By Caleb Hannan
Last Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a Turkish-born biotech entrepreneur named Serhat Gumrukcu.
Gumrukcu, the government alleged, had conspired to hire a hitman to kill Gregory C. Davis, a father of seven found dead, lying in a snowbank, not far from his home in Danville, Vt., on Jan. 7, 2018. Davis had been shot multiple times in the head and torso.
Gumrukcu’s arrest was a shock to his family and friends. It also was a shock to us at Sharesleuth.
Since October, we’ve been looking into Gumrukcu’s past because of his association with a Los Angeles-based company called Enochian Biosciences Inc. (Nasdaq; ENOB). We’ve cataloged a lot of behavior that we think should make any investor in Enochian nervous. But, candidly, none of it rises to the level of a successful murder-for-hire plot.
According to two separate court filings, one a search warrant in Nevada and the other an indictment in Vermont, the case against Gumrukcu began as a failed oil deal.
Gumrukcu and his brother, Murat, a Turkish citizen, were involved in a partnership with Davis that broke down over their delinquent payments, and they allegedly feared he was talking to the FBI about the possibility of fraud. In support of the indictments in the murder case, the government has included multiple text messages and emails from the three men that paint the picture of a relationship going from bad to worse in the months leading up to Davis’s death — including a threat from Murat that “[Davis] called me a fraud a second time, there will be no third time.”
Before Davis was murdered, an intermediary told the Gumrukcu brothers that Davis was inching closer to “the nuclear option,” by which he meant cooperating with the government or taking them to court.
These warnings came at the same time that Gumrukcu was finalizing a merger deal with the small public company that would become the current Enochian, and would eventually bring him and his husband tens of millions of dollars in cash and stock. They also came at a time when Gumrukcu was already facing other fraud charges that could have derailed the deal if the situation escalated.
The Department of Justice alleges that Gumrukcu asked his assistant at the time, a fellow Turk named Berk Eratay, to find someone to kill Davis. Eratay, a Las Vegas resident, allegedly spoke to a friend and former neighbor, Aron Ethridge, who later received $110,000 in cash and an unspecified amount in Bitcoin. Prosecutors said in court filings that Ethridge hired and subsequently paid a part-time sheriff’s deputy in Colorado named Jerry Banks to commit the murder.
Authorities say Banks is the man who came to the door of Davis’ rural Vermont home at 9 p.m. on January 6, 2018, posing as a U.S. Marshal sent to arrest him on racketeering charges. Court documents quote Davis’ family as saying he left willingly with his alleged murderer.
Banks and Ethridge both were arrested in late April of this year. Gumrukcu and Eratay were arrested last week. At the time of his arrest, Eratay listed himself as an employee of the same Los Angeles medical clinic where Gumrukcu works, and which does contract research for Enochian.
Enochian has issued two press releases since the arrest of its co-founder and inventor. The first stated that while the company’s board was “shocked” by Gumrukcu’s arrest, “the incident leading to the arrest occurred prior to the merger which created the Enochian of today”.
That statement is technically true: Davis was killed six days before the merger agreement was signed, and roughly a month before the deal closed. However, the company that would become Enochian had already signed a consulting agreement with Gumrukcu Health LLC on April 21, 2017. And to say there weren’t talks or negotiations with him prior to or during the months when Davis’s murder was allegedly planned is to suggest that the entire scouting and due-diligence process involved in acquiring a company that would eventually be worth more than half a billion dollars took place in less than a week.
Enochian said on March 25 that Gumrukcu has no involvement with the company’s management, scientific team or outside collaborators. However, our investigation found that Enochian recently changed its headquarters address to a building owned by Gomrukcu, making him its landlord.
Here, now, is our original piece on Enochian, completed just prior to Gumrukcu’s arrest:
Enochian Biosciences has the financial backing of a wealthy Danish investor. It has a respected former public-health authority as its chief executive officer, and has worked with accomplished advisors in the world of infectious diseases, cancers, and Covid.
Yet despite Enochian’s recent attempts to distance itself from him, the company’s future still rests on the alleged genius of a single man, Serhat Gumrukcu – Enochian’s co-founder and the creator of its key intellectual property.
Unlike the notable names associated with Enochian, Gumrukcu is a relative unknown. Here’s what we do know:
Gumrukcu is a 39-year-old who’s not licensed to practice medicine in California, the state where he operates his clinic; whose medical credentials never have been definitively proven; and who currently has an open arrest warrant in his native Turkey for fraud.
He’s an amateur magician who once performed under the name “Dr. No”, and a Uri Geller-disciple who at various points has claimed he can bend spoons with his mind, walk on water, and cure kidney stones with his telekinetic powers.
He’s a man who, on multiple continents, has allegedly charged the desperate families of young cancer patients exorbitant prices to use unproven “cures” and who once billed one of Enochian’s biggest investors $300,000 for leech treatments.
Gumrukcu also is the former chief executive of a mining company run by a man sentenced to a nine-year prison term in Italy for fraud.
