A Distant Soil by Colleen Doran

Reposted with some massive additions from the comments section from people who worked with Ross Rojek. And since the article still gets hits months after originally posted, obviously there is still interest in this case.

Ross Rojek, formerly of Another Universe, formerly of Comics and Comix, formerly the guy who served four years of a nearly 7 year sentence for screwing a bunch of investors who were fooled into believing he had created some kind of cool facial recognition technology that was going to keep the world safe from Al Queda, was released on September 18, 2008 from Sacramento Community Corrections.

If you are one of the many self publishers who shipped Rojek product for which you were not paid (including me), don’t expect him to be making good on those debts any time soon, felonious scoundrel that he is.

Rojek apologized to those people hurt by his actions on his personal web page. But that’s down, now. I’ll bet it was heartfelt. At least, heartfelt to people who fall for sappy crap.

Here’s an early Comics Journal article on Rojek’s arrest.

Ross got into an interesting bit of trouble over dvd’s of My So Called Life.

Here’s a website which once had pages and pages of jokes excoriating Rojek, and now you can get them in handy downloadable format! 73 pages of Rojek memories!

Somewhere on the internet, Rojek’s ex went public and ballistic at the same time, and if I could find that, I’d post it, too.

Rojek isn’t mental, or misunderstood, he’s yet another creep with no moral compass.

Just my opinion.

But then, he ripped me off, so I’m entitled to not feel a lot of sympathy for the guy. And while it may seem as if we are piling on here, in my experience, people like this don’t go away. The public needs to be aware of scammers and how to spot them.

Additions from those who experienced the wonder that is Rojek below the fold:

Danguyf: I have such a long and painful history with Ross, and I was one of the lucky ones. It gave me a bit of a chill to find him mentioned here.

A little background: I am one of the principals behind MSCL.COM. We begged BMG, which owned the license for the show, for years to release a boxed set DVD of the entire season. They never listened. One division of BMG had released two of three VHS boxed sets before going bankrupt, then transfered the license to BMG Video. BMG Video released a single DVD with the first three episodes on it. It sold poorly because (a) the fans had gotten shafted on VHS and weren’t going to be fooled into buying it again if they couldn’t get it all and (b) BMG was only tracking sales through music stores, not video stores. We had a guy inside at BMG, Jason, who pushed them so hard to release a MSCL box set that they fired him. He got mad and decided to go it alone.

Many months later he found Ross Rojek. Ross thought it would sell, and made a deal with BMG. BMG couldn’t sell him the rights to create a DVD box set, but they could make a small run of them and sell it entirely to him. He agreed to buy the run of 2,500 units. I’m not sure if he ever paid them, but they delivered. They thought he was insane and that he’d never be able to sell that many.

Via a link on MSCL.COM, he sold out in 17 hours. (And this, in what is probably the only good thing to come out of the debacle, is why an MSCL box set suddenly showed up in Best Buy and Walmart. BMG took notice and made their own run of 100,000 units.)

The trouble started immediately. Ross was pre-authorizing the cards for the full amount, and many foreign orders were using debit cards, which removed the funds immediately instead. Then some people started getting double and triple billed. Then “somehow” the email addresses of everyone who ordered got sold to a company that sent pornography spam. It was a complete debacle. Jason had to create an online database to track all of the erroneous billings and provide help to people on refuting the charges and the like. At some point in there he created AnotherUniverseSucks.com as a central clearinghouse.

I was working for a small graphic design / marketing / branding / new media company at the time. Not knowing any better, I brought Ross in as a potential client. Someone needed to design the Limited Edition packaging for the set. Someone needed to fly to L.A. and interview the Bedford Falls crew (the creators: Ed Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz, and Winnie Holzman). I wanted to be that someone. Ross spun an exciting vision of this and future work, and my employers bought it.

Ross contracted with my company to fly me to L.A. and put me up in the Four Seasons twice. The first time he came out and met me. After I was done filming for the day, we went to a wine store where he tried to impress the young woman working there and bought several hundred dollars worth of wine. Then he took me out to dinner at one of those places where a dessert the size of a silver dollar costs $110. He insisted I order dessert. (Like I said, I was one of the lucky ones. My employers were not, as he never paid them.) He talked about how he wanted to get into the DVD business and release niche shows as boxed sets. This was back before anyone realized there was a market for canceled shows on DVD.

In the end, I did the design for the Limited Edition packaging ” a tin lunchbox ” as a freelance job. The payment was not forthcoming. After eight months of waiting for the check, Jason, bless him, told Ross that at least paying me would show that he wasn’t a crook. (Ha!) It worked, and I got paid. He even sent me the lunchbox prototype that he’d promised me. (Like I said, I was one of the lucky ones. Maybe the only one.)

Meanwhile, Ross is still ripping everyone off. Including Jason, who had done something like $80k in billable hours consulting for him. After months and months of delays, Ross started mailing out the DVD box set, but without the lunchbox, saying that he’d have to ship it seperately once they were manufactured. At one point, Another Universe declared bankruptcy and sold all of its assets to another company, of which Ross Rojek was the sole owner.

