Judged a Grifter in Canada, He Fights for Anchoring Rights in Florida (Video)
Wally Moran Disses Boating Groups, Will Seek Donations
Moran Leaves a Message
Canadian Wally Moran portrays himself a champion for anchoring rights, fighting hostile forces in Florida government, but before he bought a boat and came south, a judge in his hometown found that Moran had participated in a scheme to cheat elderly retirees of their savings.
Later, Moran made history as the only member of the Seven Seas Cruising Association to have ever been ejected from the organization after he was caught “fraudulently” acquiring members’ personal data. He was ousted after a hearing on Feb. 21, 2019.1 This is what the SSCA leadership wrote in an email to members when it first learned about Moran’s scheme:
WARNING! The member website of the SSCA— that includes all of our email addresses, member phone numbers, and other identifying information—is believed to have been fraudulently accessed and likely scraped. At minimum, a fraudulent email has now been generated to you and all our membership claiming it is from the SSCA trying to entice you to go to a false website on a Facebook venue. Initial digital forensic investigation shows evidence of it being crafted two months ago by Wally Moran.
Now, Moran has announced a new campaign to resist two pieces of possible legislation—no-anchoring zones within up to 5,000 feet of Florida port facilities and a second unspecified measure that would further limit anchoring at Miami Beach. Moran’s manifesto2 notes that he will need “some people to do some fundraising.”
Readers are encouraged to examine source materials for this story available in the footnotes for download.
Moran is self-appointed president of the Cruisers Rights Network of North America (CRNNA). He said the group will host an organizational meeting sometime in January at West Palm Beach, whose government is supposedly behind one of the latest anchoring limitation ideas.
According to the CRNNA website (which Google has flagged as “not secure”), the organization was incorporated in Florida and “in the process of applying for 501(3)(c) status with the IRS which we anticipate this will be accomplished in May of 2020.”
According to the Florida Secretary of State’s Office, the corporation was disolved in September 2022. There is no evidence that it ever achieved IRS non-profit status.
Retirees Cheated
Back around 2000, Moran was publisher of SeniorsPlus, a newspaper serving retirees in the city of Barrie, Ontario and the surrounding county. According to court records and news accounts, Moran and two accomplices used the newspaper to lure elderly people seeking safe investments into a fraudulent investment scheme.
The accomplices faced criminal charges. Moran agreed to cooperate with prosecutors against them and was not charged. But, when a 92-year-old retired Scots bus driver named Alex Carrigan sued to recover his money, the judge explained why Moran was just as guilty. From his ruling:
Defendants Walter J. Moran and SeniorsPlus Newspapers are liable, among other things, in damages to the plaintiff in fraud. This is not simply a case of a newspaper merely taking an advertisement and being careless about the facts. In this case, Moran actively participated in the fraudulent scheme in using his publication’s position of trust with elderly readers by falsely representing the scheme, meeting the prospects, encouraging them to pay into the scheme, acting as the continuing contact person thereafter, being present for the pitch to obtain money, seeking to personally and corporatively profit from it, and later trying to cover by denying to the plaintiff’s son and daughter-in-law that he even knew much about it at all.
Detective Carson stated that the only reason that Mr. Moran was not charged with fraud in addition to Peacock and Anderson was that the prosecution needed a witness with knowledge of the whole scheme, and that was Moran. Detective Carson had recommended to the prosecutor that he be charged.
The two accomplices pleaded guilty in criminal court. Here is how the Packet and Times newspaper of Orillia described the judgement3 in the civil case against Moran:
Justice Peter Howden ordered Moran to pay $33,300 in damages for fraudulent representation and $30,000 in aggravated damages because of the advanced age of the victim and the 56 years he worked to accrue the lost investment. He also ordered Moran to pay $25,000 in punitive damages.
Moran was involved in another scheme in which Canadians were convinced to invest in dilapidated properties in Canton, Ohio.4 According to the Ontario Financial Service Tribune enforcement agency, Moran pleaded guilty to a charge of acting as a mortgage broker while unregistered. “A fine of $5,000 was imposed, after the court took into account Mr. Moran's present financial circumstances,” the Tribunal reported in the third quarter of 2003.
