Guilty of selling Chinese gear as U.S. — possible security risk

A Long Island man has pleaded guilty to illegally selling Chinese-manufactured security and surveillance equipment to the U.S. military and passing off the wares as American-made — creating potential security risks, according to the feds.

Aventura Inc.’s customers included the Navy, the Air Force and the Department of Energy, but the “Made in USA” labels on their products were a lie — and the products, which included items like networked security turnstiles and night-vision cameras, had known cybersecurity vulnerabilities, prosecutors said.

Feds charged Aventura and the members of its senior management with fraud and other offenses in 2019. All of the individual suspects have already pleaded guilty, and on Tuesday, the company entered a guilty plea in Long Island Federal Court.

As part of the plea, the company will dissolve itself and forfeit more than $3 million in seized assets, including a 70-foot yacht, the Tranquilo, owned by CEO Jack Cabasso and his wife, Frances.

“For years, the defendants, while pretending to be a women-owned business, intentionally corrupted the U.S. military supply chain by passing off Chinese-made networked electronics with known vulnerabilities as American-made,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Tuesday.

Aventura made $112 million in sales revenue between 2008 and 2019, with more than $20 million coming from government contracts, the feds said.

Cabasso, the firm’s owner, took pains to hide the origins of the products it sold, pushing one Chinese company to remove its initials from its circuit boards, the feds allege.

He and another Aventura employee Wayne Marino, 43, exchanged emails with workers of a Chinese digital video equipment manufacturer, fretting that the Chinese company’s name was visible in server communications.

Aventura built a bogus “lab” to show visitors to its corporate headquarters in Commack, N.Y. Employees would show off a separate, off-limits building, telling visitors classified government work was happening inside. In fact, the company didn’t even own or occupy that building.

Cabasso went as far as emailing a contact with the federal General Services administration accusing 12 other GSA contractors of selling equipment from a Chinese manufacturer — even though he was importing and reselling goods from that same manufacturer, the feds said.

Aventura’s owner also falsely identified his wife as the company’s CEO in order to present it as a woman-owned small business, which would open the door to more government contracts, according to prosecutors.

Cabasso has a lengthy history of grand larceny and fraud convictions going back to the 1980s and was sentenced to 21 months behind bars in 1992 for tampering with a juror in an earlier federal fraud case against him.

The Cabassos are slated to be sentenced on July 24.