#name stolen from Joseph Conrad
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nevesmose · 9 months ago
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Syndroma Holmiensis
Things are different now. That was the last advice Mikulin's father had given him. The Imperium is the biggest gang on the whole planet. The Night Haunter's gang. Stick with them and you'll do fine, son.
His father had lost an eye in a streetfight years ago and the bribe to fit an augmetic was far beyond their means. Mikulin tried to focus twice as much on the other eye instead, solid depthless black like those of every other Nostraman, as it gleamed with something like desperation combined with raw avarice.
Was it hope, he wondered? Something so rare on the Sunless World that they'd had to steal the Gothic word to describe it exactly. Whatever sibiliant kennings and poetic phrases his ancestors had used to subtly imply the possibility of a better future were gone now. Inefficient in comparison to the language of their new overlords.
Most of the time Mikulin found it hard to care overmuch. His ancestors had mined adamantium and murdered one another in the dark for century upon century and achieved nothing. Built nothing. Created nothing but further generations of void-eyed killers.
Until the Night Haunter came. He who flayed and freed Nostramo, pinned the planet down and eviscerated it inch by inch, block by block, heart by heart and corpse by corpse until nothing was left but order and a full stomach.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
It was natural for him to hold both thoughts simultaneously. He loved and feared his father too, didn't he? A strong provider, working shifts in the mine when the work was there and doing what he had to when it wasn't. But also a monster when he'd been paid and given the money straight back to the company bar.
When he was old enough to work they moved to the nearest great city, Nostramo Secundus. Dear Grey Place, the Adamantite City, a hive built into a vast outcropping of ore-bearing rock that jutted out into the roiling black ocean.
His father had called it a promotion, but the truth came out eventually. The mine bosses were scared that his drunken actions, his too-public offences against the new rules of society, would bring the Night Haunter to them. And the Night Haunter rarely found just one criminal worthy of punishment when paying a visit.
Far safer, therefore, to send the problem away into the teeming masses of the nearest hive city. Losing the work had destroyed his father but Secundus gave Mikulin a new razorgang to run with and all the freedom he was brave enough to steal. And he had the Night Haunter to thank for it.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
Mikulin cared little and knew less of the other demigods who had come later, surrounded by an inferno of blinding light and guarding their father the Emperor. Such events, occurring so far away in the capital, were of little importance to remote grey Secundus. Only the Night Haunter mattered because time and distance meant nothing to him. He could be anywhere on Nostramo, seeing and hearing all in his domain and dispensing punishment to the high and the low alike.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
Then the news reached Secundus that the Night Haunter had left to join his father and brothers in conquering the galaxy for humanity. Mikulin had looked up at the coldly glinting stars and felt a twist of envious fury in his gut. They had taken Nostramo's king from his people and wouldn't even use his name.
Konrad Curze, the Emperor had called him. An alien name from an alien being. Mikulin knew it was the Night Haunter who Nostramo's first Astartes followed into the void, him and no other.
They had tested Mikulin once for suitability. Just put your hand in the box on the servitor's chest. A brief sting and a few moments later the verdict was given - negative. Elevated hereditary cancer risk and other minor genetic flaws not meeting the threshold of mutation, the magos biologis announced before moving on to the next prospective recruit.
Stick with the Night Haunter's gang, his father had said. So Mikulin had apprenticed himself to the Administratum, serving the new Planetary Governor appointed in the Night Haunter's place. One of the first natives to join, they said.
Natives grated in his mind like two ends of a broken bone. We weren't natives before you came, before you took him away. We were ourselves. But things are different now.
The first time he really saw offworlders up close he'd just about managed not to stare, or grimace in the closed-off Nostraman way which, to the initiated, was just as expressive as a scream. Someone has put coins in your eyes, he'd thought irrationally, or broken glass in different colours. It happened sometimes as punishment for people who sold out their gangmates or saw things they shouldn't have.
It took him a long while to accept that it was just how they were, the same way they walked the street wrong, slowly, looking at the sights around them like prey. Behaving like that would get a Nostraman killed but, collectively, there seemed to be an indulgence for offworlders.
They didn't know what the people said or thought about them and they didn't have to care. Often Mikulin found himself hating them, hating their accents and their language at the same time as he learned to mimic both to rise up in their organisation.
The outsiders planned great things for Nostramo in the Imperium. We can make this world so much better, someone with eyes the colour of ice melting into slush told him. Mikulin said nothing.
They built Nostramo Secundus a botanical garden to rival any city in the Imperium. A vast adamantium-ribbed dome of glass filled with a kaleidoscope of verdant colour and shape tended by specialised horticultural servitors, the whole edifice illuminated by numberless ultraviolet and visible-spectrum lamps to allow the plantlife to thrive even on the Sunless World.
On the wall surrounding their creation, where Mikulin had to pass every day to reach the Administratum complex, the offworlders had commissioned some famed remembrancer to paint a mural of a lush, rolling Terran landscape lit by a rising sun and bearing the title LET NOSTRAMO FLOURISH.
The people of Nostramo Secundus hated it and the building it adorned. The cost of entry was high enough to exclude all but the wealthiest and every Nostraman visitor had to wear thick eyeshades or else suffer hours of headache and near-blindness, all just to look at plants. Mystifying.
Mikulin had access to the records of just how much power, water and heat the gardens drew away from the rest of the city. How many hab-tenements could the same resources support instead? He had calculated it once on a scrap of parchment and the answer sickened him.
The Night Haunter would have judged the creation in an instant, razed it to the ground and impaled the builders among the wreckage. Eventually Mikulin came to realise that the gardens were never really intended for him or any other native, only to improve the lot of the offworlders condemned to serve the Imperium on dark forbidding Nostramo.
Once, without thinking, he'd saluted an Administratum superior in the Nostraman way, hand clawed over his heart to say may it be torn out if I am untrue. The condescension and pity in their eyes had struck him like a physical blow.
Damn you all, he thought, eyes stinging with a shame he couldn't begin to process. Take your costume-jewellery eyes and your costume-jewellery Imperium and leave us alone like we always should have been. Our world was already better. We were already better.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
Mikulin grew old slowly, the decay held back by juvenats and technology for as long as the Administratum had the budgetary headroom to provide. Nostramo seemed to rot quickly in comparison. The nobility and oligarchs reappeared with new names and faces but the same blood in their veins, the same corruption in their hearts, and no Night Haunter any more to excise them like a chirurgeon.
He didn't remember exactly when it happened, but one work cycle he realised that the Imperium was no longer the biggest gang on the planet. Work orders, requisitions, suicide statistics, every item of paperwork that used to filter upwards to the Administratum had slowed to a trickle and eventually just stopped.
Mikulin continued to attend the office and the Administratum continued to pay him, but in reality the alternative government of the gangs and nobles had slipped into place like a knife between ribs to quietly usurp both their functions.
Eventually the last offworlders left Secundus. No one would say whether it was voluntary. Their replacements were black-eyed and loyal only to the shifting politics of the warlords they followed. They funnelled the city's sparse resources to pay debts and shore up alliances before the newer, hungrier gangs overthrew them and were consumed in turn by their own children in the incestuous reproductive cycle that was as irredeemably Nostraman as the smog filling up their lungs.
