$138M??

[the-real-steve]

https://lancasteronline.com/business/lo ... %20Reading

[the-real-steve]

From Lancaster Online, behind paywall...

https://lancasteronline.com/business/lo ... b84a9.html

********************************

‘Out of order’ Paramount ATMs retrieved; cash machines taken back 6 months after network collapse

As the legal battle raged over control of the ATMs managed by Lancaster-based Paramount Management Group, James Prenetta was desperately looking for someone to take the ones he had.

Prenetta oversees a chain of laundromats that includes 23 Clean Rite Center and Laundromax locations in Rhode Island and Massachusetts where Paramount ATMs were installed. The machines were set up and serviced by Paramount, which shared a portion of the surcharge fees with the laundromat owner Laundry Capital Co.

But as the financial pressure ratcheted up on Paramount last summer ahead of an investor lawsuit, the laundromats stopped getting their $1.25 cut from each transaction.

“When we started following up on it, we were getting ignored,” said Prenetta, executive vice president and chief legal officer of Laundry Capital Co. “We made the decision that ‘OK, if we’re not getting paid, then we’re turning off the machines.’”

The choice to unplug the machines in late October and try to move on with another provider began a six-month odyssey for Prenetta as he tried to figure out who owned the cash machines and — more importantly — who would haul them away to make room for different ones.

“No one was coming up to pick up the machines, there was no one to call,” Prenetta said. “We were getting tired of having these things in our stores collecting dust, and we were getting a little bit desperate to get some guidance on what to do with them.”

Some 2,700 investors paid into funds used to buy ATMs that were managed by Paramount, a Lancaster-based company owned by local businessman Daryl Heller. Investors have alleged that Heller fraudulently inflated the number of ATMs that were bought using their money. But Prenetta’s experience with the Paramount cash machines in his laundromats shows how some of the value of the ATMs was erased because no one was managing them for several months.

After Heller didn’t come through with a promised buyout in November, a Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas judge awarded the investors $138 million as well as control of all the ATMs. Representatives of the roughly 2,700 investors had hoped that by getting the machines quickly turned back on, they could recoup some of the more than $500 million that disappeared when Paramount collapsed.

But in most cases, it was too late.

In December, Brent Bauman, an ATM industry expert hired by investors to analyze Paramount’s operation, concluded that the network, which had once been thought to include around 25,000 income-generating ATMs, had, through neglect or possibly fraud, dwindled to only several hundred.

The saga of the ATMs in the Clean Rite and Laundromax locations is one of what are likely many other stories of neglected Paramount ATMs going from income-producing assets to liabilities just taking up space.

Abandoned and unwanted
Prenetta said Paramount ATMs were installed several years ago in some Clean Rite Center or Laundromax locations in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The washers and dryers are themselves cashless, but the ATMs offered a way for customers to get cash for adding money to laundry cards, he said.

“For us, it is something that it’s important enough that we want to have them available to our customers, should they need them,” Prenetta said.

Prenetta said the ATMs weren’t something that required much attention since Paramount maintained them and kept them filled with cash. In return, the laundromat got $1.25 of the $3 surcharge.

“It’s an empty piece of real estate in your store, you might as well use it for something,” Prenetta said.

The ATMs were so much of an afterthought that Prenetta said it took his company several months to realize that Paramount hadn’t been remitting their share of the surcharge fees. After doing some investigation, Prenetta learned of the lawsuits against the company in Lancaster County, concluding that the machines would never be reactivated, especially after he learned that all Paramount employees were fired in late December.

In a couple cases, the machines were moved to hidden-away spots in the laundromats behind the dryers. But mostly they were given “out of order” signs and stayed in place.

Prenetta said he didn’t want to just send the machines to the scrap yard since he knew they were someone else’s property. Apart from the legalities, the logistics of machines’ removal were complicated by the fact that they were bolted to the floor and the bolts could only be accessed through a locked panel for which the keys were unavailable.

Prenetta said he tried to get in touch with lawyers for Paramount’s creditors and even reached out to state banking regulators to see what his obligations were to hold on to the old ATMs. But he was unable to get any definitive answers.

“We wanted them to come and get them and we couldn’t get anybody to tell us what to do with them,” Prenetta said.

After so much time passed without any answers, Prenetta said he was getting close to just having a scrap hauler come get them, adding the extra enticement that any cash that might have remained inside could also be taken.

