I've posted this in 'The Chronicles of UK Paintball' because I'm responding to a post made on Facebook regarding an ill-fated marker called the Nemesis previously known as the Legend ... it's a sorry tale of deceit, fraud and threats of violence, all the necessary ingredients of a good story but in this case, it's not fiction, it happened, I'm sorry to say.
For those who have been directed here by the link I left on FB, you can skip the first few paragraphs because you will have already them .... for those who have come here via p8ntballer.com, then you can read the lot starting from the beginning below :-
A marker called the Nemesis, first saw the light of day in the mid-nineties when a guy called Nicky Chapple and his partner, Graham [I think] introduced a one-off prototype that heralded a new future for paintball - it certainly looked good for those times but there was one slight problem ... it fired ok but was prone to break balls; in the end, it broke Nicky Chapple's balls but that came further down the line ... and so here's the prelude to that unfortunate finale.
Nicky Chapple's partner, Graham, came from an air-gun background and so knew little about paintball but principally, he had designed air-guns before and was now moving into new ground but it wasn't as easy as he first thought.
He didn't know people in the paintball industry but this is where Nicky came in, he knew people in our world, one of whom was myself.
Nicky was the front man whose job it was to help finance the manufacture and eventual sale of the gun,
Graham had designed the Nemesis as a one-off and just needed to refine its design but paintball markers ain’t like slug-rifles and so he wasn’t best placed to sort the problems out.
I’ve little doubt that given enough time he woulda sorted it but he never got that time .. it ran out long before a solution was discovered.
Around that time, I owned an engineering business and I let them use some floor space in my factory to develop the one-off and also to begin manufacturing the parts that didn't need refining at that point, things like the handle, grips and some of its internals,
But, as time passed, they began running out of money ….. Fast !!!!
And that forced their hand because they were then approaching people asking them for financial help which indeed they got.
The marker looked good [for that time] and so people wanted a piece of it.
Unfortunately, when you are in this situation, desperate people tend to do desperate things and they didn't disappoint.
They ended up borrowing a lot of money from different people, including myself.
But they had borrowed too much because with each loan they managed to obtain from people, they handed over a percentage of the ownership of the marker itself such that if you totalled all the percentage allocations, it came to well over 100% ….
Not such a good deal if you are one of the shareholders.... I think at this point, Nicky was trying one last throw of the dice to get things back on track.
They were now in a desperate situation and doomed to fail.
Now, the people who loaned them the money all knew of each other [all were involved in paintball] but they didn’t know the others had loaned any money to the Nemesis guys who were frantically trying to get the gun manufactured.
Their descent into oblivion had begun …. Out of all the people who gave them money, all but two of them hadn’t tied their loan to a percentage of ownership of the marker, I was one of them and the other was …. ‘Pissed off’ … he was definitely that.
And he took what might be described as desperate methods to get his money back but I’ll come to that later.
Nicky Chapple, was an amiable type, 5fr 9ins tall and weighed about 11 stone [155 pounds] certainly not someone who would be thought of as a criminal, far from it in fact.
I had always marked his card as a decent enough chap but I was wrong ....
Unfortunately for Nick though, he was ill-equipped to deal with what was now looming on the horizon for him.
I had first gotten to know him because he'd asked me to help him out because a paintball site owner had been threatening him for some stupid reason that I can’t even remember why.
Nick wasn’t a fighting man by any stretch of the imagination and at the time, I was led to believe the guy threatening him was just being a bully. That situation got resolved and Nick became a friend of sorts ….
As I said, Nick wasn’t into anything physical like that and was grateful his problem had been resolved but fate then began to unravel in such a way that it left Nick with no place to manoeuvre, and the hounds begun smelling blood and closing in for their money.
Nick's house of cards was beginning to falter .....
Once people found out he had sold over 100% share in the gun on the back of loans handed over to him, people adopted various means to try and get their money back.
