Hadari Oshri allegedly linked to attempted $370M nonexistent PPE COVID-19 scheme

A Special Report: The Harrowing Impunity of White-Collar Crime (Part IV)

The attempted sales are also allegedly linked to conman Marc Lubaszka’s private jet company, Fly Private X, and convicted fraudster Arael Doolittle

AN IMPORTANT NOTE: On June 22, 2021, Hadari Oshri –Marc Lubaszka’s business partner– filed a frivolous civil harassment restraining order (CHRO) against me to stop the publication of my investigative series “A Special Report: The Harrowing Impunity of White-Collar crime,” and any subsequent installments or future media coverage. On August 3, 2021, I filed an anti-SLAPP motion to strike Oshri’s CHRO petition. In a hearing held on September 13, 2021, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Doreen Boxer granted my anti-SLAPP motion and denied Oshri’s civil harassment petition for failure to sustain the applicable burden of proof. Oshri will now have to pay my attorney’s fees for filing a frivolous case. She also declined to go on a recorded interview or provide statements via email. And what follows are the next installments of my months-long investigative series whose publication Oshri desperately attempted yet failed to stop.

Los Angeles, CA – As rapper Dylan Raw took on management roles at both Buy Gold Brightly and Fly Private X, and Marc Lubaszka’s imaginary assistant –Krista Collinsworth– stayed busy recruiting personnel for a private jet company with no jets, around 2020, the runaway broker welcomed a new entrepreneur to his team: Hadari Oshri, a 40-year-old from Israel with a wake of business casualties marching her path, including her many unpaid fashion fairies and ex-contractors from her signature yet defunct pet project: Xehar.

Initially, the Lubaszka-Oshri axis may have seemed like the perfect business marriage. With his reputation tarnished by his previous gold scam, Lubaszka would be the brains of the new partnership and remain in the background. Meanwhile, Oshri –with her mini-skirts, oversized shades and guffawed laugh– would be the front person in charge of closing face-to-face deals with investors and clients. Despite their demonstrated history of defunct businesses, they must have thought that, together, they could rise above their many failures to build an empire from scratch, create a new army of fictional business characters and put their audacity and talent to work. All towards their ultimate goal: To make hundreds of millions of dollars by trying to sell PPE and private jets –or “jests,” as Oshri baptized them in court documents.

Indeed, their partnership seemed to be as timely as convenient. As COVID-19 ravaged countries and left a trail of desolation and deaths worldwide, some last-minute entrepreneurs were already capitalizing on other people’s desperation and suffering by promising to supply and ship by a certain date medical equipment they didn’t possess. And Lubaszka and Oshri needed to act quickly if they didn’t want to miss out on this rare opportunity.

“She wants to get on the bandwagon of whatever she thinks is selling,” says curvy model Cheyenne Lee, who worked for Oshri’s Xehar fashion fairy company until it came crashing down in the Fall of 2018. “I can already hear her voice in my head like ‘Oh my God! We are gonna make so much money! The pandemic is the greatest thing that ever happened, we are about to be rich!”

Seemingly unconcerned that law enforcement agencies had stepped up their efforts to aggressively prosecute fraudulent COVID-19 schemes, Fly Private X was ready to dive bomb into their newest illicit endeavor in an attempt to hit the PPE jackpot. And what better place to ride the lucrative wave of multimillion-dollar PPE sales than a luxurious beachfront property located in East Malibu –from where Hadari Oshri and Lubaszka were running their joint schemes for months, as shown by company filings, court documents and even one text message that, surprisingly, Oshri volunteered to me via email.

Lubaszka’s and Oshri’s business ties to sentenced PPE fraudster Arael Doolittle 

Around June 30, 2020, Alaa Hattab, CEO of Canada-based Saniton Corporation, was awaiting a shipment of 10 million medical examination quality nitrile gloves from Fly Private X that never materialized.

