linking Wayne Deans' ghost-writer, jumbo shrimp and a cure for cancer…
On May 20 1998 – one week following the FBI et al raid of YBM's Pennsylvania headquarters, and almost three years after alarming details of YBM's affairs first became accessible on the public record -- Canada's Navigator Fund Company issued a release to Financial Planners marketing the Navigator Value Investment Retirement Fund (one of YBM's institutional investors).
The letter, which stated it was from Wayne Deans, Portfolio Manager of the fund, assured readers that: “YBM is a legitimate company that produces real products. This is not a Bre-X.”
When Deans, a partner at Deans Knight Capital Management, was contacted by a reporter about this release hailing YBM's legitimacy, he, at first, claimed that it was a phantom -- a product of imaginative minds in the business press. When it was confirmed that, indeed, copies of the letter circulated to the mutual fund sales force were in the hands of financial journalists, Deans tack shifted.
“I would never say something that stupid,” the Vancouver-based money manager told Jon Ferry of B.C. Business magazine. An October 1998 B.C. Business feature captured Dean's remarkable explanation: “He says the letter was put out, without his knowledge, by the Navigator Fund Company, two of whose funds he manages. ‘They sent it out under their letterhead, but signed it me, put ‘Wayne Deans' at the bottom of it. I never saw it. I never edited it. They claimed that they checked with someone in our office about it. It definitely was not me… I think they took some liberties here and they admit that'.”
When it becomes impossible to trust or rely upon words issued in a hard copy press release issued by a well-known mutual fund group in Canada, how, then, is an investor to navigate and find their bearings in the comparatively ephemeral environment of cyberspace?
YBM provides an entry point to examine this question – following up on news reports earlier this month (December 1998) that an anonymous group of investors located somewhere unidentified, has proposed to buy YBM's stock for $2 per share and relaunch the Russian mafia-associated magnet maker as a public venture.
This bizarre bid is reportedly backed by Jonathan Curshen, a self-styled investment banker whose private Sarasota, Florida-registered vehicle, Southern Assurance Group, Inc., maintains a web-site presence @ sagi.com that can also be accessed @ members.home.net A photograph of “Master Jon”, as Curshen tags himself, is available on-line to members at the “Award-Winning Kinky Contacts” site @ kinkycontacts.com
By compiling, and cross-referencing, Curshen's various web-site, newsgroup and chat group postings from a list of inter-related email addresses, a web-profile emerges of a character that appears excited, equally, by, stock market and S&M activities.
Master Jon may be the first investment banker, real or imagined, who's openly touted a “cure for cancer” as well as the benefits of bondage.
Under his familiar handle, Curshen has posted 248 “unique messages” to usenet groups – most in such predictable categories as alt.personals.bondage, alt.personals.spanking.punishment and alt.personals.festish. He has, however, posted, with less regularity, to more diverse groups including alt.sex.bestiality, at.sex.enemas, alt.sex.teens, alt.sex.fetish.power-rangers.kimberly.tight-spa, and alt.invest.penny-stocks.
Numerous of Master Jon's messages to newsgroups are repetitious requests similar, or identical, to this one:
“Female Sub Needed 941, 813, 305, 954
Author: Jonathan Curshen
Email: jonathan@sagi.com
I want the following:
1) You must be 18-28 years of age.
2) You must be heterosexual, bi-sexual, or bi-curious.
3) You must be facially attractive, curvy and have great tits and a
great ass
4) You must be experienced orally and anally.
5) You must be severly obedient.
Hair color unimportant.”
Until this past summer, when group discussions on the Silicon Investor web-site flagged the distinctive contents of his home page, Curshen unabashedly detailed his personal interests alongside his professional. Describing himself as an “Investment Banker and Venture Capital Fund Manager” located in Sarasota, Fla. and San Jose, Costa Rica, he claimed: “I own and operate several successfull (sic) world wide enterprises.” Hobbies: “Shooting, Traveling, Shopping, Motorcycles, Dominating Young Women, Looking for the right Sub.” The President of Southern Assurance offered as his own special quote: “Where ever you go, there you are.”
It seems that wherever YBM goes, there are police investigators. And it's Curshen's experience with stocks and bonds, not stocks and bondage, that may prove of greater significance to those following this latest Toronto Stock Exchange scandal.
