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Betting that Nolle himself, as a one-horse basement corporation, had had his own regulatory run-ins, I called the New Jersey Department of the Treasury and ordered status reports on all of Nolle's current and previous corporations. This search turned up two hits. The first was that one of Nolle's earlier business entities, a thing called "Telemetrix", had been voided by state proclamation in June, 1993 for failure to file two consecutive corporate tax returns. The second was that the current business, CimiCorp, had not filed an annual report since May, 1999. From my previous experience working in a private detective agency, I knew that corporations legally had to file an annual report every year. I spoke to a Phillip Ranfrone at the New Jersey Treasury Dept. to ask about when the dissolution process for CimiCorp might be started.

"He hasn't filed since when?" Ranfrone asked.

"May, 1999," I said.

"Well," he said. "We don't start dissolving until they miss two consecutive years. So he's still got some time. But if he's got a history... well, we'll see how it turns out."

Armed with this information, I first sent a cheery letter to Tom and Linda informing them of my discovery:

Dear Tom, etc.

Matt Taibbi from the eXile here. Remember me? I sent you that letter last week from Russia...

Just had a quick question for you. I happened to called the New Jersey Secretary of the Treasury's office, division of commercial filing. Had a really nice chat with a lady named Ann there -- we talked for a good half an hour. Anyway, they're still wondering why Telemetrix never filed its last two tax returns. I asked her if Tom's status as the incorporator of a voided corporation would prevent him from becoming a listed officer of another corporation. She said -- get this -- she didn't know!

So I ask her if I should call the IRS to ask them. She said, 'That's a good idea. They'd know." Then I mentioned CimiCorp to her, and she said, "Oh, sure, definitely call the IRS. They'd probably want to know if he's running another company."

I also asked Ann if she thought that having a voided corporation was such a bad thing that it would affect a businessman's reputation. "For instance," I said. "Say the incorporator of the voided corporation made a lot of his revenue from speaking engagements, and generated much of the p.r. for his new company by giving interviews to newspapers and magazines. If those venues that were hiring him to speak and those journalists were sent addended copies of Telemetrix's history, would this be the kind of thing that would affect the way those people would regard him in the future?"

She took a long time to answer that one. "I don't know," she said. "Probably a lot of people wouldn't know what they were looking at. But they might be moved to ask questions."

Anyway, just wanted to know how business is doing. Incidentally, like the photos you provide on your site. Thanks to your forethought in providing varied pixel sizes, we were able to pick one large enough to take up our entire print cover in fair resolution.

See ya in the funny papers.

Sincerely,

Matt Taibbi

editor in chief

the eXile

Again, no answer from Nolle. Undeterred, I began sending letters to Nolle's colleagues, whom he was kind enough to list on his site. Here's a selection from his bio:

"A prolific writer, Tom is a columnist for Business Communications Review (where his column focuses on issues at the service demarcation point), Network Magazine ('Wide Angle'), and Network World ('Reality Check'), and also contributes articles to these and other publications. He is also the author of our newsletter, Netwatcher...Tom is a member of the IEEE and ACM. He's one of less than 4,000 who have been members of the IEEE Communications Society for 20 years or more."

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