John Holic
After numerous rumors about Holic's career as an investment broker having a colorful, if not outright scandalous, history, we asked Holic straight up: "Have you ever been sanctioned by the SEC? If so, for what and what penalties were assessed?"

Holic responded via email as follows:

I believe the short answer to your question is no, however, there is one customer complaint listed on the FINRA web site from June 19, 2007. The complaint alleged failure to supervise and negligence from 2000-2004 and was due to a rogue broker in the office. As supervisor, I was listed in the complaint and as stated on the FINRA site, the status is closed/no action dated February 10, 2009. Due to client and firm confidentiality, I am not able to offer any further information on this alleged complaint but will be happy to provide my supervisor's name and phone number if you wish to obtain any further information from him.

My FINRA CRD# 1050307.

I trust this answers your question.

Well, actually, it didn't. One political observer, the same one who tipped us off about Holic's disastrous business background, wrote this about Holic's disclaimer:

Not exactly a complete answer. His firm was assessed $250,000 in punitive damages by the NASD (National Association of Securities Dealers). That means they did something wrong and Holic was the head of the office. It would be unusual to go after an individual because they are acting as an employee and most claims go against the employer. ...As for his culpability, Holic allowed BC [Brian Christensen] to take A.G. Edwards' clients with him [when Christensen left Edwards] and Holic did not tell those clients what he knew. Those clients were later defrauded.

That's a reference to this March 20, 2007 Herald-Tribune news story about Holic's former second-in-command at A.G. Edwards, Brian Christensen, and how Christensen defrauded investors out of millions right under Holic's nose. Worse, once Holic found out, he failed to issue notifications or warnings to duped investors and to investors about to be duped.

It's a complex story that at first looks like Holic's involvement was minimal. That would be simplistic and wrong. Holic didn't steal any money, but he knew that money was being stolen and he kept quiet about it, probably out of fear. According to the above Herald-Tribune story, Holic fired Christensen after finding out about the fraudulent acts: "A.G. Edwards found Christensen put money from about a dozen customers into All School Kids and was lying to investors about where their money was. He forged documents, putting a fake letterhead on letters with phony numbers reporting stock success."

The Herald-Trib article concludes with this sentence: A federal arbitration panel awarded a Venice couple $1.2 million in October for their troubles with All School Kids, including $249,644 in punitive damages for A.G. Edwards' lack of honest dealing.

Holic is denying this in an effort to distance himself from his own history. In a mass email sent out today, Holic wrote that Harry Walia was spreading lies and untrue innuendo, specifically that Walia lied when he stated that Holic "as manager at A.G. Edwards, was supervisor of a scam artist who defrauded elderly people."  Holic's response to Walia in the email: "Fact: the scam referred to operated almost exclusively outside the office environment and beyond my area of supervision. My work record is publically available on the FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) web site."

There is no polite way to write this. According to published news reports, the court record, and especially Holic's own statement to Venice Florida! dot com that he had a rogue broker in his office from 2000 to 2004 (see Holic's statement published at the top of this article), Holic's current disclaimer and denial is an incredibly huge and odiferous pile of bullshit. The earth is flat. There is no such thing as gravity. Lies can not possibly get any more bald-faced than this.

If Holic is telling the truth now, it would mean that the Herald-Trib was inventing a huge fiction in 2007 when the paper reported that "A federal arbitration panel awarded the Venice couple $1.2 million [from A.G. Edwards] in October for their troubles with All School Kids, including $249,644 in punitive damages for A.G. Edwards' lack of honest dealing."

Wait, what? Did you see that? The federal court-appointed arbitration panel ruling stated that Edwards had to pay $249,644 in punitive damages because of "...A.G. Edwards' lack of honest dealing." That would be A.G. Edwards' lack of honest dealing under the management and policies of Office Manager and Compliance Officer John Holic, who now claims that none of this happened at his office under his watch, which in turn would mean that the arbitration panel was using hallucinogens when they blamed Holic and his office for the entire mess.

