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Hell's Angels Linked Company Closes Without Warning And 200 Ppl Out Of Work With No EI Paperwork.
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Greg Carr
Jan 5, 2017, 4:35:27 PM1/5/17
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A telemarketing company in Vancouver that has sold foreign and Canadian lotteries for more than 20 years shut down abruptly Thursday, leaving up to 200 people unemployed.
Telemarketers showing up at the doors of Telco Management on Yukon Street found their electronic passes disabled and the building shuttered. Employees told reporters that no one warned them the operation was shutting down or to not come to work.
Telco is connected to CW Agencies, one of the only resellers of European, Australian and Atlantic Canada lottery tickets to have escaped significant penalties from U.S. investigators, who in the 1990s were battling an entrenched illegal lottery ticket industry in B.C. that targeted elderly Americans.
The employees have already turned to the provincial Labour Standards Branch for help in getting severance and holiday backpay.
Thursday’s shutdown is the latest wrinkle in a conglomerate of companies that Randy Thiemer started in the 1980s under the name Can Win with Ray Ginetti, a former stockbroker and Hells Angel associate. Thiemer bought out Ginetti in 1989. A year later Ginetti was murdered in a dramatic case that wasn’t solved for years.
Thiemer went on to build CW Agencies into a multinational conglomerate that included Telco Management, European Lottery Guild, Canadian Overseas Marketing, Continental Mail Processing and other subsidiaries that controlled the sale and distribution of lottery chances to many countries. He died in 2008 of liver failure.
Telco operated out of a nondescript two-storey building at 2215 Yukon St., two blocks from where CW Agencies was located at 2020 Yukon for many years. After Thiemer’s death the directors of the company amalgamated the operations at the Telco site. According to a 2012 wrongful dismissal lawsuit, the company’s main asset was a database of 800,000 client names and their credit card numbers.
Both Telco Management and CW Agencies are run by Frank Cerney, whose father Frank W. Cerney was a stockbroker who once worked with Ginetti. Calls to Telco for comment were not returned. Attempts to contact Cerney through the company’s litigation lawyers were unsuccessful.
It is unclear who today owns Telco and CW Agencies; corporate records show Cerney, 60, as the president and CEO, and he is listed on a number of Internet management-tracking sites as the principal operator.
Employee records obtained by The Vancouver Sun indicate Telco operated departments that sold to Indian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English residents. A list of 96 employees also show that almost all used telephone aliases to disguise their identities. Only a handful of employees used their real names.
By all accounts Telco Management appeared to have no recent dealings with law enforcement agencies about the reselling of lottery tickets. The Vancouver Police Department, whose headquarters are a block away, said the shutdown of the company was not triggered by any investigation by it. The Lower Mainland Better Business Bureau also says Telco had an “A-plus” rating, meaning it had no outstanding complaints.
But its parent company CW Agencies was part of an industry of lottery ticket telemarketing companies that in the 1990s used high-pressure sales tactics and capitalized on loopholes in Canadian and U.S. laws to market tickets or lottery “chances” to unsuspecting Americans.
It was the subject of a series of investigative stories by The Vancouver Sun, which went on to expose serious legal and multi-jurisdictional problems among other lottery ticket resellers, some of whom went on to serve time in U.S. prisons. In the early years, CW Agencies’ predecessor, Can Win was raided by police for operating a boiler room, but it re-emerged as a quasi-legal company that tried to stay on the right side of Canadian laws while sometimes running into trouble with U.S. authorities.
At one point Thiemer unsuccessfully lobbied the B.C. government to legitimize the reselling of B.C. lottery tickets. At the time several other shady lottery ticket resellers, including James Blair Down and Alvin Moss, quickly built companies that targeted elderly Americans and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit sales.
Both Down and Moss were later jailed in the U.S. after their extensive operations in Barbados and elsewhere were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thiemer stopped selling into the U.S., which has strict laws governing the sale, transport and mail of lottery materials. Instead, he concentrated on efforts to legitimize the resale of lotteries and the selling of syndicate lottery chances to any country where it wasn’t expressly illegal.
In 2008 Thiemer restarted selling European Lottery Guild products in the United Kingdom after he was granted permission to sell certain products.
In 2012, after Thiemer’s estate was settled for $20 million, the company lost a wrongful dismissal suit against a former vice-president, Vito Nardulli. It was ordered to pay more than $1 million to Nardulli.
jef...@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/sunciviclee
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/vancouver-lottery-telemarketing-company-shuts-leaving-hundreds-out-of-work-just-before-Christmas
================================================================================
Almost four years after his death, the $20-million estate of Vancouver
businessman Randy Thiemer has finally been wrapped up in court.
