A longtime friend, John Ellis, emailed me (and about 9 million other people in the industry) to update us all on the Mike Peppel/MCSi case. And no, it isn’t over, like many people seem to think. The incredibly light sentencing verdict rendered against a man who ruined a lot of the great small companies in the AV industry is being appealed by the U.S. Department of Justice.

For those of you who have only been in the industry a few years, or who have been working on the moon, Mike Peppel was the CEO of MCSi who bought up many of the great little firms that used to make up the AV industry in this country, largely with MCSi stock, and then committed multiple felonies in the fraud that brought them all down.

It was a consolidation that completely reshaped the AV industry, and wrecked (or seriously messed with) the lives of many company owners and employees in the business. The company where I started out, Audio Visual Systems (Dayton, Ohio), was one of them. I had left for the Great White North by the time it had happened, but was affected by it just the same. AVS was a family business, and the people who worked there were family. Period. I still drink my morning coffee from an AVS mug, and the stuffed penguin the gang gave me when I left for Canada is still the centerpiece of my office 25 years later. So, it gives me great personal pleasure to see the slap-on-the-wrist verdict he got be appealed, because it was like having the town you grew up in bought by a landfill company and bulldozed.

More about the appeal can be found here (thanks, John):

http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/crime/u-s-appeals-sentence-of-michael-peppel-former-mcsi-executive-1351906.html

If you were part of this industry, letters to the officials in charge are in order.

JRR