The Fall of NorVergence, Insider's Viewpoint

(This “inside” account of the demise of NorVergence, lack of cash to pay health benefits, meet payroll, and continue to operate was told to me by engineers, former sales personnel, friends of Robert J. Fine (may have been actually he under another name),including the involvement of Alex Wolf action as COO, appears fairly accurate. I am sure there are more "side stories," and "games" going on, and this is obviously not from “upper management,” which also had controls and obviously from the very beginning was not telling leasing companies “the whole truth, “making this disclaimer should not detract from what is related here.

It is a very good summation of an “middle management insider's viewpoint” about the fall of NorVergence. Editor)

From inside the company, my point of view is we probably caused our own fall.

We did owe Qwest a ton of money and had paid them for months....It takes a long time to get shutoff when you are a reseller. Qwest however did take an active interest in getting their money back and laid out what needed to be done and payments that needed to be made. As I heard it told, Qwest demanded we call them on a certain day and Alex Wolf (COO, the man who came up with the “seed” money to start NorVergence, and actually ran the day-to-day operation) convinced Peter Salzano (president, who recently filed personal bankruptcy) that we didn't have to jump when they said to because we were such big clients and they needed us like we did them. Well, Pete waited a day to call and oooops that's when they pulled the plug on all the customers. Not flipped a switch but yanked the wires which is why it took days to get everyone back on.

When the leasing companies saw that we could be shut off like that they about s**t themselves and (again as I heard it told) they had already switched their payments stream from paying us when the Matrix was mounted to when customers actually got service. A several month gap where there was be no real income because of the giant backlog of customers waiting for connection. This was supposedly cause by our S.E.V.P. of Business Operations who (I heard this from someone who spoke with a programmer) faked reports to Tom (so he wouldn't get ripped a new one for allowing installs to fall behind.)

(Tom Salzano, the brother of Peter, the real “president,” who due to his background could not be listed as president, but according to all reports, the buck stopped at his desk: he was the boss.)

At that point the leasing companies forced us to hire auditors to see if the company was viable. Again I heard (I wasn't privy to what the "important" people knew) the auditor said the company could be viable but the main leasing companies didn't care and forced us into the bankruptcy. Many of the smaller leasing companies argued to keep things going because we were a huge percentage of their portfolio but we owed so much to the larger ones they didn't care. We owed them money because we had to pay back any money they gave us if we didn't have a customer connected 60 days after we were paid, typically matrix mounting date when the D&A was signed.

In conclusion, we had a jackass faking reports and causing a backlog. (Thus confusing the Salzano's, if you can believe it, actually affecting what has been referred to as their “Ponizi type operation .) The backlog caused the leasing companies to change the way they paid us. We had no real income for several months because we had to use the money we did get for connecting customers to pay back the leasing companies for those that were not connected after 60 days based on the old payment method. Thus we didn't pay Qwest who we then p****d off and then shut us off. This freaked some of the larger leasing companies who decided to cut their loses.