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I sent Max Gomez an email to his college alumni account warning that DECN was a hoax and that Berman had lost a civil suit for previously defrauding investors at a prior company, and I sent him another email after the SEC moved in. I got no reply to either one.
Berman's 1-way trip to Mexico or Canada begins April 13. Or maybe he'll just hide out in Santa Monica, like Whitey Bulger.
It appears that perhaps the trial can be heard by phone: The website https://www.justice.gov/criminal-vns/case/decision-diagnostics states
Calling someone to tell them they made an error isn't "harassing". Regardless, I'm sure he get harassed by robocalls all day like everyone else in the USA.
Has it occurred to you that the lawyer is missing something. Perhaps someone in a USA time zone could call him?
The X-PRIZE winners have been posted.
The new document in the criminal case (available on courtlistener) has some lovely new detail about Berman's "knock knock day" experience, as described by his lawyers:
Another at-home covid test got an EUA:
https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-covid-fda-approval-quidel-quickvue-test-20210301-cb3nintrjzg4reuhxiae3oqldq-story.html
Of course, this has nothing to do with DECN, the leading manufacturer of bogus press releases.
The video conferenced court proceedings are evidently for social distancing purposes. I hope we get to see Berman in the dock. (There were some police-shooting and subsequent arson related hearings in 2020 where that was the case.)
Oh, the real fun will be the questions about the webcam porn. There is no need to fly Berman's webcam performers out to testify, since the court can conduct their testimony over video conference.
Nah, you don't have to "remember" to use recap: Just put the cases you're interested in on "alert" to be notified when something is new. (Somebody has to be the one to go to pacer to update the recap docket, though.)
If Berman has been getting off balance sheet loans that is interesting, mostly to the investigators, and I wonder how many of those "employees" are dead or otherwise conveniently hard to contact.
I wonder if the Bank of America would be interested to know that Berman has been indicted. There is probably a clause in the loan for immediate recall for fraud.
John E. O'Rouke lists himself as a "business associate and friend" of Berman on the $20K Affidavit of Surety. Does anyone know who this dubious fellow is?
Actually, the 6:20am arrest was a bit of a favor to Berman: I would have preferred that he get arrested at 5:00pm, so that he'd have to spend the night in jail before seeing the judge about bail.
OK, to be clear, I don't know that Angel is Barbara Asbell.
BTW, it is amusing to see that Berman is no longer able to contact DECN investors on an individual basis. I guess this means that Angel, aka Barbara Asbell, isn't going to be posting any more of his private bullshit anymore.
BTW, Barbara, if you're reading this, then knock knock day is coming for you as well. Knock Knock Barbara!
Pacer will let you search for all of Berman's federal cases. Unfortunately, only the more recent cases have all the documents available electronically.
Berman's bail conditions are here.
Here's the arrest warrant, good for framing on your wall:
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.805986/gov.uscourts.cacd.805986.3.0.pdf
I have found the records for Berman's arrest and bond! The arrest was handled through the California District court, although that is not the court handling the actual trial:
Berman was arrested at 6:20am on Dec 17: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.805986/gov.uscourts.cacd.805986.2.0.pdf.
Details of his $20K bail may be found at
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.805986/gov.uscourts.cacd.805986.4.0.pdf
The full record from that court is here although of course, the main documents for the case are here.
Oops, I take back the statement that a good place to find the details of his arrest is from the Marshals Service. Although from https://www.usmarshals.gov/prisoner/,
Again, I was replying to
The judge's order sealing the indictment until Berman's arrest by the United States Marshal's Service is Doc 4 of the court records. I suspect that the Marshal's Service might tell you how to find out some more details: Unlike the Soviet Union under Stalin, in the USA people surely aren't just taken away in the night to mysteriously "disappear", leaving relatives and others unable to find out what has happened.
The catch is that the balance sheets are probably as big a work of fictions as the PRs about the "test" strips. Can we be certain that all the losses on the balance sheets are 100% real, not just disguises for embezzlement? To be clear, I certainly don't claim to have any opinion on the matter (certainly not in informed one), it just that Berman is so slippery that I don't even trust him even when he claims losses.
Sure, the business is a total scam and was quite obviously so, but Berman raised a considerable amount of money by issuing shares. I presume any proceeds from share issues will get paid out in lawsuits, though.
Sure, management is a 1-man freak show, but family members or associates may be involved for money laundering & kickbacks. If he'll blow $360K on webcam porn in 2019-2020 I'd expect some millions hidden in a foreign account or mattress.
I was more interested in the long-term value, if any, of the assets of company, if any. But yeah, clearly short-term traders have an opportunity even on perhaps fundamentally worthless companies.
Wow, I haven't seen 100X differences in a single day before, but I'm seeing .0003 for the low and .03 for the high.
I'm staying well clear of this bizarre situation, but it would be interesting to hear some opinions about whether the stock is even worth .0003, or any nonzero amount.
I admit I am not knowledgeable on this, but the obviously complicating factors are
1) All of Berman's financial statements, including the pre-covid ones, should be treated as fictitious.
2) There will be shareholder lawsuits if any of the raised capital can be recovered.
3) There is no telling how Berman and associates may have squirrelled away company money, including proceeds from the share issues.
Fair enough, I won't mention any precedents with regard to bail in police shooting cases. However, Bernie Madoff did have some similar bail conditions imposed on him that appear to have been imposed only for his personal inconvenience:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/WallStreet/story?id=6498850&page=1
Thanks Geneman and Sunspotter! Your posts are quite illuminating.
Geneman,
One thing your post does not mention is that the NCIC and NCI have agreed to fund and run a large number of randomized phase 2 clinical trials. If I recall correctly from the AGM, they're chipping in something like $45M of free money for this.
I would hope that it would give some of the ONCY skeptics pause that the outside funding agencies have given a hard-money endorsement of Reolysin.
But I'm still curious, do you know if such a large outside injection of cash is untypical for small companies in the biotech field? Should all this funding of phase 2's be taken to be a strongly positive sign? (Note that the NCIC could have simply put off a decision on funding the phase 2's until after the interim phase 3 data came out.)
More broadly, do you think that a good investment strategy would be to randomly invest in small biotechs that have reached phase 3 and also attracted significant agency funding?