Eventually, Prenetta called LNP | LancasterOnline, where he had seen stories written about the Paramount and Heller. Those stories included ones about the early December FBI raid of Paramount’s Lancaster city office, the multiple lawsuits creditors have filed against Heller and his companies and the personal bankruptcy Heller filed in February in New Jersey, which has revealed new details about Heller’s ATM companies as well as the cannabis, restaurant and aviation businesses where he was an owner.

“Just calling to see if in any of your articles … if there’s any guidance or if you’re aware of what we should be doing with these machines because they’ve been sitting idle in our stores now since October when the network went down. If you have any information, I’d appreciate a return call,” Prenetta said in a late March voicemail left for an LNP reporter.

Finding a solution
When contacted in early April by LNP | LancasterOnline, Bauman said investors have been maintaining a service line for anyone with questions about former Paramount ATMs. The number is 888-246-2346.

Bauman said that in cases like the one at the Clean Rite and Laudromax locations where Paramount machines are just being stored, ATMs are being picked up and hauled away on behalf of the group. Bauman told LNP that he hoped to discuss the situation with Prenetta. After Prenetta agreed to have his contact information shared with Bauman, the two got in touch.

Over the course of the next three weeks, Bauman and Prenetta exchanged messages about what to do about the ATMs. Eventually, it was decided that all the machines would be picked up and hauled away on behalf of the investors. Pickups happened over the weekend with 22 of 23 machines hauled away. Arrangements are still being made for one machine in Allentown.

While he said he is glad to have what seemed like “never-ending drama” now behind him, Prenetta wondered if many other businesses went through as much effort as he did to return the machines to their rightful owners.

“They don’t seem to have any sort of process in place,” he said. “I feel like we’re the first people that have reached them and said, ‘Come and get these things. Can you arrange that?’”

Bauman declined to comment Monday about the process for dealing with abandoned Paramount ATMs and how many machines have been physically retrieved, or where they are being stored.

With the Paramount machines finally removed, Prenetta said a different company will be installing their ATMs at the laundromats in a matter of days.

[the-real-steve]

From Lancaster Online, behind paywall. Edited as best I could.
https://lancasteronline.com/business/lo ... 42246.html

*********************************
On a Saturday morning in April, Randall Leaman, former CEO of a multimillion-dollar ATM company, walked into a Lancaster law office for a deposition.

Leaman’s boss, Daryl Heller, was the businessman behind Paramount Management Group, which ran a network of cash machines all over the East Coast. To pay for it, Heller and his salesmen got 2,700 people, including neighbors and friends, to invest their money. Heller was born and raised in Lancaster County. He promised high returns paid monthly, and for a while, he delivered.

But in April 2024, the payments stopped, and Heller’s business empire unraveled. The investor funds sued Paramount. Unpaid creditors sued Heller. The FBI raided Paramount’s office. Heller filed for bankruptcy.

Lancaster County investors lost millions, and though the investor funds won $138 million in a lawsuit against Paramount, they have received next to nothing.

Enter Leaman. The investor funds’ attorneys brought him in for a deposition as part of their attempt to find any money they could claim for their clients. Lancaster-based attorney Joshua Voss led the deposition.

“Do you think Paramount was a Ponzi scheme?” Voss asked Leaman.

A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent financial operation that relies on a constant influx of new investors to pay the bills. It collapses when the required payouts grow larger than the money coming in.

“I do not know,” Leaman replied.

Joshua Voss poses inside the Saxton & Stump office in Manheim Township on Tuesday, May 6, 2025.


The exchange is one of several revealed in a new federal court filing in which Paramount executives, under oath, were unable to say that the company was not engaged in fraudulent activity. The conversations cast light into the inner workings of Heller’s businesses: large sums of cash transported on a private jet. Money flowing between different LLCs. And little explanation from Heller.

The 825-page document, filed by attorneys for the investor funds, is part of Heller’s personal bankruptcy case in federal court, filed in New Jersey. It includes two more depositions, as well as nine months of texts between Leaman and Heller. Neither responded to requests for comment for this story.

In contrast to what executives said under oath, the thousands of texts between Paramount’s chairman and its CEO reveal that Heller’s associates began voicing concerns about fraud before the investor funds sued Paramount in August 2024. As legal troubles mounted, Leaman sought to leave the company and feared he’d be drawn into court.

As Daryl Heller's ATM network collapsed, text messages show chaos and desperation
With Heller retaining a criminal defense lawyer, and some attorneys predicting an indictment, the texts raise questions about who could face criminal repercussions for their involvement in a venture that owes $500 million to banks, the federal government and investors who believed the sales pitch.

‘Is and was PMG a fraud?’

Leaman, of Manheim Township, said in the deposition that he started at Paramount as chief operating officer in 2011 and was chief executive officer from 2022 until it closed in December.

