SEC fines, cites Durante's astrologer-tout Weingarten
stox.com Inc - Street Wire
SEC fines, cites Durante's astrologer-tout Weingarten
stox.com Inc URL
Shares issued 14,451,381 Oct 10 close $0.02
Fri 22 Mar 2002 Street Wire
See Securities and Exchange Commission (U:*SEC) Street Wire
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission has imposed a $15,000
fine and a public censure on Henry Weingarten, a high-profile Wall Street
market astrologer with a strong knack for touting stocks of notorious
Mafia-linked career fraudster Edward Durante, and other non-Durante Howe
Street penny stock promotions. (All figures are in U.S. dollars.) In a
settlement order this week, the SEC censured Mr. Weingarten, 54, of New
York, and ordered him to mail a copy of the regulator's detailed citation
against him to all his existing investment advisory clients and new clients
within the next year. The consent settlement entered in U.S. District Court
for the Southern District of New York, also orders Mr. Weingarten to do his
best to avoid future securities violations.
The order settles the SEC's prosecution against Mr. Weingarten in the U.N.
Dollars case, one of Mr. Durante's promotions. The commission filed its
U.N. Dollars complaint on Oct. 11, targeting Mr. Durante as its lead
defendant, and Exchange Bank as its lead relief defendant. Most of Mr.
Durante's ill-gotten proceeds have been held by authorities since the
British Columbia Securities Commission froze the $18-million prime account
of EBT, the Nevis and Nauru-originated offshore brass plate bank headed by
Itex Corp. fraud mastermind Terry Neal.
The EBT account, at the main downtown Vancouver branch of Bank of Montreal,
appears to be a prime money laundering account for stock market crooks and
securities regulators, serving as a conduit for millions of dollars from
accounts at six Vancouver brokerages, mainly Union Securities. Union broker
Trevor Koenig, jailed since Labour Day, pleaded guilty in New York recently
in another Durante case, WAMEX Holdings, and awaits sentencing. (Although
Mr. Koenig handled much of Mr. Durante's manipulative U.N. Dollars trading
through offshore accounts, he was not named as a defendant in this
prosecution.)
The SEC's prosecution of Mr. Weingarten focuses only on his activities
touting U.N. Dollars and not on his promotions of several other Durante
deals, including WAMEX and Absolutefuture.com, or such non-Durante Howe
Street promos as Roger Abou-Rached's International Hi Tech Industries, now
insolvent stox.com Inc. and Doug Mason's Clearly Canadian Beverage.
Mr. Weingarten, who owns and operates Astrologers Fund Inc., its tout site
Afund.com and its subscriber newsletter Wall Street Next Week, is not your
average stock picker. According to his promotional bumpf, he not only
called just about every big market move in recent years, but just about
every other big world event as well. "He also called the Tokyo Market
Crash, U.S. Mideast War, the failure of the Russian Coup ... the decline of
the Euro after its 1999 birth and its reversal May 2000, his discovery of
IHI (International Hi Tech), etc. etc., etc."
Mr. Weingarten, who claims to have been a professional astrologer for more
than 33 years, apparently gets much of his inspiration picking stocks,
including Mr. Durante's garbage penny stocks, from casting his eyes to the
skies, charting the alignment of the planets and looking quite closely at
Uranus.
In its civil case, the SEC notes Mr. Weingarten was recruited by Mr.
Durante, whose lengthy criminal and regulatory record dates back to a 1975
conviction for felony grand larceny, in December, 1999, to tout U.N.
Dollars. (Mr. Durante, using the alias Ed Simmons, approached the
astrologer through Carib Securities, the Mafia-linked fraudster's
promotional company in the secretive offshore enclave of the Turks and
Caicos Islands.)
The Jan. 12, 2000, contract called for Mr. Weingarten to provide "financial
astrological services" and to include a banner ad for U.N. Dollars on his
Afund.com Web site. That same day, Mr. Weingarten received 250,000 shares
of U.N. Dollars in his personal brokerage account by electronic transfer
from an account controlled by Mr. Durante.
Besides touting the stock and forgetting to tell subscribers about his
250,000-share payola, Mr. Weingarten also stuffed investment advisory
accounts of seven clients with modest amounts of U.N. Dollars shares,
buying a total of 253,000 shares for $75,000. Although Mr. Weingarten
disclosed on his Web site that U.N. Dollars was a client, he gave no
details and never revealed to his advisory clients his conflict of
interest.
On Jan. 17, five days after his payoff, Mr. Weingarten profiled U.N.