Through it all, Mikulin of the Administratum was present, observed and said nothing. They treated him with something like respect - that rarest of things, an elderly Nostraman.
In the end it was Mikulin who finally closed down the botanical gardens. Let the plants rot and the gangs split the proceeds however they pleased. He left and went back to his tenement, hobbling slowly the same way he did everything else now, and went past that accursed mural once again.
It had been smashed and defaced countless times, the people of Nostramo Secundus giving vent to their fury at the image of an idyllic fantasy they would never possess. The rising sun was blotted out by an arterial splash of black paint and, above it all, someone had scrawled new blood-red lettering to change the painting's title.
LET NOSTRAMO PERISH.
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mr880fan · 2 years ago
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San Francisco’s Heart of Darkness
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Get Your Patriot911 E-newsletter In Your E mail Inbox For those who search “San Francisco crime spike” on the web, you can see numerous tales—going again years—about how town’s issues are not any huge deal or are on account of forces past the management of its policymakers. The issue isn’t crime, it’s crime rhetoric, they are saying. However rhetoric didn’t trigger a cascade of companies to shut and flee town. I lately wrote about how San Francisco’s insurance policies—born of the left-wing ideology that drives town’s management class—are main on to its woes. The Metropolis by the Bay is on a road to perdition of its personal making. Just a few current information studies illustrate that circumstances more and more are getting worse in a metropolis that—by geography and sheer wealth—ought to be one of the vital fascinating on the planet to stay in. As an example, the statistics on crime and different emergency calls on the downtown Entire Meals retailer that closed lately had been simply unreal. In keeping with a Fox Business report, the Entire Meals on Market Avenue logged 568 emergency calls within the 13 months because it opened. It wasn’t simply run-of-the-mill crime, both. Police studies paint an image of mayhem and anarchy. “Male machete is again,” learn one 911 name, in accordance with Fox Enterprise. “One other safety guard was simply assaulted,” learn one other report.  Extra from Fox Enterprise: One name famous that safety guards on the retailer had been assaulted by a knife-wielding man, who then sprayed workers with a fireplace extinguisher. One man reportedly overdosed from fentanyl and methamphetamine within the lavatory in September, in accordance with the Occasions. At the least 14 individuals had been arrested through the 13 months the Entire Meals within the downtown was open, which included severe fees of grand theft and battery, in accordance with the outlet. Apparently, going right into a Entire Meals in San Francisco was a bit like a journey into Joseph Conrad’s “Coronary heart of Darkness,” the place the ugliness of humanity is revealed as civilization is peeled away. I don’t suppose that’s the environment Entire Meals usually goals for. It isn’t simply Entire Meals and Nordstrom which can be closing store. A slew of different big brand stores are shuttering in downtown San Francisco due to the deteriorating avenue circumstances and crime. “As of at the moment, a complete of 20 retailers have shuttered shops or introduced closures within the Union Sq. space since 2020, up from 17 only a week in the past,” the San Francisco Customary reported Tuesday. The shops sticking it out are taking virtually absurd precautions to guard workers and stock. The Goal retailer within the Mission District has locked down entire sections on account of rampant shoplifting. Locking up particular, incessantly stolen gadgets is turning into frequent in lots of retail shops, however that is on an entire different stage. Simply watch this video the New York Submit placed on Twitter: Good luck getting greater than an merchandise or two. The issue for Goal and different retailers is that clients get exasperated with the inconvenience and order fundamental items on-line. It’s higher to pay a couple of further bucks for delivery than to attend round in a retailer for a clerk to open a case for shaving cream or to get sucker-punched by a deranged, drug-addled lunatic in Aisle 5. Regardless of these apparent issues, native and nationwide media—doing their greatest to not make Democrat-run cities look unhealthy—proceed to make excuses for San Francisco.  The New York Occasions described San Francisco’s points as “intractable,” as if excessive and escalating crime in huge cities is a tough rule of the universe. “These woes are not any historic, unsolvable mysteries of the human situation,” countered a New York Post editorial. The issue goes again to San Francisco District Lawyer George Gascón, who served from January 2011 till October 2019, and successor Chesa Boudin, who served from January 2020 till July 2022, when he was recalled by voters. The recall demonstrated that there are signs of sanity even in San Francisco, however the metropolis has retained most of the lawless insurance policies of the 2 males’s tenures. In fact, Democrats have presided within the mayor’s workplace since 1968. The newest, Mayor London Breed, hasn’t precisely introduced wise leadership to the office. She backed important cuts to the police finances in 2021 earlier than turning round and begging for more money to alleviate the “staffing scarcity” in regulation enforcement. Certain, it’s simple to get caught up in sensationalist headlines, however the issues in San Francisco are actual. The proof of dysfunction is ample, indicating one thing is significantly improper with town’s management. In fact, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors has different priorities to deal with. Points like a $5 million-per-person reparations plan for black residents that might price town greater than all the annual finances for all however a couple of states. You’d need to be as excessive because the vagrants handed out on San Francisco streets to suppose this was attainable, particularly as town’s tax base disintegrates. And it's disintegrating, all proper. San Francisco had an enormous finances deficit of over $700 million in 2022. So, as unhealthy as issues are going now, San Francisco’s situation could get quite a bit worse. The sugar excessive from tech cash is fading. The downtown space is empty and dangerous. As companies shutter, techies transfer on, and the remaining middle-class residents and guests flee, fewer law-abiding residents will stay to maintain town working. What you're left with is huge open-air drug markets, soiled streets and parks, harmful journeys to the grocery store, and a gem of a metropolis tarnished by a damaged ideology and its penalties. The horror. The horror. Have an opinion about this text? To pontificate, please electronic mail [email protected] and we’ll take into account publishing your edited remarks in our common “We Hear You” characteristic. Keep in mind to incorporate the url or headline of the article plus your identify and city and/or state. The publish San Francisco’s Heart of Darkness appeared first on The Daily Signal. Source link Read the full article
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silent-era-of-cinema · 4 years ago
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Aileen Pringle (born Aileen Bisbee; July 23, 1895 – December 16, 1989) was an American stage and film actress during the silent film era.
Born into a prominent and wealthy San Francisco family and educated in Europe, Pringle began her acting career shortly after her 1916 marriage to Charles McKenzie Pringle, the son of a wealthy titled British Jamaican landowner and a member of the Privy and Legislative Councils of Jamaica.
One of Pringle's first high-profile roles was in the Rudolph Valentino film Stolen Moments (1920). Many of Pringle's early roles were only modestly successful, and she continued to build her career until the early 1920s when she was selected by friend and romance novelist Elinor Glyn to star in the 1924 film adaptation of her novel Three Weeks with matinee idol Conrad Nagel. The role catapulted Pringle into leading-lady status and her career began to build momentum.
On November 15, 1924, a Sunday, Pringle was among a select group of Hollywood elites who boarded the Oneida, a yacht owned by newspaper scion and billionaire William Randolph Hearst, in San Pedro, California,. The event was a 42nd-birthday party organized by Hearst for film producer and director Thomas Ince.
