Let's Check Back In With Dani Zoldan, Shall We?

Last time we heard from Dani Zoldan, he had just relocated Stand Up New York from the Upper West Side to Times Square after resolving a strike from his employees. He was also facing two lawsuits from a small business lender, LCF Group, with whom he signed to financing arrangements that he allegedly failed to repay. (For simplicity’s sake I will refer to these agreements as “loans,” although they are technically "purchase of future receivables" agreements.) As I explained in March, these were neither the first loans he took from LCF Group nor the first lawsuits LCF Group filed against him: the very same company sued him last year for two other loans he failed to repay. All told, he's allegedly stiffed it out of more than $100,000 in the last few years. 

Two New Lawsuits Against Stand Up NY

Plus, Dani Zoldan’s continuing eviction saga.

HumorismSeth Simons

A serial entrepreneur who brings a distinctly entrepreneurial spirit (derogatory) to his work as a comedy club owner, Zoldan has spent the last two months spearheading an initiative called “Comics for Kamala.” At the behest of Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA), he worked with film producer Jamie Petricof (D-The Accountant) to put together a star-studded Zoom call that reportedly raised almost $600,000 for the Harris campaign, at least according to its organizers. Zoldan is now capitalizing on the event’s success by taking Comics for Kamala on the road, with dates in Idaho, Connecticut, Michigan, Georgia, Florida, and Washington, DC.

As event descriptions for stress, these are not official fundraisers; while donations will be collected at the shows, their actual proceeds will “cover event costs and to support the production of comedy shows and other events.” In other words, they are comedy shows with a hat passed around at the end. In other other words, they are yet another PR gimmick for Zoldan and Stand Up NY, just like his “Stand Up for Israel” tour or the popups he produced during the early pandemic, at times in flagrant violation of health guidelines. Last week the “Comics for Kamala” Instagram page posted a listing for a social media manager position—unpaid, of course.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about Zoldan. Rather, I’d like to share something interesting that’s come up in the ongoing LCF Group lawsuits. First, a bit of context: in each of the four financing agreements he signed with the firm, he included a long list of guarantors, all other entities loosely affiliated with Stand Up NY or his past work as a telecom entrepreneur: Titan International Wholesale, Dark Horse Ventures, Podcast Row, SUNY Originals, Voila Telecom, Skitish Media, Laughpass, and SUNY ED. Many of these companies, like Podcast Row and Laughpass, are familiar to us from past reporting. In each case, he signed as these companies’ owner.

Here’s where things get interesting. In June, one of those guarantors, Titan International Wholesale, filed an affidavit with the court. In that affidavit, Titan’s co-owner Cristian Costache states that Zoldan does not have any ownership in he company: he used to, but he transferred his 10% interest to his partners—Costache and a man named Rasvan Constantin—in 2015.  He hasn’t had any interest in the company since March 2016, as both a shareholder agreement filed with the court and state business filings attest. Costache argues that Zoldan therefore had no right to make Titan a co-signer in the loan, and that it was improper for LCF Group to freeze Titan’s checking accounts and have law enforcement collect more than $20,000 from them. 

I will pause here because you may be wondering, “What on earth is ‘Titan International Wholesale’? Its website describes it as a ‘privately held telecommunications company’ that has ‘terminated billions of wholesale minutes and SMS messages on behalf of our carrier interconnects,’ but I have absolutely no idea what any of those words signify, and I also can’t help but notice that the website lists Titan's address as Stand Up NY’s old Upper West Side location, and the listed contact number just goes to a series of voice mailboxes. What is this?’”

How To Get Rich In Comedy, Part II

Dani Zoldan’s “MoviePass for comedy clubs” service received $153,266 in federal performing arts relief. Venues participating in the program say nobody’s ever used it.

HumorismSeth Simons

The answer is I don’t fully understand either, but an expert in the telecom world described it—or rather, what it purports to do—as a very niche telephony logistics service, basically the telecom equivalent of various auxiliary companies involved in global shipping: it takes a lot of players to get the goods from Point A to Point B—in this case, phone calls—not just the ships themselves. While Titan is legally incorporated in New York, with Costache and Constantin as its owners, they are both based in Europe; the company itself appears to operate out of Bucharest, Romania. 

As LCF Group’s counsel acknowledged in a May 20 email to Titan’s counsel, filed with the court, what Titan described in its affidavit may be identity theft: “As discussed, we were hoping to encourage Mr. Zoldan to sort this out. I’m advised that he hasn’t really engaged meaningfully to this point so we would encourage your client to file a police report concerning this alleged ID theft. Once that is provided, we would be able to vacate [the judgment] as to them.”

“Understood,” Titan’s counsel responded. “I will get you the police reports.”

Two days later, Zoldan informed a manager at LCF Group that no reports would be forthcoming: “Titan doesn’t want to file a police report,” he wrote in an email filed with the court. “They are copied here. What are the other options to remove Titan and the dormant entities from the stipulation?”

Stand Up NY Ordered to Pay $214,000 on Defaulted Loan

How To Get Rich in Comedy, Part III.

