The air in the cavernous, decommissioned warehouse on Pier 12 was cold and thick with the ghosts of salt and machine oil. Linsy followed Hanuel through a labyrinth of towering, tarp-shrouded shapes, their footsteps echoing in the vast silence. He was explaining the paper trail, the shell companies, the buried audit that could prove the theft of his family’s intellectual property—the foundation of the Helwart empire.

“The ‘merger’ was a forced sale at gunpoint, figuratively ...