Other prominent guests included columnist Louella Parsons, actor Charlie Chaplin, actress Marion Davies (who was also Hearst's lover) and actresses Seena Owen, Jacqueline Logan and Julanne Johnston.
Early Monday morning, Ince was taken from the yacht by water taxi and brought ashore, accompanied by Dr. Goodman a licensed, though non-practicing, physician. By Tuesday night, Ince was dead.
Ince's death was ruled to have been caused by a gastro-intestinal illness, but the press frenzy that followed turned the event into a Hollywood legend; with various enigmatic and lurid stories being proffered by gossips. Among these, was a story of Hearst accidentally shooting Ince while aiming for Chaplin, who he believed to be having an affair with Marion Davies. Pringle's career weathered the controversy.
Pringle's acting career continued throughout the early 1920s, however, she allegedly was disliked by many of her co-workers for her allegedly haughty and dismissive behavior. She was prone to make witty, sometimes caustic, comments on Hollywood and her fellow actors. During a romantic scene in Three Weeks, in which actor Conrad Nagel carried her in his arms to the bedroom, lip readers saw her say: "If you drop me, you bastard, I'll break your neck".[4] Pringle's apparent disdain for her profession began to hurt her career, and by the late 1920s her roles became fewer.
During the late silent and early period of talking pictures, Pringle co-starred in a series of light films with actor Lew Cody, including Adam and Evil (1927), Tea for Three (1927), Wickedness Preferred (1928), The Baby Cyclone (1928), Beau Broadway (1928), A Single Man (1929) and By Appointment Only (1933). Of Pringle’s performance in Adam and Evil, Mourdant Hall in the August 9, 1927 edition of The New York Times wrote, “Evelyn Trevelyn, the Eve of this tale, is alluded to by Ralph Spence is (sic) one of the titles as a “spare rib.” She is impersonated by Aileen Pringle and therefore is an asset to the scenes.”
Although disliked by some Hollywood insiders, Aileen Pringle often was dubbed by the press as the "Darling of the Intelligentsia" because of her close friendship with such literary figures as Carl Van Vechten, Joseph Hergesheimer, Rupert Hughes, and H.L. Mencken who became a lifelong friend of the actress.[5] She brokered the meeting of Mencken and Valentino,[6] of which Mencken wrote an account, some weeks after Valentino had died. Mencken does not name her but describes her as "discreet as she is charming." Ralph Barton, American artist, was also a devoted friend and used her as the model for Dorothy in his illustrations for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos. Another admirer was George Gershwin who met her in Hollywood and wrote much of the Second Rhapsody at her Santa Monica, California, home. Her wit, keen intellect and sparkling personality made her a sought-after companion.
After her 1926 divorce from Charles Pringle, Aileen Pringle further focused on her acting career, including Dream of Love (1928) with Joan Crawford and Wall Street (1929) co-starring Ralph Ince, brother of Thomas Ince. However, with the advent of sound film, the studios heavily began promoting a new crop of starlets and Pringle's career faded.
During the sound era, she continued to take small parts in major films and even uncredited roles. In 1944 Pringle married the author James M. Cain, but the union lasted only two years and ended in divorce. By the late 1940s, Pringle retired from the screen and lived a wealthy retirement in New York City, where she died in 1989 at the age of 94.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Aileen Pringle was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6723 Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles, California.
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inkstainedfanfics · 7 years ago
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The Gods’ Apprentice
Summary: Two lovers are intertwined, their fates meant to be nothing more than mere toys of the universe meant to entertain the gods of old. But when they find themselves torn apart, separated by both distance and stolen memories, they fight to rediscover who they were together before time destroys the very echo of their love. Fate and the gods may have their plans in place, but these two have faith in more than just prophecies.
Word Count: 1,708
Pairing: Newt x Reader
Tag List: @dont-give-a-bother @myrtus-amongst-the-stars @caseoffics @red-roses-and-stories @ly--canthrope @benniesgalaxy @studyforthreehands @thosefantasticbeast2 @whatinbenaddiction
                                    We live as we dream—Alone                                             - Joseph Conrad
There is a story never written down before, one that speaks of a young man who loved a young woman with all of his heart, who would have burned the world to ashes if she only asked. And he, he was lucky for she felt for him equally as he did for her. She would have scoured the entirety of the earth for eternity if it meant finding him and kissing him one final time. The two were halves of each other, meant to complement the other until the dark shroud of death covered their hands and closed their eyes, but even then, they would have found one another in the afterlife, would have laced fingers together and smiled at one another with the love of the world glimmering in their eyes and together they would have faced whatever harsh secrets death hides.
But this is not a story of joy. Indeed, it is a story of woe and misery and the loss of one’s soulmate.
But I’m getting ahead of myself now, for misery isn’t where the story begins. No, the story begins with two lovers, their hands clenched together as they watch a sunset drip molten colors onto the horizon, painting their world beautiful. Leaves tumble through the yard of their small dwelling, mere passerby’s sent to observe a wonder of the universe that too quickly will fracture apart.
The young man shuts his eyes and a breeze slips through the fencing on the front porch to ruffle both his hair and the front of his unbuttoned vest.
“Beautiful night, isn’t it?” The young woman murmurs, eyes shimmering in wonder as she watches a pastel green seep slowly into the gentle blue of the sky.
The young man opens one green eye, not bothering to look at the sunset, just the young woman. “It’s always beautiful around here, love.”
She blushes and smiles to herself, a small smile that’s half-hidden by the way she turns her chin toward her shoulder, but he notices it and squeezes her hand.
An ocean somewhere nearby whispers, breaking against the bronze cliffs of the country. The young man had traveled here with his family at the young age of three, met his girlfriend only three years after that, and fallen in love with her immediately. He began courting her the moment he turned fifteen, and the past year had been the brightest point of his life. He’d taken her to his grandparent’s house on their first date out, and the two had fallen in love with the warm winds and smell of salt hanging in the air, spending at least on evening there weekly afterward.
The woman shifts in the creaking rocking chair the young man had carved for her himself. “Darling, do tell me another story.”
He chuckles, the sound low, but obliges his beloved’s request. “About what?”
She shuts her eyes as well, humming below her breath as she thinks. “The ocean.”
“A fabulous request,” he murmurs before he spins her a tale woven with golden threads and stolen from the lips of the gods themselves. When he finishes, tears have filled her eyes and she reminds him again that she knows she is lucky to have him in her life, but he just smiles and tells her he is truly the lucky one.
“Not many have the fate of meeting a goddess in their lifetime.”
She laughs. “I would say I’m far from a goddess, my dear.”
He shrugs. “You’re more than any deserve, my love, and I swear I will never forget it.”
She sighs when she opens her eyes and is confronted by the deep blue of the evening sky. “I suppose it’s time we begin our walk home.”
“Can’t we spend just one more moment here, together?”
“You know we can’t.”
“But—”
She shakes her head, standing and tugging on his hand to pull him from his rocking chair as well. “We have to head back before my father worries.”
The young man stands, eyes twinkling like the sleepy stars above him. “Come on, dear. He adores me. He won’t worry if we’re a little behind time.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t you a tad bit arrogant tonight.”