Thiemer started a company named Can Win, which resold Canadian lottery
tickets to foreigners.
He got the idea after seeing an ad in a Vancouver newspaper offering
Irish Sweepstakes tickets.
“It started at his kitchen table and progressed to a $100-million-a-
year business,” recalled Vito Nardulli, who worked for almost 25 years
for Thiemer and was former vice-president of operations of the
company, C-W Agencies.
In the company’s early days, Vancouver police officers who showed up
at Can Win’s offices, then located at 319 West Pender, found a bag of
cash they were planning to seize.
“The bag was just sitting there while police were looking around,”
recalled Nardulli.
Thiemer whispered something to his business partner at the time, Ray
Ginnetti, who quickly left the office, he said.
“Randy opened the window and dropped the bag out the window, and
Ginnetti was waiting on the street below and caught it,” Nardulli
recalled.
“Back when I started, there were only four employees,” he added.
C-W Agencies now employs about 250 people and is almost across the
street from the police station on Cambie St.
The operation also has a related company in Europe called the European
Lottery Guild.
Nardulli eventually became vice-president of operations and was making
$150,000 a year but was fired in 2009 after Thiemer’s death.
He filed a wrongful dismissal suit, which remains unresolved; he is
seeking more than $1 million, including profit sharing he claims he is
owed.
Thiemer, who died Aug. 7, 2008, founded the company in 1981. He had
bought out his former business partner, Ginnetti, for $5 million in
1989.
Ginnetti, a former Vancouver stockbroker who was buddies with some
Hells Angels members, was shot to death in 1990.
The man who arranged the $30,000 contract killing, a former Hells
Angels enforcer named Roger Daggitt, was shot three times in the head
in 1992 while having a beer in the Turf Hotel in Surrey.
A Montreal hitman was later convicted of Daggitt’s murder.
“Randy was brilliant,” Nardulli said. “He was also a workaholic.
Sometimes he worked up to 20 hours a day.”
He said the company had a few setbacks, including a decision by the
B.C. government in 1993 that C-W Agencies and other lottery ticket
resellers couldn’t buy and sell B.C. lottery tickets.
“We stopped selling Canadian tickets altogether,” Nardulli said. “The
operation shifted to Europe.”
The company opened offices in London, Liverpool and Amsterdam, which
still exist today.
Another setback was a $500,000 fine imposed in 1999 by a U.S. Federal
Court.
C-W Agencies pleaded guilty during the court proceedings in Seattle
and Thiemer agreed to never again market lottery products to U.S.
residents, and not participate for five years in any kind of marketing
aimed at Americans through the mail or Internet.
“We stopped selling to Americans after that,” Nardulli said.
C-W Agencies had about 3.5-million customers when he left the company.
Nardulli said the operations are a lot more automated now than the
early days, when Thiemer employed people to stuff tickets in envelopes
and get them to the post office and mailed before each lottery draw.
“Some days you would get 1,000 pieces of mail, but some days it was
10,000,” Nardulli recalled. “He believed in a 24-hour turnaround.”
He recalled Thiemer led the jet-set lifestyle and had a beautiful home
in Shaughnessy, which was decorated with $100,000 Persian rugs,
Japanese art and Asian jade.
Thiemer spent his final years travelling the world looking for a liver
replacement, which never came.
He tried the U.S., then a private clinic in London, England, where he
spent a year waiting. “He had a 5,000 square foot apartment at
Regent’s Park,” that cost about $35,000 Cdn a week.
Thiemer eventually got fed up waiting and returned home to Vancouver.
A replacement liver was eventually found in Monterrey, Mexico, for $1
million.
But by the time Thiemer flew to Mexico, he wasn’t in good enough shape
to survive the operation, his friend recalled. Thiemer died in Mexico.
The court judgment sorted out the complexities of Thiemer’s bequests,
which divided his $20-million estate into 16 parts and left a portion
to his parents, Phil and Arlene Thiemer; his brother, Reid Phillip
Thiemer; his sister, Denny Shelley Byers; his niece and three nephews.
He left $500,00 to his accountant, Brian Gardiner, and also bequeathed
money to Doctors Without Borders.
The rest of his estate was left in a spousal trust to his common-law
wife, Gigi Christine Schlappner, with the instruction to “maintain
Christie according to her station in life and in the style to which
she has been accustomed ...”
The full judgment in online: http://bit.ly/IMppVu
nh...@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Read more:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Court+settles+estate+Vancouver+made+million+year+reselling+lottery+tickets/6575746/story.html#ixzz1uFAbySBM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Yardley used to work for CW Agencies and he is a lying fraudster who eventually returned to his native land having totally failed in crime and legitimate employment in Canada.
