Justice Department Sets Up Sting for Springdale Company (Editorial)

The news came via the Dow Jones news service in New York on June 13: The U.S. Department of Justice set up a sting operation to get to the bottom of a Springdale company called Shimoda Atlantic Oncology Biosciences LLC.

And what it turned up has apparently been enough for the U.S. attorney’s office in Fort Smith to present to a grand jury.

While Shimoda Atlantic is not a company this publication has reported on, its executive suite (if it has one) is occupied by some characters that we and our faithful readers know very well: Jim Bolt, Mel Robinson and prolific lawyer John Dodge. The idea that they are in deep water does not exactly bring a tear to our eye.

These are the folks that ran a penny-stock operation called Golf Entertainment; they advertised it as the next big thing in Spanish-language broadcasting. After Jeffrey Wood, now publisher of Northwest Arkansas Business Journal, spent months investigating it, state Securities Commissioner Michael Johnson ordered Golf to stop trading its dubious shares in Arkansas.

Robinson (and later Bolt) accused the Business Journal and Arkansas Business of libel, claims they eventually abandoned but not before Bolt and Dodge got into a messy and expensive trademark dispute with Arkansas Business Publishing Group. (By the way, you guys still owe Arkansas Business Publishing Group $92,000.)

Golf also sued Johnson for doing his job, with similarly unsuccessful results.

So it came as no surprise that the Shimoda trio had responded to the FBI sting by, you guessed it, filing a lawsuit against the National Association of Securities Dealers for allowing the FBI to pretend to operate an NASD-registered securities firm.

There ought to be a word for people who use the legal system in order to disrupt the legal system.

And the thought that Jim Bolt, John Dodge and Mel Robinson are in the business of treating cancer was better left unthought.