As I mentioned earlier, one of Nick’s benefactors didn’t just want to write his loan off and put it down to experience, he had felt betrayed by Nicky because Nick had told him so many lies that it had gone waaaay past the point where any friendship with him could offset what he’d done.
This guy then made a decision that would set the tone from then on. He financed some ‘help’ to retrieve his money from Nicky but there was no money left, it had all gone.
The creditor who went on to employ a 'debt collector' was ultimately disappointed because you really can't get blood out of a stone ... he tried but the only thing coming out of Nicky wasn't green, it was red, dark red.
Nicky had been introduced into the world of consequences whereby violence becomes the chosen currency but in that sense, Nicky couldn't compete and suffered the somewhat harsh penalties of such a shortcoming.
Nick had sweet fuhk-all to his name I'm afraid ... and was bracing himself for the inevitable onslaught of the remainder of those he had loaned money from.
I genuinely don’t know where the loaned money went but it wasn’t financing the marker, none of it came my way I know that much - somehow they had blown thousands of pounds but nobody could see where it went.
If I had known then what I know now, it may well have gone up Nicky’s nose but he certainly didn’t see the type to doing sniff.
I could have been wrong about that but hey, who nose :/…
Nick was now a marked man and was looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights, I genuinely felt sorry for him but I wasn’t prepared to help him anymore financially speaking, I had done my bit.
A few months after all that crap subsided, he came around my house and whilst he was sitting in my front room, he said, ‘Pete, thanks for the money you loaned me’ and then threw a roll of cash over to me.
He then added, ‘There’s more than what I borrowed; it’s a thank-you for helping me out’.
Now that might seem a generous gesture and it would have been had it not been for one slight technical point, as I started to casually count it I noticed something … the more I looked at the money, the more I realised that Monopoly money was probably worth more.
It was counterfeit but worse than that, it was badly done counterfeit money – Stevie 'fuhkin' Wonder could have spotted that much.
I looked up at Nicky, and with a smile on his face, he said something like, ‘The extra was just to say thanks’…. I kid you not, to this day, I don’t know if he had intended to pass it off as real but as soon as I threw it back at him, he laughingly added, ‘I know it’s fake but you got a lot there Pete’.
That’s not verbatim but close enough …. I was pissed off, not so much because he didn’t initially tell me it was fake but because he had brought it into my house.
He left, taking his Monopoly money with him … but like all good stories, it didn’t end there for Nicky.
I always kinda liked him but paying me his debt with hookie money was a step too far, even for him.
He never managed to repay his debt to me but I had written it off anyway because I knew he was up against it and had little to no money for anyone.
Nicky then evaporated from the paintball scene and all hopes of the marker being manufactured went with him … As I mentioned earlier, Nicky wasn’t the villainous type in the sense he wouldn’t really be able to survive in the criminal world because he didn’t possess the required credentials ....or so I thought !
He wasn’t a big guy, nor was he the vicious type, far from it in fact, and then one day, I got a phone call from a friend of mine and was directed toward this link :-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1178361/Jail-gang-members-smuggled-cocaine-Channel-Britain.html
When I read that, I was gob-smacked because I’ve come across people like those involved in that line of business, and Nick was nothing like them - I don’t know how the hell he got involved in all that but it seemed as though Nick wasn’t really one for working for a living and preferred the fast-track to paying his bills.
I think he’s got a couple of kids and so he’s paying a serious price for his decisions in life.
As far as the Nemesis marker goes?
It’s sad really because aesthetically, the gun looked really slick for those times but bottom line is always gonna be its reliability that sets the tone and they never managed to nail it.
They had ran out of money, ran out of options and eventually ran out of time …. Nicky had then moved into more dubious areas of commerce and eventually paid the price … sad really, because as I said, he was a likeable fellah but he obviously took one risk too many and paid the ultimate price of being estranged from his wife and kids for many years .... that's a price nobody wants to pay ........ but he knew the score, he just hoped he could buck the system and steer clear of getting Nicked .... he was wrong !!!