Gumrukcu pleaded no contest in January 2018 to a felony stemming from allegations that he forged documents and email addresses, and stole identities, to take more than $1 million from a Turkish banker so that he and his spouse, an interior designer and large shareholder in Enochian, could buy and upgrade a bungalow in Los Angeles. The charges led to a raid that ended with Gumrukcu in handcuffs.
His felony conviction – entered about a week after a merger that would transform the publicly traded company now known as Enochian Biosciences – was later dismissed, although it remains on the books as a misdemeanor.
The indictments last week connected the dots on an astonishing sequence of events. On Jan. 6, 2018, Davis was kidnapped and killed in Vermont. On Jan. 12, Gumrukcu, his spouse and an associate agreed to merger Enochian into another company, with Enochian being the successor.
Just over two weeks later, on Jan. 25, Gumrukcu largely escaped punishment in his previous criminal case, which could have led to prison time or deportation. The next month, the Enochian deal closed, making Gumrukcu a millionaire, at least on paper.
PRIOR WARNINGS
We are not the first to alert investors to the red flags present at Enochian. White Diamond Research wrote multiple pieces on the company in 2019. A Danish news outlet called MedWatch has devoted significant resources to investigating Gumrukcu, as has the Danish equivalent of NPR.
White Diamond focused primarily on the questions about Gumrukcu’s past, and on Enochian’s inability to produce any notable scientific studies to back its claims. The Danish news outlets focused on Enochian’s chairman, the complaints against Gumrukcu from parents of terminally ill children, and an incredible wave of skepticism from prominent Danish physicians about the claims made by Gumrukcu.
Nothing about those criticisms has changed in the time since.
What has changed, at least until very recently, is Enochian’s market capitalization, which last November briefly eclipsed $700 million. The company’s stock has since come down to Earth, as has most of the preclinical biotech world. It closed Tuesday at $5.26, down from a high of $13.78.
(Disclosure: Mark Cuban, owner of Sharesleuth.com LLC, shorted the shares of ENOB last November but no longer has a position, short or long. Chris Carey, editor of Sharesleuth.com, has no position, nor does Caleb Hannan, the main author of this report)
Enochian also has expanded its drug pipeline.
Whereas at its outset the company was merely claiming to have a potential cure for AIDS, it now boasts treatments for some of the most confounding viruses and diseases in the world. Along with HIV, the pipeline includes therapies for hepatitis B, Covid-19, and some cancers.
The face of the company has changed in that time, too.
At its creation in 2018, Enochian was defined by its chairman, Rene Sindlev, the previously mentioned Danish entrepreneur who made the bulk of his fortune in the jewelry business, helping to build the Pandora empire. Sindlev in turn helped attract capital from celebrities like actor Mads Mikkelsen and other wealthy Danes who had previously sunk money into a different Sindlev-led pharmaceutical company, DanDrit Biotech USA Inc. (formerly OTCBB: DDRT)..
The pivot from DanDrit, whose drugs Sindlev said the company couldn’t give away, to Enochian, meant giving Gumrukcu, his spouse, and another associate as many as 24 million shares for Gumrukcu’s intellectual property. Enochian has since paid nearly $12 million in licensing fees, along with more than $10 million in research and development fees and likely more than $1 million for security. It also meant giving Gumrukcu, his husband, and their other business partner, Carl F. Sandler — who owns a hair dye company and the dating apps KNKI and Daddyhunt.com — control of nearly half the company’s shares.
Now that focus has shifted once again. This time to Mark Dybul, who last July was named Enochian’s CEO.
Dybul has an impressive track record. He’s spent 30 years in public health, is a protege of Dr. Anthony Fauci, and achieved the rank of Ambassador when he was appointed U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator in the George W. Bush administration.
These credentials have allowed him to do things for Enochian that Sindlev and Gumrukcu could not. Like getting valuable media coverage when making news while speaking at a Fortune CEO conference, or attracting scientific advisors like Dr. Peter Piot, one of the most respected names in global public health.
Dybul’s work for Enochian has become increasingly lucrative. The company gave him a new contract last year that includes a base salary of $850,000 annually, nearly double what he made in the two previous years. It also calls for a bonus of up to 60 percent of that amount, if certain goals are met.
Yet every time Enochian’s ambitions have expanded, they’ve done so off of the allegedly groundbreaking work of Gumrukcu himself. Dybul may be the current face of Enochian, but it’s Gumrukcu’s research and intellectual property that forms the backbone of Enochian’s potential.
“Dr. Serhat has the type of brilliance that has the capacity to see across disciplines in science and connect things that others don’t see,” Dybul said in an Enochian promotional video.
Sindlev has been even more hyperbolic.
In a Facebook post aimed at skittish investors shortly after White Diamond and MedWatch began publishing critical pieces, Enochian’s Chairman wrote: “Hold your shares well. Our researcher and inventor is the biotech world’s response to Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Larry Page. People close to him compare him to Leonardo Da Vinci, Nicolas Tesla and Einstein in one and the same person. We will be presenting data on exciting science over the next 4-12 months.”
That was written 38 months ago.
THE CURRENT NARRATIVE
The Enochian story cannot be told without acknowledging one simple fact: a lot of people put a lot of faith into Gumrukcu.
