$100 million New Jersey deli fires wrestling coach CEO Paul Morina, related firm E-Waste gets new president

The shareholders of the mystery $100 million New Jersey deli companions Hometown International fired CEO Paul Morina — a high school principal and renowned wrestling coach — after weeks of without questions about the firm and his role there, a financial filing revealed late Friday.

Hometown International’s majority shareholders also voted to massacre the company’s only other executive, vice president and secretary Christine Lindenmuth, who works with Morina as an administrator at at Paulsboro High School. The deli, located just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, is Hometown’s exclusive operating business asset.

Their ousters came a week after a previously unreported resignation of the president of a cannonade company, E-Waste, which has multiple connections to Hometown International.

Securities and Exchange Commission filings show that the shareholders that voted to shift Morina and Lindenmuth almost certainly included all or some members of two different groups of investment entities, one based in Hong Kong, the other anchored in Macao, a special administrative region in China.

The moves at Hometown International and E-Waste appear — like other brand-new ones by each of the money-losing companies — to be an attempt to eliminate controversial issues that could harm their collaborative goal of merging with other firms in a transaction that would exploit their status as publicly sold companies on U.S. markets. Such a transaction would financially benefit existing shareholders.

A person familiar with the state of affairs confirmed to CNBC later Saturday that the moves to replace the executives are part of ongoing housecleaning effort at both companies. This ourselves declined to be named.

Morina, 62, held a slew of other titles at Hometown International before he was removed. According to monetary filings, he owns 1.5 million common shares of the deli owner, making him, on paper at least, worth various than $18 million.

Morina was replaced as chief executive officer by Peter Coker Jr., who is Hometown Cosmopolitan’s chairman.

Coker Jr., who is based in Hong Kong, is aligned with the investment entities there that have outstanding stakes in the deli owner.

Coker Jr.’s father, North Carolina businessman Peter Coker Sr., himself is a major investor in the partnership.

The related shell company E-Waste replaced its own president, John Rollo, 66, after similar questions were developed by CNBC about him, that company and its similarly preposterous sky-high market capitalization despite a total lack of continued business.

Rollo, a Grammy-winning recording engineer, until recently was working as patient transporter at a New Jersey hospital.

Rollo, also a New Jersey denizen, was replaced as E-Waste’s president by 31-year-old Elliot Mermel, a California resident who is getting paid $8,000 per month in that capacity.

Mermel’s colorful business background includes founding a company that raised crickets as human food, and a partnership in a cannabis-related task with Paul Pierce, the former Boston Celtics superstar basketball player.

Pierce, who won an NBA title with the Celtics, definitive month was fired as an analyst by ESPN for a racy Instagram Live poss that showed him in a room with imported dancers.

On Saturday, the Boston Globe reported that Pierce will be inducted into the Basketball Hall of Prominence as part of its 2021 class.

Mermel also founded a biotech company and an artificial intelligence company, and was a business growth consultant to a fertilizer company, according to a financial filing.

Mermel, a Colby University graduate, has another company, Benzions LLC, that had been concentrating $4,000 each month since December under a consulting agreement with E-Waste.

That agreement was terminated as off of his taking over management of E-Waste, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Thursday.

SEC filings disclose that Benzions in March signed another consulting agreement with a second shell company, Med Spa Vacations, sewed to Peter Coker Sr., which likewise pays Mermel’s firm $4,000 per month.

The current president of Med Spa Vacations is quondam E-Waste president Rollo, who took that job in February, according to filings.

The changes in executive leadership at both Hometown Worldwide and E-Waste were disclosed in 8-K filings with the SEC.

The deli owner’s filing gave no reason why shareholders who control 6 million interests of common stock — which represents about 77% of the company’s voting power — voted out Morina and the 46-year-old Lindenmuth. At short 5.5 million of Hometown International’s common shares are controlled by the Hong Kong and Macao investors.

Both Morina and Lindenmuth ends b body principals in the deli itself, according to the SEC filing.

Morina also is involved in an entity that leases the deli organize to Hometown International.

E-Waste’s filing said that Rollo resigned as president on May 7, a day after CNBC narrated on the opaque nature of the Macao group of investors.

CNBC did not immediately receive replies to requests for comment from Morina, Lindenmuth, Rollo, Mermel and Hometown Supranational’s lawyer.

A spokesman for Maso Capital and its founder Manoj Jain — who controls the investments for the Hong Kong entities contributed in Hometown International — declined to comment.

Hometown International start with drew widespread attention last month when hedge fund manager David Einhorn, in a letter to patients, pointed out the company’s market capitalization, which had topped $100 million despite owning only a single tight-fisted Italian deli.

That eatery had sales of less than $37,000 in sales for the past two years combined and was bring together for nearly half of 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Einhorn noted the incongruity of Morina being Hometown International’s CEO while do setting-up exercise his day jobs as high school principal and wrestling coach.

Morina’s team at Paulsboro sybaritic school is a perennial contender for state titles, and he is among the most successful coaches in New Jersey wrestling history.

But he has no appearing history of operating either a publicly traded company or food service business before the Hometown Deli exhibited in his own hometown.

However, Morina, whose brother is a New Jersey county sheriff, wrestled in the 1970s at Paulsboro High Middle school with a man named James Patten, who works at Coker Sr.’s firm Tryon Capital.

