Lab Rats

"But I told them, 'You need to ask questions, look further into it,' " Theodore says. "I wasn't going to come out and tell them [about the murder] because I was a private citizen at that time," not an Infolink executive. Had he been an Infolink executive, he says, he would have been obligated to disclose Correia's past in order to keep faith with shareholders.

About the same time that Holden sued Infolink, Infolink sued ActiveCore, alleging that ActiveCore had exploited Theodore's former position at Infolink to gain an unfair advantage in its acquisition bid. The dueling lawsuits remain active, and for that reason, the individual filings by the two sides are not available to the public. Executives and attorneys on both sides either refused to comment on the cases or failed to return calls.

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Far away from the treachery that took place in Canada, Theodore is sitting at the CEO's desk at University Lab, asking a million-dollar question: "Did Cesar talk to you?"

He hopes so. But Correia did not return my phone calls or e-mailed inquiries for this article, probably because Correia didn't want to give Theodore a chance to refile his libel suit against him.

That suit, which landed in Florida Southern District Court this past May, accused Correia of writing defamatory messageboard posts under the pseudonym Bryan Swan. In the complaint, Theodore's attorney attached a transcript of a phone call allegedly made to Ken Silberling, whose company leases the office space that is University Lab headquarters.

The caller is Cesar Correia, and the transcript suggests he is pretending to be interested in leasing space at Peninsula Corporate Circle but wants first to know whether his competitor, ActiveCore, is close by. At one point, Silberling asks the caller if he's doing "a little corporate espionage."

"Yeah, well, you got to... keep on top of these things...," the transcript quotes the man identified as Correia. "We compete with them up here, so..."

Theodore alleges in the complaint that the transcript was mailed anonymously to him in an effort at intimidation.

The case was dismissed in June based on Theodore's failure to prove that the alleged online defamation took place in Florida.

Was Correia curious about a link between Theodore's new company, University Lab, and his previous one, ActiveCore? The answer comes in one of the more explosive allegations from the mysterious Bryan Swan. He claims that Theodore is playing a shell game, that University Lab was "created, produced, set up, and funded by ActiveCore. This is called misdirecting funds from a public company to a private company, and to the personal benefit of George Theodore." And this, if it is true, constitutes fraud.

There is no doubt that Theodore retains a tight relationship with ActiveCore. He leases the office space in Boca Raton from ActiveCore and remains a paid consultant for the company. But Theodore denies that ActiveCore financed University Lab.

"ActiveCore has made many investments, which have been disclosed in their filings," he says. "You can't make off-the-book investments. That's illegal."

So where did the cash come from?

"My own personal money," Theodore says.

ActiveCore President and CEO Peter Hamilton also said his company had no stake in University Lab, but the denials aren't enough to ease the anxieties of ActiveCore investors.

Over the past year, ActiveCore stock has sunk to its lowest level, at the same time that its former vice president, Theodore, has been using ActiveCore-leased office space and churning out two lines of nutrition supplements.

New Yorker Gregory Sabba bought ActiveCore stock about five years ago, when it was selling at about 1.5 cents per share. "At first, I made a killing," Sabba says. When the stock climbed to 4 cents, he more than doubled his initial investment.

The luckiest investors held onto their ActiveCore stock till it hit the 20-cent mark, in early 2005. The stock has been heading south ever since. In mid-August, it was trading at about a half-cent per share. "Look at the charts," Sabba exclaims. "You couldn't ask an Olympic skier to jump off that!"

Sabba posts on a messageboard for ActiveCore, hosted by Agoracom.com, a site for shareholders of small stocks. Black humor has been the only humor on that board this year. The community is largely divided between two camps: the pumpers and the bashers. The pumpers accuse the bashers of being the paid agents of ActiveCore rivals, while the bashers wonder whether the pumpers are insiders trying to inflate the stock so they can sell, cutting their losses.

Sabba wonders who in this climate could still cling to any belief in ActiveCore's future — unless that person was only feigning enthusiasm. "You buy a 20-cent stock that goes to a penny, you're not optimistic anymore," he says. "You want to kill somebody."

"Blacksnake" is the only poster who seems to be enjoying the messageboard. He (or she) seemingly has boundless energy for ridiculing the pumpers and for bilious tirades against ActiveCore officers.