Hope I didn't miss it being posted earlier, but here is an article from the Tonawanda News explaining how he only ever got into the fake ID business to bail himself out of 'accidentally' getting involved in the illegal distribution of DVDs
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PROFILE: On the road to success in business came trials
Hydroponics business in Wheatfield has taken off
By Jill Terreri/
[email protected]
Niagara Gazette 4/6/07
Entrepreneur Christopher Casacci could be considered a Niagara County success story.
Casacci, who is just 25, started a hydroponic equipment business four years ago and now employs 15 people.
He does over $1.8 million in Internet sales and grosses $72,000 in retail sales from his company’s headquarters where self-contained units Casacci developed for growing plants without soil or sunlight are built.
The success didn’t come without some significant growing pains, however, inflicted by naiveté and “stupidity”, he says.
There have been blazing headlines out of the attorney general’s office for one of Casacci’s misdeeds and a lawsuit for hundreds of millions of dollars for another.
Now, Casacci seems hard at work at Sunlight Solutions, headquartered just over the Wheatfield border next to the Niagara Falls Airport.
He’s also married and has two children and lives in the town of Clarence.
There’s no doubt Casacci is bright; he came up with a way to grow plants all year indoors by using plastic cabinets, small and large, and the idea has taken off.
Casacci started the business four years ago with manufacturing operations in North Tonawanda and a storefront in the outlet mall on Military Road before consolidating the operations in Rainbow Industrial Suites.
He receives orders from around the world, but most come from customers in the United States.
His customers buy the equipment to produce kosher food or organic food or hops for homemade beer.
If they show an interest in growing illegal plants, such as marijuana, he says he shows them the door.
But while Casacci knows how to make money, he hasn’t always done it the right way.
The troubles began in 2002 when Casacci was running a DVD-replication business where many of his clients wanted personal DVDs, such as wedding footage, duplicated.
But he was sued for $648 million for duplicating a DVD to which someone else had the distribution rights.
The DVD was of a Japanese cartoon in the Dragon Ball Z series, and the rights were owned by Funimation Entertainment.
“I didn’t realize it was a big deal,” he said.
Funimation legally pursued the unlicensed distributor of the DVD, who had hired Casacci to reproduce them so they could be sold on the Internet. Funimation then went after Casacci.
“I paid a sizable settlement,” he said, adding he believed that because he had signed a waiver provided by his customer that (incorrectly) stated no one else owned the rights he would be legally free and clear.
“It was terrible,” he said. “They took everything I had.”
To get him through the financial strain of the lawsuit and his subsequent bankruptcy, Casacci set up a fake identification business on the Internet that got him one and a half years probation after then-State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer busted him and two associates.
“It was just stupid,” he said. “I was young and stupid and desperate for money.”
In 2004, he pleaded guilty to forgery charges.
It wasn’t an interest in hydroponics that got him into his current business.
After the bankruptcy he was a salesman for Brinks, the security company, a job he says he took so he could pay the bills. On a sales call to a hydroponic store near the Buffalo airport, he learned about the lack of growing equipment for people who didn’t want to convert a whole room of their house for the activity, so he developed cabinets that can be stored in a garage or a closet.
While he was at Canisius College, Casacci majored in biology and business but he still had to study hydroponics for six months so he could know enough to field calls from customers with technical support issues.
His next venture would capitalize on America’s gastronomic revolution and his own knowledge of hydroponics.
He’s trying to devise a way to grow trees that make the fungus commonly known as truffles — that delicacy found shaved onto risotto and inside ravioli in high-end restaurants — and sell the trees to American farmers.
Now truffles sell for over $2,000 per pound and are dug up by pigs in Europe, though American cultivation is gaining ground, however slowly.
The process takes about 10 years to get a tree to grow so its roots will produce the right conditions so fungus can grow upon them.
“They’re so incredibly difficult to grow,” he said.
From here:
http://www.tonawanda-news.com/local/gnnlocalnews_story_096203339.html
