BOCA RATON — The superstar clients of an exclusive private jet service may have had sensitive financial data stolen earlier this year by two company employees in Boca Raton who made off with client lists and banking information, police say.
Boca Raton cops have arrested the two former employees of Halcyon Jets, a top-tier aircraft services broker that serves such A-listers as singer Kanye West, film director Spike Lee and basketball star Shaquille O'Neal.
They say the two men — Christian Matteis, 37, of Boca Raton and Leonard Tambasco, 27, of Boynton Beach — decided to open a rival jet service and made off earlier this year with furniture, office equipment, client information and financial data from the company's Boca Raton office.
It was not clear Friday how many of Halcyon's clients were affected or whether the clients' information had been recovered. A company spokesman declined to comment and a spokeswoman for the Boca Raton Police Department said she was not familiar with details of the investigation.
But an arrest report says that the two men had decided to start a rival company called Atlantis Jets and tried to take Halcyon's well-to-do clients with them. One longtime client told investigators he had been contacted by both Matteis and Tambasco in an attempt to solicit his business.
Halcyon's chief executive officer, Gregory Cohen, contacted Boca Raton cops in May, saying that the company had been defrauded by its own employees.
He told police that Matteis had been hired two years earlier as chief operating officer of the company's Boca Raton office but that in recent months he had stopped returning phone calls and communicating with the New York headquarters.
In early May, a sales employee called Cohen and asked why Matteis, Tambasco and an office manager were removing furniture and supplies from the office, according to the arrest report
That prompted Cohen to fly to Boca Raton, where he found that "virtually everything in that office had been removed" — including file cabinets that held clients' information, the report said.
Matteis and Tambasco were arrested Thursday at Atlantis Jets on Airport Road on charges of grand theft, theft of trade secrets, organized scheme to defraud and computer tampering.
They were released Friday on bond.
