Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup, America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo.

At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project.

Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals.

Pulling up the company’s website, I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow missed the existence of a major business owned by the man at the center of our next story?

“From Houston to Rotterdam, Jurong to Fujairah. Our network connects the world’s most vital energy markets with speed, safety, and precision bulk oil storage,” announced the front page of the company’s website.

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When we searched the company’s Texas phone numbers, we found the same numbers listed online for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office.

We called the Texas numbers: dead. Then we tried the numbers for the company’s facilities in the Netherlands, Singapore and China. Also dead.

We were beginning to suspect this company did not actually exist, at least as described on its website.