Is Anthony Wile's marijuana plan smoking hot?

FIRST IN A SERIES...

Look out baby cause we’re comin’ on like a hurricane!"

Or, can a penny stock bad boy corner the North American pot market from a tiny outpost in Nova Scotia?

Six years ago, would-be financial guru, free market zealot and Austrian economics acolyte Anthony Wile was sitting uneasily in his gated Vancouver mansion reading a sixty-seven page civil complaint filed in Federal Court in New York by seven senior lawyers from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The thick complaint, which Wile is alleged to have spent two years avoiding receiving from the SEC, spelled out chapter and verse how Wile and thirteen other companies and individuals cooked up complex schemes to separate hapless rubes and penny stock investors from their precious investment funds.

According to the complaint, Wile was at the epicenter of a finely orchestrated con of “pump-and-dump” penny stock manipulation which, if successful could have netted the financial high-flyers $30 million or more, $15 million of that to Wile himself.

Delicious bone for big legal beagle
David Williams, assistant chief litigation counsel for the SEC and one of the most formidable civil and criminal fraud litigators in the USA, had Wile and company in his sights since the 2003, when the SEC became aware of the alleged serial stock frauds and he was like a large dog with a very delicious bone. Williams brought six other crack federal litigators to court with him.

Wile, on the other hand, was being represented by one of the country’s most accomplished attorneys in Florida, with a reputation for getting great deals for clients accused of white collar crimes, like the ones Wile was accused of.

Spitting image
Wile grew up on the outskirts of the calm little Canadian town of Bridgewater in Nova Scotia. A big deal there when he was in school in the 1980s was to smoke some weed and go downtown to spit off the bridge over the LaHave River. Lunenburg County was and is famous for some of the best Christmas trees grown the world over and, after a business degree from St. Mary’s University in Halifax, Wile moved to southern Florida, where he started a Christmas tree selling operation.

He did very well there for himself, this son of New Scotland, whose ancestors started coming to Lunenburg County in 1844.

TONY WILE'S 5,000 SQ FT MANSION NEAR THE EVERGLADES

Living large under the sun
Four years before receiving the complaint, Wile was ensconced in a million-dollar, five thousand square foot, five bed and bath mansion with elevator and hardwood-paneled library on the edge of the Everglades Wildlife zone. From there, he ran several investment operations, including Scotia Capital Management Services, which, in 2005, Wile changed to Yang Capital Management, Inc [also called Yang Investment Group], but dissolved that firm at year’s end.

Wile’s Florida-based The Free Market Fund Ltd, according to documents filed with regulators, was designed by Wile to raise money for Toronto-based Columbia Goldfields by issuing stock valued at $.00001 a share. An amended filing in early 2005 claimed investments of $600,000, with anticipated investments of $25 million. The business registry was revoked by the State of Florida for failure to file annual report in 2006.

During his time in Florida, Wile and Vancouver-based partner Ian Park formed Renaissance Mining Corporation, through which he came afoul of the SEC. He was joined in that scheme, the complaint says, by his uncle Wayne, whose own penny stock exploits had him doing at least one stint in prison.

Wile was also a principal in a penny stock churning news operation called Free Market News Service and he formed the International Mining Group, ostensibly to serve as an “investor relations firm” for Renaissance..

According to the 67-page SEC complaint, it was during this period that Wile and his uncle colluded with Bermudian stock brokers, several stock touting newsletters others to “pump” a virtually worthless stock to 300 times its previous value, with plans to sell it off before the eventual collapse of the stock price.

Like a hurricane
In email messages to his co-conspirators during the stock price run-up, Wile brayed, “Look out baby cause we’re comin’ on like a hurricane!"

In investment circles, "pump and dump" is a form of microcap stock (penny stock) fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements, in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price. This description follows chapter and verse that given by the SEC in their complaint against Wile, et al.

Apparently, once the operators of the scheme "dump" their overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money. Stocks that are the subject of pump and dump schemes are sometimes called "chop stocks".

According to one definition in a web-based encyclopedia, while some fraudsters in the past relied on cold calls or mailing millions of glossy brochures, the Internet now offers a cheaper and easier way of reaching large numbers of potential investors.

Perhaps coincidentally, one of the drums which Anthony Wile has been beating loudly for the past three years is that of a coming “internet reformation”, a phrase and concept he says he coined and which he and his supporters promote ceaselessly on The Daily Bell, in at least eighty-nine separate stories, interviews and opinion pieces over the past three years.

Bell weather alerts
The Daily Bell – which also fronts on the web for his network of “High Alert” entities – is an attractive and seemingly sophisticated internet news blog, which Wile unabashedly uses to promote his “free market” ideas and is now using to promote legalizing marijuana and to directly promote investment in his Vida Cannabis operation, which has targeted Stellarton as a location.

After years legal of wrangling - and a purported two years of avoiding service of the complaint behind the fortress-like walls of his new home in Vancouver - the SEC had its way with Wile and his pals in that same New York courtroom, resulting in settlements which cost them collectively more than $5 million in civil penalties and restitution.

The agreement, which Wile signed in 2010 while in Switzerland, included the proviso that Wile did not have to admit – but could not deny – the allegations. Wile has repeatedly breached that proviso in The Daily Bell and other publications, calling the SEC incompetent and accusing the SEC of a massive conspiracy to be “in a frenzy” to file false charges against him. He says he has now made it his life’s work to “completely expose the power elite”, which he asserts the SEC supports.

His co-conspirators were not so lucky, and, two of them were penalized heavily by the SEC. Two others in the complaint have just file an appeal in BC Court of a 2013 judgment there that they must pay millions in penalties and disgorgement ordered by the federal court in the USA.

Wile’s uncle Wayne took off for Mexico during legal battle and has apparently not been heard from since.

Big pot palace in little Nova Scotia
Last week, Wile – with long-time family friend, business colleague and Vida Cannabis CEO J Gregory Wilson - traveled to Stellarton Nova Scotia, just miles away from his boyhood home of Bridgewater, to give the media a walk-through of an abandoned 300,000 sq ft factory, which they say will be the home base for North America's biggest legal pot farm.

During the walk-through, Wile again also flatly denied the allegations made by the SEC.

The marijuana grow-op is the sweet spot that Wile - through subsidiary High Alert Investor Services and freshly-minted Vida Cannabis Corp - is touting to potential investors. On his Daily Bell business news blog he is telling them that he can reserve them "a ground-floor participation opportunity within the marijuana industry" that will dominate the "space" and capitalize on the trend "not unlike that which followed on the heels of the deregulation of prohibition on alcohol in 1933."

Wile is joined in the Vida Cannabis project by a stable of his trusted allies, some of whom also have less than stellar track records in following securities law, according to securities regulators.

Vida loco
Other than the run up of more than a dozen in articles about marijuana during the past year on Wiles’ Daily Bell news blog, Vida Cannabis Corp seemed to rise out of the mists, being incorporated in Delaware on February 17, with a web address bought by Wile and installed on February 18. Wile and Wilson have told media in Nova Scotia that wholly-owned subsidiary, Vida Cannabis Ltd. is registered with the Canadian government, a claim Corporations Canada denies.

None of Wile’s businesses appear to registered in Nova Scotia

The Vida “team” appear to be working part time on the project, as many have several other irons in the fire. Wile, who is not named as an officer, appears to be the one running the show to date. He also runs The Daily Bell, a very active online news blog, catering to the ultra-conservative, government-hating, gold-loving, penny stock trading crowd, fond of free market libertarianism, conspitacies galore and Austrian economic theory.

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