Available public record does not indicate whether Moran paid the fine. Alex Carrigan’s lawyer Peter Thompson told Loose Cannon that Moran left Canada on a boat bound for the U.S., without ever paying Carrigan or his family.
Also in 2003, an investigative Canadian TV journalist named Dale Goldhawk published a book called “Getting What You Deserve: The Adventures of Goldhawk Fights Back.” The book was about the various scams that Goldhawk had exposed during his career. He devoted a chapter to Wally Moran.5
Disses Boating Groups
In his latest manifesto, Moran derided the coalition of legitimate boating groups which had come together to fight unreasonable new limitations on anchoring—BoatUS, the American Great Loop Cruisers Association, Marine Trawler Owners Association, DeFever Yachts and Waterway Guide. Together, they constitute a lobbying group called the Boaters’ Rights Coalition.
“Over the years, this group of well meaning organizations has allowed far too many of our rights to disappear through well meaning, but badly misguided actions,” Moran wrote.
Most, if not all of these organizations had signaled to Moran over the years that they wanted no alliances with him. Their leaders had concluded that his in-your-face style of advocacy was counterproductive.
Miami Beach waterfront property owners were never sympathetic to cruisers in the first place, but Moran’s confrontation tactics appears to have hardened their opposition and helped unite the entire South Florida legislative delegation against the anchoring-rights cause.
(Interviewed over the years by Loose Cannon, leaders of these groups did not want their names used because of Moran’s history of threatening behavior, examples of which follow.)
‘Gut You Like a Fish’
Thompson, the lawyer who won the judgement for Alex Carrigan, told Loose Cannon that he was compelled to obtain the Canadian equivalent of a restraining order because of Moran’s threats of violence against him after the trial. At the time, Thomson was suffering from the first stages of Parkinson’s Disease.
Before his past became known, Moran had worked as a contractor for SAIL magazine leading its fall “SAIL the ICW” rally from Chesapeake Bay to South Florida. At one point, SAIL added cruising guide authors Mark and Diana Doyle and marine journalist Tom Hale to the “Sail the ICW” team. SAIL executives thought the event needed to be better organized. Apparently, Moran resented the help.
Note to Wally Moran: If you would like a chance to rebut any of the assertions in this article, please begin by answering two questions: 1. Why haven’t you apologized to the family of Alex Carrigan? And, 2. When do you intend to obey the judge’s ruling and pay the family?
Mark Doyle said that Moran at one point threatened to “gut him like a fish.” Moran told Hale he would “roll him down like a rug and piss all over him.” And those weren’t even specified as the reasons that SAIL terminated it’s relationship with Moran soon after. Too much drama in general—Moran was just “bad for the brand.”
Early this year, Moran put on a collared shirt and tie and traveled to Tallahassee to testify before the committee considering a bill that would restrict anchoring at Miami Beach. The committee was unswayed by his testimony, and its chairman chastised Moran for spending his alloted speaking time trying to attack the bill’s sponsor, which you can watch in this video:
For years, Moran engaged in an online feud with Jeff Siegel, creator of Active Captain, a crowdsourced online cruising tool. Their emnity culminated when Moran accused Siegel of cyberstalking him and sought a protective order. Siegel hired a lawyer to fight the allegation. The venue was a Florida state court in Titusville before Judge Michelle Baker.
Siegel later recounted the moment when Moran realized the proceedings were not going his way. From a Siegel Facebook post:
With Moran on the witness stand being asked question after question that was objected to by my attorney and sustained by the judge, Moran grew angrier and angrier.
I had warned my attorney that Moran has a thin coating of charm with a deep layer of anger and apparent violence underneath. If you've seen any of Moran's argumentative writing, you know exactly what I mean.
On the stand, Moran cracked through that thin charm coating. His face turned beet red. His hands clenched into fists. He turned to the judge and yelled at her. I watched the bailiff move forward to get closer between Moran and the judge.
I saw the officer place his hand on his weapon. Moran calmed down, and the bailiff started to move back. The judge asked the bailiff to remain forward.
Siegel’s reaction to Moran’s latest gambit:
Wally’s rude and immature behavior seems to only hurt the cruising community. Anchoring rights would be better protected by more mature actions by others without the baggage that Mr. Moran appears to carry in bulk.