Beyond the effusive praise from Sindlev and Dybul, there are other prominent names willing to talk about Gumrukcu’s alleged scientific achievements. Before resigning from Enochian’s respiratory advisory board in September because of a conflict of interest, Piot told Sharesleuth that he got a personal presentation from Gumrukcu and described the science behind Enochian’s trademarked Hijack RNA treatment platform as “truly innovative.”
Those who’ve worked alongside him, like Zeus Ochoa, a young former scientist at Enochian, described Gumrukcu as “the smartest person I’ve ever met.” Even some people unaffiliated with the company, including immunologists and research scientists at prominent universities, who, at Sharesleuth’s request, looked at some of Enochian’s poster presentations have conceded that there are elements to the research that appear creative, if entirely unproven.
Enochian is a pre-clinical company making claims about its technology that would, without exaggeration, alter the course of human history. Yet the extent of the research it has shared only includes a few mice studies and two individual cases of treatment on humans.
Given the dearth of evidence offered by Enochian and the striking ambition of its goals, it seems logical to ask who Gumrukcu is and where he came from.
MAGIC AND MEDICINE
The first online mentions of Gumrukcu center on his life in the early 2000s as an illusionist in his native Turkey.
At the time, Gumrukcu was a young protege of Ozlen Tuncer, a magician who still performs under the name Dr. Tora. Tuncer told Sharesleuth that Gumrukcu was a smart student who eagerly took in Tuncer’s lessons on telepathy, telekinesis, and fortune telling. Tuncer was also the one to give Gumrukcu his name, “Dr. No”, he says, because the young student was “so negative; he used to oppose everything.”
Tuncer says he and Gumrukcu had a falling out when, he claims, his protege began telling the fortunes of wealthy Turks. “He became probably the richest magician in Turkey,” Tuncer said.
But Tuncer disapproved of the way he believed his student was cashing in on what he knew to be simple tricks disguised as truth.
Soon Gumrukcu met another, more well-known mentor in the world of magic when he befriended Uri Geller. Geller got famous in the 1970s when he went on TV programs like The Tonight Show and appeared to bend a spoon using only his mind. Most recently, he wrote a letter to British Prime Minister Theresa May saying that he could “stop [her] telepathically” from exiting the European Union. He was, of course, unsuccessful.
People at every point in Gumrukcu’s life, from former employees at Enochian to those who knew him when he was still in Turkey, say that he mimicked Geller’s famous spoon-bending.
Some people, like Ochoa, who know Gumrukcu as a serious scientist and researcher, view the magic as just a hobby. Others who saw Gumrukcu bend spoons say he appeared to be serious about convincing them he was truly capable of the feat.
Likewise, in a 2008 interview with a now-defunct Turkish magazine devoted to magic, Gumrukcu appeared to take his psychic abilities very seriously.
He told the interviewer that he had inherited his powers from many of the women in his life, including his mother. He said he could break a kidney stone with his mind, explained that he would soon be able to walk on water, and also shared what seems to be his first experience with the ability to manipulate real life events using only his powers.
“When I was in primary school,” Gumrukcu told the magazine, “we were walking down the stairs with my mother. I saw the balconies of the houses and on one of the balconies there was, in an earthen pot, a beautifully blooming cactus. As soon as I said to my mother, ‘look at the cactus,’ it exploded.”
A year or so after giving this interview, Gumrukcu registered the website MindMedicine.com. The holding page for that site did not include an explanation of its plans or approach.
During this period, when he was touting his own supernatural gifts, Gumrukcu was also meeting his lifelong mentors in the field of medicine – although these mentors were far from what would be considered mainstream.
Gumrukcu appears to have had two formative influences during this time.
The first was Suat Arusan, the now-deceased former owner of a Turkish clinic called Dogal Hayat. Before deleting his LinkedIn account after being questioned by a reporter about claims made on it, Gumrukcu said he was an attending physician at Dogul Hayat between 2008 and 2009. Earlier last year, Gumrukcu also shared a video on his Instagram page praising Arusan, in what looked to be a documentary about the doctor.
Arusan is a relatively controversial figure whose clinic was once briefly shuttered in Turkey in 2014. His specialty was hirudotherapy, or the process of bloodletting using leeches. Arusan (and Gumrukcu in that video he posted) have claimed that hirudotherapy can act as a treatment or cure for a broad range of maladies, including lost eyesight.
Hirudotherapy has been cleared for use in post-surgical healing by the FDA. However, it does not appear to be a typical treatment for concerns like blood clots, which is the stated reason why wealthy Danish businessman and large Enochian shareholder Karsten Ree paid Gumrukcu and his Los Angeles clinic approximately $300,000 for treatment a few years ago.
Gumrukcu’s other mentor is still alive and still wields some influence in the world of cell and gene therapy.
Israeli physician Shimon Slavin is considered something of a pioneer in the world of immunotherapy. But in many ways, he has alienated himself from that field.
In 2017, Slavin’s Tel Aviv clinic was shut down by the Israeli Ministry of Health and his license subsequently suspended for recruiting foreign patients to receive treatments not approved within the country.
“To his detriment,” the Israeli Disciplinary Committee wrote, “[Slavin’s] greatness is only matched by the depth of his fall.”
