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What I thought would most likely be a goofy lawsuit against Brent Wilkes by one of ADCS's competitors actually turns out to be kind of revealing. So Wade learned his tricks of the trade from Wilkes, and Wilkes learned some of his tricks, the suit alleges, from Steve Caira, the owner of a San Diego-based document conversion company called TomaHawk II. [Tomahawk II is the supposedly Native American-owned spin-off of a document conversion firm Wilkes consulted for in the 1990s called Audre Recognition Systems -- before Wilkes ripped off the idea and started ADCS that directly competed with it]. And while Cunnigham was first Wilkes' and then Wade's benefactor, according to this lawsuit, Caira's benefactor was Rep. Duncan Hunter. What's also incredible if true is the lawsuit's allegation that Caira gave 15,000 stock shares in his company to the DoD official who awarded Caira's company, TomaHawk II, a Pentagon contract (facilitated by Hunter on the Appropriations committee).
And who lobbied for TomaHawk II? In one of those scenarios familiar from Wilkes' Group W Advisors' situation, TomaHawk II is both a registered lobbyist and a lobbying client of itself, and a client of another lobbying firm (The P.A.C.E. Companies, now Pace-Capstone), back in 1998. Get your head around that. [Pace-Capstone is interesting. Looking at the bios of its lobbyists, it seems to specialize in representing two familiar groups: Native American tribes and businesses, and the Mariana Islands, among others.]
This site has more on TomaHawk. It suggests that one of the founders of TomaHawk II, Dennis D. Di Ricco, resigned from the New York Bar association in 1989, and later "testified he helped launder hundreds of thousands of dollars and supplied large quantites of cash for use as payola, in the largest record industry payola case in U.S. history, that of Robert Isgro, a record promoter indicted after he was seen meeting with members of the Gambino Mafia family in New York in 1986." The Gambinos. Money laundering. Hmm. Is there anything to this hint that some in Wilkes' larger business circle had links to the mob? Was Kontogiannis one of his tie-ins to that milieu?
Update: How TomaHawk II and Audre Recognition Systems, for which Wilkes served as a consultant in the 1990s before starting ADCS, are related is both comical and a bit hard to understand. This 1993 press release says TomaHawk, which is supposedly owned by Native Americans, signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Audre. "The agreement will make TomaHawk the exclusive Minority Business Enterprise authorized to use Audre Recognition Systems advanced automatic conversion image- scanning system as a service bureau. A certain number of Federal contracts have a minority set-aside of up to 5 percent where Minority Business Enterprises have the privilege of non-competitive bids." As far as I can tell, Audre seemed to create a minority owned subsidiary, TomaHawk II, to get federal contracts.
Update II: More on Mr. Di Ricco's role in the massive 1980s record payola case. From the end of an August 1990 NYT Larry Rohter piece:
... Judge Ideman's announcement came immediately after testimony by David Michael Smith, [record producer] Mr. Isgro's former bodyguard and a chief prosecution witness, describing a money- laundering scheme in which Mr. Smith said he had acted as a courier between Mr. Isgro and Mr. Di Ricco. Beginning late in 1984, Mr. Smith said, he made ''about a dozen trips'' from Los Angeles to San Francisco, each time to pick up a briefcase containing between $60,000 and $100,000 in cash.
Mr. Smith said that after he and Mr. Isgro had counted the money, large sums were stuffed into record jackets and mailed to several radio stations. ''On a couple of occasions,'' he said, he also saw Mr. Isgro deliver amounts of cash as large as $30,000 to Fred Di Sipio, an independent record promoter from Cherry Hill, N.J.
Mr. Smith said he and Mr. Isgro had also made ''about a half-dozen trips'' to New York, where on ''about three occasions'' he had seen Mr. Isgro deliver large amounts of cash to Joseph Armone, a convicted heroin dealer who Federal investigators say is a member of the Gambino crime family. Government prosecutors have charged in earlier court documents that Mr. Isgro gave the money to Mr. Armone for loan-sharking activities. There are no charges against Mr. Armone.
Further research suggests that sort of New Jersey rough bunch is something Kontogiannis had a little bit of exposure to. From a 1992 Newsday story:
Kontogiannis, fraud victim of a convicted felon taking out hits, huh? What do you know. It sounds more like Tony and Carmen settling scores through private uh negotiations. And the possibilities for massive amounts of cash and money laundering that changing laws on Native American gaming rights opened up to operators in such a milieu is quite interesting, and seems to play a role in the wider Cunningham case and the Abramoff case. What was the key year? It seems to be right around 1997/1998.'I WANT THE PROBLEM ELIMINATED," Gregory Montagnino told a hit man when they met at the Vince Lombardi service stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in March, 1991.
The "problem" that Montagnino, a financial wheeler-dealer out on bail from auto loan fraud charges, said he would pay $ 5,000 to eliminate was Bergen County assistant prosecutor Robert Wilson. Wilson had been aggressively pursuing Montagnino on charges that he had fraudulently obtained $ 80,000 in auto loans by using false identities.
But the hit man turned out to be an undercover investigator, and Montagnino was later tried and convicted of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced last month to 20 years in jail and is now in custody waiting to be assigned a prison.
The attempted murder shocked even jaded investigators, who said that it is unusual for anyone to target a prosecutor, and even more unusual for someone accused of white collar crimes to go to such lengths to avoid prosecution.
The New Jersey attorney general's office is investigating Montagnino for more than auto loan frauds. It has spent more than a year looking into bank and real estate fraud charges. [...]
Thomas Theodore Kontogiannis, president of Olympic, said his company did not sue Montagnino because Olympic found he had defaulted on loans from other lenders and believed it would be unlikely to recover anything.
Montagnino had apparently thought out every angle of that deal. The mortgage checks were made out to the co-op association. Kontogiannis claims that prior to the closing, Montagnino had opened a bank account in the name of the association, with himself as its president, and cashed the checks in that account.