Curshen has posted about speculative shares and investment opportunities to various internet groups and sites using a range of email addies – pitching on-line investors such lines as this one for Imagica Entertainment (IMEA): “I don't know about you, but 100% return on your money in a couple of week i(s) pretty darn good.”
One of his most enduring, and entertaining, picks has been Cryogenic Solutions, Inc, (http://www.biogenix.com ) a Nevada incorporated entity, with an address in Houston, Texas, that began trading on the U.S. OTC Bulletin Board in January 1996.
Cryogenic (symbol CYGS) was originally floated at US $7 per share. The company's intended business was to offer an alternative to pregnant women who were in the position of having to choose between an abortion or having a child. This junior public venture proposed to be able to freeze the embryo or fetus leaving open the possibility of someone being able to birth a child at a future date.
By August 1997, when Curshen started up a Silicon Investor discussion “thread” to tout CYGS stock, the company's focus had been transplanted to the medical areas of anti-aging/cancer treatments. “CYGS has a three year high of 7 dollars. This could be a huge play,” posted Curshen “At a current bid .28 ask .31 CYGS could not only be an instant double but a super homerun to 3 or 4 (dollars). ” (The stock did, subsequently, make a run over the US $3 mark.)
On November 13 1997, then CYGS President Steve Sloat revisited SI's on-line chat forum to explain the transformation: “Unfortunately, there was negative press about cryogenic preservation of fetal material and the stock plummeted to a low of 5 cents 14 months ago.” Although Sloat commented upon how “the same processes” were viewed “in a positive light ever since Dolly the sheep and Polly the cow were publicized,” he noted that Cryogenics “has not been in that business for over a year and has redirected efforts in genetics R&D.”
Days later, jonathan@sagi.com was reposting Cryogenics' latest news release to a financial chat group using the subject header: “CYGS Finds a Cure For Cancer.”
The less-direct CYGS announcement opened with: “Studies Show Proposed Anti Aging Therapy Kills Cancer Cell” and related how company staff “while perfecting the patent on their anti aging therapy, became aware of studies indicating that the same technology intended to rejuvenate healthy cells actually killed cancer cells in laboratory and animal studies.” Mike Skillern, Cryogenic's Vice President, proclaimed, “On paper, this looks a lot like the ‘silver bullet'.”
Skillern would soon replace the web-surfing Steve Sloat as CYGS President. On January 5, 1998 the company disseminated a pair of releases through the Houston, Texas office of the PR service, Business Wire that further illuminated the special nature of this favourite of Master Jon and other stock touts.
Proposing a corporate name change to US Biogenix, the new President Skillern explained: “The original name reflected the use of cryopreservation in our proposed pregnancy suspension technology, but unfortunately the social, ideological and political opponents made it impossible to deliver that service so we redirected our efforts toward telomere biology and its applications to aging, cancer and other therapies.”
A cure for cancer may be a goal sufficient for some to achieve, but CYGS saw wider benefits to be realized from “optimizing the value of the TeloVector ™ in all its manifestations.” This technology, it was stated, was expected to have application to the shrimp farming industry and the company reported it would “spin off (its) aquaculture division into a separate corporation.” CYGS director of research Craig Tomlinson, PhD, said, “We believe we can grow more shrimp, faster and larger, and produce a ‘clean' shrimp, free of environmental or viral contaminants.”
Cancer cures and bigger, healthier, shrimp promised by a OTC stock venture trading for dimes and promoted by an S&M advocate may not raise too many eyebrows in today's investment climate, but Cryogenic's other press release of January 5 1998 did cause some dissonance in financial chat circles on-line.
CYGS announced that it had agreed to license its TeleVector ™ technology to something called Clinica Lirpa, S.A. of Costa Rica. According to Mike Skillern, “Clinica Lirpa, S.A. is especially interested in the gerontology (anti-aging) and oncology (anti-cancer) applications of the TeloVector.” Such an arrangement with an obscure Central American entity is not that out-of-the-ordinary for a typically surreal junior public company.
