Wall Street Crime and Punishment: Christian Meissenn And His Penny Stock Pump-And-Dump Games

Does crime pay?

Wall Street Crime and Punishment is a weekly series by Benzinga's Phil Hall chronicling the bankers, brokers and financial ne’er-do-wells whose ambition and greed take them in the wrong direction.

“Be careful who you let into your life,” declared a meme on Christian Meissenn’s Instagram page. “People will come and drain the s**t out of you…then leave and blame everything on you.”

Was Meissenn’s meme a cry of anguished warning against a world full of evil, or a self-tribute? After all, his claim to notoriety was ruining the lives of thousands of people who saw their money disappear into his warped fantasy world of promised penny stock glories.

The irony of that meme posting was that it happened at all. Meissen was able to play around on social media by making himself a victim of a greater injustice than the brutal scams he enacted on others.

The Strategy: On Nov. 8, 2016, Meissenn pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and one count of tax evasion in connection to his grand scheme. A plea of not guilty would have been ridiculous — not with the wealth of evidence stacked against him.

Starting in 2009, Meissenn and six accomplices (including two unscrupulous lawyers) orchestrated a seven-year pump-and-dump attack against vulnerable investors to buy shares in penny stock companies, which were mostly shell companies that fell under their control.

This gang unleashed an endless series of telephone calls and emails that bombarded the investors with grand promises of extraordinary returns on investments, while dishonest press releases went across the Internet with wild misrepresentations of the companies’ activities. The attorneys signed phony opinion letters offering false assurances to securities transfer agents and prospective investors that they reviewed corporate records and filings for the issuing companies and were satisfied with the adequacy of the companies’ public disclosures.

Meissenn and his gang gleefully reeled-in victims who naively sank money into the worthless stocks, bringing their prices to heights where they never belonged. When the prices reached inflated zeniths, the miscreants quickly cashed out and laughed over their gains while their investors were left with worthless stocks and no hope of recovering their losses. By the time the feds moved in during the summer of 2016, more than 12,000 investors collectively lost nearly $19 million.

Between 2011 and 2015, Meissenn accumulated roughly approximately $4.4 million from the scheme, but rather than deposit the money into his bank account he diverted most of his ill-gotten gains into an attorney’s trust account. The attorney was then directed to either wire funds or send checks to Meissenn — and none of this money was declared on his income taxes. When the Internal Revenue Service finally figured out what he pulled, Meissenn had tiptoed away from paying $1.5 million in federal income taxes.

A declaration of innocence in the face of this evidence was untenable, Meissenn realized, but cooperating with guilty pleas was not a happier solution. He faced up to 20 years behind bars for accepting guilt on the conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud charge and a maximum of five years for the tax evasion count.

But Meissenn had a curious talent for hitting a cosmic reset button that changed his situation when change was needed.

The American Adventure: Christian Meissenn only existed in America — in his native Bulgaria, he was Christian Levon Nigohossian. In 1987, the 15-year-old Nigohossian and his mother fled their impoverished country and a miserable domestic life under his abusive father for a better opportunity across the Atlantic.

He would later claim that his mother worked very long hours to support them, which distorted their relationship — he recalled their relationship was “more a friendship than a parental one.”

He may or may not have fallen into juvenile delinquency. An unpublished autobiographical novel called “Raised by Wolves” offers a colorful, Martin Scorsese-style coming-of-age tale with street gangs and petty crime, but given his shaky acquaintance with the truth it is hard to discern where boisterous tales replaces less-than-entertaining facts. Still, another meme on his Instagram page asked male viewers to “Be the Man You Needed as a Boy,” a hint that his youthful years went awry without paternal guidance.

Nigohossian found his way into the broker-dealer world in the mid-1990s and began to claim executive positions in sketchy companies. He was cited as treasurer and secretary of The Minneapolis Company and president of Speed of Thought Trading Corp. and GIT Securities. Most of these companies were expelled from their industry by FINRA, which also barred Nigohossian from working as a broker.

Somewhere along the way, Nigohossian jettisoned his surname for Meissenn. He would call himself Christian Mason and Christopher Mason in his penny stock scheme and he erased all traces of his Eastern European roots from his voice, speaking English with a non-regional American accent. He also found his way to Connecticut, where he registered a skein of intriguing business names with the state, including Bubble’s Lounge and Pip Stop Trading without actually setting up a business.

In September 2013, the Connecticut Department of Banking issued a cease-and-desist order after determining Meissenn and his business cronies sold unregistered securities for six companies in violation of state law. He was also accused of violating state law by “inducing investors who previously bought securities issued by one or more of the referenced entities to swap their shares at a premium for different securities, promising profitability but not disclosing critical information on the entity, the involvement of Meissenn in the entity’s operations and the impact of dilution.”