Early this year, around the time of his Tallahassee testimony, Moran was in South Florida conferring with the Miami Beach liveaboard community that was the target of the legislation. One of them, Carlos Leon, had belped form a loose organization representing about 40 local liveaboards. They had raised about $6,000 in a Go-Fund-Me campaign in case they needed to hire a lawyer.
Leon said he was unaware at the time of Moran’s record in Canada and with the SSCA. He described the friction that soon developed between them. “I thought he wanted control of the Go-Fund-Me. He was pushing, and I said, ‘I’m not going to put any money in the hands of someone I didn’t know’,” Leon said.
Moran headed north in his 34-foot sailboat Gypsy Wind and hasn’t spoken to him since, Leon said.
Below is an audio transcript from the SSCA hearing that resulted in Wally Moran’s ouster from the organization:
Wally Moran published the following on Facebook recently:
We are aware of two major pieces of proposed legislation, the 5000 foot setoff from seaports being pushed by West Palm Beach that we have reported here earlier, and another from Miami Beach for which we have no details as yet. Just the 5000 foot setoff, if passed and implemented, will cause complete chaos for anchoring in Florida as it will affect EVERY seaport in the state, and those locations are where most boaters are anchored.
Miami Beach is a basket case situation—they despise anchored boats and whatever bill they want will be a disaster for us. These bills cannot be allowed to pass, but if we are to stop them, your help is needed. One of the major issues is that the current, so called "anchoring coalition," made up of BoatUS, SSCA, AGLCA, MTOA, DeFever Yachts and Waterway Guide, isn't up to the task. Over the years, this group of well meaning organizations has allowed far too many of our rights to disappear through well meaning, but badly misguided actions.
We need new and more vigilant, proactive actors working to protect our right to anchor in Florida. We need people who aren't observing this fight from their offices in DC or elsewhere, we need people like you who are on the water, who are a part of this community and who truly understand just what the fight is about.
Therefore, we are holding a meeting in West Palm Beach in early January to discuss ways and means to protect our rights.You're invited. Details will follow very soon.This may be the most important boating meeting you will ever attend.
In the meantime, I need some volunteers to deal with some non glamourous jobs so that this meeting will be a success. We need someone who can be in WPB who can video the entire event, set up a sound system, do the entire AV thing including setting it up for ZOOM to the world. I have NO idea what's involved, but I'm sure someone reading this does, and I need you.
I need several someones to contact the various boating groups, yacht clubs, etc. to inform them of this event and encourage them to send a representative.I need several more someone's to contact media and industry groups to inform them of this event and send a rep to join us.I need someone to arrange and deal with the venue—and to research a suitable venue for this. I need some people to do some fundraising.
At some point, I'm going to need people to attend hearings, etc. in Tallahassee, contact legislators, etc.And I'm sure I'll need a few more people for stuff we haven't thought of yet. You joined this group to keep up with what's going on in Florida anchoring, and now it's time to get more involved. We need you to help protect your rights to anchor in Florida.
PM me at Wally Moran or send me an email at wally@CRNNA.com and let me know what you can do to help make this meeting a success.
We can win this fight. We WILL win this fight.
Wally Moran has been running his little enterprises for years. In an online conversation with him a couple of years ago I challenged his legal presence in our country since he seems to always be around and is doing business here but is Canadian lwhen he admitted that he does not have a work visa. He responded by calling me vulgar names and blocking me.
By his "so called" actions for boater's rights and his "Pied Piper" style of sailing caravans (by charging inexperienced sailors' big money to follow him down the ICW known as "Fun in the Sun"), Moran has built an almost "cult like" following of naive people".
I believe that Moran leverages this to grow his online sales business of Sea Water Pro water makers and Mantus Anchors. It should be noted that US immigration law forbids the conduct of any business without a valid US work visa.
Your article is the first step in starting the process of rooting out this illegal alien.
It starts with his suppliers, CBP and most importantly, Moran's own pathetic defense of his actions online by claiming so many are conspiring against him.
Is Moran also a US citizen ? If not how does he get to spend so much time in the US ?
As Canadian Citizens it cost my wife and I $1100 to get a 3 month extension of our mandated 6 month limit in the US. This paid for an FBI check, fingerprinting and retinal scanning ... PS. Neither of us has any criminal record or civil judgements against us,