Re: Putting it all together - draft 2 (part 2 of 2)
VI. Judah Wernick Related
5th Avenue Channel (FAVE) - Previously known as Tel-Com Wireless Cable TV; headquarters in a strip mall in North Miami Beach. Hired Ivana Trump as hostess of the company's shopping website and its planned TV channel. Trump's appearance on The Rosie O'Donnell Show caused the stock to immediately surge from $6 to $25. Barron's reported on 12/7/98 that "the company's boosters and big shareholders include convicted stock manipulators, shameless promoters and brokers who've been banned from the securities business." Key figure is Charles S. Arnold, a private investor from FL and NC, who in the 80s sold franchises for renting videocassette recorders and running coin-operated pizza ovens. Arnold founded Sound Money Investors and published "Sound Money Investor" and "Personal Investing News" where he touted penny stocks but failed to disclose he was paid to do so. When Tel-com couldn't make payments to a Melvin Rosen, Arnold got him to buy the company in 1996; Rosen became CEO is May 1997 and Arnold related companies somehow ended up with 29% of Tel-Com shares.
Rosen's partner was Howard Edrich, a stockbroker who was banned from the securities business and pleaded guilty in '92 to possession of stolen property. Rosen hired the brokerage firm Meyers Pollock Robbins as financial consultants to Tel-Com on 7/24/97, two months after the attorneys general of four states had held a news conference to announce a crackdown on Meyers Pollock for fraudulent sales practices. In November 1997, "federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged that two of the firm's branches were controlled, through a combination of bribes and muscle, by stock consultants and thugs from the Genovese and Bonanno crime families." The Barrons article goes on to say that "In December of last year [1997], Tel-Com filed a stock registration to allow nearly six million shares to be sold by Rosen, three shell companies affiliated with Chuck Arnold and seven Meyers Pollock brokers, including ex-president Michael Ploshnick, who is under continuing federal investigation. The filing says the brokers got their stock from Tel-Com 'consultants.' Several of the Meyers Pollock brokers have since moved to the Long Island firm Glenn Michael Financial, another ardent proponent of Tel-Com stock."
On 11/1/99, Barrons reported "Within days of the story's appearance, a micro-cap stock promoter named Maier Lehmann called to tell us that a pair of Russian gangsters named Michael and Boris Vax had been making threatening visits to people they suspected had been sources for the story." The Vax brothers are "convicted Russian racketeers and onetime partners of a jailed Russian godfather" who "visited several persons they suspected were our sources, allegedly demanding compensation for any harm the article might have done to Arnold's holdings. 'If you don't pay up," Michael Vax allegedly told one terrified man, "you should worry about your kids.'"
Vax, Boris and Michael - Florida records show Boris Vax owned and ran Wholesale Petroleum Company Inc. of Ft. Lauderdale FL, from 9/11/91 to 8/13/93. From 9/1/92 to 8/26/94, the Vax family operated Worldwide Brokerage Firm Inc. also out of Ft. Lauderdale. The RA is listed as Raisa Vax, Boris is President, Treasurer and Secretary, Michael is Vice President, Gennadi Ivankov is listed as a manager, and the directors are Zvi Lev and Eduard Ivankov. A Department of Justice press release on 3/15/95 says Michael Vax was later "sentenced to 41 months in prison by the U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Georgia for his part in a racketeering enterprise which defrauded the government of $1.6 million in motor fuel excise taxes. Ilia Miller, who also pled guilty, received a 15 month sentence. The case stemmed from a 7 month undercover investigation by the IRS and Georgia Bureau of Investigation." In late 1998, Lehmann called Barrons to complain that Boris and Michael made threatening calls to him on the assumption he might have been the source for the article. See also "5th Avenue Channel".
Wernick, Judah L. - 36, former partner of Lehmann's, also from Woodmere, NY. Barrons reported that the Lehmann "had been trying for nearly two years to get journalists to publicize his account of wrongdoing on Wall Street" and that his "main goal seemed to be to interest prosecutors and reporters in the financial dealings of one of his former business associates, Judah L. Wernick." "In August, the National Association of Securities Dealers censured and fined Wernick, who consented (without admitting or denying guilt) to findings that his brokerage firm, Patterson Travis, improperly underwrote stocks and failed to act on customers' trading instructions." Wernick was also indicted in September by federal prosecutors in Manhattan in a "racketeering and stock fraud case that involved the notorious stock promoter Randolph K. Pace." "Lehmann told Barron's, and any regulator who would listen, was that Wernick was the latest in a long line of front-men for the legendary stock swindler Robert E. Brennan. Wernick denies this, but evidence shows that Wernick and Brennan have worked together in the past and that many of Brennan's former associates have been involved in questionable deals with Wernick." "Brennan's brokerage, First Jersey Securities, was later found to be a 'massive and continuing fraud' on small investors, according to the federal judge who upheld a $75 million SEC judgment against Brennan." "Contacted last week [early November], Wernick said he hadn't spoken to Lehmann in four years." The Barrons article goes on to cite evidence that supports Lehmann's contentions.
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VII. C3D Related
C3D (CDDD) - CEO and founder is Dr. Eugene Levich. C3D claims to have invented "revolutionary" optical data storage technologies. They applied for a patent under the name of Memory Devices, Inc. of NY, NY, but state records show no such company. The inventors are listed as Natalia T. Sokoluk and Vladimir V. Shubin of Moscow, Russia, Eugene B. Levich of Ramat Aviv, Israel, and Jacob N. Malkin of Ashdod, Israel. The founders of C3D are Phil Garratt and Clair Calvert, both of Vancouver. Garrett and Calvert also started Cycomm International, previously known as Sonatel Communications, which became embroiled in one of the "highest-profile regulatory scandals in Vancouver in decades." Other "revolutionary" devices Garratt pitched were an automatic fishing device, the PL 2000 which was supposed to convert party lines into single phone lines, and the Ad-Zapper and Ad-Swapper which purportedly allowed hotels to replace television commercials with their own advertising content. Several of these devices were created by an esteemed scientist, Dieter Blum, who turned out to be a high-school dropout with a lengthy criminal record for fraud-related offenses, and he was serving time behind bars in a B.C. prison during his purported European academic career.
Chalem is said to have been negotiating for a 500,000 share block of CDDD stock which was to be traded on 10/26/99, the day after he was murdered. CDDD was apparently being manipulated down for the stock to be crossed at lower prices. CDDD shortsellers "told investigators that Chalem was helping them, and that they feared that he and Lehmann had been killed because of that help." C3D officials said they had never heard of Chalem or Lehmann.
- Jeff |