Despite these setbacks, Meissen carried on and in 2017 he claimed to hold the rights to the Atari Games trademark and was “rebuilding the brand in a brand new entity.” This claim came as a surprise to Atari Interactive, which filed a complaint with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Incredibly, this occurred while Meissenn was awaiting sentencing for his penny stock swindles.

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The Ultimate Death Sentence: Meissenn was free on bail after pleading guilty to his penny stock chicanery, but his original sentencing date of Jan. 31, 2017, wound up being postponed until Nov. 30, 2018, due to the aggressive work of his attorney, Cody N. Guarnieri, in turning Meissenn from a predator into a victim.

Guarnieri disclosed during the sentencing that Meissenn was a patient at Yale New Haven Hospital for two rare diseases: Erdheim-Chester disease, a slow-metastasizing blood cancer, and retroperitoneal fibrosis, an inflammatory disorder that creates abnormal fiber-like tissue in the abdomen. Guarnieri informed the court that Meissenn’s condition was terminal and the chemotherapy treatment he was receiving would only slow the diseases but not cure him.

Even worse, Guarnieri argued, was whether Meissenn could receive proper medical care while in prison — without the proper care, the attorney insisted, Meissenn would be assured that his prison term would be a death sentence.

Amazingly, Guarnieri was able to recruit prosecutors to his side, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Avi M. Perry informing the court that Meissenn only had between 1½ and 5 years to live.

Meissenn’s wife Kerry was brought forth to close the sale, recounting the tragedy in watching her husband’s rapidly deteriorating health, including decreased mobility, fraying memory, and shaking and vomiting from the chemotherapy treatments.

“He is definitely not the man I married,” she said, begging the court to allow her husband to serve his sentence under house arrest without prison time.

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey A. Meyer listened to the presentations in his New Haven court and spoke calmly about the case before him. He did not absolve Meissenn, branding him as a “brazen criminal” who became wealthy by “ripping people off.” Meyer also pointed to the health issues that burdened the “staggering number of victims” of Meissenn’s pump and dump scam.

And then, Meyer embraced the argument for leniency.

“The victims come to court and say they want justice done and don’t even care about the how,” Meyer said. “I look at your case, and I have to wonder whether some providential force — I’m sure this has crossed your mind many times — has essentially decided to send you something much worse than this court could ever do.

“I believe you should serve some prison time,” Meyer added, “but I don’t believe it should be so much you don’t see your children again.”

Meyer sentenced Meissenn to three months in prison followed by three years of supervised release under house arrest in the comfort of his Suffield, Connecticut, residence. He also ordered Meissenn to pay restitution of $5.3 million to the victims and $1.5 million to the IRS for unpaid taxes, although he acknowledged it was unlikely Meissenn would ever be able to fulfill that requirement.

Meissenn entered prison in January 2019 and was out in April 2019. In comparison, two of Meissenn’s collaborators each received prison terms of six years months while two others received seven-year sentences. The two attorneys involved in the scam each received three-year sentences.

Denouement: While Meissenn apologized for his actions during his sentencing, his life outside of his brief stretch behind bars was remarkably free from remorse.

Meissenn said he authored the autobiographical “Raised By Wolves” and offered graphic novel illustrative glimpses of his story on Instagram of its content. He also claimed a film version was in the works starring Danny Aiello, but there is no evidence that the Oscar-nominated actor was ever attached to this project. Aiello died in December 2019 and Meissenn ceased trumpeting a film production after he passed away.

Meissenn started a website called Humor the Tumor to find a light spot in chemotherapy treatment but abandoned it after a few dismal attempts at levity. He filled his Instagram page with scatological angry memes and photographs of himself with his hair growing to flowing lengths — in one video post, he blamed chemotherapy for hair loss and then credited it for allowing his tresses to return with a vengeance.

One Instagram image from September 2020 showed Meissenn’s hand on the steering wheel of his Lincoln Town Car. Meissenn was driving that vehicle on Aug. 16, 2021, when he was killed in a multiple-vehicle crash on I-95 in lower Connecticut. He was 49 years old at the time of his death and roughly 80 miles away from where he was supposed to have been under house arrest.

In the month before his court sentencing, Meissenn posted a photograph of himself on Instagram lying on a pillow featuring the message “People are f**king scumbags” while holding up a book titled “How to Be Your Own Best Friend.” Perhaps this photo encapsulated everything that was wrong with Meissenn — the pillow’s contemptuous message was mirrored in the venality of his stock swindles, and the book he displayed offered cruel evidence that he stupidly self-identified as his own best friend when, in reality, he was really his own worst enemy.

Photo: January 2020 photograph of Christian Meissenn, courtesy of his Instagram page.