The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LXXXIII

This newsletter is the third in a series about George Anthony Devolder-Santos. If you are just tuning in please click these links to read the full series in succession. For those already caught up I hope you enjoy this week’s installment.

• Russian Nesting Dolls, Gremlins, and Tribbles - Part I

• Russian Nesting Dolls, Gremlins, and Tribbles - Part II

Let's see if I can explain what a tribble is.

On Star Trek, where tribbles originated, Captain James Tiberius Kirk and crew welcomed a bunch of the little furballs aboard the USS Enterprise only to find them getting into every single crevice of the ship, multiplying exponentially, and eating all the grain in the cargo hold. They were cute enough, but that was all they did, lived fast and died young. Kind of like a financial vehicle in a diversified portfolio. You know it is worth money because you paid for it. Then it gets fat and you think, "Wow, look how much money I have got. It is even paying dividends." Then before you know it, that vehicle that looked like it was growing - dies. And those dividends are worthless.

It might not happen overnight. It could take days or weeks, and if you don't need the money right away, like if you are saving it for retirement, you may not look at it for years. This is why you need to check your portfolio every once in a while. Because if you invest with the wrong financial advisor, you may just be buying tribbles that will not pay off in the long term, and all of your money will disappear.

Of course, this does not happen with every financial advisor. The majority of firms are insured, diversified, and have been around for several years or decades. While all investment comes with some risk, you can generally be confident that when you open an account with a financial firm you have heard of before, because the name is instantly recognized as part of the American landscape, that when you buy their mutual funds, those funds are not a bunch of tribbles that will dry up and disappear.

But sometimes, no matter how well known, popular, established, and successful a financial advisor is, you could still be buying into a pyramid scheme and lose everything. Case in point: Bernard Madoff. 

Typically known as a Ponzi scheme, after Charles Ponzi, who pulled these shenanigans a century ago, a pyramid scheme is simply promising investors that they will see great returns on their investments. Then great returns start getting paid out, and people start talking and recommending the financial advisor to others, and more people buy in, and everybody at the top and in the middle of the pyramid gets a payout. This keeps happening as long as people keep stepping up and throwing money at the pyramid, supporting it from the bottom. But what nobody knows, except for the schemer at the top, is that no actual investment is taking place. People at the bottom are paying it upward, and when nobody comes in behind them to support the bottom of the pyramid any more, the people at the bottom never get paid and the structure collapses.

When Jonathan Paul (JP) Maroney whirled onto the financial scene he did so with gusto, promising smart work and great returns for his investors. His company, Harbor City Capital (HCC), was touted as a Billion-Dollar Virtual Team in this opinion piece in Inc. magazine. JP wrote contributing articles for Huffpost. He was considered to be an extremely successful entrepreneur who shared his strategies for success via books and podcasts. He filled up a YouTube channel with financial advice. He opened businesses in Florida and Wyoming. Money flowed. He was golden. So people trusted him. Until April of 2021, when the SEC froze his assets for operating a $17 million Ponzi scheme.

Sorry folks, you invested in tribbles.

In early 2020 George Santos was busy plugging away at his first congressional bid. With funds dwindling, Santos pumped the last of his money into his campaign and was tapped out by June, so he needed a new revenue stream. Whatever he was paid by LinkBridge Investors was not enough to pour into advertising needed to convince enough Republicans to vote for him. With a tweak of his résumé, Georgey Boy had attended Baruch College (he did not), where his boss Pablo Patrick played volleyball and scored a business degree (Santos falsely claimed that he did too). When his résumé came across JP Maroney's desk with a 3.89 GPA (false), experience at CitiGroup (false), MetGlobal (true), Goldman Sachs (false), and a current gig as Vice President at LinkBridge (true), JP did not see red flags, he thought "What's not to love?"

"Tell me about yourself, Georgey Boy. Why should I hire you?"

"Separating people from their money is my jam. That's why I got into politics."

"I hear you are doing a bang up job making the rounds. People are talking - on your way to Congress - donations rolling in - Wow! Impressive. Any experience with tribbles?"

"Absolutely. Love tribbles. My Russian nesting dolls are stuffed with tribbles."

"Welcome aboard!"

