Daniel S. Laikin is an American business executive. He was chief operating officer and chief executive officer of National Lampoon, Inc. from 2002 to 2008.
Laikin was co-chairman of Indiana-based real estate development company Biltmore Homes, Inc., until 2000. He also was a managing partner of technology investment firm Four Leaf Partners, LLC.[ citation needed ]
In 2001, Laikin's group moved to buy a majority stake in J2 Communications Inc., the owner of the moribund National Lampoon properties. [1] [2] From 2002 forward they built media businesses around the brand, becoming active in film, television, radio, and print, as well as building the largest Internet-based comedy network in the world.[ citation needed ]
Laikin was the largest shareholder of National Lampoon, Inc. In December 2008, the SEC alleged Laikin conspired to inflate the company's stock price. In 2010, a federal judge sentenced Laikin to 45 months in prison. [3] (Laikin was replaced by Tim Durham, who himself was arrested in 2011 for looting more than $200 million from National Lampoon, Inc.) [4] Laikin was released from prison in 2012.
National Lampoon was an American humor magazine that ran from 1970 to 1998. The magazine started out as a spinoff from The Harvard Lampoon.
Andrew Stuart Fastow is an American convicted felon and former financier who was the chief financial officer of Enron Corporation, an energy trading company based in Houston, Texas, until he was fired shortly before the company declared bankruptcy. Fastow was one of the key figures behind the complex web of off-balance-sheet special purpose entities used to conceal Enron's massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets. By unlawfully maintaining personal stakes in these ostensibly independent ghost-entities, he was able to defraud Enron out of tens of millions of dollars.
MCI, Inc. was a telecommunications company. For a time, it was the second-largest long-distance telephone company in the United States, after AT&T. WorldCom grew largely by acquiring other telecommunications companies, including MCI Communications in 1998, and filed for bankruptcy in 2002 after an accounting scandal, in which several executives, including CEO Bernard Ebbers, were convicted of a scheme to inflate the company's assets. In January 2006, the company, by then renamed MCI, was acquired by Verizon Communications and was later integrated into Verizon Business.
Bernard John Ebbers was a Canadian businessman and the co-founder and CEO of WorldCom. Under his management, WorldCom grew rapidly but collapsed in 2002 amid revelations of accounting irregularities, making it at the time one of the largest accounting scandals in the United States. Ebbers blamed his subordinates but was convicted of fraud and conspiracy. In December 2019, Ebbers was released from Federal Medical Center, Fort Worth, due to declining health, having served 13 years of his 25-year sentence, and he died just over a month later.
AT&T Wireless Services, Inc., formerly part of AT&T Corporation, was a wireless telephone carrier founded in 1987 in the United States, based in Redmond, Washington, and later traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol "AWE", as a separate entity from its former parent.
Vodafone Group Plc is a British multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates services in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania.
Enterasys Networks, Inc. was an American networking company. Enterasys products included networking equipment ranging from routers, switches, and IEEE 802.11 wireless access points and controllers. The company formed in March 2000 as a spin-off of Cabletron Systems.
Dynegy Inc. is an electric company based in Houston, Texas. It owns and operates a number of power stations in the U.S., all of which are natural gas-fueled or coal-fueled. Dynegy was acquired by Vistra Corp on April 9, 2018. The company is located at 601 Travis Street in Downtown Houston. The company was founded in 1984 as Natural Gas Clearinghouse. It was originally an energy brokerage, buying and selling natural gas supplies. It changed its name to NGC Corporation in 1995 after entering the electrical power generation business.
Townsquare Media, Inc. is an American radio network and media company based in Purchase, New York. The company started in radio and expanded into digital media toward the end of the 2000s, starting with the acquisition of the MOG Music Network. As of 2019, Townsquare was the third-largest AM–FM operator in the country, owning over 321 radio stations in 67 markets.
J.Crew Group, Inc., is an American multi-brand, multi-channel, specialty retailer. The company offers an assortment of women's, men's, and children's apparel and accessories, including swimwear, outerwear, lounge-wear, bags, sweaters, denim, dresses, suiting, jewelry, and shoes.
Martin Gerald "Matty" Simmons was an American film and television producer, newspaper reporter for the New York World-Telegram and Sun, and Executive Vice President of Diners Club, the first credit card company. Simmons gained his greatest fame while serving as the chief executive officer of Twenty First Century Communications.
The Williams Companies, Inc., is an American energy company based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its core business is natural gas processing and transportation, with additional petroleum and electricity generation assets. A Fortune 500 company, its common stock is a component of the S&P 500.
@Home Network was a high-speed cable Internet service provider from 1996 to 2002. It was founded by Milo Medin, cable companies Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), Comcast, and Cox Communications, and William Randolph Hearst III, who was their first CEO, as a joint venture to produce high-speed cable Internet service through two-way television cable infrastructure. At the company's peak it provided high speed Internet service for 4.1 million subscribers in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia, and the Benelux nations. The company operated as four joint ventures, three of which were international. In 1999, the company acquired Excite. In 2008, @Home was merged into Ziggo.
Move, Inc. is a real estate listing company based in Santa Clara, California. The company operates the Move Network of real estate websites, the largest of which is Realtor.com. Move has a longstanding partnership with the National Association of Realtors, the real estate industry's largest trade association, for operating Realtor.com.
Platinum Equity, LLC is an American private equity investment firm founded by Tom Gores in 1995, headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. The firm focuses on leveraged buyout investments of established companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
National Lampoon, Inc. is a company formed in 2002 in order to use the brand name "National Lampoon" in comedy and entertainment following the tradition of its magazine predecessor, The National Lampoon. In the words of its prospectus, the role of the company was to "develop, produce, provide creative services and distribute National Lampoon branded comedic content through a broad range of media platforms."
SafeNet, Inc. was an information security company based in Belcamp, Maryland, United States, which was acquired in August 2014 by the French security company Gemalto. Gemalto was, in turn, acquired by Thales Group in 2019. The former SafeNet's products include solutions for enterprise authentication, data encryption, and key management. SafeNet's software monetization products are sold under the Thales Sentinel brand.
J2 Communications was a media production and distribution company that operated from 1986 to 2002. The company is best known for its unsteady stewardship of National Lampoon magazine and all its related properties through the 1990s.
Timothy Shawn Durham Sr. is an American former lawyer and businessman convicted in 2012 of the largest corporate fraud ever investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Indiana. His investment firm Obsidian Enterprises invested in a number of companies, including wireless device company BrightPoint and comedy brand National Lampoon, Inc., where Durham was CEO. In 2012, Durham was sentenced to 50 years in prison in connection with a Ponzi scheme that defrauded 5,400 investors, many of them elderly, of approximately $216 million, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.