Yet more -- Holic's denial is in sharp contrast with how one investment broker at Markowski Investments summarized what happened in a company blog/newsletter (page 2 of this PDF document, pops in new window):

Again, what is at issue is how a goodly number of Venice area retired investors lost millions of their savings after entrusting Holic with their money. Holic, who was the compliance officer with A.G. Edwards' Venice branch. Holic failed to mention the $1.2 million judgment against his office that went to one of his defrauded customers when we asked him. This judgment against Holic's operation was a direct result of Holic's lack of oversight and lack of courage to do the right thing.

Holic wants to be mayor, claiming he is sick and tired of municipal lawsuits. Holic states he has the business experience to avoid future legal problems.

Yeah, right. As Peter Garrett once wrote, "The rich get richer, the poor get the picture."

Holic, who is (natch) sponsored by the C.J. Fishman / Boone, Boone, Boone, Cheatham & Howe law firm PAC known as the CQG (Crooks for Quantity Growth), makes Harry Walia look great in comparison. Holic wants to kill the city's Comprehensive Plan, which would set the stage for more high-rises all over the island once the current real estate bust turns back to boom, and that's some sweet, sweet music to Dan and Jeff Boone's ears.

Even Walia acknowledges that that would be dumb.

So please, whatever you do, do not vote for John Holic. God knows, there's enough funny things that have happened at city hall over the years and there's still a few crooks and liars on the payroll, we don't need another Dean Calamaras, Fred Hammett, or Ed Martin who will help sweep it under the rug and deny that any of it happened.

Harry Walia
Despite the fact that last year, this web site came as close to raping Harry Walia as is legally possible, Walia offered up an olive branch and bought this site's editor a meatball sandwich at Valenti's Restaurant a week or so ago. The sandwich was good, the conversation was pleasant, and the moment was just as odd and tense as one might expect.

Walia has mellowed tremendously in one year, and it looks like he is sincerely trying to clean up his act. Hell, even Cynthia Crowe, the Walia supporter who threatened and then physically attacked this site's editor last year (and was awarded with a YouTube posting of her prodigious pugilistic stylings), actually apologized for being rude. Never saw that one coming.

Earlier this year, local nutloaf and fruitcake baker and professional staggerer Winston Wilmore cut a check for $1,000 or so to pay off Garry Moore. Moore, you may remember, was a landscaper who claimed that Walia stiffed him after Moore had done a voluminous amount of work in preparation of a campaign fundraiser that Walia was hosting last year. Walia tried to get Moore arrested, which didn't work out so well. Moore responded by filing a lawsuit. Wilmore's check essentially ended the conflict, although Wilmore wanted nobody to know that he was paying off Walia's debts. Sorry about that, Winston.

Walia's been settling several other lawsuits, only to get hit with yet another lawsuit three weeks ago, this over an unpaid bill to an engineering firm out of Charlotte County. The firm claims Walia owes thousands for services rendered. Walia counters that the engineering work came in past deadline and was useless to him as such.

Still, Walia has somehow managed to stay economically afloat, not an easy feat in this post-real estate crash economy.

Walia has one really great idea -- bringing cheap or free high-bandwidth next-generation internet WI-FI access to Venice residents, this through an already existing fiber-optic network that the city's IT department installed several years back as part of a city tech upgrade. It sounds crazy enough for us to bring back the moniker we gave Walia last year except for one thing: it's not so crazy. It's actually quite feasible, but we probably won't do it because Comcast and Verizon are making a bundle with their ripoff bundle rates on much slower and crappier internet access (just once, I'd like to watch a Netflix streaming movie without the picture getting locked up due to choked bandwidth).

So with that, in a two-way race between Holic and Walia, we would endorse Walia hands down.

It is not, however, a two-way race.

Marshall Happer
Happer is the former head of the American Tennis Association. Until recently, he was the David Stern of tennis, the guy who gave public smackdowns to John McEnroe.

Happer sees Holic's constituency, the Boones, as a special interest whose actions are not in keeping with what the residents of Venice want and need. Holic, in turn, has accused Happer of bending to the special interests of voters and residents, a curious turn of phrasing that Happer siezed on early in the campaign: "As an attorney, if my opposition was to refer to residents and citizens as a special interest, I'd love to make a counter-argument about who is really a 'special interest.' I'll take an argument like that to a jury any day of the week, that's a guaranteed winner."