The attempted $124.5M transaction was detailed in a PO (purchase order) that Hattab had sent to Lubaszka’s private jet company. Dissatisfied with the services rendered, Hattab referred to the Fly Private X team as “sketchy” and accused them of not having the PPE items they were trying to sell.

“The PO you (Aitana) are talking about was not completed. We were representing a client and sent a PO on the basis that they were buying from us. We were intermediaries in the transaction,” said Hattab in an email to me. “There was no product and the whole thing was a waste of time. Never proof of stock, always delays in getting us any sort of verification for products. It was a complete waste of time.”

Also on June 30, 2020, the now sentenced energy executive Arael Doolittle sent a PO to Fly Private X ordering 20 million boxes of nitrile gloves. But the jet company failed to deliver the PPE supplies, for which it was trying to collect $248M. Named in the PO was Bill Underwood, Doolittle’s attorney, who confirmed that the sale had gone South.

“I was involved in this transaction and it was not completed, which is the case with most of the PPE transactions that I have seen,” Underwood said in an email.

Although Doolittle’s attorney seemed to go easy on Oshri and Lubaszka for failing to deliver the promised PPE items, the POs that both his client and Hattab issued to Fly Private X contained misleading information: Both documents listed Oshri’s old Xehar warehouse in El Segundo (California) as the jet company’s offices. However, Oshri’s warehouse was vacated a few years ago and she no longer had ties to those offices. Neither did Lubaszka. It was, simply put, a smoke screen.

While no charges have been filed against Marc Lubaszka and Hadari Oshri for their dubious PPE operations, the POs obtained by this outlet also raise questions about the bigger role that the jet company and its representatives might have potentially played in a more elaborate PPE scheme across national and international borders.

In the meantime, in November 2020, Doolittle’s luck ran out. The businessman was charged with PPE fraud by the US Department of Justice for attempting to sell 50M nonexistent N95 masks to the Australian government. The fraudulent $317M transaction never materialized.

Doolittle pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges in 2021 and was ordered to serve a 54-month sentence in federal prison on February 16, 2022. As Judge Lynn N. Hughes handed down the sentence, he highlighted that despite “no actual financial loss in this case, there are still costs associated with cases like this that victims of frauds suffer.”

Judge Hughes’s opinion on PPE fraud is also echoed by other legal experts. According to a column published on the National Law Review site by Dr. Nick Oberheiden, a federal attorney who has defended clients in PPP loan fraud cases and COVID-19 investigations, PPE fraud can be construed as “promising to supply medical equipment or goods that the sellers do not have in order to capitalize on societal fear and make a profit at the expense of the emotional public sentiment.”

Hadari Oshri volunteered the POs linking both her and Fly Private X to a potential PPE scheme

When the news on Doolittle’s arrest broke in the Fall of 2020, it didn’t come as a surprise to Fergal Furlong, who already had first-hand knowledge that Oshri –with whom he had a contentious professional relationship at Xehar– had teamed up with Lubaszka in various ventures and that the 44-year-old gold broker had become her meal ticket.

In an exclusive interview at the beginning of 2021, Furlong explained that, around June 2020, Oshri was looking to hire a writer capable of placing promotional articles about Fly Private X in Forbes. But eventually, it also became clear to him that she played a key role in the jet company’s multimillion-dollar PPE operations. And it was Oshri who volunteered this information to Furlong.

Throughout 2020, Furlong demanded that Oshri start making payments as part of a $200K defamation and breach of contract settlement agreement that they had signed. To prove that she’d soon have the financial muscle to pay him, Oshri emailed him three POs totaling over $400M in attempted PPE sales that she claimed to be “working on” on behalf of Fly Private X. But the PPE sales were never completed, she failed to make any settlement payments and further tension set in between them.

Marc Lubaszka posed as an alleged attorney

Then, around June 2020, Furlong received an unexpected call from an alleged attorney who identified himself as “Marc,” wanted to clear the air and facilitate a payment plan between Oshri and Furlong. About two weeks later, Furlong and Marc met in a hotel in the oceanside city of Marina del Rey.

