Ed Wishner: The Epitome of Professionalism

We hear a lot about Joel. It’s no wonder, given that he seemed to be the face of the scam.   An outsider might even walk away from this whole thing thinking that Joel somehow convinced poor little Ed to get in on this scheme.  But Ed’s no saint. While I can only dig so far into the past, what I have found isn’t all squeaky clean. As you know, Ed’s been a CPA for a great many years.  And if you hold yourself out to be a certified public accountant, there is a code of ethics by which you must abide. Ed engaged in various conflicts of interest throughout his career.  Behold! First of all, the oil and gas lease scam happened in the early ’80s.  Secondly, it doesn’t matter if he ever coerced a client.  Either: He was in business with Joel at Prudential Petroleum, the people running those deals or He was a client of Prudential Petroleum and hocked those investments to his own clients Keep in mind that I can’t prove that Ed was running Prudential, although I don’t doubt that he was. In any event, in the first case, there is a very clear conflict of

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A Look Back: Interview from Maui

For those who were not able to follow the Quatloos thread religiously or did and simply forgot reading about this. Tednewsom mentioned in January 2014 that he saw an interview with Joel on an Australian investment site and conversed with the interviewer, but could not recall the site.  MarvinGardens did eventually find it, but said that it was not longer available on the original site, Capitalist Exploits. Wayback Machine to the rescue! You may remember the WABAC machine from the Peabody’s Improbable History segments of the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.  Well, in the internet sense, the Wayback Machine is a website which has been archiving the internet since the mid-nineties.  If there’s a website, there is often a copy of its’ various versions at the internet archive. It was in the archive that I located the original transcript of the interview and the archive included the comment section wherein one of the site owners decides that NASI smells fishy. I can’t copy-paste the entire interview here, for copyright purposes, but you are free to step through to November 10, 2011 and see what Joel had to say for himself back then as well as the comments that followed.

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Theme Change!

So, sometime in the last two months, the theme this site was using was retired.  A theme is basically how the site looks: the colors and layout.  If we use a retired theme or one that is not updated by the author, we run the risk having a site that no longer works, eventually. So, I spent a bit of time finding a new one and making minor formatting changes.  The font size seems a bit smaller, so if the text size hinders your ability to read the site, please comment and I’ll increase it for everyone.  If you notice anything else that’s hard to read for whatever reason, please let me know and I’ll try to fix it. I may eventually make a header graphic and spruce up a few things along the way, I’m undecided.

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Two Years, The Celebration

I have no new news to report and I’m still researching a few things. This is a Dickwad Duo-free post. I was going through some old photos in my Google Drive just now and could not resist posting this picture. I had forgotten it existed. Today was two years to the day that Ed & Joel turned themselves in for their jail sentence. I did not go out and buy a cake for this nor did I buy the cake for the anniversary. This is a not a Ponzi cake. No, this cake has another, somewhat humorous story, so let’s lighten up the end of 2017 and hear a few tales. Names have been changed to protect the terminally stupid. My brother-in-law, let’s call him Jim, is not exactly a model citizen. I heard he once got pulled over for riding a child’s dirt-bike to the bar, while drunk. He had his license pulled at some point, either for child support or drunk driving. If it wasn’t for one thing, it would have been for the other. He wore an ankle bracelet once…no, two times while I knew him. I will probably never know which strikes truly landed him in

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A Look Back: Ed’s Sentencing Brief: Letters of Support

Unlike Joel’s letters of support, these seemed a lot less…cloying and mentioned more about Ed’s history, which we tend not too see much of.  I didn’t actually see red when reading them. Ed started his accounting career in the 1960s, working for a firm. Later, he and another person at the firm opened Tax Master Inc. They later sold the business. In 1980, he moved his family from New York to California to start his accounting firm. His two of his sons own a restaurant together.  This restaurant is within walking distance of Ed’s firm.  I know that there was a theory bandied about that the restaurant was started using fraudulent funds from the NASI scheme.  Considering that the restaurant was started in 1988, a good eight years before NASI began, I think it’s safe to say that the theory is dead. Onto the quotes! First of all, I would like to point out that this guy uses a letter (either a capital “i” or lowercase “L”) instead of the digit “1” two times in his letter.  It’s disturbing.  They’re nowhere near each other on the keyboard.  Why?  Just WHY?  Don’t dare blame horrible transcription or OCR, either!  You still

