axium
Axium Fallout Continues: Why Was Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model and Soft Core Porn Actress Amber Smith On The Payroll?
4:37AM Defamer Hollywood | The bombshell allegations against the partners of Axium, the Hollywood payroll company that recently declared emergency Chapter 7 bankruptcy, keep coming. According to court documents filed in the United States District Court (Central District of CA division), Goldentree Asset Management is taking partners John Visconti and Ron Garber to court for “diverting untold millions of dollars in cash and other assets to secret bank accounts” and “using Axium as their own personal piggy bank to finance their extravagant lifestyles.” Zing! Thanks to our base of well-connected tipsters, we got our hands on PDFs of the court filings. We read through the 35-page document and picked out the juiciest moments for your enjoyment. We’re talking multiple identities, cash payments to former supermodels for “consulting” and all sorts of other general shadiness not seen since the halcyon days of Enron. Trust us, it’s GOLD. More »
Axium Fallout: The Wagging Finger Of Shame Points Mostly Towards John Visconti
7:50AM Defamer Hollywood | In the six days since news broke that Axium, payroll company to a number of Hollywood studios, ceased operations after declaring emergency Chapter 7 bankruptcy, we have received countless tips about the company’s spotty business practices over the last six months or so. Many of the tips revolved around John Visconti, one of the firm’s principal owners and a former chair and CEO of the company. He sounds like a real peach! His CV is full of bizarre fun facts allegations like this: there’s a possibility that Visconti isn’t his real last name (still digging on that one) and that he used to have bullet proof glass in his office on Wilshire. More goodies, including a handy cheat sheet of the events that led to the company’s demise and loss of up to $500 million in liabilities, after the jump! This handy summary of what went down in the last few months of Axium’s history comes from a tipster. Things are worse than they seem and I bet this story is going to get uglier and uglier. Nobody knows any of this for sure. But here are some rumors that had been floating around the company. 1. Axium ‘forgot’ to pay some pretty high tax bills recently. 2. The 2 formally in charge, John Visconte, and Ron Garber, used to work in Wilshire and had bullet proof glass in their office. 3. Those same two were let go from their positions about a month ago. No warning. No nothing. 4. Two months ago the company laid off all their contractors and many employees. I would guess the total number of laid off: 60 5. The company was spread VERY thin. We offered things like check-cashing services to personal loans to employees to a real estate division (that nobody really knew anything about). 6. Bottom line – the company was fucked. Most people believed there were shady things going on. But i guess what we didn’t know – didn’t hurt us. Um, wow. Being the intrepid gumshoes that we are, we did some additional digging and found out that two of Visconti’s other companies, Unity America Fund and Park Avenue Productions, were found to part of a 2005 campaign contributions reprimand that Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently received. We’ll have more on this story as the week progresses. More »
More Details Emerge From Those Axed By Axium
7:07AM Defamer Hollywood | Is it 2009 yet? The hyperbolic rate in which bad news is proliferating through Tinseltown in the first nine days of 2008 is officially starting to freak everyone the fuck out. If it’s not the Golden Globes cancellation putting a $100MM dent in local revenue, it’s Warner Bros. getting ready to issue rosé slips to scads of employees. And then there’s the sad story of Axium, the payroll company that shut its doors yesterday, leaving hundreds out of work and thousands without paychecks (tip: even if you got a paycheck from Axium, DON’T CASH IT — chances are it will bounce higher than a superball). Tips have been flying into Defamer’s virtual P.O. Box fast and furious; follow along for some of the lowlights, including a internal memo issued by Axium subsidiary Ensemble Chimes Global and a firsthand account of the goings-on in Burbank yesterday. So there’s that! And there’s also this: Hi fellow CoProers – I just wanted to share an account of what I experienced today when I visited Axium’s office in Burbank. Having no idea of what was going on, I stopped by there early this afternoon to personally drop off the last remaining timecards from a job I just wrapped yesterday. I live in the valley so I thought I’d save on a messenger and deliver them myself. When I got there, there was no one at the front desk and piles of unopened mail cluttered the space (including tons of envelopes from the EDD). After waiting a few minutes, a woman walked out and told me that if I was dropping off payroll I would need to take it somewhere else because the company went out of business. I thought she was joking. A week prior, we had turned in all the crew payroll for a commercial we had shot a few days before Christmas. We had even spoken to our paymaster yesterday morning who assured us that the checks would be going out at the end of the day. Guess he didn’t know he was about to lose his job. More and more people starting walking out with their belongings and told me that they had received an email from the CFO yesterday afternoon telling them that they no longer worked there because the company had gone out of business. I was also told that I would not be able to cash the payroll check I had just received in the mail yesterday because their accounts were frozen and the check would be bounced back (along with a bank fee for attempting to cash a bad check). There were a few nice people who tried to gather up all the original timecards from my job so that I could process them at another company, but I was not able to get the ones in which a check had already been issued. Oh yeah, I was told that they were trashing all the timecards! Luckily I was able to get the majority of mine back. The moral of the story is… if you have recently received a check from Axium/Avalon DO NOT CASH IT or it will be bounced and you will be charged a fee. If you have already cashed a check, call your bank and see if it has cleared. If it has not – it won’t, and the funds will be withdrawn from your account soon and they will charge you a fee. If you have recently submitted timecards to Axium/Avalon and your paymaster didn’t think to take the originals home with him when he left, they are most likely garbage. I think we can expect this situation to screw up our Unemployment and our 2007 tax filing since the last of the employees were leaving today. This sucks! More »