“Marc showed up dressed in a suit, wearing sandals and visibly drunk,” Furlong explained. “He looked like a complete mess.”

The self-proclaimed attorney stated that Oshri was broke, and instead of providing a payment plan, he offered Furlong multiple partnership opportunities that ranged from selling private jets to setting up gold websites and trading options. The meeting, however, ended abruptly when Furlong pulled out his phone and asked Marc about one of the POs that he’d received from Oshri showing Fly Private X’s involvement in attempted PPE sales.

“Marc just got up, then looked at me for a second, said he had to go and walked outside,” Furlong explains. “I had to pick up the breakfast tab.”

Minutes later, Furlong walked to the parking lot and headed to his car. “Marc was walking around, approached me and said: ‘You can’t be doing well if you’re driving that car.’”

This was the last time they saw each other. Yet blatantly unaware of how poorly the meeting had gone, Marc texted Furlong the same day to see how they could “work together” and asked for any correspondence between them to be delivered via email to his imaginary assistant, Krista Collinsworth, who responded to Furlong’s emails from a Fly Private X account, according to documents I had access to.

But by then, it was too late. Furlong had finally confirmed that the alleged attorney was small businessman Marc Lubaszka, and that he’d been working with Oshri for months.

“When I confronted him about his identity, Marc hung up on me, then called me a few minutes later and insisted that he was Marc Anderson,” Furlong explains.

By inventing a new persona, Lubaszka had just added another alias to the long list of pseudonyms and assumed personalities that he has used over the years to disguise his identity: From David to Anthony Cohen, Andrew Stevens, Scott Mason, British financier Jason Butler and deceased German-American philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

Indeed, in 2018, Marcuse must have risen from the dead to publish an ecstatic article on Medium to perpetuate the myth that Lubaszka had built a $100M real estate empire in Venezuela –a country the gold dealer survived in 2012 thanks to the humanitarian aid and free assistance provided by Venezuelan-Italian pastor Rubén Turtulici and his religious network. Needless to say, Marc Lubaszka’s piece, an obvious PR attempt to clear his name, was removed by Medium months ago.

Hadari Oshri incriminates herself in a multimillion-dollar PPE operation in legally recorded audio conversation 

Legally recorded phone conversations between Furlong and Oshri that I had access to before March 2021 show that the origin and authenticity of the POs was a highly contested topic between them in the summer of 2020.*

When Furlong pushed Oshri for honest answers, doubted the nature of the documents and raised questions about potential fraud, the Israeli entrepreneur stated that she had “made up” the POs in an attempt to get him off her back by showing that, as soon as she completed several multimillion-dollar transactions, she’d be able to pay him.

In the audio recordings, Oshri also claimed that she named Fly Private X on the POs because she “had to use a company name” and decided to list Lubaszka’s private jet company.

Oshri’s remarks above, however, contradict those made by Hattab and Doolittle’s attorney, who confirmed to me that the POs listing Fly private X’s attempted multimillion-dollar PPE transactions were, indeed, authentic.

Hadari Oshri’s PPE version in the recordings is not supported by her own PR campaign

More importantly, the version Oshri provided in the recordings is not supported by her own self-promotional claims in articles published in 2021 on several digital outlets, in which she portrayed herself as an expert on global supply chain and a successful PPE businesswoman.

*Read here a collection of Hadari Oshri’s online statements portraying herself as an expert in global supply chain and PPE. 

“When the pandemic hit, she (Hadari Oshri) saw an opportunity to sell PPE,” says a story published on The Inscriber Magazine, her Medium account and her website. The article was written by her ghost writer, Ryan Foland, and went on to say that Oshri “has pivoted to helping hospitals and other organizations source much-needed medical supplies and PPE from suppliers around the world.”