He steps toward her until she’s pressed against him, then he lifts a hand and runs it down her cheek. “I’m just utterly in love with you, my dear.”
The young woman steps away as the young man bends down to kiss her, grinning at him and shaking her head. “Not until you bring me back. You know what my father will say if we’re late.”
The young man groans but concedes the fight. He holds onto her hand, fingers laced with hers as he steps to her side. “Well, let’s leave, then. Though you should know,” he says, shoving his free hand in his pocket when another warm breeze sweeps through the area, “that I won’t let your dad say no to me when I finally ask to marry you.”
She giggles. “Marriage, huh?”
“Oh yes,” he says, “I plan on marrying you. If you’ll have me, of course.”
“Well, Mr. Scamander,” she murmurs, grinning at the ground, “you’d better follow through on such a promise.”
The stars shine brighter but all he notices is how beautiful her grin is as he replies, “It’s a promise I’d never consider breaking.”
The rest of the walk is spent in silence, both floating on the folly of youth and love, both truly believing they had fate in their hands and were weaving the story of their lives by themselves, but fate isn’t so kind as to offer others her string, and she had plans that wandered far from the young lovers’ plans.
When the young man kisses her on her front stoop, he is unaware, unable to know it will be the last kiss the two may ever share. Some may question his loyalty, but how can anyone blame him for not staying a moment longer? For not accepting the tea offered to him by her mother? If he had known fate was plotting to rip him away from his most precious lifeline, he would never have left her side that night. He would have married her then and there to spite the gods, to resist their attempts to tear him from his darling’s side.
But he didn’t know, couldn’t, and, as the young man steps away from the front door and it shuts behind him with a gentle click, fate sets her plan in action.
The next morning, he’s gone, and though the young woman searches the entire coast for him, she finds nothing. There is, after all, not a thing to be found. She and her family overturn every rock in town, knock on every door, search in every cave to find the man that she loves, but there is not even a whisper of him on the lips of the locals that hear everything.
He vanished that night, and, though years pass, she looks, searches, scours, but she never finds a trace of the man.
Not until another man, this one tall and muscular and quite opposite in every way to her love, appears at her door, tanned skin and a smug grin plastered over his chiseled features. He shoves a hand at her. “Hello, madam. Pleasure to meet you. If you don’t mind, I need to ask a favor.”
She frowns at him, trying to reconcile where she’d met the man before, but some things are meant to remain secret to people like her. “Sorry?” She doesn’t even have a chance to ask his name before he bowls her over with more questions, pushing into the room behind her, lifting the tea cup she was drinking and peering at it.
“Oh, you are a tea drinker? So my brother was right. Perfect.” He grins at her with a dazzling grin, nodding toward the road that’s still visible through the open door behind her. “May I ask who that man is?”
She turns her head to find an empty road. “I’m sorry, sir, who?”
“Ah, I must be seeing things. The gods play tricks on hot days like these.”
She blinks as he sets her cup down and starts her way. “You… you asked for help?”
He smiles once more, “No, nothing anymore. You’ve been more than helpful, thank you. I’ll see myself out.”
He steps past her as she protests, ignoring her questioning gaze as he steps into the golden sunlight. It suits him like it seems to suit no other man on the isle.
And just like that, he’s gone.
She stands, dazed, at the door for a moment, curious. Who was the man? How did he know her? And who is his brother? She’s never known such a stranger in her town. As her senses return, she darts to the window, sticking her head outside to watch him jaunt down the road toward the ocean.
She doesn’t realize as she wanders back into the kitchen that he slipped something in her drink, and she doesn’t realize as she sips it that it tastes different, sweeter, like a gift from the gods.
And she doesn’t realize as she grows faint and falls, the tea cup trembling in her hand before slipping to the ground, that she has just been tricked.
I could continue here, describe the effects of the trick, who the stranger was, tell you, dear reader, exactly what occurred in this moment and where her love went years before after he disappeared from the lives of everyone that loved him, but I cannot. Impatience will ruin the story. You deserve your memories back slowly, after all. I wouldn’t wish to shock you.
And yes, you read that correctly. This scene, this entire story, it’s your story. It’s about you, about the memories I know were stolen from you by a cruel fate that refuses to remove her hands from the stories of mortals. They will be returned over time so long as you promise to be patient. And I will return them exactly all as they happened, just trust me.
The story is yours, I hope it is worth remembering.
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These 1923 Copyrighted Works Enter the Public Domain in 2019
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“I’m free! I’m free!”
For the first time in twenty years, as the Atlantic points out, a whole year’s worth of copyrighted works will enter the public domain in the U.S. on January 1, 2019. Under the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, works first published in 1923 will enter the public domain, meaning anyone can re-publish them, or chop them up and use them in other projects, without asking permission or paying the old rights holders. You can record new versions of the musical compositions; you can show the movies for a profit; you can even remake them. Amazon can sell you the ebook and keep all the money, and Project Gutenberg can give you the ebook for free. The Atlantic has a short list; we have a longer one below.
You can even make new copyrighted works based on the old works—the way Disney made all its cartoons based on public-domain fairy tales—and people can’t copy any of the new parts you include. (That’s why anyone can make movie about the fairy tale of Snow White and the seven dwarves, but only Disney can make new things where the dwarves are named Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Happy, Bashful, and Doc.)
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Speaking of Disney, they’re the ones who lobbied for such long copyright terms, because in 1998 Mickey Mouse’s first appearance (in the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie) was close to losing its copyright. But after the Sonny Bono Act, Now that first Mickey Mouse appearance will enter the public domain in 2024. Walt Disney had just started his company in 1923, but they hadn’t produced anything major. So we won’t get any free Disney stuff in January.
But here’s what we will get:
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Safety Last!
Movies
All these movies, including:
Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments 
Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!, including that scene where he dangles off a clock tower, and his Why Worry?
A long line-up of feature-length silent films, including Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality and Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim
Short films by Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and Our Gang (later Little Rascals)
Cartoons including Felix the Cat (the character first appeared in a 1919 cartoon)
Marlene Dietrich’s film debut, a bit part in the German silent comedy The Little Napoleon; also the debuts of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Fay Wray
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“Dizzy Fingers”
Music
All this music, including these classics:
“King Porter Stomp”
“Who’s Sorry Now?”
“Tin Roof Blues”
“That Old Gang of Mine”
“Yes! We Have No Bananas”
“I Cried for You”
“The Charleston”—written to accompany, and a big factor in the popularity of, the Charleston dance
Igor Stravinsky’s “Octet for Wind Instruments”
And these songs I picked purely based on their titles:
“Back To Croa-Jingo-Long”
“I’m Sitting Pretty In A Pretty Little City”
“Come On, Spark Plug!”
“Dizzy Fingers”
“I’ve Got The Yes! We Have No Bananas Blues”
“When It’s Night-Time In Italy, It’s Wednesday Over Here”
“Oh Gee Oh Gosh Oh Golly I’m In Love”
“Old King Tut”
“Horsey, Keep Your Tail Up”
Note that these are published songbooks, not recordings, meaning you can record a cover version without permission or payment, but you can’t just steal any post-1923 recording. So Connie Francis’s version of “Who’s Sorry Now?” is still under copyright.