As part of the city's Planning Commission, Happer has been instrumental in finishing off the Comprehensive Plan and helping to guide it into becoming a document that will prevent a replay of the last few years, specifically the runaway gerrymandered land development that brought Venice to its knees just months before the rest of the country's real estate market came crashing down.

Happer is no fan of City Attorney Bob Anderson, having noticed that through the past decade, we have had a continuous spate of bad legal positions that have cost the city millions in litigation costs as well as judgments. Forget about the so-called Sunshine Law lawsuit for a moment, one can go back to the fight with the FAA to support Dan Boone's sweetheart airport lease to the Venice Golf Association. That expensive and losing battle, which took place under Mayor Calamaras' reign, caused Venice to lose FAA grant funding for seven consecutive years, ending when Ed Martin became mayor. Total cost there: roughly $10 million or more in actual costs and potential grants and other funding, all of which could have been avoided if Anderson had done his job and authored a more protective lease. Instead, Anderson allowed Dan Boone to author an incredibly and outrageously favorable lease on behalf of Boone's client, the VGA, and then allowed the uncontested lease to become legally binding by not informing council of the down sides.

Then there's the ultra-expensive fight with Cardinal Contractors over the millions spent to run a reuse water line from North Venice to the VGA golf course ponds on the south end of the airport (you may have wondered how George Hunt and Dean Calamaras spent all the utility money and why we have no money to rebuild sewers -- there's your answer).

How much would you pay for all this? But wait, there's more... Add in a couple of million for attorneys fees over the fight with the EPA when we were caught illegally dumping sewage into storm drains plus other ecologic crimes that earned the city a felony conviction in Federal criminal court, plus the million a year we paid to OMI for four years after that, this to satisfy the federal criminal court. What did we get for that $1 million a year? Four guys with no equipment or materials to help run our sewage plant, one of whom was in charge and was so dumb he couldn't even spell the word 'budget,' let alone figure out how to create and utilize one (true story: OMI was once kicked out of New Orleans due to graft and bribery -- how bad you must be if you are too corrupt for New Orleans!!!).

Then you get to the Sunshine lawsuit, a drop in the bucket compared to Anderson's prior legal fiascos. We could and should have settled early, but Anderson assured council there would be a "favorable outcome." Since then, there was the bogus and expensive case brought against VPD Officer Michael Frassetti, which earned Anderson all kinds of billable hours when Frassetti fought back, plus the now equally bogus legal problems that the city has engaged in over their ridiculous and nearly-criminal treatment of VPD Officer Demitri Serianni (the city just filed its legal response last Friday, which basically told Serianni and his attorney to FOAD, see you in court), and it all boils down to this:

Anderson litigates everything to the max. It's very profitable for him to do so, as he is retained by the hour, not by in-house salary. There is no profit in using common sense and settling cases out of court, so there is no incentive to do so.

Anderson has sent out memos stating he anticipates a favorable conclusion in court, this whenever he is updating council on his legal doings, an admittedly rare thing. We've seen a number of these memos over the years, all with the same wording: "favorable outcome." That the city invariably loses despite Anderson going to the wall every time, there really always is a "favorable outcome" to Anderson: his billable hours would bring a wide smile to any lawyer's lips.

It is both fun and profitable to sue the City of Venice. Opposing attorneys invariably win, including their attorney fees, after lengthy cases, plus Bob Anderson gets a huge payday. The ultimate win/win scenario, all based on the premise that all of the citizens of Venice are too stupid and illiterate to have ever heard of Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

None of the current candidates have noticed the single common thread in ALL of the city's legal woes over the last decade.

None except one.

Marshall Happer keeps noticing that the common denominator in all of these cases is Bob Anderson and Anderson's legal strategy of 100% maximum litigation. Over the last decade plus, council, has consistently deferred to the city attorney, as though council works for him and not the other way around. In actuality, council is underneath Anderson in the chain of command -- council members come and go but Anderson is a constant who has survived and thrived through and because of all of the political civil wars.

Marshall Happer has promised to put an end to this. He has our vote and our fervent hope that he can pull it off.

In the race for Mayor, Venice Florida! dot com endorses Marshall Happer.