HumorismSeth Simons

And that’s where things stand today, with no movement in the proceedings since a June filing by LCF Group, arguing against Titan’s effort to vacate the judgment. Until the case unfolds further, I will leave you with one more thing: Zoldan, who has a history of taking out loans he doesn’t repay, and who also appears to have made a great deal of money from some of the companies he’s listed as guarantor on these loans, has created three new New York LLCs this year: SUNY Times Sq, SUNY Presents 236, and Brand Up Comedy. That last one, Brand Up Comedy, describes itself as a sort of sponsored content agency that connects comedians with brands and helps create funny content. It is also one of the producers of the Comics for Kamala tour. 

Catching Up With New York Comedy’s Resident Nazi Sympathizer

A few days ago the comedian Dave Smith unleashed a torrent of Nazi propaganda on his podcast Part of the Problem, during a rambling defense of the crank Holocaust revisionist Darryl Cooper, who last week appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and unleashed his own barrage of Hitler apologia, including the argument that Churchill was ultimately responsible for the Holocaust. I fear these comments just won’t hit the same if I summarize them, so I’m gonna do one of my famous long block quotes and you can deal with it as you please:

So they imposed the Treaty of Versailles on Germany, which was designed to humiliate them internationally. And the treaty was just like, it was unbelievable. They had to take full responsibility for everything in the war. Interestingly, Wilson insisted that the German military and their right wingers weren't allowed to even sign the treaty, it was like they don't even get a seat at the table—screw them. So they made, essentially, the German Democrats have to sign the Treaty of Versailles, who by the way were disproportionately Jewish, and that comes into being an interesting factor in this whole thing. It was total bullshit. Like, the military was done, the German military was not fighting anymore, they had lost the war.

[…] There was also what you could call in some ways the precursor to wokeism or something like that. I don't know exactly how you wanna describe it. But the kind of cultural degeneracy of the Weimar Republic, including a lot of very weird stuff about like—like I think kind of the origin of a lot of the modern trans ideology stuff actually started in the Weimar Republic. Which is kind of interesting and strange. But it's just kind of this cultural decadence being promoted, international humiliation, then you throw in hyperinflation and then you had the rise of the Nazis. 

And of course Adolf Hitler was able to say, “Well look, we have this horrific communist threat over here to the east of us, and we have the bankers who have totally destroyed our economy. And then you got these people, the Germans themselves”—or not really German in his view—“who betrayed us and who signed onto the Weimar Republic”—excuse me, signed onto the Treaty of Versailles. And so by the way, what did all three of those groups have in common? Well, there were disproportionately a lot of Jews involved in them. 

[…] The point that Pat Buchanan really harps on in his book [Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War], and this is essentially his argument, and I think this is right. I'm persuaded by his argument here. His argument is basically that the Holocaust—well, okay, let me actually start it from a little before that. So his argument is that war guarantees are reckless. War guarantees put a burden on societies where they make these promises that then has a tremendous moral hazard, because the country that has a war guarantee now feels comfortable doing things that they wouldn't have otherwise done. That they're made recklessly, that they lead to wider wars. And that essentially England's war guarantee of Poland is what led to the second World War. And that the Holocaust happened in the war, and that it was a war crime. 

So his argument is that, look, Adolf Hitler certainly hated Jews. He certainly blamed Jews for all of their problems. However, he didn't end up going genocidal—that was ultimately a war crime. And he was like, if you didn't have the war guarantee with Poland, you wouldn't have had the war, and if you didn't have the war, you wouldn't have had the Holocaust. That's essentially his argument. I think it's a pretty compelling one.

[…] The major catastrophe, the major blunder was that Chamberlain then gave a war guarantee to Poland. Now Poland was in a dispute with Germany over Danzig, and Danzig was, I think, you know, go again, go double check me on this, like 90% German, it was like a German-speaking town that with a few hundred thousand people there, and it was strategically important, something like the port or something there was strategically important  […] Hitler wanted this city back. And just to be clear here, it was stripped from them in the Treaty of Versailles. This was part of Germany before that.

[…] And so now the British Empire just made a war guarantee with Poland. And so now Poland, instead of feeling any type of pressure to negotiate with Hitler, goes “Fuck you, Hitler. We're not giving you shit.” Okay? So now they get into a thing and then ultimately Hitler ends up invading. And they had given Poland a war guarantee, and so they followed through on that and went to war. 

And the argument being made is that that was totally unnecessary. That the idea that we would have a World War over whether this German city was controlled by Germany or Poland, made no sense. And just to add on top of that, which is the craziest part of all of it, is that Poland didn't end up being protected. It's not as if we fought that whole World War, but then Poland was liberated. The second World War gets fought, it's the worst catastrophe in the history of humanity, tens of millions of people are killed, and then Poland is subjugated by Joseph Stalin until 1989. That was the result of it.

What can I even say? Only this: tomorrow night Smith will welcome white supremacists Sam Hyde and Nick Rochefort to the Legion of Skanks’ weekly recording at The Stand. 

Regrets Dept.:

Before we close out here, I’d like to apologize for the light programming of late! It’s always a bit of a challenge juggling my other work with this newsletter, and last month it compounded with some life things to make the challenge extra challenging. I think I’ve finally figured out a balance and should be getting things back to normal from hereon out, knock on wood. That said, I know times are tight all around and I haven’t kept up my end of the contract: if you’d like me to refund your August subscription fee, please email me your Venmo or Zelle or Paypal username or whatever you prefer and I’m happy to oblige. Thanks as always for reading.