A second piece authored by the Israeli businesswoman –yet written by Foland– that appeared in 2021 on Disrupt Global, her Medium account and her website stated that:

“Over the last year, in a world impacted by a global pandemic, I have seen buyers circumventing their brokers. I have heard clearly that sellers are not being 100% loyal to their brokers… I have seen people present sellers that are not sellers. Examples of this and other problems are common in the many PPE deals during the pandemic that blew up and never closed.”

Unsurprisingly, nowhere in these articles does Oshri mention that Hattab and convicted PPE fraudster Doolittle never received the supplies that she claimed to possess and tried to sell for over $370 million.

But in her desperate effort to dictate and impose her own PPE narrative, Oshri may have made a fatal mistake. In a legally recorded phone conversation with Furlong, she delivered statements that could potentially trigger criminal liability for the Israeli entrepreneur: That she was aware that she had committed PPE “fraud” and that she knew it was “wrong.”

“In an attempt to hide Marc’s involvement, defend her business partner and avoid any potential investigation into him and his dealings, she told me that she made up the POs. But she didn’t. They were real,” Furlong explains.

Victims still waiting for justice

The POs that Oshri volunteered to Furlong amount to over $370M –an amount significantly higher than the $317M worth of nonexistent PPE that Doolittle fraudulently attempted to sell to a foreign government, for which he was criminally charged and recently ordered to serve a 54-month sentence in federal prison.

Why Lubaszka and Oshri remain untouched is a question that only law enforcement can answer, but one that lingers to this date and that, for years, their many victims have demanded to know.

“I just want to see some form of justice,” regrets Gern. “After so many years, you start losing all hope. How come these guys don’t get caught and prosecuted? What else needs to happen?”

Gern’s sentiment is also shared by other victims of Lubaszka. 78-year-old David Coonrod, who lost over $17,000 with the gold broker nearly ten years ago, is still hopelessly awaiting some form of closure.

“Your publication (Aitana) may be the only satisfaction any of us ever receive,” he regrets.

Don’t miss the next installments of this investigative series: Hadari Oshri Exposed: From questionable PPE operations through her company, Trade Safe Pro, to a failed fashion fairy empire that collapsed leaving behind a trail of unpaid models and workers.

*The audio recordings between Furlong and Oshri were made with Oshri’s consent and upon her request. 

**If you’d like to share your testimony or story, please contact the reporter at aitana_investigations@protonmail.com or connect with her on Facebook. All emails are checked for legitimacy, spam and viruses and deleted when suspicious malware is detected. 

***Lubaszka never responded to requests for comment.

Read here Part I, Part II and Part III of this series.

Story originally published on Feb. 22nd, 2022.

RELATED COVERAGE

Read Aitana Vargas’s exposé on Hadari Oshri nominated for journalism award.

Read “A Special Report: The Harrowing Impunity of White-Collar Crime (Part I): Marc Lubaszka, the ultimate white-collar conman on the run: From a Hollywood Hills mansion to Venezuela’s illegal gold mines and back.” 

Read “A Special Report: The Harrowing Impunity of White-Collar Crime (Part II): Marc Lubaszka’s nonexistent private jets failed to deliver PPE amid the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Read “A Special Report: The Harrowing Impunity of White-Collar Crime (Part III): Pursuing flash money, rapper Dylan Raw partners with conman Marc Lubaszka and becomes his patsy.”

Read 2019 court case against Hadari Oshri exposes her dodgy, aggressive legal maneuvers.

Read Hadari Oshri’s losses mount up as she fails again to silence her victims.

Read Hadari Oshri loses anti-SLAPP court battle against journalist Aitana Vargas.

Read The Legal Bullies Club – The SLAPPers: Featuring Hadari Oshri.

Read Hadari Oshri sued for copyright infringement in 2017.

Read La reportera Aitana Vargas pide 23.000 dólares en honorarios tras pulverizar la querella mordaza de Hadari Oshri.

Read Hadari Oshri deactivates LinkedIn account following PPE exposé.