Santos time at LinkBridge was put to good use and JP Maroney knew it. He made connections with elite people holding extreme wealth. LinkBridge Investors slick packaging offered a closed door introductory experience where you would get to meet renown people one-on-one in a personal setting with the specific purpose of networking to make money.

In the LinkBridge Investors brochure for their Global Investors Annual Meeting, we are introduced to Pablo Patrick, CEO, Naira Trazzi, Principal, and George Devolder, Vice President. For a nominal fee participants would gather for two days and be among 400 participants, with 175 of them being institutional and private wealth investors. This gathering took place at The Harmonie Club in New York on June 24-25, 2019. Keynote speakers were Daniel D'Aniello of The Carlyle Group, Valerie Rockefeller of the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and Mitzi Perdue of Sheraton & Perdue. 

Take a look at the brochure in the link below.

All that financial gravitas in one place creates a magnet for anyone looking for a huge score. It was the perfect hunting ground for funding Georgey Boy's political aspirations. He got to where he was thanks to Pablo and it was here he would find the first donors to his campaign. Who he met exactly, only they can say, but Santos would eventually shake hands with billionaire Andrew Intrater through some well-heeled introduction and get him to sign on as a supporter. Intrater donated only $5,800 to the Devolder-Santos 2020 campaign (according to FEC records), but would become a major donor in 2022 to the tune of $200,000, and soon invested another $625,000 in Harbor City Capital based on Santos recommendations.

But let's not jump too far ahead so quick. Observe the timeline.

2020

• January 3 - GDS* Loans $18,500 to his own campaign - Cumulative total $23,850

• January 10 - GDS* Loans $4,200 to his own campaign - Cumulative total $28,050

• March 10 - GDS* Loans $2,000 to his own campaign - Cumulative total $30,050

• March 31 - GDS* Loans $50,000 to his own campaign - Cumulative total $80,050

• May 11 - GDS* files Financial Disclosure stating only $5,000 income from LinkBridge Investors

• Later that afternoon on May 11 - GDS* files addendum to Financial Disclosure adding $50,000 more income from LinkBridge Investors

• May 29 - Jayson Benoit and Associates Inc. is established through Registered Agent Devaughn Dames in Melbourne Florida

• June 19 - Paul Nicolini begins work at Harbor City Capital

• June 25 - GDS* Loans $1,200 to his own campaign - Cumulative total $81,250

• July 17 - GDS* begins work at Harbor City Capital

• September 15 - Andrew Intrater makes his first donation to Devolder-Santos for Congress

• November 3 - Santos loses to Thomas Suozzi, who begins his third term

• November 22 - Devolder-Santos for Congress first campaign ends with $393,000 (accepting $15,285 in contributions beyond election day)

• December 16 - First 2022 GDS* for Congress campaign donation ($100 from one donor)

GDS* George Devolder-Santos

Wait a minute, Mike! You have got a whole bunch of new players on the field. Where did Paul Nicolini come from and what is his deal, exactly? Who is Jayson Benoit and Associates and what do they have to do with all this? What about this Devaughn Dames character? Is he a drag queen?

Not that I am aware. Please stop jumping to conclusions and let me explain.

Santos joined Harbor City in July. JP called him a perfect fit. They could certainly use a mover and shaker who looked like they knew something about other people's money. 

His new gig at Harbor City Capital placed Santos alongside Paul Nicolini, who joined HCC a month before Santos did, but was already well established within a small circle of other shadowy financial schemers on Florida's space coast. JP Maroney also called Nicolini a perfect fit for HCC. The dream team was taking shape.

Maroney, Nicolini, Benoit, and Dames were already a tight knit unit with an insatiable appetite for opening and closing Corporations and Limited Liability Companies (LLC) with no visible business presence online, no physical stores or offices, no mission statements, employees who are mostly relatives, and years of experience doing something allegedly successful, but with no evidence other than extremely vague LinkedIn pages that say so, yet effectively reveal nothing of substance.

