Things might have gone differently for the Property Brothers had a thief not stolen a bunch of magic equipment.

File this under weird but true: Johnathan Scott—co-host of the house-flipping reality show along with his identical brother, Drew—wanted to be a magician, complete with his own big TV special. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be: a dastardly thief stole all of his gear and Scott was forced to file for bankruptcy.

This story was brought to my attention via an incredulous tweet from Michael Fuller: 

Not sure we're sufficiently discussing fact that one of the Property Bros would be a magician had someone not stolen all of his magic props pic.twitter.com/kQDcKYThTz

— Michael D. Fuller (@michaeldfuller) September 21, 2017

The highlighted bit references a Vulture article about HGTV. I dug into this a bit more and found the September 4, 2017 People Magazine cover story, which goes into the back story of how the brothers went from acting and magic to running a successful real estate television show. The accompanying video goes into more detail of how Jonathan lost everything:

“I wanted to be a magician, and so I had built all these props and I had this trailer custom made…I was dead set on making it as a success touring, and doing something like David Copperfield,” Jonathan says. “After I was scammed, and this person stole all my stuff, he essentially put me out of business.”

Things (obviously) worked out for the two in the end, as they used the contacts they made networking as entertainers to pitch a show about their day job, but it’ll always be interesting to wonder what could have been.