CALIFORNIA SCHEMING
REVEAL/THE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
A dirty secret in the world of California governmental regulation is that the perfect scheme doesn’t have to be all that perfect to lure customers and fend off state officials. It just needs to be sufficiently complex and the people behind it sufficiently persistent.
Few individuals have taken more advantage of this fact than Paul Boaventura-Delanoe, as the man who for decades earned notoriety under the name Paul Noe II now calls himself. Over the past several decades, Boaventura-Delanoe has engaged in a series of elaborate business schemes, usually targeting vulnerable customers—retirees, veterans, distressed homeowners—and typically ending in a regulatory crackdown. And each time, Boaventura-Delanoe has simply picked himself up and moved on to the next venture, deploying an uncanny instinct for finding the weakest links in California’s system of business regulation.
Boaventura-Delanoe’s latest reinvention involves an invention: a device called the JouleBox that’s marketed through a Van Nuys–based company named Eco-Gen Energy. Eco-Gen has touted the JouleBox as a miracle product, so energy efficient that it can amplify solar power, letting its users earn tax credits as “green energy producers” and income from surplus electricity fed into the energy grid. Experts who’ve reviewed the amplification claims say they defy basic laws of physics. But California’s processes for vetting eco-friendly technologies might be no match for Boaventura-Delanoe’s knack for finding new business opportunities.
THE VILLAGE AND THE MIRACLE MACHINE
On July 11, 2016, the village trustees of Johnson, Vermont, population 1,495, spoke with Boaventura-Delanoe via conference call to learn about the inner workings of the JouleBox.
The device, named for an English physicist whose