Slavin does not have a disclosed business or scientific relationship with Enochian. But he is currently serving as an advisor for the Seraph Research Institute, part of Gumrukcu’s Los Angeles clinic, where Gumrukcu treated Ree and many others.
“Dr. Gumrukcu was a young Turkish post-doc with interesting ideas when I first met him eight years ago,” Slavin was quoted as saying in 2019. “I am looking forward to our future collaboration in developing and implementing novel cancer treatments at Seraph Research Institute.”
Slavin was also quoted last year in a Seraph release about a potential AIDS cure.
These relationships with controversial figures obscure something even more basic about Gumrukcu’s medical history: no one really knows what training he actually has.
Back in 2019, White Diamond alleged that Gumrukcu’s LinkedIn page never mentioned that he was a doctor, nor listed where, if at all, he received his medical degree or PhD., even though Enochian’s site said he had earned both titles.
Even stranger was Gumrukcu and Enochian’s reaction to an article a year later from DR, Denmark’s NPR. In a rare interview, Sindlev told the DR reporter that he had personally seen “all of Serhat Gumrukcu’s diplomas”.
Yet when DR asked Gumrukcu why he listed his work as a “fellow” at the “St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation” even though its director said she had no record of him having been there, he and the company didn’t offer a typical explanation. Instead, both Sindlev and Gumrukcu’s lawyer denied that Gumrukcu even had a LinkedIn page. His lawyer insisted that the page itself was actually created by some sort of corporate saboteur looking to spread misinformation about his client.
Shortly thereafter, Gumrukcu’s LinkedIn page, or in his lawyer’s contention the one created to smear him, disappeared for good.
DIGGING FOR GOLD
If Gumrukcu’s influences, mentors, and path to medicine were unusual, so too was his next career move.
For a few years, Gumrukcu positioned himself as an expert in finding minerals and water below ground. This work took him to the Middle East, Africa, and South America. It also led him to a number of people who still have questions about who he was and why he was ever involved in a business so different from his stated specialty.
The picture above was taken around 2012. To the far left is Roberto Riva, a man who says he’s spent most of his professional life in Miami real estate. Next to him is Giuseppe Giudice, an Italian entrepreneur. Then there is Ali Gultekin, a geothermal engineer who claims to be able to find oil, water, and minerals in the ground through an ancient, pseudo scientific technique called dowsing. Finally there’s Gumrukcu, who would have been about 28 years old at the time.
Riva, Giudice, Gultekin, and Gumrukcu were business partners in a venture called USD Mining Resources LLC, incorporated in Florida in 2011.
Giudice is now dead and Gumrukcu has not responded to any requests for comment from Sharesleuth. In fact, through his lawyer he has sent two separate cease-and-desist letters. So it is left to Riva and Gultekin to fill in the when, where, and why of how they briefly went into business alongside Gumrukcu.
According to Gultekin, “the whole organization revolved around Serhat.” In emails viewed by Sharesleuth, investors at the time can be seen writing to Gumrukcu and other involved with USD Mining asking about their money. One, Furkan Gozalan, who wrote that he was afraid the company was about to go out of business, told Sharesleuth recently that he made his small investment after meeting Gumrukcu through his astrologist.
Gultekin met Gumrukcu in a similar way.
He says Gumrukcu was a mentor to another famous Turkish spiritual healer named Metin Hara, who introduced the two of them. Gultekin says he taught Gumrukcu to dowse; “to use a fork stick and pendulum…he went to Africa, found water, built a school.” Then one day, Gultekin says he got a call from Gumrukcu from Peru.
“We have entered the gold mining business,” Gultekin says Gumrukcu told him.
The “we” in that sentence, Gultekin would find out later, were Gumrukcu and Giudice.
According to those who knew him well, Giudice was unforgettable – a voluble man who lived in a mansion outside of Rome with a half dozen German Shepherds, a man who insisted on wearing blazers and dress shirts in dusty mines, and who, apparently, was a friend of Gumrukcu’s.
According to Roberto Riva, the only other USD Mining employee who was in Peru at the time and is willing to talk today, the project was a disaster from the start. Riva says that the mine was at an elevation of 14,000 foot and hours from any city. He said that locals were often caught stealing and that he and the rest of the USD Mining team couldn’t use traditional equipment, but instead had to buy dynamite from armed rebels who controlled the area.
To Riva, Gumrukcu was “a very strange character.” He was a man who claimed he could bend spoons, had a cure for cancer, and a clinic somewhere in Eastern Europe where he worked with leeches.
Gumrukcu also appeared to be overruling everyone on something he seemed to know nothing about: mining.
“Serhat was overriding Ali,” Riva told Sharesleuth. “Giuseppe would follow more what Serhat would say and Ali was not happy with that.”
On this, Gultekin agrees: “Serhat acted as if he knew everything he did not know,” he wrote to us in a translated email.
Gumrukcu advised Giudice where to drill and when. Perhaps not surprisingly, according to both Gultekin and Riva, after more than a month of digging in the locations Gumrukcu identified, little to nothing of value was found.
USD Mining seems to have spent most of its money building an ill-fated road to the mine that would later be washed out during the rainy season.