Jason was trying to help all of the customers all this time, and also tracking everything. When he heard that the SBI (and, later, the FBI, I assume) were investigating Ross he called them up and asked them if they knew what he knew: the fake identities, the shell companies, etc. It turns out they didn’t have half of what Jason had on Ross, so he turned it all over to them. Among other things that came out, when they put their heads together, was that Ross was keeping a wife on the East coast and a girlfriend on the West coast and neither knew about the other.

So eventually Ross got busted by the feds for the “facial recognition” scam, which defrauded, among others, some churches that were looking to make a quick return on their investment in order to fund missionary work. Ross’ employees hadn’t been paid for months by this point. And Jason gets a call from someone that the employees are basically looting the warehouse and that they’ve found something he might be interested in. Turns out there was a pallet of 2,500 MSCL lunchboxes just sitting there. We had all assumed by that point that they had never been manufactured.

And Jason, bless him, somehow managed to quickly find a forklift and a storage facility and took possession of them, thanks to some blind eyes. And then he spent the next two years tracking down every fan who had paid for one and mailing them their lunchbox. He still has a few, and a few people he hasn’t been able to find, and has been thinking about donating them to a charity auction.

And that’s my Ross Rojek story.

DanguyF: Yeah. Exciting times.

Ross really botched the Bonus Content DVD too. After I interviewed the Bedford Falls crew, he decided to have his own people master it in-house with a Mac or something. They optioned none of the extra materials, like an interview with the cast at the (then) Museum of Television and Radio, did no actual editing of the interview (it was meant to have title cards for the questions), and included my b-roll footage (that I had meant to use as a source of stills for the menu backgrounds) as a feature entitled, “A Tour of Bedford Falls”. Arg.

Oh, and they spelled my name wrong in the credits.

…He really wanted to get this werewolf show, that Fox had produced during its first year on the air, on DVD.

He also had grand plans to start release soap operas on DVD. Not “best of” collections, but entire seasons as boxed sets. I tried to do the math for him and explain that he probably couldn’t master them fast enough to ever catch up, but he wasn’t interested in my line of reasoning.

Colleen: I honestly did now know the extent of the Rojek saga until long after I was quits with the guy.

And had almost completely forgotten the Tower Records escapade.

I had done some business with him when I was self publishing, and had a vague memory that we had trouble getting paid. But I didn’t recall losing much money. If any. Too long ago to remember details.

Then Rojek came back under another incarnation claiming to be a GN buyer for Tower Records.

So, we filled an order for Tower Records and sent an invoice. I think we may have filled more than one order.

But after awhile, folks like me realized we were just not going to get paid.

To the best of my memory, it turns out we weren’t dealing with Tower Records, we were dealing with Rojek. Tower was buying from Rojek, not from us. So our invoices to Tower went unpaid, because our real client wasn’t Tower, it was Rojek, and he really wasn’t their buyer, he was just another distrubutor/dealer supplying product to them.

I don’t have financial records going that far back anymore, because there is no way to collect on the debt. Can’t have been huge, but it wasn’t appreciated. Maybe about $600? I can’t really remember. This would have been about ten years ago.

No comparison to what danguy went through, just to add my two cents.

Dan’o'MAN. That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing that.

This business never ceases to amaze. What a cast of characters.

I never got that closely involved with Rojek. He just set off my alarms, but he did used to call and email with Big Deal Plans on occasion. I’m afraid I just don’t have any records of those, either, so take my word for what it’s worth. Can’t prove anything at this late date.

Jason R: Thanks for the memories, Dan!

I had a good chuckle reading this. Only a dope can take a product that ended up selling about $10,000,000 in copies and totally botch it up.

I’m sure that his Face-It scam netted much less than he’d have legitimately made if he wasn’t such a scumbag.

To clarify a few things, I didn’t lose my job because of my pushing for the MSCL set. Instead, my division got caught up in some major downsizing (2 weeks after 9/11, although we would have been laid off on 9/11; it was delayed due to the tragedy). The guy I reported to took a contract buyout 3 months before I was shown the door. I had nothing offical to do for my final months at BMG, so I focused on the DVD set.

The way that I got the lunchboxes and bonus discs is actually pretty funny. I had been speaking with the FBI (while he wasn’t arrested because of the DVD scam, I take some solace in knowing that I played a bit role in his undoing). They knew about one of his shell companies called AEG (American Equity Group). In my first interview with them I said, “Don’t you mean American Entertainment Group?” (he bought this shell from the defunct Fandom.com). I sent them a stub from a check (a bounced check) bearing the American Entertainment Group name.

They connected the dots and it turns out that Ross was using the confusion of having two companies with the same initials to transfer funds from the Equity group to the Entertainment group.

What is so great about today is seeing how so many people have prospered and moved on since their encounters with Ross Rojek. In the meantime, look at his life.