Quote:
Originally Posted by shhh
Heres another updated article and somehow puck even comes off worse in this one
- lease says tenant is responsible for all building repairs
- landlord has a $125,000 judgment against puck for being in rent arrears since fall 2017
- they are going to rightfully seize the casino assets to pay his debts
- puck is refusing to comply acting indignant as usual claiming they are “stealing his life savings” for expecting to get the money he owes them
https://www.unionleader.com/news/bus...e94e0c466.html
I read the court transcript he posted. My first takeaway is how childish and unprofessional he comes off. It's one thing to do that on Facebook but in a court where you're trying to seek relief? Come on. Apparently he needs headphones to hear, so they give them to him and throughout the beginning he responds fine. The minute the landlords' attorney begins to question him, he goes deaf and makes them repeat themselves over and over. He plays stupid when asked simple questions about what is in the lease knowing full well they have it there so they can read from it.
The other thing I got out of it was wondering how in the hell he lasted 20 years in real estate development and construction. He inspected the property himself (hope it was worth saving a few hundred dollars with a professional inspector). The property was basically described by everyone as dilapidated. Parking lot overgrown and needing to be graded and repaved, building not touched since the 60s, etc. Yet somehow he thought he was only going to need to spend $500k to rehab it? All that experience for 20 years and he signs a lease that requires him to pay for all repairs, improvements, etc with no cap? Supposedly he was well versed in the charitable gaming licensing requirements before he meets the landlords, yet allowed a clause in the lease which specifically says the landlords are not required to sign any permits or applications? 20 years experience and he is comfortable taking non-descript verbal promises about it being ok to not pay rent for a year or getting some kind of consideration from the landlords for all the money he's spending improving their property?
And then his assertion that Manchester and Chasers owners approached the landlords through an agent to express interest in the property should Puck fail. Even if that were true, I'm sure it isn't the first time a property owner with a struggling tenant was approached by another business expressing interest. And even if the landlords did intentionally refuse to sign off on Puck's gaming application to shut him down in May 2018 (doubtful) so they could rent the space to someone else, why would that be so evil? He hasn't paid rent in a year! If I were the landlord I wouldn't have given him from February (when they were supposedly approached) to May, he would have received a demand and an eviction notice sometime in February or March. And they didn't try to evict him until it was apparent his license was being revoked. At that point, what expectation would they have that he was ever going to pay them?
Rent is stated as $10k per month, Puck says the utilities are $15-18k per month for a total of at least $25k each month just to run the building. Yet the charitable gaming newsletter says charities got $6k in November from Cheers. That is after paying Cheers $750/day for using the facility. So the total revenue should be somewhere around $67,000 for the month. Since they were closed the first 7 days of November, that means one could expect about $91,000 gross revenue if open the full month and about $8600 going to charities (less than $300/day) while Puck should have about $85,000 in revenue leaving $60,000 with which to pay staff and other bills each month (if November business is typical). All this without counting food and beverage revenue. So why not pay what you owe? And he certainly was busier before being closed down for the license issue, so why not pay at least part of your rent back then? In the court transcript the judge only ordered him to pay $2309/week. That's just the ongoing rent, they weren't even making him come current on the past due! So strange.
Oh and for good measure, caught him in another lie. In his "closed for roof repair" post last week he indicated there are no roof drains. Yet in the planning board minutes from before they opened his agent indicated they were completely reworking the roof drain system so that it wouldn't flow into the abutting wetlands. So there were drains and he removed them? Or there are drains up there and he lied about there not being any?
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