worst case on the Norwood deal may be that Rossi burned down the building Norwood owned but he didn't have any insurance. It wasn't arson, just an accident with an early prototype e-cat that overheated (not all that hard ~ things run 1200 degrees). So he has to "stay in touch" with Norwood until he can figure out how to pay for losing his building.What a creative idea! Except that there is no indication that Rossi had even dreamed up this scheme way back then.
A much more likely theory is that Rossi had embezzled the money from the Army, and torched the factory to cover the fact that he didn't actually have any of the hardware he had supposedly bought. Also, that would destroy the prototype so it could never examined to see how Rossi faked the early demo.
There's an old joke about that: Two "legitimate" businessmen pass on the street. One says to the other, "I heard that your factory burned down! What a shame!" The other says, "Not so loud! That's next Tuesday!"
Rossi had no better luck in Italy finding someone to scale up.
The report points to too many solders in a device ~ which, checking with the former control board sales rep who hangs around here, that could be the only problem but it'd get the work rejected.