There is a perennial debate in the community of enthusiasts that track these cases and Wright's escapades to what degree and at what times was Calvin Ayre bambo

There is a perennial debate in the community of enthusiasts that track these cases and Wright's escapades to what degree and at what times was Calvin Ayre bamboozled or, at least, the specific form of his bamboozle. There is reasonable evidence that Ayre's most recent involvement is knowing-- in the form of leaked emails where Ayre discusses how his media outlet will spin Wright's faked documents. There is also leaked emails describing of witness bribing, and offers of payments to barristers of 100 million pounds which sound corrupt and not like the actions of someone who thought they were legitimately pursuing justice. By "specific form" what I mean is that it's possible that Ayre doesn't believe (or even never believed) Wright was Satoshi and if so Ayre still could have been conned. One of the most common form of large scale "Big con"'s is a pattern where you convince a mark that you intend to do some fraudulent thing to someone else, and you invite them to participate. This solves a lot of problems for the conman, like "If this is such a great deal, why hasn't someone else taken it? Why offer it to me?", "Why should I keep this a secret", "How could a deal this good be real?", etc.-- (answer: because it's illegal). In any case, the idea is that the mark thinks he's in on the con when he's really the target. "We're totally gonna rob this bank, we just need a minor advance of $20,000 to preload safe deposit boxes..." So tying it back in, Ayre might have at one point believed the claim that Wright was Satoshi... but then Wright might have been forced to admit he wasn't and then invited Ayre to participate in the fraudulent "recovery" of Satoshi's coins. This 'recovery' isn't possible, of course, but Ayre doesn't know that and Wright has milked him for much of a decade on the basis of that ignorance. When the facts are kinda fuzzy it can be hard to tell which explanation is the simplest that is consistent with the facts.