St. Louis lawyer’s ex-wife gets pulled into executive’s paternity suit

Key figures in a multibillion dollar critical mineral company that once planned to establish its headquarters in St. Louis were back in town for a highly unusual reason: as players in a deposition related to a paternity suit. 

The case itself is sealed, but a related case in St. Louis County is not, and it offers records suggesting an ugly, if tangential, brawl around a multi-billion dollar company that once planned to set up its headquarters in St. Louis. It suggests the former wife of local attorney Al Watkins, who is from Peru, grew concerned about a Peruvian immigrant who Watkins believed to be undocumented. The woman was living in the home of the company’s executive chairman of the board—and Watkins’ ex made a call asking if she was OK. That call set off a legal battle, as well as suggestions from Watkins that the company’s lawyer had acted inappropriately by not disclosing the woman’s immigration status to shareholders. 

That lawyer, John Arrastia, declined comment on questions regarding those allegations, noting that the paternity case is sealed.

Arrastia is the chief legal officer of Evolution Metals and Technology, a West Palm Beach-based company with market capitalization of around $4 billion. It’s a new company: As part of a SPAC deal, Florida based Evolution Metals LLC was to purchase the St. Louis-based Critical Mineral Recovery as well as four Korean companies. Evolution would then merge with a Chicago-based special purpose acquisition company and the new entity would go public as Evolution Metals and Technology. St. Louis businessman Rob Feldman was to become the new company’s co-CEO, and Watkins was to be the entity’s chief legal officer. The deal was set to close in July of last year. 

That deal didn’t happen—and the relationship between Watkins and the company soon turned acrimonious. Watkins told SLM that the deal crumbled after he discovered that executive chairman David Wilcox had a similarly named company called Evolution Metals Corporation, which had been sued by an investor and a former executive, each saying they were owed money.

Despite Watkins’ ominous portrayal, in January of this year, Evolution Metals completed the SPAC deal and went public, only without Feldman, Feldman’s company or Watkins.

But Watkins and Wilcox weren’t ready to part ways. Earlier this year, attorneys representing Wilcox in an Idaho paternity suit began seeking to depose Watkins’ ex-wife, Carolina Diaz-Silva. 

Though documents in the paternity suit are sealed, public records show more than 300 court filings have been made since the case began 14 months ago. It also spawned a related case in St. Louis County Circuit Court. There, in February, attorneys with the law firm Lewis Rice subpoenaed Diaz-Silva, who was married to Watkins in the 1990s, stating that they were seeking “certain documents” from her.

Watkins says that the effort was so that Wilcox could determine how Diaz-Silva had gotten a phone number for a Peruvian woman that Wilcox employed. Says Watkins: “Mr. Wilcox appears to be consumed to his own detriment with determining the source of the phone number for the undocumented Peruvian domestic servant.”

The effort to depose Diaz-Silva proved contentious. 

Last month, a Lewis Rice attorney filed a motion asking the St. Louis County judge to allow Evolution’s lawyer, Arrastia, to enter the case pro hac vice, a generally rote filing that allows an attorney not licensed in one state to enter a case in another with the approval of the judge. The requests are almost always granted. 

Diaz-Silva’s attorney, Patrick Watts, fought Arrastia’s entry. In a lengthy filing, Watts argued that Wilcox was acting in “bad faith” seeking to depose Diaz-Silva. His filing noted that Watkins had been publicly critical of Wilcox and claimed that Arrastia had previously made false statements about him to SLM. Combined with the fact the woman whose deposition is being sought is Watkins’ ex-wife, the matter was tainted with “obvious implications of bad faith,” he wrote,

Then the filing goes for the jugular. Watts accuses Arrastia of failing to disclose to Evolution’s board that Wilcox employs “Peruvian foreign nationals as domestic servants” when they are not lawfully in the country. It also accuses Arrastia of having conflicting loyalties—both to Wilcox personally (as his lawyer in the paternity suit) and to Evolution Metals’ shareholders (as its chief legal officer). It notes that the mother of Wilcox’s child is herself an Evolution shareholder. 

Stranger still, Evolution’s former CFO, Robert Loitman, made his own motion in the case, also opposing Arrastia entering the matter. Loitman is a St. Louis native and former corporate executive who operated his own consulting firm in Los Angeles prior to being recruited by Evolution. He later became a vocal critic of the company, alleging to SLM that Wilcox obstructed efforts to build the corporate infrastructure needed for the proposed multibillion-dollar enterprise. Loitman has an active lawsuit against Wilcox, alleging that Wilcox fired him as the company was on the verge of going public, an event that would have triggered a $5 million payday. A judge partially denied Wilcox’s motion to dismiss that lawsuit late last month, allowing portions of Loitman’s suit to carry forward.  