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Even worse, rights over music recorded until 1972 is governed by state law, and if its copyright was registered and renewed, it doesn’t automatically enter the public domain until 2067.
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Virginia Woolf
Literature
This is the real good shit. All these books, and these books, including the classics:
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Cane by Jean Toomer
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Bambi by Felix Salten, illustrated by Barbara Cooney—the source of Disney’s animated film, and the first in a series
The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud
Towards a New Architecture by Le Corbusier
Whose Body?, the first Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers
Emily of New Moon, the first book of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy
The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
Two of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Murder on the Links
The Prisoner, volume 5 of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (note that English translations have their own copyrights)
The Complete Works of Anthony Trollope
George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan
Short stories by Christie, Virginia Woolf, H.P. Lovecraft, Katherine Mansfield, and Ernest Hemingway
Poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Sukumar Ray, and Pablo Neruda
Works by Jane Austen, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, Jorge Luis Borges, Mikhail Bulgakov, Jean Cocteau, Italo Svevo, Aldous Huxley, Winston Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, Maria Montessori, Lu Xun, Joseph Conrad, Zane Grey, H.G. Wells, and Edgar Rice Burroughs
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Brancusi’s Bird in Space
Art
These artworks, including:
Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space
Henri Matisse’s Odalisque With Raised Arms
Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)
Yokoyama Taikan’s Metempsychosis
Work by M. C. Escher, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Ernst, and Man Ray
Many 1923 works, like the blockbuster film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, are already in the public domain, as the owners failed to renew their copyrights. Until 1963, a rightsholder had to manually renew their copyright after 28 years.
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According to the LibraryLaw Blog, not everything published in 1923 will be public domain; only works with an authorized publication in 1923. The distinction came up in the legal fight over the rights to “Happy Birthday to You,” whose current owners maintained that the song had only been published by unauthorized sources, without the permission of the original owners. (The bad song was eventually ruled public domain for other reasons.) So if you’re worried about litigious rightsholders, make sure the 1923 publication isn’t considered some stolen unauthorized version.
Remember, the works above only lose their copyright on January 1, 2019. Double-check before you use anything listed above, and watch out for all the many ways that works can enter, or not enter, the public domain. Remember that certain uses of copyrighted works are protected as fair use. And check out the many existing collections of already rights-free works, and freely available copyrighted works.
A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain | The Atlantic
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aion-rsa · 4 years ago
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Sean Connery and Michael Caine are Godlike in The Man Who Would Be King
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“I’ll stand one day before the Queen, not kneel, mind you, but stand like an equal, and she’ll say ‘I’d like you to accept the Order of the Garter as a mark of my esteem, cousin,’” Sean Connery’s ex-British soldier Daniel Dravot proclaims in the 1975 period adventure film, The Man Who Would Be King. And with those words, and the epic death scene which followed, Connery completed the saga of a long-germinating work from one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors. John Huston was Hollywood royalty. His father, Walter, was an acting icon, and his offspring have all gone on to distinguish themselves as part of the Huston Dynasty.
Connery was of course no stranger to acting royalty himself. Eventually knighted in 2000, he also got to play King Agamemnon in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits in 1981, King Richard the Lionheart in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), and King Arthur in First Knight (1995). James Bond was only a small part of Connery’s cinematic output. The Oscar-winning screen legend wasn’t always a suave, debonair, tuxedoed aficionado of the shaken martini.
He was already distancing himself from the immensely popular 007 role by the time he made Diamonds Are Forever in 1971. He wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty for parts, and he reveled in playing the occasional antihero and other less sympathetic roles.
Thus Connery got the chance to play a not-so-bright, morally flawed but timeless character in the 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King. He also fulfilled a lifelong dream for a Hollywood legend, and turned a myth into reality.
Huston had loved Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” since he was a child, according to the book The Hustons, by Lawrence Grobel. Kipling was 22 in 1888, when he wrote the short story, and had been shot at while exploring the setting. Huston’s adaptation was a dream project which had morphed into the purgatory of lost film masterpieces, like Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, Alejandro Jodorowski’s Dune, or Orson Welles’ Heart of Darkness. Francis Ford Coppola wound up adapting the Joseph Conrad novel with a post-Vietnam War mentality. His Apocalypse Now is about a good man corrupted by absolute power. Huston took the lessons of the unpopular war in the opposite direction. The Man Who Would Be King is about bad men who are held accountable to the indigenous people they conquer.
The Man Who Would Be King is about power, greed and the manifest destiny of entitled Europeans. It lampoons the superiority of British colonialism. In a “Making of” documentary about the film, Huston says he found the “ideal” actors to capture his subversive intent. This movie was the only time Connery played with his lifelong friend Michael Caine, besides A Bridge Too Far, which had too many bridges and a platoon of stars between them. The pair met at a cast party for the first show Connery acted in, a touring company’s production of South Pacific in 1954. On July 9 of that year, Huston told Allied Artists’ Harold Mirish he wanted his next film to be the first and only on-screen pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable.
Huston originally had The Man Who Would Be King slated as his next production after he finished Moby Dick (1956). He planned to begin principal photography in India between November 1955 and January 1956 and was negotiating to film in the Todd-AO process. Huston had worked with Bogart on the very first film he directed, The Maltese Falcon in 1941, and the pair continued a string of successful and innovative films together. Though working fairly steadily, Bogart was battling esophageal cancer and ultimately succumbed to it on Jan. 14, 1957. Huston discussed the film with Gable while filming The Misfits, but the actor known as “The King of Hollywood” then also died in 1960. 
Richard Burton was set to play the role against Peter O’Toole, and Huston kept start dates ready from January 1966 to January 1967, waiting for the opportunity, but the year passed and it never came. The film almost reunited Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting’s Robert Redford and Paul Newman, who told Huston the film deserved English actors, and suggested Connery and Caine specifically.
Caine immediately jumped at the role just because his part had been written for Bogart. He’d chosen his stage name after seeing Bogart fidget with his ball-bearings as Commander Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. As for Connery, the Scottish actor captures the essence of Gable’s screen persona in the film. They both bring an amused cynicism toward their roles. Both actors furrow their brows and project a sensual gravitas.
You can imagine hearing Connery say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” with a different accent but the same delivery as Gable’s in Gone with the Wind. Granted, it would probably be coming out of the mouth of Saturday Night Live’s Darrel Hammond as a bemused answer to Alex Trebek, but it rings true. Whether he liked it or not, Connery’s turn as Bond made him as recognizable in the public’s mind as Gable.
On screen, Caine and Connery interact easily and naturally, nailing the parts with their distinct charisma. Danny and Peachy laugh at their disasters, because there’s really nothing else to do, and they make it infectious. They really are the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of imperialist Great Britain. Caine’s Peachy Carnahan could have been a great-great-grandparent to his Jack Carter in Get Garter; Connery’s Daniel Dravot could imaginably give sage advice to his third-generation thief grandson Matthew Broderick in Family Business (1989), or even lead a son like Indiana Jones across unexplored ancient treasures.