(I recall investigating one Canadian public company, Technigen Corp., that claimed to be selling over CDN $100 million worth of computerized golf driving ranges to Corporacion Relacio, S.A. – purportedly a Swiss company. Even though it was documented that Relacio, S.A. was, in fact, a Panamanian-registered shell whose signing representative in Canada was an ex-convict stock swindler who'd been banned for life from the Vancouver Stock Exchange, VSE officials were satisfied. Coincidentally, a founding Technigen shareholder, and its subsequent head of Investor Relations, Michael Schmidt, was one of the founding directors of Pratecs/YBM.)
What drew the disdain of several internet stock-watchers was the company's declaration: “As a condition of the license agreement, Clinica Lirpa has agreed to ‘preferential access' for anyone owning 5,000 or more shares of (Cryogenic Solutions) common stock as of March 1, 1998. ‘Essentially, Clinica Lirpa will confirm reservations to qualified individuals with at least 5,000 shares registered in their name,' said Skillern. ‘Everyone else will be served on a space available basis. This preferential service access will be for all services offered by Clinica Lirpa, not just services developed from our its TeleVector ™ '.”
When Silicon Investor posters reacted by calling this news “spooky and unethical”, “PREJUDICIAL” and “completely bizarro” one of a tag-team of on-line boosters, Barry R., jumped to the defense of CYGS: “Overall I think it's a great idea to make patients part owners of the company so they can receive the benefits of the treatment and profit from the success of the company at the same time.” Still, another SI threader brought things back to a less surreal perspective, pointing out that CYGS was "probably years and years away from treating humans and to start to make these ridiculous statements throws a major kink in their credibility.”
Internet financial forums often receive a negative rap, sometimes based on ignorance or a misunderstanding, most often as a result of the shills that operate in cyberspace. But penny stock touts have long been a part of the market culture and this new communications technology, rather than worsening the odds for carrying out some honest due diligence, actually gives the average investor a better-than-historical opportunity to probe the layers of a dubious or fraudulent stock hype.
Over the course of 1998, individuals participating in such internet discussion groups as Silicon Investor and Stockhouse uncovered and documented elements of the background and operations of Cryogenic Solutions, Jonathan Curshen and others that would be helpful to any person wanting to gain a better understanding of, either, these entities in particular, or, the penny stock market in general. There appeared the transparent hyping by Barry R. – e.g. “I still think I'm going to retire on this one” – and others of that ilk, but some harder, factual, information also emerged.
The Houston office address listed for CYGS -- 6524 San Felipe, Suite 388 -- was found to be a mail drop rented from Mail Boxes, Etc. Mike Skillern, president of CYGS, was discovered to have been fined in connection with an investment scheme that saw his father, Bud Skillern, sentenced to a lengthy jail term in the early 1990s. (The younger Skillern, who successfully plea-bargained, testified that he had installed a command in a computer system to erase traces of a fraudulent annuity investment plan that his father created involving the insolvent American Teachers Life Insurance Co.)
And Master Jon Curshen of Sarasota, Fla., was identified as promoting penny stocks in association with such characters as Barry Ross of Miami, Fla. and Jimmy (Ray) Carter of Arlington, Texas. In 1992, as several on-line investors learned, Carter (formerly a broker with Eppler Guerrin and Turner) had been fined by the NASD, (following fines in 1988, 1990 and 1991), for serious securities violations and “barred… from association with any member of the NASD in any capacity.”
At today's close, on the OTC Bulletin Board, CYGS last traded at US $0.54.
Curshen, “outed” on the SI CYGS thread in mid-1998, has kept a low profile in chat groups for many months now (unless he's adopted the guise of pseudonymous postings). It was with some amusement that the emergence of his name in the YBM Magnex story-line was greeted recently by those members of the on-line community familiar with, and not enamoured by, his activities.
Investors purportedly lined up by Southern Assurance to bail out YBM's shareholders with a CDN $88 million offer may prove to be as colourful as Curshen himself or some of the associates behind the stock plays of Imagica Entertainment, Cryogenic Solutions et al. Or, the rescuers -- and their money -- may turn out to be a chimera, like Cryogenic's cure for cancer or jumbo shrimp.
And, in the end, Master Jon could claim that the web-site postings, and hundreds of email messages identified as being his handiwork are really the product of some unknown party taking liberties with his name, business and IDs.
After all, would an investment banker – no different to, say, a money manager or other market professional -- really say or do “something that stupid”?
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