A Gavel Falls In Paradise

By Author: Elliott Rosenthal
Total Articles: 4
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Trat is one of Thailand’s 76 Provinces. It is bordered by Cambodia to the east and the Gulf of Thailand to the South. Throughout a history that dates back to the early 17th century, Trat has played an important role in the Thailand’s stability and economy due to its strategic location. Chinese merchants flocked to Trat in its early history, and played an important role in its development. The political and economic elite of Trat take pride in the region’s history and economic importance. And, as a result, are less than sympathetic to western financial adventurers sullying the province’s reputation. But Trat has another reputation as well - as a sort of paradise on earth, with gorgeous pristine beaches in the south and the vaulted Cardamom Mountains to the east. The type of place people dream of “owning a piece of.”

The courtroom in Trat is quiet with only the sounds of the various court officials working at their respective tasks with bureaucratic efficiency. Lawyers representing Richard Cayne and Gregory Pitt - both Canadian nationals living and working in Thailand, sat shuffling through papers, either busy ...
... or wanting to appear so. Cayne sat quietly, occasionally chatting with his lawyer and looking at his watch. He appeared his usual self: confident but not excitable, exhibiting the understated quiet that often seems to surround him.

Sitting somewhat apart from even his own attorney, Gregory Pitt looked nervous and slightly disheveled. Some of the salesman’s self-confidence that used to be his moniker has faded. Pitt’s future is the real subject of the day’s courtroom drama. In simple terms, he stands accused by Cayne of absconding with millions of dollars in real estate assets that are the property of Cayne’s investors. It is a peculiarity of Thai law that an individual like Cayne can bring criminal charges against another individual, like Pitt, and if he prevails in the matter, the defendant can find themselves facing a prison term in the very disagreeable confines of a Thai prison. Pitt has good reason to be nervous.

It had been a long, winding and totally implausible road since 2004, when Cayne and his firm, Meyer Japan, first became aware of what was a seemingly excellent investment opportunity with Pitt and White Sands Beach. Thailand’s real estate market was booming and Japanese nationals were looking for real estate investment opportunities abroad. Cayne had developed a well-known reputation for his ability to search-out higher-yielding investment opportunities for his clients when he met Pitt, who was the driving force between the Royal Siam Trust with investments in various financial opportunities including White Sands Beach. Initially the relationship was a typical one between Meyer and the Royal Siam Trust. Nothing noteworthy other than the usual grind of facilitating investment documents and sales of investment interests.

But in 2010 Cayne started to hear stories that things were amiss with White Sands Beach. Cayne received word from multiple, independent source, that Pitt had illegally transferred control of investor’s interests from their names to Pitt’s control. It was an action akin to changing title on a home without the owner’s consent.

Initially, Cayne found such a brazen act to be hard to believe. When he finally learned the true dimensions of the fraud, he tried to convince Pitt to return the investor’s equity to their rightful owners. Pitt’s response was like something out of a modern-day courtroom drama: He not only wouldn’t return the investor’s rightful positions, he made it clear that if Cayne didn’t back-off and he would accuse Cayne of complicity in the fraud and bring down Meyer Japan. Cayne, so Pitt’s thinking went, would never, ever risk that. After all, billions of dollars in losses, not the millions in losses at White Sands Beach, had just been lost in the U.S. banking fiasco and no one had owned-up to anything and certainly no one had gone to jail. Surely, Pitt reasoned, Cayne would do the same: Take his lumps and walk away. He was wrong. And the magnitude of his error had leaded him to this hour in a Trat, Thailand courtroom.

Not only had Richard Cayne refused to go quietly into that good night and let Pitt walk away with millions of dollars of his investor’s assets, he had taken on the considerable burden of all of the legal expenses for bringing Pitt before the Court. Cayne had made good on a pledge to front the legal fees for any claimant who wanted to fight and be represented in the proceedings. But money wasn’t the only thing that Richard Cayne was to spend during the four years of litigation. He was to pay dearly with his reputation.

Beginning several years before that day in the Trat courtroom, Pitt had made good on his threat to sully Cayne’s reputation. He had indeed sought to claim – against all evidence to the contrary – that Cayne, not he, was complicit in the fraud. Pitt had a promoters understanding that despite mounds of bank records, legal documents, money trails and testimony that he was the perpetrator of a fraud where scores of people’s names were wiped away from their land holdings; he, Gregory Pitt, still had a wild card to play. It’s the same card that so many others have found useful in modern information wars: the ability to make any claim you want on the Internet.