Together, Connery and Caine are a powerhouse. One of the great cinema pairings. They bring authentic accents, real-life camaraderie, and regional humor to the roles. Caine also bought his wife, Shakira, who plays Roxanne, the Kafiristan wife of Connery’s Daniel Dravot in the film. Christopher Plummer played Rudyard Kipling, a correspondent for “The Northern Star” newspaper, and a Freemason, a central point in the film and its symbolism.
Huston wrote the new screenplay with his long-time secretary Gladys Hill. Shooting on the final version took place in Morocco, which traded rough terrain for rampant corruption as the producers had to bribe their way through much of the filming. The locations and local extras were important to Huston to evoke the British Raj period of the movie.
The director wanted Connery and Caine to brave the “mass of mountains and peaks and glaciers” Kipling described in his story. Huston exposed Bogart to the cruel elements of location filming in The Treasure of Sierra Madre and The African Queen, and had discussed parachuting the two Hollywood icons into the Himalayas during the initial production, according to The Hustons. The two British stars faced equal peril. For the climax of the completed version, Huston let Connery plummet hundreds of feet from a rope bridge suspended over a vast valley. 
In the film, two former British Army sergeants, now clumsy gunrunners and incompetent conmen, traverse the Khyber Pass to find the isolated area of Kafiristan, located in the Hindu Kush mountains northeast of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. This is where the descendants of Alexander the Great live. The Greek emperor had conquered Afghanistan and married a Kafir princess named Roxanne, according to Kipling’s story.
Peachy and Danny plan to become the first Europeans since the ancient Greeks to penetrate the region and “loot it six ways from Sunday.” They admit this to Kipling shortly after robbing him and returning his stolen item back to him.
“In any place where they fight, a man who knows how to drill men can always be a king,” Connery’s Danny explains to Plummer’s Kipling. “We shall go to those parts and say to any king we find: ‘Do you want to vanquish your foes?’ And we will show him how to drill men, for that we know better than anything else. Then we will subvert that king and seize his throne and establish a dynasty.”
With this, Connery’s character captures the eternal dilemma of that region. No external power has ever permanently dominated Afghanistan. Britain lost control in 1919, which the country celebrates as the year of its independence. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, and continues its costly occupation with no end in sight. Kafiristan, which is now called Nuristan, is home to 15 ethnic groups speaking five different languages. No one man can be king. No single government can rule. Even O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia had to admit that. Connery’s authority, however, has a much deeper voice, and the conviction of a faithful pilgrim.
Peachy and Danny believe they can find a kingdom not yet touched by civilization which they can take over easily with their weapons, knowledge and contemporary expertise. “When we’re done with you, you’ll be able to stand up and slaughter your enemies like civilized men,” they tell their trainees. Huston allows the audience to enjoy the two soldiers of misfortune, in spite of their self-ascribed superiority and blatantly racist attitudes. When their translator asks whether to woo local high priests with claims of their divinity, Peachy says to tell them they are “not gods, [but] Englishmen. The next best thing.”
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Danny is nonplussed by how easy the locals are exploited. Connery lets him indulge his moral superiority, tossing harsh judgements on native customs like offering daughters and sons up to guests for sex. When he takes an arrow in the chest and keeps on fighting, he readily assumes his mantle as the son of Alexander the Great. Connery sells that assumption realistically and believably. Peachy assumes the huge rubies in the temple are good to go. 
Caine’s Peachy Carnahan remains a Cockney through and through. Connery’s Dravot gives in to temptation almost athletically. When he finds himself worshiped as a deity, he is happy to believe it. The scene where he convinces himself is hysterical, and performed completely organically. Connery is completely surprised by himself, and Caine literally falls over laughing as he does an internal pratfall. It is as much an acting free-for-all as it is a ballet of physical comedy. The gag is the same as C3P0 telling the Ewoks he’s a deity in Return of the Jedi, which happened to be shot on the same Panaflex camera as The Man Who Would Be King.
In a highly competitive Oscar race–which included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Barry Lyndon, and Jaws—The Man Who Would Be King was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Art Direction, Best Writing, Best Costume Design, and Best Editing. Connery was also the lead performance in the Oscar-nominated film The Wind and The Lion that same year.
The Man Who Would Be King is an adventure film, and Connery and Caine make it a wild ride with perilous curves and a harrowing but hollow finish. Like so many of Huston’s movies, their scheme doesn’t turn out the way it’s planned, but the plot finds strength in the weakness of powerful characters. By the end of the movie, all these two characters have is each other, and even that promises to be fleeting. The performances endure though. It’s acting royalty. It’s like they were destined to do it, preordained. 
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juditmiltz · 6 years ago
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South Florida’s most head-turning lawsuits of 2018
From left: Craig Studnicky, John Yanopoulus, Philip Spiegelman, and Brenda Nestor
In 2018, South Florida’s real estate industry saw longtime business partners going through bitter divorces, buyers seeking to get out of luxury condo deals by accusing developers of construction delays and false advertising, foreign governments and investors suing local companies over allegedly fraudulent real estate investments and sizzling disputes over allegedly unpaid six-and-seven-figure commissions. Here’s a look back at the 10 most scandalous lawsuits filed in the past 12 months:
1. Craig Studnicky and Philip Spiegelman built International Sales Group into one of the region’s leading luxury condo brokerages during a quarter century’s worth of peaks and valleys in South Florida’s real estate cycles. The company outlasted recessions and the market bottoming out in 2008, but it may not survive an internal civil war between the ISG founders.
Over the summer, Studnicky and Spiegelman sued each other in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over control of ISG. Studnicky wants to force Spiegelman out and keep ISG in business. Studnicky wants a judge to dissolve the company. Both partners made scathing allegations against the other. Spiegelman accuses Studnicky of burning “through large amounts of cash” that ISG made in sales commissions, and failing to deliver any profits. Studnicky alleges Spiegelman’s “overbearing narcissism and obnoxious personality” alienated an original founding partner, employees and clients.
2. Vulcan Investment Partners, a fund founded by a group of leading Mexican businessmen and financial experts, had plans to go on a voracious buying binge when it announced six years ago that it planned to invest $150 million to purchase 1,200 single family homes throughout South Florida. Turns out that 41 properties Vulcan ended up buying were actually financed with allegedly pilfered funds from the Mexican state of Veracruz. The state sued Vulcan Dynamic Realty Fund and its CEO Inaki Negrete, Miami-based Nexxos Realty and its managing member Ana Maria Velasquez, and Delaware-based ACE Realty Holdings.
The Veracruz government claims the money used to buy the properties was stolen by Javier Duarte De Ochoa during his term as the Mexican state’s from 2010 to 2016. Duarte is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges in Veracruz after he was captured last year in Guatemala. Veracruz is seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages and additional punitive damages, as well as control over the properties.
3. Jupiter developer Nicholas Mastroianni II has become somewhat of a guru in the world of EB-5 financing and investing. As founder of U.S. Immigration Fund for EB-5 Investment, Mastroianni has raised tens of millions of dollars for a number of major projects, including his own $170 million Harbourside Place in Jupiter. But nearly 80 Chinese investors in the Jupiter development sued Mastroianni in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleging he defrauded them by intentionally falling short of a $100 million capital fundraising goal.