Telemarketers showing up at the doors of Telco Management on Yukon Street found their electronic passes disabled and the building shuttered. Employees told reporters that no one warned them the operation was shutting down or to not come to work.
Telco is connected to CW Agencies, one of the only resellers of European, Australian and Atlantic Canada lottery tickets to have escaped significant penalties from U.S. investigators, who in the 1990s were battling an entrenched illegal lottery ticket industry in B.C. that targeted elderly Americans.
The employees have already turned to the provincial Labour Standards Branch for help in getting severance and holiday backpay.
Thursday’s shutdown is the latest wrinkle in a conglomerate of companies that Randy Thiemer started in the 1980s under the name Can Win with Ray Ginetti, a former stockbroker and Hells Angel associate. Thiemer bought out Ginetti in 1989. A year later Ginetti was murdered in a dramatic case that wasn’t solved for years.
Thiemer went on to build CW Agencies into a multinational conglomerate that included Telco Management, European Lottery Guild, Canadian Overseas Marketing, Continental Mail Processing and other subsidiaries that controlled the sale and distribution of lottery chances to many countries. He died in 2008 of liver failure.
Telco operated out of a nondescript two-storey building at 2215 Yukon St., two blocks from where CW Agencies was located at 2020 Yukon for many years. After Thiemer’s death the directors of the company amalgamated the operations at the Telco site. According to a 2012 wrongful dismissal lawsuit, the company’s main asset was a database of 800,000 client names and their credit card numbers.
Both Telco Management and CW Agencies are run by Frank Cerney, whose father Frank W. Cerney was a stockbroker who once worked with Ginetti. Calls to Telco for comment were not returned. Attempts to contact Cerney through the company’s litigation lawyers were unsuccessful.
It is unclear who today owns Telco and CW Agencies; corporate records show Cerney, 60, as the president and CEO, and he is listed on a number of Internet management-tracking sites as the principal operator.
Employee records obtained by The Vancouver Sun indicate Telco operated departments that sold to Indian, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and English residents. A list of 96 employees also show that almost all used telephone aliases to disguise their identities. Only a handful of employees used their real names.
By all accounts Telco Management appeared to have no recent dealings with law enforcement agencies about the reselling of lottery tickets. The Vancouver Police Department, whose headquarters are a block away, said the shutdown of the company was not triggered by any investigation by it. The Lower Mainland Better Business Bureau also says Telco had an “A-plus” rating, meaning it had no outstanding complaints.
But its parent company CW Agencies was part of an industry of lottery ticket telemarketing companies that in the 1990s used high-pressure sales tactics and capitalized on loopholes in Canadian and U.S. laws to market tickets or lottery “chances” to unsuspecting Americans.
It was the subject of a series of investigative stories by The Vancouver Sun, which went on to expose serious legal and multi-jurisdictional problems among other lottery ticket resellers, some of whom went on to serve time in U.S. prisons. In the early years, CW Agencies’ predecessor, Can Win was raided by police for operating a boiler room, but it re-emerged as a quasi-legal company that tried to stay on the right side of Canadian laws while sometimes running into trouble with U.S. authorities.
At one point Thiemer unsuccessfully lobbied the B.C. government to legitimize the reselling of B.C. lottery tickets. At the time several other shady lottery ticket resellers, including James Blair Down and Alvin Moss, quickly built companies that targeted elderly Americans and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit sales.
Both Down and Moss were later jailed in the U.S. after their extensive operations in Barbados and elsewhere were raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Thiemer stopped selling into the U.S., which has strict laws governing the sale, transport and mail of lottery materials. Instead, he concentrated on efforts to legitimize the resale of lotteries and the selling of syndicate lottery chances to any country where it wasn’t expressly illegal.
In 2008 Thiemer restarted selling European Lottery Guild products in the United Kingdom after he was granted permission to sell certain products.
In 2012, after Thiemer’s estate was settled for $20 million, the company lost a wrongful dismissal suit against a former vice-president, Vito Nardulli. It was ordered to pay more than $1 million to Nardulli.
jef...@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/sunciviclee
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/vancouver-lottery-telemarketing-company-shuts-leaving-hundreds-out-of-work-just-before-Christmas
================================================================================
Almost four years after his death, the $20-million estate of Vancouver
businessman Randy Thiemer has finally been wrapped up in court.
Thiemer started a company named Can Win, which resold Canadian lottery
tickets to foreigners.