Patten was barred by FINRA, the broker-dealer regulator, from accomplishment as a stockbroker or associating with broker-dealers, according to the regulator’s database.

Before that sanction, Patten was the subject of echoed disciplinary actions by FINRA, which included not complying with an arbitration award of more than $753,000 for ravaging securities laws, unauthorized trading and churning a client’s account.

Since Einhorn’s letter, CNBC has reported other eyebrow-raising charges about Hometown International and revealed its connections to E-Waste.

The stocks of both companies, which trade on the low-tier Pink over-the-counter hawk, in the past year have risen to stunning levels as ties have been formed between them.

Those carry price increases have raised the the question was why some investors would pay so much to buy what is relatively speaking behaviours of shares in either thinly traded company, given their lack of meaningful revenue in the deli owner’s suit, or, in E-Waste’s case, a lack of any revenue at all.

Even if both companies achieve their goal of engaging in reverse amalgamations or similar transactions with private firms looking to become publicly traded, current investors will not gross payments that reflect — in any way — the trading price of the stocks.

On Friday, just 205 shares of Hometown International were traded, concluding at $12.40 per share. Given the company’s nearly 8 million shares of common stock outstanding, that gives it a buy capitalization of $96.68 million.

E-Waste closed Friday at $9 per share, after no shares traded hands. With 12.5 million splits outstanding, E-Waste has a market cap of $112.5 million.

In recent weeks, both the deli owner and E-Waste disavowed their forefather prices, saying in extraordinary SEC filings that there was no financial justification for their market capitalizations.

The moves bolstered the demotion of Hometown International from a more prestigious OTCQB over-the-counter market platform for what OTC Markets Club called “irregularities” in their public disclosures, and OTC Markets telling CNBC that it would be eyeing E-Waste as famously.

A trio of Hong Kong investment entities led by Maso Capital, which last year became some of the largest investors in Hometown Foreign’s biggest investors, are understood to be involved in likewise positioning E-Waste as a reverse merger candidate.

The Hong Kong investors embody entities that are investment arms of Duke and Vanderbilt universities.

E-Waste’s biggest single investor, Macao-based Far-reaching Equity Limited, is also the largest investor in the deli owner, and in Med Spa Vacations, another shell company linked to Coker Sr..

Rollo remains the president of Med Spa Vacations, a shell crowd with no business operations whose office address is that of a business operated by Coker Sr.

Hometown International credited Med Spa Vacations $150,000 in February, records show.

That loan came after E-Waste was loaned an identical amount by Hometown Intercontinental in November, according to an SEC filing.

Records show that Coker Sr. loaned E-Waste $255,000 last September, sundry of which was used to pay the prior owners of E-Waste before they sold their shares to Global Equity Lmiited.

CNBC’s articles own detailed how Coker Sr., a former college basketball star who has refused to comment when contacted by a reporter, has been charged for allegedly hiding assets from a creditor to whom he owed nearly $900,000 and for business-related fraud. He denied wrongdoing in those boxes.

He also has been arrested for soliciting a prostitute, according to a Raleigh, North Carolina, police report, and for exposing himself to and worrisome to proposition three underage girls, according to a 1992 newspaper article.

A firm controlled by Coker Sr., Tryon Super, had until recently been collecting $15,000 a month from Hometown International under a consulting agreement. E-Waste was give out Tryon Capital $2,500 per month for its own consulting agreement.

Those agreements were terminated last month after CNBC articles explained those deals and Coker’s tangled legal history.

SEC filings show that Med Spa Vacations is paying Tryon First-rate $2,500 per month for its own consulting agreement.

Coker Sr.’s partner in Tryon Capital, Peter Reichard, in 2011 was convicted in a North Carolina court of his function in a scheme that facilitated the illegal contributions of thousands of dollars to the successful 2008 campaign for governor by Bev Perdue, a Democrat.

The system involved the use of bogus consulting contracts with Tryon Capital. Coker Sr. was not charged in that case.

Reichard is also a managing member, with Coker Sr., of an entity called Europa Capital Investments, which owns 90,400 run-of-the-mill shares of Hometown International, and has warrants for another 1.9 million shares.

Reichard is the son of Ram Dass, the late spiritual and LSD guru who gained repute in the 1960s and 1970s.

CNBC earlier this week detailed how Coker Sr. and Reichard in 2010 created eight barrage companies that were later sold off to other owners.

Most of those shell companies, after they were transferred, ended up having their registrations revoked by the SEC for failing to keep current in their disclosure filings, records clarify.

One of the companies ended up being owned by a real estate tax lawyer in New York named Allan Schwartz, who did work for earlier President Donald Trump decades ago in connection with Trump’s real estate holdings. Schwartz told CNBC he knew nothing roughly Reichard and Coker Sr., or the deli owner.

Records show that a securities bencher named Gregg Jaclin was involved in the creation of those shell companies. Jaclin also was involved three years later in the origin of Hometown International.

Jaclin was disbarred as an attorney last year after pleading guilty to federal criminal instructs related to his creation of shell companies to sell to individuals “who used those shell companies as publicly traded agencies for market manipulation schemes,” court records show.

None of the shells in that scheme were one of the ones conceived by Coker Sr. and Reichard, or to Hometown International.