Q. All right. What did you do after that?
A. I did some international trading. I became a purchasing agent for the Venezuelan government. And I got ripped off for $500,000 investing in a pyrolysis system.
Q. Well, I guess that's where we better start our focus.
A. Now, that makes good common sense.
Q. Well, thank you.
A. I congratulate you, sir.
Q. Thank you.
A. You're finally going to get on track.
Q. I am finally going to get on track, that's right. Mr. Rivera, I'm entitled to know your history.
A. Excuse me?
Q. I'm entitled to know your history.
A. And I'm entitled to know yours.
Q. Well, good. So how did you get ripped off -- how did you get involved in the pyrolysis business to begin with and what was the state of development of the pyrolysis business at the time?
A. I believe my statement was I got ripped off investing in a pyrolysis system.
Q. Well, would you explain?
A. Now, if you're going to testify for me, please answer the questions for me.
Q. Well, just tell me how you got ripped off.
A. A man came and --
Q. A man whose name was came?
A. You know, I should remember it, but I don't. It was a bad experience. And, you know, the human mind is really a wonderful machine. It sort of, you know, lets you forget things that you don't want to remember, as I'm sure you're fully aware of.
Q. Tell me how the --
A. I'm not sure there's a lot of things.
Q. Tell me how the guy ripped you off.
A. Pardon me?
Q. Tell me how the guy ripped you off.
A. Oh, okay. That is a direct question germane to my testimony. He ripped me off by telling me that he had a system to take used tires and convert it to diesel and natural gas. And this conversion, okay, was limitless. The feedstock were billions upon billions of tires around the world that had to be disposed of because tires, as you well know, are not inert. They cannot be buried in landfills, because if they're buried in landfills, the tire, when it's crushed down with all the soil on it, when the water comes through, it erodes and, boop, back pops up the tires. So I recognized it as a global problem that if the system worked as it was delineated, an opportunity to make a lot of money. So being extremely busy with eight to ten projects at one time, which were in various stages of negotiations and closing, I wrote him a check for $500,000. And when I caught up with myself, which sometimes is a feat, I went to investigate what I invested in. And I said, okay, show me the plant; and he said, oh, no, we don't have a plant. I said, well, show me your -- show me what you sold me. Show me, you know, how you can ascertain that you can do all these things. And he says, well, Hitler during World War II was using pyrolysis to power his Sherman tanks. And I said the same Sherman tanks that were left all over the world with their motors blown up because of the bad fuel? And he says, well, we're going to – I said either show me the plant, show me a demonstration where you did it in small scale, or give me back my money. And he could not show me a demonstration. He could not show me a plant. He could not show me anything in small scale. And I made it perfectly clear to him that it was in his best interest to return my money.
Q. Did he?
A. Absolutely.
Q. Well, then, how did that lead to the pyrolysis process that we have come to know about that was going on in Port Gibson, Mississippi with tires?
A. Mr. Rue, I am trying to afford you all courtesies and all professionalism as a senior trial counsel for the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please do not continue to insult me by calling my system pyrolysis because it's the furthest from the truth. I take exception to it, and I will not answer any questions that you have associating my system as the pyrolysis system of John Rivera. Are we perfectly clear?
Q. Yes, sir.
A. Thank you, sir.
Q. All right. How did you get from this pyrolysis system that you got your money back on to whatever it was you were doing in Port Gibson, Mississippi?
A. First of all, I -- I invested in what was delineated as a pyrolysis system when, in fact, it was air of a con artist.
Q. Okay.
A. But in all fairness, it intrigued my mind. The gray matter between my ears that God has so graciously given me, tweaked interest in saying, wait a minute, if Hitler did this in World War II, surely someone else is doing it, and surely someone else has succeeded. And I spent the next six to seven years, not on a full-time basis, as time permitted within my scope of purchasing, buying and selling things throughout Europe and Central South America, I visited every known pyrolysis system in the world. In the free world, in the Communist world, in the United States. And I noted what was good, what worked, and what was bad on each and every one of them. Here again, I believed that my intellect was as such that I could process all this information and come up with my own system. And I did. I took and found out why everybody was failing. Why somebody spent $20 million in Taiwan, built a pyrolysis system that was going to be operating and feeding a steel mill. I mean, a perfect application, why it wasn't running. And the biggest problem that I saw in the pyrolysis system is not being able to get the same product each and every time. You may run for an hour and get this, another hour and get that, and another four hours and get something totally different, which whether or not it was a crude oil or a fuel or whatever, there was no consistency. So that was my first attempt -- excuse me, that was my first challenge to overcome to proceed with my system. Now, if you go onto the Internet as your purported expert witness did, you can pull up thousands and thousands and thousands of references and experts on pyrolysis which, here again, has no bearing on what I do because I spent three years figuring out how to be able to produce the same product 24/7. As long as the feedstock was the same, the product had to come out the same. Okay. And based on life experiences, not education, I was able to formulate a catalyst that unified and created the harmonics necessary to produce one product, the same product.
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