Gregory J. Pitt is many things: salesman, promoter, founder of his own “ready made” law firm without lawyers, and lover of the good life. But he was not two things: a lawyer or technically savvy. But as with so many other things, he understood these talents were a mere commodity to be bought on the cheap. He soon found that cheap commodity in two additional players in the White Sands Beach drama – both of whom are, or shortly may be, facing their own legal hurdles.

Daniel Edward Giroux, aka Daniel Edward Kennedy, aka Michael Gage is an American national who teaches English in Japan where he lives with his wife and young family. Kennedy, the name he appears to prefer more often than not, was a long-time of associate of Greg Pitt’s who had made himself known to Cayne and expressed a willingness to work with Cayne in the fight for the investors. Cayne sensed that perhaps Kennedy might actually be able to be of help and worked out an agreement with Kennedy for his assistance. After all, Cayne thought, Pitt and Kennedy had a history together and Kennedy knew a lot. He was about to find out how wrong he was.

After initially signing an agreement to work with Cayne to help investors recoup their investments, Kennedy saw there was more pay-dirt helping the increasingly desperate Pitt than with the more business like Cayne. So Kennedy jumped ship and headed to Pitt’s camp for an unknown amount that was nevertheless boasted by Kennedy as an “a shitload of money”.

In Kennedy, Pitt had hired a hyper-aggressive Pit Bull with an exaggerated sense of intrigue and less than stellar judgment about when and where to take a plunge. Kennedy would be Pitt’s “hit man” on the web. Like Pitt, Kennedy and Pitt enjoyed roaming through the seedier night life of Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy and Nana Districts while working through their plan to shift the finger-pointing to Cayne – something they regularly did together in the earlier stages of their effort to destroy Cayne’s reputation before he could gain traction in court.

Kennedy then enlisted James De Carlo, a Canadian national from Ottawa who, like Kennedy, taught English in Japan. De Carlo and Kennedy would be Pitt’s hit men on the web, each alleging and causing to be alleged on blog posts, in articles and on social media that the real perpetrator of the White Sands Beach fraud was Cayne, not Pitt. They offered no facts, no documentation, nothing. But they had a cunning realization that it didn’t matter. There plan, soon put into motion was to perpetrate the informational equivalent of a “drive by” shooting where few people would be interested in any more than the accusation. Facts are damned – and they knew it.

But like their new boss Pitt, Kennedy mistook Cayne’s determination and resolve. Having broken the agreement where Kennedy agreed to work to help bring Pitt to justice, Kennedy had triggered a liquidated damages clause in the agreement with Cayne. Damages that could total $250,000.00, and are now the subject of Kennedy’s own legal morass that will in all likelihood come to a head in the coming weeks when Kennedy will learn his own fate in a Japanese court. DeCarlo, who investigators have linked to Kennedy and Pitt and has worked with the two helping thwart the investor’s fight to recoup their money , has significant blame in the White Sands Beach affair. After Kennedy’s and Pitt’s legal cases are concluded, it is likely that DeCarlo will be the next to see the inside of a courtroom.

The din of clerical noise comes to a halt as the Judge enters the courtroom. All rise except the subject of today’s courtroom drama. Pitt, now in a wheelchair for unspecified reasons, remains seated, looking tentatively around the courtroom. The Judge listens to final motions and pronouncements by attorneys for Pitt and Cayne and then announces he will issue his opinion in due order, making clear he has come to a conclusion.

When the verdict is made public it is a devastating one for the man who wanted more than anything to emulate his hero: Donald J. Trump: The court rendered a verdict of three years imprisonment on each of two charges of systematic criminal violations of the Thai Partnerships, Companies, Associations and Foundations Act.

Then, in the first week of December, another hammer blow: An additional verdict of three years on each of four additional counts, bringing Pitt’s total sentence to 18 years in a Thai prison.

The differences between U.S. and most European nation’s laws can be striking. Another anomaly of Thai law is this: If Pitt agrees to return assignment of the land to its rightful owners, and Cayne is willing to drop the charges, the court can be petitioned to withdraw the sentence. In theory, by making good, Pitt could potentially avoid a lengthy prison sentence in Thailand.

What’s a mystery to everyone, even those close to Pitt, is why he stretched the envelope so far for so long. Why he didn’t back down earlier in the brutal battle when it became clear that he was in serious jeopardy of losing his liberty and going to prison. One of the claimants who lost his investment and who benefitted from Cayne’s determination had perhaps the best answer: “When Greg came to Thailand he was going to get rich. And he got rich. Once he all of that wealth in his hands, he just couldn’t give it up and go back to being the old Greg Pitt.”

“The Donald” would surely would have settled and kept the game rolling.

Source: - http://whitesandsbeach.info/a-gavel-falls-in-paradise/