For those who have been directed here by the link I left on FB, you can skip the first few paragraphs because you will have already them .... for those who have come here via p8ntballer.com, then you can read the lot starting from the beginning below :-
The Nemesis [previously named the Legend]
A marker called the Nemesis, first saw the light of day in the mid-nineties when a guy called Nicky Chapple and his partner, Graham [I think] introduced a one-off prototype that heralded a new future for paintball - it certainly looked good for those times but there was one slight problem ... it fired ok but was prone to break balls; in the end, it broke Nicky Chapple's balls but that came further down the line ... and so here's the prelude to that unfortunate finale.
Nicky Chapple's partner, Graham, came from an air-gun background and so knew little about paintball but principally, he had designed air-guns before and was now moving into new ground but it wasn't as easy as he first thought.
He didn't know people in the paintball industry but this is where Nicky came in, he knew people in our world, one of whom was myself.
Nicky was the front man whose job it was to help finance the manufacture and eventual sale of the gun,
Graham had designed the Nemesis as a one-off and just needed to refine its design but paintball markers ain’t like slug-rifles and so he wasn’t best placed to sort the problems out.
I’ve little doubt that given enough time he woulda sorted it but he never got that time .. it ran out long before a solution was discovered.
Around that time, I owned an engineering business and I let them use some floor space in my factory to develop the one-off and also to begin manufacturing the parts that didn't need refining at that point, things like the handle, grips and some of its internals,
But, as time passed, they began running out of money ….. Fast !!!!
And that forced their hand because they were then approaching people asking them for financial help which indeed they got.
The marker looked good [for that time] and so people wanted a piece of it.
Unfortunately, when you are in this situation, desperate people tend to do desperate things and they didn't disappoint.
They ended up borrowing a lot of money from different people, including myself.
But they had borrowed too much because with each loan they managed to obtain from people, they handed over a percentage of the ownership of the marker itself such that if you totalled all the percentage allocations, it came to well over 100% ….
Not such a good deal if you are one of the shareholders.... I think at this point, Nicky was trying one last throw of the dice to get things back on track.
They were now in a desperate situation and doomed to fail.
Now, the people who loaned them the money all knew of each other [all were involved in paintball] but they didn’t know the others had loaned any money to the Nemesis guys who were frantically trying to get the gun manufactured.
Their descent into oblivion had begun …. Out of all the people who gave them money, all but two of them hadn’t tied their loan to a percentage of ownership of the marker, I was one of them and the other was …. ‘Pissed off’ … he was definitely that.
And he took what might be described as desperate methods to get his money back but I’ll come to that later.
Nicky Chapple, was an amiable type, 5fr 9ins tall and weighed about 11 stone [155 pounds] certainly not someone who would be thought of as a criminal, far from it in fact.
I had always marked his card as a decent enough chap but I was wrong ....
Unfortunately for Nick though, he was ill-equipped to deal with what was now looming on the horizon for him.
I had first gotten to know him because he'd asked me to help him out because a paintball site owner had been threatening him for some stupid reason that I can’t even remember why.
Nick wasn’t a fighting man by any stretch of the imagination and at the time, I was led to believe the guy threatening him was just being a bully. That situation got resolved and Nick became a friend of sorts ….
As I said, Nick wasn’t into anything physical like that and was grateful his problem had been resolved but fate then began to unravel in such a way that it left Nick with no place to manoeuvre, and the hounds begun smelling blood and closing in for their money.
Nick's house of cards was beginning to falter .....
Once people found out he had sold over 100% share in the gun on the back of loans handed over to him, people adopted various means to try and get their money back.
As I mentioned earlier, one of Nick’s benefactors didn’t just want to write his loan off and put it down to experience, he had felt betrayed by Nicky because Nick had told him so many lies that it had gone waaaay past the point where any friendship with him could offset what he’d done.