Responding to that filing, an attorney for Wilcox wrote in court filings that Loitman is “a disgruntled former employee of Evolution Metals LLC, before Evolution Metals and Technologies even existed.” He argued that Loitman had no discernible interest in whether a St. Louis woman ought to be deposed in a matter pertaining to an Idaho paternity suit.

“As for the allegations about my participation in the Missouri proceeding, those were rejected by the court and the pro hac vice application granted,” Arrastia wrote to SLM in email.

To his point, attorneys for Wilcox didn’t need to make any filings in response to Watts’ lengthy brief. The same day Watts made his filing, St. Louis County Judge Bruce Hilton granted Arrastia’s admission. Diaz-Silva was deposed at the end of May. Arrastia travelled to St. Louis for it. 

A copy of the deposition shows that Diaz-Silva was asked about a pair of calls she made in the fall of 2025 to a Peruvian domestic worker in Wilcox’s employ in Idaho. Diaz-Silva says she called the woman to check on her well-being because Diaz-Silva had been told Wilcox was “dangerous” and that the woman also faced the spectre of being picked up by ICE. According to Diaz-Silva, the woman said she was fine and that was more or less the extent of the call, which was conducted in Spanish. Diaz-Silva indicated she was motivated by a simple concern for a young woman who hailed from the same country as her. Diaz-Silva said she forgot about the call until she was served the subpoena for the deposition about it. 

Asked during the deposition who alerted her to the Peruvian worker’s possible plight and who gave her the phone number, Diaz-Silva replied, “Albert Watkins.” 

The call from Diaz-Silva to the domestic worker was recorded and its transcript was read at the deposition. At one point in the call, Diaz-Silva said to the woman, “So they told me that this man, David Wilcox, is being investigated by the authorities and that it would be better if you found another place to, how would you say, be safe for, for various reasons because ICE can come at any moment.”

During the deposition, Arrastia expressed serious skepticism that Watkins gave her the phone number solely out of concern for an allegedly undocumented immigrant many states away. Diaz-Silva said Watkins is “a very caring person” but conceded this is the only time she could recall him asking her to phone a stranger he believed to be in danger. 

“I was not present for the deposition, but I understand Ms. Diaz-Silva was very complimentary of me and suggested Mr. Arrastia get to know me … that I was very nice,” Watkins tells SLM in an email. (The transcript of the deposition indeed confirms this.)

The whole Evolution enterprise—both the version of it that failed to go public in July 2025 and the current publicly traded company—is premised on developing a greener, domestic supply chain for the critical minerals essential to iPhones, electric vehicles, and computer chips. The idea is that these minerals no longer need to be mined in places like Central Africa and processed in China. They can instead be recycled out of end-of-life electronics like old computers and smartphones, and then processed domestically. 

In the days immediately after Evolution went public in January, its stock price more than doubled from $10 a share to a little above $24 a share, giving the firm a market capital capitalization of  about $15 billion. 

As of this Tuesday, however, the stock price had fallen to around $7, giving it a market capitalization of around $4.3 billion. 

In late April, white-shoe law firm Jones Day filed a lawsuit in Georgia saying that Evolution owed $3.9 million in unpaid legal fees for work the firm did to prepare the company to go public on NASDAQ.

Jones Day says its lawyers “performed substantial, complicated legal work” for Evolution between August 2024 and December 2025. The lawsuit says that when the particulars of the deal changed—for instance, when Feldman’s company was cut out—it required “significant work to restructure,” adding to the bills. After July 2025, when Feldman’s company was cut out, Jones Day alleges that Evolution continued asking its lawyers to complete closing work and repeatedly promised payment even after unpaid invoices exceeded $2 million, before ceasing communications altogether in November 2025. The firm says it withdrew its representation on Dec. 13, less than a month before Evolution completed its NASDAQ offering. Ultimately, Jones Day’s suit alleges, Evolution only paid about $600,000 of roughly $4.3 million owed.

In its response to the lawsuit, Evolution claims that Jones Day’s work “was botched so badly that Evolution Metals had to replace them with another law firm to finish the job.”

Says Watkins of the matters playing out in Idaho, Missouri, and Georgia courts: “Scrutiny of the public record was all that was required to identify a rash of ethical, legal, and regulatory issues involving several individuals who surround Mr. Wilcox and Evolution. I suggest no amount of talcum powder will abate this jock rot inducing rash.”