Mastroianni, who’s been linked to President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, as well as to the Kushner Companies, vehemently denies the allegations and in a statement said that his company invested close to an additional $34 million in equity to “ensure all investors would receive their immigration benefits…. In addition, all investors have been, and continue to be, paid interest and their investment remains superior to the developers equity.”
More than 60 of the 78 plaintiffs have received their green cards, but have not been paid back, according to their attorneys.
4. Brenda Nestor lorded over Victor Posner’s estate for nearly 15 years until she was abruptly removed as its personal representative in 2016 for allegedly disobeying court orders to provide a full accounting of her management of the late corporate raider’s assets. So earlier this year, she sued the national law firm Akerman for breach of fiduciary duty, legal malpractice and civil conspiracy.
Nestor, a former-girlfriend-turned-business-associate of Posner’s who was named the primary beneficiary of his $321 million estate in 2002, alleged that she suffered damages as a result of “negligent and reckless” legal advice Akerman provided to her court-appointed successor of Posner’s estate. That successor, Philip von Kahle, sued the estate’s insurer to claim a $23.1 million bond she had posted back in 2002 that allowed her to operate Posner’s real estate business through his estate.
Von Kahle alleged that Nestor caused the Posner estate to lose $375 million in value to negative $50 million during her tenure as personal representative. In November, Nestor voluntarily dismissed the complaint.
5. Canadian developer Pierre Heafey and the Peluga family helped save the long-troubled Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach project two years ago by becoming 51 percent owners and infusing $100 million in the development. But shortly after the condo-hotel finally opened this year, Heafey and the Pelugas, who own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, became entangled in a legal battle with the Conrad’s original developers, Jose and Joseph Cabanas.
Between February and March, both sides sued each other for breaches of contract, self-dealing arrangements and delaying a $40.9 million sale of the property at 551 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. The Heafey-Pegula company alleges that the Cabanas partnership has refused to execute part of the agreement that allows the Heafey-Pegula company to buy 20 percent of the condo-hotel units. The lawsuit claims the Cabanas partnership initially agreed to consummate the deal after Heafey and Pegula raised their offer from $37.5 million to $40.9 million last October, when the Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach opened for business.
6. Stephen Hess was expecting to have 3,635 square feet of living space in the three units he bought at Muse Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. Instead, he lost about 400 square feet in each unit after realizing the floor plans included exterior areas such as columns, corridors and balconies that are not part of the units, according to a Miami-Dade Circuit Court lawsuit Hess filed against development entity PMG-S2 Sunny Isles LLC, which is controlled by Property Markets Group.
Hess is seeking to recoup more than $7 million in deposits he put down in 2014 and 2015. The buyer alleges a disclaimer in the sales materials was tiny and unreadable. Hess clams it violates Florida law regarding conspicuous type, which requires at least 10-point bold type. Attorneys for the developers refuted the allegations.
7. Local developer Ari Pearl agreed to leave a joint venture with the Chetrit family in 2017 to develop a massive five-phase development on the Miami River, consisting of 1,678 residential units, 330 hotel rooms, 266,000 square feet of retail and office space, and more than 2,000 parking spaces. But more than a year later, Pearl is trying to collect half of the $2.25 million that was part of the separation package.
Pearl is suing the Chetrit-controlled Miami River JV LLC in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for $1.125 million, the third and final payout as part of a settlement between the two. By paying Pearl, the Delaware-based joint venture company agreed to release and waive all claims against the joint venture, including “his employment by JV or his acting as a consultant to or on their behalf,” according to a 2017 contract that’s attached to the suit as an exhibit.
8. Yamile Espinosa and her company Miami Grand Realty brought a big-time buyer to look at units at Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences. But when her client closed on a $5.5 million and a $440,000 boat slip, the developers and their in-house sales director muscled her out of a commission, Espinosa alleges in a May lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Espinosa claims she is owed roughly $356,400, representing the 6 percent commission she would have made on the sale.
Espinosa sued Marina Palms Realty, its manager Michael Internoscia, and Marina Palms Residences North and Marina Palms Residences South, the development entities. All three companies are owned by The Plaza Group and The Devstar Group, which built the two-tower project at 17201 Biscayne Boulevard through a joint venture. According to the lawsuit, Internoscia sold the penthouse and the boat slip in early 2017 to Pablo Otero and his company Blue Marlin without Espinosa’s knowledge or participation, even though Espinosa is alleging he was aware that she represented the buyer in previous transactions at Marina Palms.
9. Hotelier John Yanopoulos, who developed the W Fort Lauderdale, allegedly keeps disappearing on high-profile friends who give him six figure sums for investments. Former NFL running back Julius Jones, who claims Yanopoulos befriended him during one of his South Florida vacation, is suing the hotel developer in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for failing to repay $300,000 from a $500,000 loan. Yanopoulos missed a September 2013 deadline to satisfy the loan and it took him another two years to pay back $200,000, Jones alleges.
To date, Yanopoulos has not repaid the balance, yet was able to purchase a $3.1 million mansion in Pinecrest in March 2017, according to the suit. In 2016, Magic City Casino co-owner Isadore Havenick sued Yanopoulos for allegedly welching on a $500,000 loan.
10. Christopher Benjamin, an indigent man born with Albinism which caused him to develop problems with his sight, forced the Florida Realtors Association to place its member brokers on notice about violating local laws against discriminating against low-income renters. Benjamin filed civil lawsuits against 46 Miami-Dade and Broward brokerages and dozens of listing agents for allegedly engaging in discriminatory advertising practices, according to court documents.
The lawsuits allege realtor associates working for the defendant brokerages listed rental property advertisements that rejected individuals who receive Section 8 assistance, a federal program which pays landlords the balance of a rent payment that exceeds 30 percent of a renter’s monthly income. The Florida Realtors Association sent out an urgent legal alert to its membership to remind them that discriminating against Section 8 tenants violates Miami-Dade and Broward laws.
from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/12/24/south-floridas-most-head-turning-lawsuits-of-2018/ via IFTTT
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alfredrserrano · 6 years ago
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South Florida’s most head-turning lawsuits of 2018
From left: Craig Studnicky, John Yanopoulus, Philip Spiegelman, and Brenda Nestor
In 2018, South Florida’s real estate industry saw longtime business partners going through bitter divorces, buyers seeking to get out of luxury condo deals by accusing developers of construction delays and false advertising, foreign governments and investors suing local companies over allegedly fraudulent real estate investments and sizzling disputes over allegedly unpaid six-and-seven-figure commissions. Here’s a look back at the 10 most scandalous lawsuits filed in the past 12 months:
1. Craig Studnicky and Philip Spiegelman built International Sales Group into one of the region’s leading luxury condo brokerages during a quarter century’s worth of peaks and valleys in South Florida’s real estate cycles. The company outlasted recessions and the market bottoming out in 2008, but it may not survive an internal civil war between the ISG founders.