This guy then made a decision that would set the tone from then on. He financed some ‘help’ to retrieve his money from Nicky but there was no money left, it had all gone.
The creditor who went on to employ a 'debt collector' was ultimately disappointed because you really can't get blood out of a stone ... he tried but the only thing coming out of Nicky wasn't green, it was red, dark red.
Nicky had been introduced into the world of consequences whereby violence becomes the chosen currency but in that sense, Nicky couldn't compete and suffered the somewhat harsh penalties of such a shortcoming.
Nick had sweet fuhk-all to his name I'm afraid ... and was bracing himself for the inevitable onslaught of the remainder of those he had loaned money from.
I genuinely don’t know where the loaned money went but it wasn’t financing the marker, none of it came my way I know that much - somehow they had blown thousands of pounds but nobody could see where it went.
If I had known then what I know now, it may well have gone up Nicky’s nose but he certainly didn’t see the type to doing sniff.
I could have been wrong about that but hey, who nose :/…
Nick was now a marked man and was looking like a rabbit caught in the headlights, I genuinely felt sorry for him but I wasn’t prepared to help him anymore financially speaking, I had done my bit.
A few months after all that crap subsided, he came around my house and whilst he was sitting in my front room, he said, ‘Pete, thanks for the money you loaned me’ and then threw a roll of cash over to me.
He then added, ‘There’s more than what I borrowed; it’s a thank-you for helping me out’.
Now that might seem a generous gesture and it would have been had it not been for one slight technical point, as I started to casually count it I noticed something … the more I looked at the money, the more I realised that Monopoly money was probably worth more.
It was counterfeit but worse than that, it was badly done counterfeit money – Stevie 'fuhkin' Wonder could have spotted that much.
I looked up at Nicky, and with a smile on his face, he said something like, ‘The extra was just to say thanks’…. I kid you not, to this day, I don’t know if he had intended to pass it off as real but as soon as I threw it back at him, he laughingly added, ‘I know it’s fake but you got a lot there Pete’.
That’s not verbatim but close enough …. I was pissed off, not so much because he didn’t initially tell me it was fake but because he had brought it into my house.
He left, taking his Monopoly money with him … but like all good stories, it didn’t end there for Nicky.
I always kinda liked him but paying me his debt with hookie money was a step too far, even for him.
He never managed to repay his debt to me but I had written it off anyway because I knew he was up against it and had little to no money for anyone.
Nicky then evaporated from the paintball scene and all hopes of the marker being manufactured went with him … As I mentioned earlier, Nicky wasn’t the villainous type in the sense he wouldn’t really be able to survive in the criminal world because he didn’t possess the required credentials ....or so I thought !
He wasn’t a big guy, nor was he the vicious type, far from it in fact, and then one day, I got a phone call from a friend of mine and was directed toward this link :-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1178361/Jail-gang-members-smuggled-cocaine-Channel-Britain.html
When I read that, I was gob-smacked because I’ve come across people like those involved in that line of business, and Nick was nothing like them - I don’t know how the hell he got involved in all that but it seemed as though Nick wasn’t really one for working for a living and preferred the fast-track to paying his bills.
I think he’s got a couple of kids and so he’s paying a serious price for his decisions in life.
As far as the Nemesis marker goes?
It’s sad really because aesthetically, the gun looked really slick for those times but bottom line is always gonna be its reliability that sets the tone and they never managed to nail it.
They had ran out of money, ran out of options and eventually ran out of time …. Nicky had then moved into more dubious areas of commerce and eventually paid the price … sad really, because as I said, he was a likeable fellah but he obviously took one risk too many and paid the ultimate price of being estranged from his wife and kids for many years .... that's a price nobody wants to pay ........ but he knew the score, he just hoped he could buck the system and steer clear of getting Nicked .... he was wrong !!!
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