He got the idea after seeing an ad in a Vancouver newspaper offering
Irish Sweepstakes tickets.
“It started at his kitchen table and progressed to a $100-million-a-
year business,” recalled Vito Nardulli, who worked for almost 25 years
for Thiemer and was former vice-president of operations of the
company, C-W Agencies.
In the company’s early days, Vancouver police officers who showed up
at Can Win’s offices, then located at 319 West Pender, found a bag of
cash they were planning to seize.
“The bag was just sitting there while police were looking around,”
recalled Nardulli.
Thiemer whispered something to his business partner at the time, Ray
Ginnetti, who quickly left the office, he said.
“Randy opened the window and dropped the bag out the window, and
Ginnetti was waiting on the street below and caught it,” Nardulli
recalled.
“Back when I started, there were only four employees,” he added.
C-W Agencies now employs about 250 people and is almost across the
street from the police station on Cambie St.
The operation also has a related company in Europe called the European
Lottery Guild.
Nardulli eventually became vice-president of operations and was making
$150,000 a year but was fired in 2009 after Thiemer’s death.
He filed a wrongful dismissal suit, which remains unresolved; he is
seeking more than $1 million, including profit sharing he claims he is
owed.
Thiemer, who died Aug. 7, 2008, founded the company in 1981. He had
bought out his former business partner, Ginnetti, for $5 million in
1989.
Ginnetti, a former Vancouver stockbroker who was buddies with some
Hells Angels members, was shot to death in 1990.
The man who arranged the $30,000 contract killing, a former Hells
Angels enforcer named Roger Daggitt, was shot three times in the head
in 1992 while having a beer in the Turf Hotel in Surrey.
A Montreal hitman was later convicted of Daggitt’s murder.
“Randy was brilliant,” Nardulli said. “He was also a workaholic.
Sometimes he worked up to 20 hours a day.”
He said the company had a few setbacks, including a decision by the
B.C. government in 1993 that C-W Agencies and other lottery ticket
resellers couldn’t buy and sell B.C. lottery tickets.
“We stopped selling Canadian tickets altogether,” Nardulli said. “The
operation shifted to Europe.”
The company opened offices in London, Liverpool and Amsterdam, which
still exist today.
Another setback was a $500,000 fine imposed in 1999 by a U.S. Federal
Court.
C-W Agencies pleaded guilty during the court proceedings in Seattle
and Thiemer agreed to never again market lottery products to U.S.
residents, and not participate for five years in any kind of marketing
aimed at Americans through the mail or Internet.
“We stopped selling to Americans after that,” Nardulli said.
C-W Agencies had about 3.5-million customers when he left the company.
Nardulli said the operations are a lot more automated now than the
early days, when Thiemer employed people to stuff tickets in envelopes
and get them to the post office and mailed before each lottery draw.
“Some days you would get 1,000 pieces of mail, but some days it was
10,000,” Nardulli recalled. “He believed in a 24-hour turnaround.”
He recalled Thiemer led the jet-set lifestyle and had a beautiful home
in Shaughnessy, which was decorated with $100,000 Persian rugs,
Japanese art and Asian jade.
Thiemer spent his final years travelling the world looking for a liver
replacement, which never came.
He tried the U.S., then a private clinic in London, England, where he
spent a year waiting. “He had a 5,000 square foot apartment at
Regent’s Park,” that cost about $35,000 Cdn a week.
Thiemer eventually got fed up waiting and returned home to Vancouver.
A replacement liver was eventually found in Monterrey, Mexico, for $1
million.
But by the time Thiemer flew to Mexico, he wasn’t in good enough shape
to survive the operation, his friend recalled. Thiemer died in Mexico.
The court judgment sorted out the complexities of Thiemer’s bequests,
which divided his $20-million estate into 16 parts and left a portion
to his parents, Phil and Arlene Thiemer; his brother, Reid Phillip
Thiemer; his sister, Denny Shelley Byers; his niece and three nephews.
He left $500,00 to his accountant, Brian Gardiner, and also bequeathed
money to Doctors Without Borders.
The rest of his estate was left in a spousal trust to his common-law
wife, Gigi Christine Schlappner, with the instruction to “maintain
Christie according to her station in life and in the style to which
she has been accustomed ...”
The full judgment in online: http://bit.ly/IMppVu
nh...@vancouversun.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
Read more:
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Court+settles+estate+Vancouver+made+million+year+reselling+lottery+tickets/6575746/story.html#ixzz1uFAbySBM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Yardley used to work for CW Agencies and he is a lying fraudster who eventually returned to his native land having totally failed in crime and legitimate employment in Canada.
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