Prospective airport owner has checkered past
Published 3:00 pm Saturday, May 29, 2004
Seattle businessman Joel (pronounced Jo-el) Eisenberg gave Island County officials reason to feel hopeful about the long-awaited resurrection of the Oak Harbor airport, but not all those who know him are enthused.
Eisenberg met with the Joint Council of Governments Wednesday to propose a private-public venture for the airport. He told them he would be the owner of the property by month’s end. He is currently chairman of a company called International Telcom, Ltd.
Brooke Barnes, who lives adjacent to the airstrip on Monroe Landing Road, said Eisenberg is not the owner, but just one of many note-holders left hanging when Harbor Airlines ceased business. Barnes and the other note-holders don’t know how to contact owner Richard Boehlke.
Eisenberg has filed a lawsuit in Island County to gain control and ownership of the airport from the other creditors. The entrepreneur is no stranger to lawsuits and airports.
According to a Seattle Post-Intelligencer report in 1988, Eisenberg was the subject of fraud and bankruptcy proceedings in the 1970s related to his operation of an air travel club.
In that case a King County judge ordered him to pay $200,000 to 3,000 Seattle-area residents who paid for pleasure flights on Airclub International that never took off. Eisenberg was ordered to never operate an air travel club again.
Eisenberg said those fraud charges were the result of not being able to refund customers after the company went bankrupt.
“It was a question of whether I should have known it was going out of business,” he said.
Another company he owned, Aeroamerica, was the subject of a state attorney general fraud case, in which he was fined about $140,000. That company also went out of business, in 1982.
Eisenberg made the news again in 1993 with the Seattle Times headline: “Porn-network operator agrees to pay $20,000 to settle civil case.”
In that case the Federal Trade Commission alleged that five corporations owned by Eisenberg, also known as Jack Starworth, pressured people to pay for 900 and 976 prefix calls on their phone bills, which were charged through his business.
Eisenberg admitted some of the phone lines were used for sexually explicit conversations, which is not illegal in itself.
His fault in that case, he said, was in not following through with the threat to sue for nonpayment, thus committing fraud. He said he settled at $20,000 to avoid higher legal costs.
During a lengthy divorce in 1991 Eisenberg was accused by his estranged wife of wiretapping her phone line and taping calls. His attorney argued that there was a question of whether the law invoked by Eisenberg’s wife applied to “family-type” situations.
Eisenberg said the charges were dropped when the divorce was settled.
According to a press release on the International Telcom Web site, Eisenberg was also involved in a lawsuit in Puerto Rico in 1999, in which he sued Puerto Rico Telephone for creating a monopoly in the phone service business and shutting out his competing business. He gave up that fight and left the Puerto Rican phone business in 2001.
While Barnes holds the principal note on the airport property, Eisenberg said he is running the airstrip now, renting hangars and selling fuel. Barnes, who lives next to the airstrip, said he would like to run it but that he and Eisenberg have not talked.