Dollars in his Astrologers Fund newsletter under the headline, "Will UNDR
become a new age JP Morgan?" (Mr. Weingarten apparently loves name-dropping
-- in other bumpf, he claims that even the legendary J.P. Morgan used an
astrologer for market advice.) Mr. Weingarten wrote that he was doing due
diligence on U.N. Dollars, but he already had a $1 price target on the
stock, which had closed at four U.S. cents the previous day.
A few days after touting U.N. Dollars to his subscribers, Mr. Weingarten
posted the content to his free Web site. On Feb. 25, 2000, when the stock
had hit $1, Mr. Weingarten raised his target price to $4.
Mr. Durante's dirty promotion was short-lived, as the SEC moved quickly. On
March 13, 2000, the SEC abruptly imposed a 10-day trading suspension
pending clarification of numerous details, including "possible artificial
manipulation of the market." The day before the halt, U.N. Dollars shares
closed at $1.31. The stock plunged when it was kicked off the OTC Bulletin
Board to the pink sheets after the suspension was lifted. With the
promotion shut down in the early stages, Mr. Durante made a paltry profit
of just $93,000 on U.N. Dollars.
A month later, the SEC stumbled on the EBT account at Bank of Montreal in
Vancouver when it was chasing wire transfers of an unrelated tout, Stephen
Sayre of eConnect. Mr. Durante later emerged as the key client of EBT.
"He (Durante) transferred approximately $19.6-million from accounts he
controlled at Union Securities to an account maintained in EBT's name at
Bank of Montreal in Vancouver, British Columbia. These are the proceeds of
illegal market manipulation of the securities of UNDR and several other
public companies," stated the SEC in its complaint.
Mr. Weingarten repeatedly touted Mr. Durante's promotions, including WAMEX.
(WAMEX was exposed in June, 2000, when the SEC suspended trading amid the
FBI's biggest raid on Mafia-linked market players. WAMEX's top two
executives were among the more than 100 alleged penny stock crooks
arrested.)
The astrologer's touting included responding to set-up questions from
purported readers.
"I plan to buy some WAMX. Could you inform me more about their fundamentals
and financial position, e.g. what is their cash position, what about their
management, do they have people like Stox in charge with lots of experience
and when are they about to launch their system and who will be their
prospective business. Will you do astro analysis on WAMEX?" asked one
reader in a Feb. 1 Internet edition.
Mr. Weingarten gave a bullish response. "We do astrological analysis on ALL
our client companies as part of our due diligence. However, in such insane,
fast, manic markets, we often take starter positions on fundamentals,
technicals or gut instinct alone. In the meantime, we will be posting the
astrological data for WAMX and UNDR with more to follow so readers with
more free time than I have can do their own financial astrological
analysis."
In another upbeat banter that day, stox.com was given the tout target. (The
now worthless Canadian Venture Exchange stock was then trading at $9
(Canadian), or about $5.50.)
"Do you think it is appropriate to buy STOX (V.URL) today at its current
price level? (I see it) as a high risk investment with a potential far more
than a double. (I believe) if we value Stox with possible competitors, they
should trade not at 12, but between 20-30," stated a purported reader.
"You are giving my 2001 price target. If you are asking if STOX is a better
value at 12 than their sector competitors, the answer is most definitely
YES. If you are asking CAN they trade to 20-30 this year, the answer is
also YES. ... Without question, I would personally much rather buy and hold
shares of Stox.com than an equivalent amount of almost all the big name
dot.coms -- AOL, Yahoo, Amazon etc.," replied Mr. Weingarten.
In a subsequent posting a month later, in early March, 2000, Mr. Weingarten
stated, "I was delighted that our client WAMEX (WAMX) announced a 4-1 split
last week and ended the week up 387%+ since January 1."
Two weeks later, on March 16, 2000, Mr. Weingarten was boosting another
Durante promotion, Absolutefuture.com (symbol AFTI.)
Mr. Weingarten's kennel of dogs soon collapsed, evidenced by a June 9,
2000, posting, just before the FBI raid on Mr. Durante's operation and
other Mafia-linked penny stock networks.
"Looks like AFTI, LDW, UNDR, CELN and Stox have all been creamed. When I
asked last time, you said you would have info on your site, but I see none
... I've really taken a hit," stated an unhappy reader.
While stox.com was unrelated, collapsing amid its own debacle, Mr.
Durante's stable of Absolutefuture, U.N. Dollars, WAMEX and others was
imploding.
The final shoe fell on Oct. 26, 2001, when London-based penny stock
promoter Graham Andrews abruptly resigned as president of Consolidated
Fortress Resources, a CDNX promotion. A few weeks earlier, Mr. Andrews was
named in one of the SEC's Durante prosecutions and a sealed criminal
complaint.
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