Gray Davis and Garry South will have Democrats out in force tomorrow (8-1-02) to attack and harass Bill Simon.
Please come and bring signs to show your support of Bill.
Time: 8:30 a.m.
Place: Fremont High School, 7676 S. San Pedro Street, Los Angeles
Jury Awards $65m To Coin CompanySo, Simon's company boots some lowlife - after they discover that he lied about being a CONVICTED drug dealer - and THAT is "wrongful termination" worth millions?
Thursday August 1, 2002 2:20 AM
LOS ANGELES (AP) - A jury in a fraud lawsuit on Wednesday awarded a businessman $65 million in punitive damages against gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon's investment firm.
A day earlier, the Superior Court jury found William E. Simon & Sons liable for fraud and assessed $22.2 million in compensatory damages.
Simon, a Republican facing Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in the November election, started the investment firm with his brother and his father, a former U.S. Treasury secretary.
The lawsuit was filed by Paul E. Hindelang, who co-founded and owns 95 percent of Pacific Coin Management. The suit alleged that Simon & Sons and other firms that invested heavily in Pacific Coin hatched a secret plan to take Pacific Coin public and in the process destroyed the company.
While offering assurances they would stick to Hindelang's slow-growth plan, the investors were planning aggressive acquisitions with the goal of pulling off a highly profitable public offering, the suit said.
Simon, who was not named in the suit and is on leave from his post as co-chairman of Simon & Sons, said Wednesday in a statement the decision ``is fundamentally flawed.''
``I expect the judge to set aside this judgment or it will be overturned on appeal,'' he said.
Simon & Sons and another investor acquired a controlling 60 percent interest in Pacific Coin in a deal consummated in 1998. The plan for an initial public offering failed and debt-ridden Pacific Coin was taken over by a bank in 2000.
In 1981, Hindelang pleaded guilty to federal drug smuggling charges and served about 30 months in prison. The Wall Street Journal reported on Hindelang's past in 1998, and Hindelang claimed investors used that article as a pretext for Pacific Coin to wrongfully remove him as chief executive.
Investors filed a federal lawsuit, later dismissed, that accused Hindelang of fraudulently concealing his past. Hindelang then sued the investors in Superior Court, and the investors filed a countersuit with the concealment allegation. The jury rejected the investors' claims.
Sounds like Hindelang could be another poster boy for tort reform.
Here's some parts of the WSJ article (click here for full text):
Secret Past Returns to
Haunt EntrepreneurFrom The Wall Street Journal Online
LOS ANGELES -- In the scrappy world of pay-telephone entrepreneurs, everybody knew Paul Edward Hindelang Jr. -- or so they thought.
His story was legendary: Starting with a few phones in L.A.'s poorest neighborhoods, Mr. Hindelang had built his business, Pacific Coin, into one of the country's largest independent pay-phone operators. Last year, he and several partners sold half their stake to a group that included former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, in a multimillion-dollar deal.
But last Dec. 18, Mr. Hindelang was uncharacteristically subdued during a conference call to negotiate a big long-distance deal. Afterward, he called back his partner, Pacific Coin Chairman Thomas Keane. "Tom, I've got some very bad, difficult, disturbing news," he said, according to Mr. Keane. "I thought this would never come to light."
The news, as a statement from the Miami U.S. attorney's office later that day put it, was that Mr. Hindelang had agreed to forfeit to the government $50 million in drug-trafficking proceeds "previously held offshore."
Ed Hindelang, it emerged, was one of the biggest and most innovative marijuana smugglers of the 1970s, and had done prison time before getting into phones. Stunned, Mr. Keane and the Pacific Coin board voted that day to fire Mr. Hindelang, the chief executive of the company. That weekend, Mr. Keane says, he spent a long time with his young sons, "taking Ed off the pedestal I'd put him on."
Mr. Hindelang, 51 years old, declines to comment, and many details of his story remain sealed in court documents or otherwise hidden. What is known offers a rare peek into the shadow land of dirty money and the government's war on drugs, with all its dark twists and strange allegiances. For instance, Mr. Hindelang's attorney, Harland Braun, says that some of Mr. Hindelang's ill-gotten loot was still around all these years later because, back when Mr. Hindelang was busted and put out of the dope business, federal agents encouraged him to retain access to some of his money to fund the job they put him up to next: informer.
A Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman calls that "highly unlikely." Privately, though, some law-enforcement officials say Mr. Braun may be right, and court records make clear that Mr. Hindelang was an informant -- a good one. The authorities dispute another of the attorney's assertions: that the forfeited $50 million wasn't technically Mr. Hindelang's anymore because he had simply given his drug money to a family friend more than two decades ago.
Riordan may have been a RINO and a doofus, but he hasn't been involved in a corporation that was found by a jury to be guilty of fraud. This on the same day that Worldcom execs turned themselves into the FBI. Voters aren't going to care about the facts of this case. They're simply going to see the name "Simon" associated with "corporate fraud" in the headlines today, and figure he's as tainted as Enron and Worldcom execs. This projects the absolutely worst image for a Republican candidate.