Gultekin says today that he believes Gumrukcu met Giudice in Turkey “on the subject of health.” Gultekin says that while they were all in Peru, Gumrukcu was advising Giudice on certain “herbal treatments.” Gultekin says Gumrukcu even offered him the same herbs, though unlike Giudice he refused to take them.
According to both Gultekin and Riva, at some point during their time in Peru, Giudice fell deathly ill. He had to be rushed to Lima where he spent a few days in a coma. Though he managed to emerge from that state, Giudice’s life would only get worse from there.
On Oct. 27, 2012, a few months after the above photos were taken, Giudice and his wife Fatima were both sentenced in absentia in Italy on charges of fraud. Giudice and Fatima were accused and found guilty of secretly siphoning off millions of Euros from a bankrupt Italian telecom company. He was sentenced to nine years; she got three.
According to those who knew him, however, neither Giudice nor his wife ever spent a day in jail. Instead, only a few months later Giudice would again fall ill, this time for good. His wife, Fatima, would also die not long after of an unrelated illness.
Guidice’s U.S. lawyer, Paul Steinberg, also claims that Giudice died broke – he said his client’s mansion in Rome was in foreclosure, what few bank accounts existed in the British Virgin Islands were mostly empty, and his estate is still on the hunt for any money that might be out there.
The last person involved with USD Mining to have any contact with Gumrukcu was Riva. He told Sharesleuth that a few years after the failed mining venture in Peru, Gumrukcu called him out of the blue and asked to meet him for dinner in Miami.
Riva recalls a strange dinner where nothing much was accomplished. But he remembers why Gumrukcu asked to meet. He said Gumrukcu had a new interest unrelated to mining or medicine: He wanted to know how he could make money in real estate.
CHARGES IN CALIFORNIA
When a California marketing executive went to sell his West Hollywood bungalow in 2014, he was happy to take an all-cash offer from a stranger named Serhat Gumrukcu and his partner, Liam Wittekind (who also goes by Anderson Wittekind). He says he was told by the couple’s realtor that his old home would be their second — somewhere to live while a mansion they owned in Beverly Hills was being renovated.
The marketing executive didn’t care what their motive was for the purchase, but he was concerned when the cash that was meant to be wired out of Gumrukcu and Wittekind’s supposed Swiss bank account didn’t arrive. Not for one week, two weeks, even three. He said it wasn’t until nearly two months after the sale was complete, and after he had threatened to cancel the transaction, that the money was finally delivered.
A few months later, the executive said, he was surprised to get an invite from Gumrukcu and Wittekind for lunch at the home he had sold them. The get together, he said, was pleasant. He could see Gumrukcu and Wittekind were spending a lot of money renovating the home, and that, according to him, they’d also recently bought a Porsche.
At some point during the lunch, he said, Gumrukcu insisted that they all take a photo together. That, the executive figured, would mark the end of his relationship with the couple. But then a few years later, he got another phone call, this one from an old neighbor, saying that their street was blocked off, police had surrounded his old house, and Gumrukcu was in handcuffs on the sidewalk.
The details of what happened wouldn’t come out for a while. If they had, it’s possible that DanDrit never would have gone ahead with its acquisition of Enochian.
Most of what we know today comes from a declaration in support of Gumrukcu’s arrest filed by Doug Beard, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Major Crimes Division. Though the end result of this investigation has been reported publicly, these details, which Sharesleuth obtained from the California State Attorney General’s Office, never have.
According to Beard’s declaration, two months after buying the marketing executive’s house, Gumrukcu reached out to Ersin Akyuz, a Deutsche Bank executive in Turkey. Gumrukcu told Akyuz that he had been successful in flipping multiple investment properties, and convinced Akyuz to wire $930,000 in personal funds to do the same with another West Hollywood property, just around the corner from the one he’d recently purchased.
Unbeknownst to the marketing executive, and to Akyuz, Gumrukcu actually was making up nearly everything. According to Beard’s declaration, he was sending emails from a Los Angeles attorney named Ben Kacev that were from a GMail account that Kacev would later tell the LA detective that he’d never seen. Gumrukcu also was sharing documents from a company called Beverly Hills Escrow that an agent there told Beard appeared to be forgeries.
According to Beard, Gumrukcu even personally met with Akyuz and presented him with a forged bill of sale, complete with fake tax documents. In the bill of sale, Gumrukcu made it appear as if the marketing executive was the one who was selling him and Akyuz this new home, even though the executive already had sold him the one and only home he owned.
Beard’s declaration also contained details of a seemingly unrelated “fraud scheme” conducted by Gumrukcu around the same time.
According to the detective, Gumrukcu told a man named Gregory Gac, a friend and owner of a Minnesota-based financial group, that an Omani company Gumrukcu controlled were soon to be involved in an oil deal with the petroleum giant Shell Plc. Gumrukcu deposited $600,000 worth of checks into a bank account that Gac was supposed to use to wire money to the related parties. But when Gac went to fulfill his end of the deal, Beard’s declaration asserts, Gac found that the checks had been returned for insufficient funds, the account had been frozen and the phone number Gumrukcu had given him had been disconnected. Gac was able to retrieve some of the funds he’d wired out, but eventually paid the bank nearly $120,000 to cover those costs he could not get back.