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Holiday Blessings

On this, the morning before a day of some kind of peace and joy…ugh I just can’t.  I did six years in retail.  Hearing non-stop Christmas music for eight to twelve hours a day, six days a week will give you an unholy hatred for this holiday.  I swear to you that one day I heard the same song four times in a row by four different artists.  I almost lost my shit. Anyway, one great thing about this holiday is that shortly after Christmas two years ago, Ed & Joel were incarcerated. If they had gotten what they wanted, they’d be just about out of jail by now or…actually they might have been out.  There’s some rule about how you actually serve something like 80-85% of your time if you’re a good boy.  Since I doubt they would have caused any trouble in jail, they might have been out by Thanksgiving and on supervised release. But that didn’t happen because the judge knew that justice couldn’t be served by giving a light sentence to two men who robbed Peter to pay Paul for fifteen years.  I haven’t heard anything about Joel’s current condition, but Ed said in a declaration

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A Look Back: Ed’s Sentencing Brief

We’ve already covered Joel’s infuriating response to the sentencing brief and now we’ll cover .  I don’t focus as much on Ed, probably because we just don’t hear as much about him.  My theory is that while he had his fingers all up in those numbers, he didn’t do as much of the day-to-day scamming. To start, this will only be busted up into two parts.  One for the majority of the filing and one for the character statements. And we’re off and running!  His lawyer didn’t lay the whole “upstanding member of the community” on too thick while recognizing that he’s done harm to others.  I would have thrown the phrase “considerable and irreparable harm” in there somewhere, but we can’t win them all. And then they follow up with this noise again.  Like Joel, Ed lived in a land of denial for months before finally admitting wrongdoing.  The absolutely best time to come clean was in 2001 when the $11 million contract fell through.  It would have been easier and they would have been fifteen years younger.  Probably would have only had to pay a fine for unregistered securities. The next really good milestone to come clean was

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Recent Docket Updates

Haven’t had any new posts in a few days because I’ve been busy behind the scenes updating the dockets on all the court cases I already had listed, including the cases against Net Winners.  The Tarnol case has proved interesting because although it technically closed in September of last year, it has seen activity as late as October of this year. I also found a bunch more net winner cases, and will be adding them over the next few days. Unfortunately, there has been no notable activity on the SEC case.  Like you, I’m anxiously waiting for that claims process to get rolling.

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Joel’s Cease and Desist

Unable to locate a document as old as the Cease and Desist on Missouri’s Securities site, I emailed them.  Lo and behold, I got a response!  A paralegal was kind enough to forward a copy of the Cease and Desist order, issued in 1988. In August 1988, the Commissioner found out that in 1983, Prudential Petroleum offered and sold a filing service to provide investors oil and gas leases through the federal lottery in the State of Missouri. The State considers this to be “soliciting investments for a filing service.” Prudential Petroleum was not registered and did receive an exemption to do this. In September 1988, the Commissioner sent a letter to Joel asking for his exemption or why he thought he didn’t need to register to sell securities in their state. They also wanted Missouri investor information. His wife, Carol, signed for the letter, which makes sense since that was their residence. Joel’s lawyer responded in October 1988 stating that the company was an “advisory company which assisted individuals in entering the oil and gas lottery run by the United States Government.”  I’d love for someone to explain to me how that’s different from “soliciting investments for a filing

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Joel, Investment Advisor Extraordinaire

I’ve managed to dig up some information on Joel’s old investment advisor license using some good old fashioned internet sleuthing.  I’m not finished, but it’s so long ago there’s no guarantee that there’s more to find. Once upon a time, Joel was an investment advisor in the State of California.  I pulled his FINRA report from…FINRA.org for free.  The horror!   He worked for a brokerage firm called CECO Financial Services (now defunct) from 05/06/1985 to 08/20/1986. None of that is interesting. What is interesting is that this report has a little black mark on it.  On 11/22/88 someone reported a regulatory event – a Cease & Desist Order in Missouri: Then it looks like Joel Responded.  All the quoted spelling and grammatical errors are his, by the way. Prudential Petroleum was registered in the State of California on 9/23/1982 and their last state filing was on 2/22/1985. So, it appears that Prudential Petroleum got in trouble for soliciting potential clients by mail in Missouri without a license, but Joel doesn’t think he did anything wrong. Now, I looked up if the whole filing service thing could be scammy since it certainly seems like an excellent opportunity to fleece someone

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