O.C. Boiler Rooms Shut Down in Raids by State : Fraud: Action targets Southland operations pitching allegedly illegal wireless cable television ventures.

State authorities, trying to stem a fast-growing area of investment fraud, said Monday that they raided and shut down several telephone boiler-room operations in Orange, Los Angeles and San Diego counties selling allegedly illegal investments in wireless cable television ventures.

The raids were aimed primarily at Marrco Communications Inc. in Newport Beach, which now does business as Micro-Lite Television, and the offices of San Diego lawyer Richard A. Weintraub.

Those two operations, believed to be working separately, took as much as $30 million from more than 3,000 investors since August, 1992, said state Corporations Commissioner Gary S. Mendoza, whose agency conducted the raids in conjunction with officials of four other states.

Many of the investors, Mendoza said, were elderly people and others not sufficiently sophisticated to put their money in such risky ventures.

In a statement issued from its Newport Beach headquarters, however, Micro-Lite’s chairman, Jon E. Marple, insisted that his company is legitimate and predicted it will be “exonerated of any wrongdoing whatsoever.”

Marple, a principal of two other firms targeted by the state agency, called the raids “heavy-handed” and labeled his firm “a leader in the wireless cable industry.”

The selling of interests in wireless cable ventures around the country has become fertile ground for fraud in recent years, industry observers say. In November, Robert L. Schmidt, president of the Wireless Cable Assn., the industry trade group, called the scams “nefarious” and a “cancer on the industry.”

The field has attracted unscrupulous promoters in part because it is is relatively easy to enter and largely unregulated. Wireless cable differs from conventional cable television in that subscribers receive TV signals via an antenna-like device installed at their homes, rather than through physical cables.

Wireless cable has also become a fraud-ridden area because unscrupulous promoters have largely exhausted the possibilities of other types of investments. Furthermore, Southern California is traditionally known as the telemarketing fraud capital of the nation.

In the Orange and San Diego cases, promoters promised financial returns of more than 600% over five years at low risk, Mendoza said, an implausible return given that they were taking sales commissions of 38% to 50% of the money invested.

They also used television “infomercials,” cold-calling of prospective investors and other high-pressure sales techniques to entice people to invest, he said. Mendoza cautioned that a full determination of the legitimacy of the ventures--and any possible criminal charges--would have to await further examination of the materials seized from their offices.

“We have been active in the overall development and success of this dynamic new technological advance,” the Marple statement said, adding that Micro-Lite has been the general partner of two wireless ventures in Boston and Baton Rouge, La., which were later sold to third parties.

As it happens, Micro-Lite on Monday became a publicly traded company on the over-the-counter market, said spokesman Mario (Ike) Iacoviello. He said the company had acquired a shell corporation in a deal that allowed it to go public without an initial stock offering.

“We were funding through investors, but we have discontinued that operation,” he said. “We’re a clean company doing a clean business, as far as I know. We’re a legitimate telecommunications company.”

Marple was otherwise unavailable for comment Monday, as was Weintraub, the San Diego lawyer. Agency officials said that a firm associated with Weintraub received a “desist and refrain” order last June to cease selling virtually identical investments.

The raids were conducted by officials of the corporations department and regulatory bodies from Arizona, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois at 10 Orange and San Diego locations associated with Marple’s Marrco Communications of Newport Beach and with Weintraub.

Authorities raided Marple’s Newport Beach offices and two separate offices of a wholly owned subsidiary, MCC Ventures Group in Irvine. They also raided Weintraub’s law office and two other San Diego offices, as well as two Orange County firms associated with Weintraub: Emerging Technologies Group Inc. in Irvine and Microtech Communications Inc. in Costa Mesa. The remaining raids were on firms in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills that were connected to Weintraub.

Marple and Weintraub were not charged with a crime, though two telephone salespeople at Emerging Technologies were arrested and charged with a misdemeanor count of making telephone sales without having been registered with the state. They were identified by a Corporations Department spokeswoman as Charles A. Murphy and Collin J. Procton. They could not be reached for comment Monday.

Mendoza said his agency believes that the raided enterprises may have been violating state law by selling unlicensed securities--the cable system interests--and may also have misrepresented the nature of the investments.

The disposition of much of the $30 million is unknown, he said.

Iacoviello said that Marple has a “strong background” in communications and once worked for the Federal Communications Commission. “We’re real telecommunications people,” he said.

Micro-Lite sold its interest in a Boston wireless license to CAI Wireless Systems last fall for an undisclosed amount of CAI stock, he said. The company also owned a license for a wireless operation in Baton Rouge, La., but sold that a year ago. Weintraub eventually ended up with the license, said a corporations department spokeswoman.

Micro-Lite, Iacoviello said, now is “building up” Des Moines, Iowa, Erie, Pa., Colubbia, Ky., Augusta, Me., and Logan, Utah. But he acknowledged that the furthest the company has got in actually delivering wireless television signals is to “have equipment on order” for Des Moines. No subscriptions have been sold to anyone yet, he said.

The main advantage of wireless cable television is that it can serve customers unable or unwilling to hook up via cable. For the system operator, the technology has the virtue of being exempt from regulation by local municipalities, unlike cable TV.

The entire industry is an outgrowth of 1983 and 1985 decisions by the Federal Communications Commission to reallocate for commercial use 11 television channels previously reserved for video conferencing and educational television. The FCC distributed licenses for these and other reallocated channels on a first-come-first-served basis, meaning that the applicants needed to put up no money or show any qualifications to use them.

Once up and running, wireless cable systems can be legitimate competitors of conventional cable systems. Experts say, however, that wireless cable operators face the obstacle of accumulating rights to enough channels in any given locality to compete effectively.

“You can tell a lot about the legitimacy of a wireless venture by how many channels it has,” said Paul Sinderbrand, legislative counsel to the Wireless Cable Assn.

“In any market a wireless operator has to accumulate more than 20 channels” to be competitive, he said, noting that the licenses have to be bought from the holders or leased. “A lot of the bucket shops don’t have 20 channels; they may have four, and you can’t make a cable service out of four channnels of television.”

This complexity also makes it hard to assign a value to any given wireless venture, meaning that unscrupulous promoters can freely overstate their systems’ financial potential.

Times staff writer James S. Granelli in Costa Mesa contributed to this report.