Beard’s declaration also contained this fact about the bank accounts Gumrukcu used in his dealings with Gac: the four checks were all drawn from a bank account in the name of “HRH Prince Serhat D. Gumrukcu”. “HRH” is sometimes used as an acronym for “His Royal Highness”, and is a title Gumrukcu has used himself in a post on Facebook.
According to Beard’s declaration, after Gumrukcu got Akyuz to wire a further $260,000 for what he said were renovations that needed to be completed before the home was flipped, Akyuz received a promissory note saying he would be paid $1,200,000 plus interest on or before July 30, 2015.
When the payment didn’t arrive, Akyuz reached out to the FBI.
According to the California AG’s office, the FBI and LAPD’s Major Crimes Division worked in tandem on the investigation into Gumrukcu as part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. On Oct. 27, 2017, Gumrukcu was formally charged with 14 counts, including grand theft, identity theft, and second-degree commercial burglary.
According to a lawyer who represented Akyuz – and to the warrant that was issued for Gumrukcu’s arrest – Gumrukcu failed to appear at a mandatory hearing after the charges were filed.
As a result, a warrant was issued, the raid was conducted, and Gumrukcu was officially arrested and held on a $625,000 bail on Feb. 9, 2017.
A little less than a year later, on Jan. 25, 2018, Gumrukcu entered a plea of no contest to one count of second-degree commercial burglary and received a sentence of five years probation. While the California AG’s Office declined Sharesleuth’s requent to explain why 14 counts became only one, Assistant Attorney General Natasha Howard did tell the court that, on the day that Gumrukcu was sentenced, he had paid in full the restitution he owed.
Akyuz’s attorney confirms this as it relates to the roughly $1.2 million owed to her client, who did not want to talk with us. So too does Gac, who texted Sharesleuth that “I’m pretty sure Serhat covered me for the amount I was short.”
On Aug. 10, 2020, after serving just over half of his sentence, Gumrukcu petitioned the California Superior Court for a dismissal of his charges and termination of probation. Both motions were granted a month later.
A COMPANY IN NEED OF CHANGE
When Rene Sindlev’s previous company DanDrit Biotech flamed out, the wealthy entrepreneur had a problem.
“I had an investment that was not very interesting,” he told a Danish newspaper in 2018. “I had to find some alternatives to how I could avoid losing my money.”
That alternative came in the form of Gumrukcu.
After magic, medicine, mining, and then the ill-fated attempt at flipping homes that landed him in jail, Gumrukcu had seemingly finally found his footing in America when he first met Sindlev.
According to an unpublished interview Sindlev gave to a Danish journalist, Sindlev was introduced to Gumrukcu by a Miami Beach-based “health food alchemist” called Dr. Etti.
https://youtu.be/mGEYO7rOqg4
Dr. Etti is also the Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Dr Smood, a chain of organic boutique cafes founded by Sindlev. Based off of her Instagram account and Gumrukcu’s Instagram account, the two appear to have been friends for years.
According to the Danish journalist’s notes, Gumrukcu met Sindlev for the first time in 2016 and made an immediate impression.
Not long after, Gumrukcu helped form two separate but related entities that serve both as his headquarters for medical research, an “incubator” for Enochian, and the place where he treats patients from all around the world. These two entities are the Seraph Research Institute and Seraph Medical.
SELLING THE CURE
Seraph Medical, Gumrukcu’s clinic, and Seraph Research Institute were both, for a time, located two floors below Enochian’s headquarters in a Los Angeles office building. Gumrukcu is listed as Seraph’s “Director of Research”. His attorneys have previously denied that he practices medicine at the clinic, which would be illegal because he is not licensed in California, or in any other state in America.
Yet a long string of emails shown to Sharesleuth fly in the face of that claim. Gumrukcu, whether he or his lawyers admit it, appears to be taking very active roles in treatments of very serious conditions.
The emails concern the health of a child dying of cancer, sometime in the past few years. The parents of the patient involved have asked Sharesleuth to obscure any details that would identify them or their child.
After an initial referral to Gumrukcu, the parents exchanged a number of emails with him and others at Seraph about their child’s condition. As they remember it, Gumrukcu quoted the parents an up-front charge of at least $600,000 for their child’s treatment, a hefty bill they say they assumed would’ve grown much larger as the treatments continued.
They also say that Gumrukcu claimed, by phone but in writing, to have treated and cured thousands of cancer patients worldwide.
In the email exchanges, the parents often found their messages cc’ed to a man named Gregory Howell, who was one of Gumrukcu’s co-workers and a frequent presence on his Instagram page. Howell appears to have no background in medicine. Instead, he describes himself as “quite possibly the world’s first celebrity juicer” and a “granola gangster.”
His only other professional experience listed on his LinkedIn profile is a six-year stint as a producer on “America’s Most Wanted”.