In these roles, Leaman took work trips to Las Vegas and Costa Rica, and to a company office in Mississippi, he said. The company sold him a 2024 Mercedes E350, which retails at more than $60,000, for $1. Company money, which Leaman said came in the form of “ownership draws” from his and Heller’s equity, bought the two men a beach house in Sea Isle City, New Jersey — a property that was sold in April for a record $6.4 million as part of Heller’s bankruptcy.

But in the deposition, Leaman said one thing Paramount didn’t give him was financial breakdowns of the money paid to investors or routed to other Heller-owned companies. Leaman said he only saw summaries provided by others.

For the details, he said at the deposition, Voss would have to ask other executives, or ask Heller.

Paramount was just one of the businesses that Heller, who lives in East Hempfield Township, managed out of an office in downtown Lancaster. Heller held stakes in a cannabis company operating in Michigan and Massachusetts. He had holdings in real estate and a restaurant in Lititz. And, in recent years he had launched a cryptocurrency ATM machine spinoff called PowerCoin. The company, also called Margo Network, was ranked the sixth-largest such operation in the world in 2024. Asked by Voss if it was still operating, Leaman said, “I have no idea.”


Paramount ATM Pickup
A Paramount ATM is retrieved from a laundromat in Cranston, Rhode Island, on Saturday, May 3. The Paramount ATMs, which been out of order since last fall, were retrieved on behalf of investors in the ATM network that had been owned by Daryl Heller.

Laundry Capital Co.
Nearly all of these entities fell under an umbrella company, Heller Capital Group LLC, which was 99% owned by Heller.

In total, Heller had created more than 130 LLCs, according to depositions. And after Paramount missed its first monthly payout to investors, insiders worried that the whole thing was an elaborate shell game.

In his deposition, Leaman explained that in April or May 2024, Heller Capital Group chief financial officer Barry Rynearson raised concerns about a potential Ponzi scheme. Rynearson, of Dauphin County, did not respond to a request to comment. Depositions and texts indicate that Rynearson resigned from the company in 2024; he does not include Heller Capital Group on his public business profile.

“I heard that he was concerned that maybe something wasn't being done properly and so he investigated,” Leaman said. In response, Leaman added, Heller provided Leaman with a 10-point explanation of why the company was not a Ponzi scheme. (Heller’s explanation was not included in the legal exhibits).

On April 26, Leaman forwarded Heller a message from Jerry Hostetter, a Manheim Township investor and the president of Prestige Investment Group, the company that ran the investor funds for the ATM business. Prestige, like Paramount, was owned by Heller Capital. Hostetter hired Voss on behalf of the investor funds.

“Is and was PMG a fraud?” the message began, using an abbreviation for Paramount Management Group.

“OMFG,” Heller texted back to Leaman. “I’ll hit him tomorrow. Messages hime [sic] yesterday. This is all self serving. No one wants to talk to him.”

‘We are basically screwed’
The text threads between Leaman and Heller submitted as part of the bankruptcy case show that nearly every day between March 13 and Dec. 5, 2024, Leaman brought investor complaints and financial concerns to Heller. He begged Heller to meet in person, attend meetings with staff or potential investors or take calls. Heller often responded with optimistic promises — a workaround, a legal reversal, an infusion of cash, a new deal on the cusp of closing.

In October, a judge ruled that Paramount, Heller Capital Group, Heller, Leaman and former Paramount CFO Dennis Ream owed $6 million to a Michigan-based ATM company, according to a judgment filed in the Lancaster County Court. In addition, Leaman and Ream, who owns a home in Manheim Township, owed $2.6 million, the judgment states.

On Nov. 14, Leaman texted Heller that he was worried that they had committed fraud. “But our attorney is saying that we are basically screwed if they don't agree to remove this and that we agreed that we committed fraud in the documents we signed,” Leaman wrote Nov. 14.

By then, Leaman was begging Heller through texts to let him resign. On Nov. 23, Heller suggested that Leaman could move into a leadership role at Margo, the cryptocurrency business.

“I’m OK with that,” Leaman said. “I am just completely freaked out that when they get in and realize that there's not 25,000 (ATM) locations there and they're not generating the margins that they need that they are going to trip and we're gonna be all in lawsuits and alleging fraud.”

On Dec. 4, Leaman again texted that he was worried about the actual number of ATMs “and the investor expectation of performance if we turn these over to them. We don't have 28,000 units which I saw on the serial number list. Is all hell going to break loose?”

