Frank Report

Douglas By Robert Douglas I think at the very base of everything, you've got thought leadership. And thought leadership's been going on for a long, long time. The problem with thought leadership is it can be coercive. Thought leadership is bad. It really is bad, because people can lead you with their thoughts. Thought leaders are dangerous because they could lead people to do something they don't want to do. They listened to another person's thinking, and they did things they didn't want to do.

PART ONE — HOW A NEWSPAPER STORY KILLED A TEN-BILLION-DOLLAR COMPANY Joshua Wander is 44. In 2015, he co-founded 777 Partners in Miami. 777 began by buying structured legal settlements and lottery winnings. A person entitled to monthly payments for, for example, the next 20 years could sell that future income to 777 in exchange for a cash discount paid immediately. 777 would then collect the payments. Next, 777 started buying businesses.

The Mighty Vanguard Turned 66 Yesterday SILVER BAY, N.Y. — Vanguard Week, also called V-Week, was the annual 10-day gathering held by followers of Keith Alan Raniere, the founder of the self-help organization NXIVM, to celebrate his nativity. Raniere, who used the title “Vanguard,” was born Aug. 26, 1960. Beginning around 2005, members paid to assemble each late August at the YMCA Silver Bay Resort, a roughly 550-acre campus on Lake George in New York’s Adirondacks.

On November 3, 2009, in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles, Judge A. Howard Matz sentenced Curtis Somoza to 25 years for a $64 million fraud. The prosecution's case was that Somoza promised investors risk-free returns of 25 percent, told them their money would come back five-to-one, and instead spent more than $27 million of it in 16 months on two houses and a great deal of jewelry. Matz called it an orgy of self-indulgence.

Part one: $500M Fraud Rap — and a Baby Photo as ‘Witness Tampering’ HOW A $10 BILLION FIRM DIED IN NINETY DAYS Suppose Joshua Wander is presumed innocent. Suppose that his firm, 777 Partners LLC, claimed more than $9 billion in assets and more than 2,000 employees and was managing its problems when the Justice Department killed it. 777 was stressed by rising interest rates, bruised by critical press, but not dead.

PARTNERS SAY THEY WERE CUT OUT Vitek By the summer of 2016, Radovan Vítek had completed what might be called the dismantling and capture of ORCO Property Group. The Luxembourg regulator had issued its findings in 2017. Vítek paid the fine. When everybody finished filling out the paperwork, he had the buildings, the shares, and the money. That was not the end of the story. It was merely the point at which another part of the story became easier to see. Before there was ORCO, there were partners.

Radovan Vítek is a Czech billionaire who controls CPI Property Group, a real estate company that claims more than €20 billion in assets. Forbes says he is worth $7.2 billion. He rarely appears in public. He does not give interviews. He has made a habit of staying out of sight. He uses shell companies. They have names, directors, and bank accounts. They have no obvious sign that Radovan Vítek controls them.

AS FAR AS I KNOW Joshua Wander goes on trial October 19 on six felony counts From the superseding indictment (S1 25 Cr. 473 (JPO), filed 06/30/26): Count One — Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud Count Two — Wire Fraud Count Three — Conspiracy to Commit Securities Fraud Count Four — Securities Fraud Count Five — Wire Fraud (the additional count involving Lender-4 / Advantage Capital) Count Six — Witness Tampering The government's six-count case rests on three principal accusations.

Fourth of six parts. WHO IS WHO Frank Rose — Principal Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency's second-ranking official. President Biden nominated him, the Senate confirmed him, and he took office on August 2, 2021. In April 2024, he was forced out. He is now suing the Department of Energy, which oversees NNSA.

Third of six parts. PART THREE: THE ACCUSER Kathryn "Kate" Hewitt was Frank Rose's research assistant at Brookings. He wrote the references that got her into the National Nuclear Security Administration. For two years afterward, she asked him for help. Then Rose became the presidentially nominated and Senate-confirmed No. 2 official at the NNSA. For eight months they were in the same building. Then Hewitt left on a detail to the Department of Defense and never came back.