Although the emails do not reveal the specific treatments Gumrukcu would have suggested for the child, he did offer some details in a long elaboration on his general philosophy for treating cancer. Based on some simple research, many of the treatments he suggests– Coley’s toxins, a foundational breakthrough in immunotherapy that is now over 100 years old and completely out of favor, and IMAK, an acronym for intentionally mismatched activated killer lymphocytes – are ideas in immunotherapy championed by almost no one except for Slavin, Gumrukcu’s mentor. As we mentioned before, Slavin’s clinic in Israel was forcibly closed and he now is a scientific and medical advisor at the Seraph Research Clinic.
In the interest of seeing how these ideas and treatments would be viewed within the larger immuno-oncology space, Sharesleuth asked a handful of experts, all of whom, unlike Gumrukcu, are licensed and work for accredited institutions, to review his stated philosophy. When possible, Sharesleuth offered no further information about Seraph or Gumrukcu, to get, as much of an unbiased response as possible.
Here are a few samplings from those responses:
“A load of crap from beginning to end.”
“None of this makes any sense.”
“None of these treatments will do anything to this particular tumor.”
“IMAK therapy looks like dangerous bullshit.”
“Much of the approaches he writes about don’t seem to be FDA approved, and I don’t know what loopholes if any he used to deliver these treatments.”
One of these experts also highlighted the fact that inoperable, currently incurable pediatric brain tumors have often served as something of a magnet for controversial, expensive stateside doctors who claim miraculous results. Some of those doctors ultimately got sanctioned for misleading desperate parents.
The Danish couple who emailed with Gumrukcu about their child’s case ultimately decided not to go to Los Angeles and get treated by Gumrukcu. The child died shortly thereafter.
MILLIONS IN CONSULTING CONTRACTS
After Gumrukcu was arrested last week, Enochian issued a press release asserting that he had no formal role in the company and no involvement with its management or scientific teams.
But our review of SEC filings found that Enochian has paid more than $21 million since the start of 2018 to three entities controlled by some combination of Gumrukcu, his spouse and Sandler.
Those payments covered licenses for intellectual property, payments for research and development work under consulting agreements, payments for supplies and equipment and even a progress payment toward an Investigational New Drug application to the FDA.
In February 2018, right around the time the merger was completed, the company signed a consulting agreement with Weird Science, to provide “ongoing medical services” related to the development of products for the treatment of HIV and Cancer.
Gumrukcu’s spouse, Liam Wittekind, was the signatory for Weird Science. The agreement called for payments of up to $30,000 a month. It was terminated in July 2018, after $112,500 in total payments.
Enochian then signed a new consulting contract with G-Tech Bio LLC, to assist in the development of gene therapy and other techniques for the prevention and treatment of HIV in humans and as a “wide-spectrum platform” for cancer and other diseases.
That contact, also signed by Wittekind, had a term of 20 months and called for payments of no more than $130,000 a month, or a total of $2.6 million.
SEC filings show that as soon as the DanDrit-Enochian deal was completed, the combined company’s spending on security skyrocketed. According to Enochian’s annual financial report for the year that ended June 30, 2019, those expenses were up $780,015 from the prior year.
The same filing said the company had just eight employees at the end of that period, meaning that its average spending on security amounted to more than $90,000 per worker.
In January 2019, Enochian terminated the contract of its chief financial officer, Robert E. Wolfe, a holdover from the DanDrit days. That move led to litigation in Denmark, in state court in Vermont (where Wolfe was based), and in federal court in Vermont.
Wolfe has asserted in court documents that he was fired for persistently raising questions about what he believed were “serious financial improprieties” at the company. He noted that, as CFO, he had fiduciary duties to shareholders and legal obligations to the SEC.
At the end of January 2020, Enochian signed another contract with G-Tech and G Health Research Foundation, a California nonprofit doing business as Seraph Research Institute. That one gave Enochian the exclusive license for a treatment being developed for hepatitis B.
The deal included an up-front fee of $1.2 million, plus monthly payments of up to $144,500 to cover scientific staffing needs. It also called for periodic outlays for materials and equipment.
Enochian said in an SEC filing at that time that G-Tech was controlled by Gumrukcu and Wittekind, and G Health/Seraph Research Institute was controlled solely by Gumrukcu.
In April 2021, Enochian entered yet another agreement with G-Tech and Seraph Research Institute – its biggest since the original acquisition. Enochian acquired an exclusive license for the research, development and commercialization of certain formulations aimed at preventing and treating various viruses, including Covid-19 and other viruses.
Enochian paid a fee of $10 million for that license. It also agreed to pay $760,000 for expenditures incurred prior to the signing of the agreement.
Last August, the company acquired another HIV-related license from Seraph Research Institute, this one for $600,000. In addition, it made a $1.5 million milestone payment for completion of the Pre-Investigational New Drug process for the hepatitis B research.
SEC filings show that Enochian had $51.6 million in total expenditures on payroll, research and development and other categories in its last four fiscal years. Our analysis found that the various entities connected to Gumrukcu were by far the biggest recipients of that spending.
We also noted another recent development that undermines Enochian’s assertion that it has distanced itself from Gumrukcu.
Enochian’s last three SEC filings – two releases related to Gumrukcu’s arrest and another with a copy of the presentation the company made at an H.C. Wainwright investment conference – list a new headquarters address.