Leaman estimated the company had fewer than 10,000 ATMs in operation and probably was “down much more” after a vendor, Cash Connect, stopped supplying cash for Paramount’s machines due to nonpayment.

Later that day, Leaman wrote, “Daryl? I’m seriously tripping here. This is appearing to be fraudulent to me. Please tell me why my perception is incorrect.”

“I am with them right now,” Heller replied. “Sorry not ignoring. Not fraudulent. We needed to assign ATMs which we did, not have all operating. Never a requirement.”

Two days later in a contempt hearing against Paramount in Lancaster County Court, Paramount vice president of Information Systems Leigh Danca testified that many of the ATMs Heller claimed were in his network either did not exist or were owned by other businesses. Leaman was called to testify, but exercised his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.

In his deposition, Leaman told Voss that, for specific financial information, he should talk to Ream, the Paramount CFO who separated from the company in early October after resigning in August.

But Ream had already given written responses to deposition questions in March. There, Ream said he reported directly to Leaman.

Ream explained that he was hired as Paramount’s CFO in 2016 and became COO in 2019. He left in early 2022 but returned within a year to temporarily serve as CFO, working “to build teams both at Paramount and PowerCoin.”

Ream estimated Paramount was worth at least $80 million in 2024. But money was flowing out at a rapid pace, with little explanation.

Ream said money was transferred from Paramount to PowerCoin, and there were “many transfers over the years” from Paramount to Heller Capital, with sums sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ream also oversaw finances at PowerCoin and said that for part of 2024, money was being taken from the cryptocurrency business on a daily basis. “I’m aware that there were daily amounts being pulled by a third party at the direction of Daryl Heller but not exactly sure of the details, how much or for how long.”

Though PowerCoin had contracts with security companies such as Brinks and Loomis, it also used a “Tiger Team” of “third-party resources along with key company personnel” to pick up cash from its bitcoin ATM machines, Ream said.

Voss asked Ream if he was aware of Heller Capital’s use of private planes to transport “large amounts of cash” to Michigan.

“Yes,” Ream wrote, “this was related to PowerCoin (not Paramount), and I was on two flights.”

At the time, a Heller company was part-owner of a twin-jet Cessna aircraft that flew out of Harrisburg Capital City Airport. The jet was sold a few months ago.

In the deposition, Ream said Paramount was profitable “through ATM operations for many years,” but he couldn’t remember which years.

Voss asked him if Paramount paid existing investors with cash brought in by new investors — the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

“I do not know,” Ream said. “The payments between Paramount and Prestige were run separately between Daryl Heller and Prestige.”

“Was Paramount operating a Ponzi scheme?” Voss asked.

“Not that I was aware of,” Ream said.

[Only an Anz]

Here in the Pacific Northwest where pot is legal (in both OR and WA) it turns out that the cannabis business is not all that was advertised. Growers and distributers are going bankrupt all over the place.

It turns out that cannabis is super easy to grow in enormous quantities. But not so easy to sell and market to the public once you've captured the 5% or so of the population who are heavy users. So those hundred million dollar greenhouse grow operations? Not so easy to make a profit off of after all. Especially when state and federal law prevents any of it from going out-of-state.

Especially when you are still competing with illegal grow operations that are not restricted by any regulations obviously.

Not to mention, drying/processing it in a quality-controlled way is rather involved. A lot of folks learned that the hard way in OK when it was legalized there...

[the-real-steve]

I see that Lancaster Online already updated this article. I'll try to post later today....

[the-real-steve]

I'm not gonna post anything on this unless it's fresh. Lancaster online keeps regurgitating the same things over and over. The local conspiracy theories are abundant.

[JohnH]

I'm not gonna post anything on this unless it's fresh. Lancaster online keeps regurgitating the same things over and over. The local conspiracy theories are abundant.

No updated cemetery photos?

[the-real-steve]

I'm not gonna post anything on this unless it's fresh. Lancaster online keeps regurgitating the same things over and over. The local conspiracy theories are abundant.

No updated cemetery photos?

This time it was a house he bought for his son in Lancaster.

[Grace]

I'm not gonna post anything on this unless it's fresh. Lancaster online keeps regurgitating the same things over and over. The local conspiracy theories are abundant.

No updated cemetery photos?

Or no updated photos of Hammer Creek Mennonite Church ?

[the-real-steve]

I'm not gonna post anything on this unless it's fresh. Lancaster online keeps regurgitating the same things over and over. The local conspiracy theories are abundant.

No updated cemetery photos?

Or no updated photos of Hammer Creek Mennonite Church ?

Nope.