Jayson Benoit was the Chief Technology Officer at HCC. Through his company Benoit & Associates, he did did some work providing website services to the Republican Reset PAC. According to Mother Jones, the chief strategic advisor for Republican Reset PAC is Resilient Patriot LLC, which is run by Michael Flynn (from a mail slot in a UPS store in Lakewood Ranch, Florida). You may recognize Flynn as Donald Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, who lied to the FBI about dealings with Russia. Flynn faced five years in prison but Trump pardoned him.

Paul Nicolini has been registering corporations along the Space Coast since the 1990's. Most have simple names, a few letters followed by the words "financial services," "partners," or "associates," and ending with Inc. Most of them fizzled out in a year or two, sometimes five, and then they disappear, leaving only the names and addresses of who filed the businesses as remnants that will never go away on the state of Florida's Sunbiz.Org website.

Devaughn Dames does the same thing with both Corporations and LLCs for himself and others. He is a Registered Agent (RA), a signatory for the purpose of establishing legal documentation and registering a business. Dames is the RA for multiple businesses and has ties to the Bahamas. He maintains high profile internet visibility as a major player in finance without the backing of any newsworthy stories to prove his prowess. Everything ever said about him, was said by him. He was Harbor City Capital's Chief Financial Officer.

Lots and lots of corporations and LLCs are run from Florida mailboxes. Everyone on Maroney's crew works out of the Melbourne area. Even LinkBridge Investors was established in Orlando, but operates from New York, yet other than Santos himself, nothing else (that I found) ties Pablo or his company to Harbor City Capital or any of the Melbourne gremlins.

The beauty of corporations and limited liability companies is that they are things, not people. They are vehicles for money and they do not bleed. You can't harm or offend them. Most of the time you will be hard pressed finding out what they do, why they do it, where they operate, how much money they have, and who controls them. Registered Agents can be the same kind of things. LLCs can act as RAs for corporations to create nesting dolls that hide money.

This is not a real big secret. It has been happening for decades. Because corporations and LLCs are not people, and have no autonomy, they have virtually no responsibility, so when they do something improper and get sued for it, the people who run the corporations and LLCs are personally protected from financial loss. That is it in a nutshell. To really get into the ins and outs takes some real study, but suffice it to say that when you are dealing with a corporation or LLC, you really don't know who you are dealing with.

Anybody with lots of money to hide knows this, so they incorporate and limit their liabilities, not just once, to say they are in business and protect themselves from loss, but multiple times, naming an LLC as the RA for a Corporation, placing that Corporation under the umbrella of another LLC alongside other Corporations and LLCs, and shoving each one of those inside of one another like nesting dolls. Corporations and LLCs can be parts of multiple Corporations and LLCs, all nesting inside each other, making it extremely difficult for anyone with authority to look inside to see what is actually going on. If a governing authority gets inside a nesting doll and find tribbles it can sometimes be impossible to find out where those tribbles originated.

Entire businesses are built on this concept. Take a look at Florida and Wyoming. You can register a new business in about five minutes. Then you can print out your articles of incorporation or proof of your LLC and take it to your bank or credit union and open an account and put money into it. You don't even need to leave your house. Stay online and get a bank account in another state or another country, like Bahamas or Jamaica, submit a PDF of your paperwork and “Voilà!” you're in business.

They make it too easy.

Anybody hiding money knows this. The Melbourne gremlins certainly do. They have done so (many others have, too) with the help of Northwest Registered Agent in St. Petersburg, Florida and ABC Consulting LLC in Cheyenne, Wyoming. These are by no means the only Registered Agents being hired by everybody who needs one but these companies are relevant to them.

And boy, have they made a mess of a paper trail to follow.

Will Andrew Intrater ever get his money back? Is George Santos going to do anything worthwhile in Congress? Will we get video footage of drag queens flaunting other people's money?

Please tune in again next week when I will explain how this all fits together.

Only one way to find out. Unless another reporter beats me to it.

Thanks for reading.

Continue reading Russian Nesting Dolls, Gremlins, and Tribbles - Part IV

If you are new to the Rembis Report and would like to read any of the previous issues, PLEASE CLICK HERE to access the archives. To read it from the beginning, PLEASE GET A COPY of The Rembis Report: An Observation. Make sure to share this with all of your friends and tell everyone to sign up so nobody misses a trick.

It is about to get funky.