Dallas Morning News - STORY

Dallas Morning News - STORY

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The mystery of Southridge Enterprises and its ‘ghost’ executives who were supposedly murdered in Mexico

By GARY JACOBSON Staff Writers
Published: 14 February 2013 09:09 PM

Stock scam sleuth Janice Shell, once hailed as the “unofficial queen” of cybervigilantes by Fortune magazine, says she has never seen anything like it.

“It’s very metaphysical,” she said of Southridge Enterprises Inc. and recent reports that two of the allegedly Dallas-based mining company’s executives were murdered in Mexico. “How can you kill people who never existed?”

One U.S. law enforcement official familiar with the case agreed with Shell. “No bodies have been found,” the official said. “I don’t think these men ever existed. They’re ghosts.”

Shell said a joke photo making the rounds of her online community purports to show one of the “departed” Southridge executives taking a shower with the fabricated girlfriend of Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o. There’s nobody there.

In the world of penny stocks, where stretch limo dreams intersect with bus fare means, there are often far more questions than answers.

That’s definitely true in this case.

No answers

Are Southridge and the person, or persons, ultimately behind it somehow connected to Mexican drug cartels or the Russian mafia, as claimed on Internet chat boards?

Is it just a big pump-and-dump stock scheme designed to make quick
profits for a few?

Are the company’s gold and silver mining concessions in Mexico real,
and if they are, are they worth anything?

Who’s really running the show — the person behind the wizard’s curtain, if there is a curtain?

Is this all an elaborate artifice, a la Manti?

All good questions. No good answers.

What we do know:

Southridge doesn’t have a headquarters office in Dallas, as it claims. It doesn’t have a Mexico office, either. The “fifth floor” of the suburban Guadalajara building where it is supposed to be doesn’t exist, a reporter from The Dallas Morning News discovered when he went there Thursday. A person who worked in the building said he had never heard of the company.

The Mexican newspaper reporter who wrote the original “murder” story now admits doubts about its veracity.

Thursday, the LinkedIn profile page for one of the supposedly slain executives carried the same mug shot as the profile for a person identified as the owner-operator of a Wisconsin trucking company. Each had previously viewed the other’s profile, according to LinkedIn’s tracking.

The Securities and Exchange Commission suspended trading in Southridge stock in December.

The company didn’t answer phone calls to its listed number Tuesday and Wednesday. And apparently, according to Shell and another cybersleuth, it has begun auto-forwarding calls to a shareholder who once complained to Southridge. The party didn’t return a call from The
News.

Southridge stock is very cheap. Thursday, in what the industry calls gray-market — post-SEC suspension — trading, a penny would fetch about 7 shares, according to Google Finance.

Shell said she has been monitoring Southridge-related companies for awhile and quickly cautioned that the truth may never be known. “You can’t assume that any of this actually makes any sense,” she said.

It sure didn’t make sense earlier this week to Linda Coker, the tenant relations manager at 3625 N. Hall St., the Oak Lawn office building with the supposed headquarters — Suite 900 — of Southridge and its mining subsidiary, Southridge Minerals.

“Three federal agents were here this morning asking the same questions you are,” she told a reporter.

She said Southridge doesn’t lease space in the building. Later, after searching records, she indicated that at one time, years ago, Southridge might have been serviced by a temporary or virtual office
operation that had space in the building.

And those federal agents?

“Homeland Security, I think, but I’m not sure,” Coker said.

Contacted for comment Wednesday, a spokeswoman at the Department of Homeland Security instead asked The News for details about Southridge and the supposed Mexican murder story. She said the agency would investigate and respond but cautioned that it would take time. The
department has not yet responded.

David Peavler, associate regional director for enforcement for the SEC’s Fort Worth office, said Thursday that he could not confirm or deny whether his agency was investigating Southridge.
More broadly, he said:

“The agency as a whole has taken a number of steps toward trying to cut off the fraud that has occurred in the microcap market.” On a single day last year, he said, the SEC suspended trading in nearly 400 penny stocks for violations of various rules, such as missing deadlines for financial filings.

Southridge Enterprises, according to its filings, was formed in Nevada in 2004 and originally was based in Edmonton, Alberta. It began using the Hall Street address for its SEC filings in 2006, a review of the records show. The company has missed many filing deadlines and is definitely amicrocap. According to Google Finance, it has nearly 1 billion shares outstanding and a market capitalization of about $1.5 million.

Of course, Shell cautions, be skeptical about everything, especially numbers. In its 2012 annual report, for example, Southridge claims $3.1 million in revenue, which, since it’s a mining company, presumes some mineral production. Yet no production costs are listed.

“You can’t have production without production costs,” Shell said.

On Dec. 28, the SEC suspended trading in Southridge stock on OTC Link because of questions, in part, regarding the company’s claims of a joint partnership in Mexico with Kinross Gold Corp. of Canada. Kinross said there was no such deal.

In January, Southridge issued a press release saying “the joint partnership is no longer valid.”

Then, last week, things got very interesting.

‘A country of rumors’

On Saturday, a newspaper in Guadalajara published a story about the killings and even carried a photograph showing bodies, identified as Southridge’s CEO and CFO, Michael Davies and Derald Johnston.
The reporter, Antonio Neri Johnston, said he had received a call last Friday from a person identifying himself with the municipal police in Hostotipaquillo, in Jalisco state.

The alleged cop reminded Johnston (no relation to the alleged victim) that they had met days earlier when the reporter was covering the killing of a police chief. This time, the alleged cop said, he had an
exclusive: the bodies of two Americans found floating in a river between the municipalities of Ixtlan del Rio, in the state of Nayarit, and Hostotipaquillo. Near them were briefcases with information that
identified the men and traced their company to Dallas.

Since then, Mexican authorities in both the states of Nayarit and Jalisco have denied any knowledge of recovering the bodies of any Americans. One Mexican official in the state of Nayarit said, “There
have been bodies, but no Americans. If they were Americans, everyone would know.”

Johnston, the reporter, said, “In retrospect, I should have verified the information more because Mexico is still a great place to disappear, especially in that part where killings are very common. Impunity is so high that nothing is ever solved, or clarified. We live in a country of rumors.”

‘We were fed a story’

Johnston said his newspaper hasn’t printed a correction or clarification because no one has stepped forward to “tell us we were wrong.”

“We were fed a story, and many of us ran with it,” he said. The photographs “were archived photos of past dead bodies recovered.”

The story appeared in at least six publications in Guadalajara, and on radio. On Monday, a company calling itself Minera San Jorge SA said it had acquired Southridge’s Cinco Minas mine. But the phone number attached to the press release doesn’t work. The company has no address.

“Whoever did this knew what they were doing,” Johnston said. “They called us, got the story in public. They needed these people dead, part of a fairy tale.”

Shell said that, over the years, she has never found anyone who has talked in person to Davies or Johnston. She said the biographical information for them, since deleted from the corporate website, was cribbed and compiled from other online bios.

In its own investigation, The News found many, many “Michael Davieses”
who live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, but none linked to Southridge. The News wasn’t able to find a “Derald Johnston” who lived in Texas.

Somewhere, maybe, Davies and Johnston do exist.

But not at Southridge’s fake headquarters in Dallas. And people do come looking, a security guard there said.

Any of them angry?

“Now that you mention it, yes,” he said.

Staff writers Marina Trahan and Darlean Spangenberger contributed to
this report.