That address, 4142 Lankershim Blvd. in Toluca Lake, Calif., is a building that a company called GTB Holdings LLC bought in December, taking out an $11 million first mortgage and a $2.7 million second mortgage.
California corporation filings show that the managing member of GTB Holdings is SG & AW Holdings LLC. The initials in that entity’s name translate to Serhat Gumrukcu and Anderson Wittekind, and the address listed in incorporation papers is the old home of Seraph Medical and Seraph Research Institute.
Seraph Medical andSeraph Research Institute also are using the Lankershim address now.
TROUBLE AT HOME
Gumrukcu’s legal problems in California may be resolved. But he still has an ongoing case in his home country of Turkey that appears to have kept him from returning for many years.
According to researchers in Turkey hired by Sharesleuth, Gumrukcu has the Turkish equivalent of an outstanding warrant for his arrest.
The line on the left in this screenshot from a police database roughly translates to “fraud by taking advantage of the difficult conditions a person is in” and the word in red is either “searching” or “wanted”.
According to this file, and another seen in a Turkish courtroom more recently, Gumrukcu’s current criminal case stems from an alleged crime that occurred in 2012. The plaintiff, a man named Metin Akyuz, claimed that Gumrukcu promised cancer treating drugs for an unnamed patient and solicited $275,000. The charges of “qualified fraud” carry with them a possible sentence of 3 to 10 years in prison.
In a response mailed to the court in October of 2020 and seen by one of these researchers, Gumrukcu agreed that he took some money, but alleged it was only $75,000 and that it was in service of a good faith attempt to help the patient. He further alleged that Akyuz had at some point put a gun to his head, and that Gumrukcu was saved only by police intervention.
As part of his defense, Gumrukcu appears to have solicited character letters from current Enochian CEO Mark Dybul and current Enochian board member Carol Brosgart.
Dybul compares Gumrukcu favorably to Nobel laureates and Bill Gates. Brosgart claims that Gumrukcu’s research could lead to “curative therapy for HIV, HBV, cancers and other infectious diseases and malignancies.” Dybul also cites Gumrukcu’s service on “two important Committees” at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT).
Included in the batch of character references to the Turkish court is proof of Gumrukcu’s time at ASGCT. It comes in the form of the initial invite letter from one of the two heads of the committees on which Gumrukcu would serve. However, there are some discrepancies on what happened next.
Gumrukcu’s current biographical statement says he is still serving on both committees. This would make sense given that the initial letter asked him to join the committee for a three-year term from May 2019 to May of this year.
According to the ASGCT, however, Gumrukcu no longer serves on either. A representative there told Sharesleuth that Gumrukcu’s “volunteer appointments” actually ended in May of 2021. When pressed, that representative declined to say why the ASGCT and Gumrukcu have different timelines.
(Editor’s note: In late February, we learned that Hindenburg Research, another site that specializes in exposing securities fraud, also was investigating Enochian. We agreed with Hindenburg that rather than race each other to publication, we would continue conducting separate investigations but publish our findings on the same day. After Gumrukcu was arrested in the murder case, we set that date for today).
PERSONAL ATTACKS
Sharesleuth’s investigation into Enochian and Gumrukcu has not gone unnoticed. Thus far, we have received one cease-and-desist letter from lawyers representing the company, and two from Gumrukcu’s attorney. The second cease-and-desist from Gumrukcu’s attorney seemed to suggest that Sharesleuth was motivated by an anti-LGBT stance because of a previous story written by staffer Caleb Hannan and published on another site in 2014.
“In light of your history of malicious, anti-LGBT jouirnalism and your harassment in this case,” Gumrukcu’s attorney wrote, “we believe that we will be able to establish actual malice in your effort to defame Dr. Gumrukcu…please understand that our response to a defamatory and malicious smear campaign…will be personal and directed to ensuring, once and for all, that you are publicly discredited and unable to direct your hatefulness against anyone else.”
Roughly a month after that letter was sent, an anonymous proxy registered the website EssayAnneVanderbilt.com and the Twitter account @JusticeforDrV. The site and Twitter account are both inspired by a story published eight years ago by one of Sharesleuth’s staffers, Caleb Hannan. During reporting, the transgender woman at the center of the story took her own life.
There is no direct connection between the site, the Twitter feed, and Gumrukcu. However, the only non-bots that seem to have interacted with anything the Twitter account has posted are all based in Turkey.
And the site has similar language and themes to the cease-and-desists sent in Gumrukcu’s name. The site claims to have a movie in the works that “depicts Hannan’s real motives” and his “malicious actions”; “actions that, to this day, remain unpunished.”
“By helping to spread the word of this important story,” the site’s copy reads, “we hope that actions can finally be brought to stop Caleb Hannan from all public work that may potentially damage other lives.” A recently released trailer for the film includes headshots of Hannan, his wife, and for some reason a picture of the home they share with their children.
See the purported trailer here:
The idea that Hannan or Sharesleuth is motivated by a dislike of the LGBT community is, of course, absurd. Our direct messages and emails to the owners of the site and Twitter feed have thus far gone unanswered. And as of last night, the Twitter account no longer exists.
Chris Carey and Jim McNair contributed to this report
