff’s office to give up information on his daughter and dismiss another case against him, threatened an individual’s arrest over a supposed kidnapping probe, styled himself as a “Special Master” enforcing Supreme Court orders, and later claimed to head a made-up intelligence unit. In each instance, prosecutors say, he demanded that courts or officials dismiss cases and warrants against him. (This content was created with the help of AI. Read our AI policy.)