Over the summer, Studnicky and Spiegelman sued each other in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over control of ISG. Studnicky wants to force Spiegelman out and keep ISG in business. Studnicky wants a judge to dissolve the company. Both partners made scathing allegations against the other. Spiegelman accuses Studnicky of burning “through large amounts of cash” that ISG made in sales commissions, and failing to deliver any profits. Studnicky alleges Spiegelman’s “overbearing narcissism and obnoxious personality” alienated an original founding partner, employees and clients.
2. Vulcan Investment Partners, a fund founded by a group of leading Mexican businessmen and financial experts, had plans to go on a voracious buying binge when it announced six years ago that it planned to invest $150 million to purchase 1,200 single family homes throughout South Florida. Turns out that 41 properties Vulcan ended up buying were actually financed with allegedly pilfered funds from the Mexican state of Veracruz. The state sued Vulcan Dynamic Realty Fund and its CEO Inaki Negrete, Miami-based Nexxos Realty and its managing member Ana Maria Velasquez, and Delaware-based ACE Realty Holdings.
The Veracruz government claims the money used to buy the properties was stolen by Javier Duarte De Ochoa during his term as the Mexican state’s from 2010 to 2016. Duarte is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges in Veracruz after he was captured last year in Guatemala. Veracruz is seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages and additional punitive damages, as well as control over the properties.
3. Jupiter developer Nicholas Mastroianni II has become somewhat of a guru in the world of EB-5 financing and investing. As founder of U.S. Immigration Fund for EB-5 Investment, Mastroianni has raised tens of millions of dollars for a number of major projects, including his own $170 million Harbourside Place in Jupiter. But nearly 80 Chinese investors in the Jupiter development sued Mastroianni in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleging he defrauded them by intentionally falling short of a $100 million capital fundraising goal.
Mastroianni, who’s been linked to President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, as well as to the Kushner Companies, vehemently denies the allegations and in a statement said that his company invested close to an additional $34 million in equity to “ensure all investors would receive their immigration benefits…. In addition, all investors have been, and continue to be, paid interest and their investment remains superior to the developers equity.”
More than 60 of the 78 plaintiffs have received their green cards, but have not been paid back, according to their attorneys.
4. Brenda Nestor lorded over Victor Posner’s estate for nearly 15 years until she was abruptly removed as its personal representative in 2016 for allegedly disobeying court orders to provide a full accounting of her management of the late corporate raider’s assets. So earlier this year, she sued the national law firm Akerman for breach of fiduciary duty, legal malpractice and civil conspiracy.
Nestor, a former-girlfriend-turned-business-associate of Posner’s who was named the primary beneficiary of his $321 million estate in 2002, alleged that she suffered damages as a result of “negligent and reckless” legal advice Akerman provided to her court-appointed successor of Posner’s estate. That successor, Philip von Kahle, sued the estate’s insurer to claim a $23.1 million bond she had posted back in 2002 that allowed her to operate Posner’s real estate business through his estate.
Von Kahle alleged that Nestor caused the Posner estate to lose $375 million in value to negative $50 million during her tenure as personal representative. In November, Nestor voluntarily dismissed the complaint.
5. Canadian developer Pierre Heafey and the Peluga family helped save the long-troubled Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach project two years ago by becoming 51 percent owners and infusing $100 million in the development. But shortly after the condo-hotel finally opened this year, Heafey and the Pelugas, who own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, became entangled in a legal battle with the Conrad’s original developers, Jose and Joseph Cabanas.
Between February and March, both sides sued each other for breaches of contract, self-dealing arrangements and delaying a $40.9 million sale of the property at 551 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. The Heafey-Pegula company alleges that the Cabanas partnership has refused to execute part of the agreement that allows the Heafey-Pegula company to buy 20 percent of the condo-hotel units. The lawsuit claims the Cabanas partnership initially agreed to consummate the deal after Heafey and Pegula raised their offer from $37.5 million to $40.9 million last October, when the Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach opened for business.
6. Stephen Hess was expecting to have 3,635 square feet of living space in the three units he bought at Muse Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. Instead, he lost about 400 square feet in each unit after realizing the floor plans included exterior areas such as columns, corridors and balconies that are not part of the units, according to a Miami-Dade Circuit Court lawsuit Hess filed against development entity PMG-S2 Sunny Isles LLC, which is controlled by Property Markets Group.
Hess is seeking to recoup more than $7 million in deposits he put down in 2014 and 2015. The buyer alleges a disclaimer in the sales materials was tiny and unreadable. Hess clams it violates Florida law regarding conspicuous type, which requires at least 10-point bold type. Attorneys for the developers refuted the allegations.
7. Local developer Ari Pearl agreed to leave a joint venture with the Chetrit family in 2017 to develop a massive five-phase development on the Miami River, consisting of 1,678 residential units, 330 hotel rooms, 266,000 square feet of retail and office space, and more than 2,000 parking spaces. But more than a year later, Pearl is trying to collect half of the $2.25 million that was part of the separation package.
Pearl is suing the Chetrit-controlled Miami River JV LLC in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for $1.125 million, the third and final payout as part of a settlement between the two. By paying Pearl, the Delaware-based joint venture company agreed to release and waive all claims against the joint venture, including “his employment by JV or his acting as a consultant to or on their behalf,” according to a 2017 contract that’s attached to the suit as an exhibit.
8. Yamile Espinosa and her company Miami Grand Realty brought a big-time buyer to look at units at Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences. But when her client closed on a $5.5 million and a $440,000 boat slip, the developers and their in-house sales director muscled her out of a commission, Espinosa alleges in a May lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Espinosa claims she is owed roughly $356,400, representing the 6 percent commission she would have made on the sale.
Espinosa sued Marina Palms Realty, its manager Michael Internoscia, and Marina Palms Residences North and Marina Palms Residences South, the development entities. All three companies are owned by The Plaza Group and The Devstar Group, which built the two-tower project at 17201 Biscayne Boulevard through a joint venture. According to the lawsuit, Internoscia sold the penthouse and the boat slip in early 2017 to Pablo Otero and his company Blue Marlin without Espinosa’s knowledge or participation, even though Espinosa is alleging he was aware that she represented the buyer in previous transactions at Marina Palms.
9. Hotelier John Yanopoulos, who developed the W Fort Lauderdale, allegedly keeps disappearing on high-profile friends who give him six figure sums for investments. Former NFL running back Julius Jones, who claims Yanopoulos befriended him during one of his South Florida vacation, is suing the hotel developer in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for failing to repay $300,000 from a $500,000 loan. Yanopoulos missed a September 2013 deadline to satisfy the loan and it took him another two years to pay back $200,000, Jones alleges.
To date, Yanopoulos has not repaid the balance, yet was able to purchase a $3.1 million mansion in Pinecrest in March 2017, according to the suit. In 2016, Magic City Casino co-owner Isadore Havenick sued Yanopoulos for allegedly welching on a $500,000 loan.
10. Christopher Benjamin, an indigent man born with Albinism which caused him to develop problems with his sight, forced the Florida Realtors Association to place its member brokers on notice about violating local laws against discriminating against low-income renters. Benjamin filed civil lawsuits against 46 Miami-Dade and Broward brokerages and dozens of listing agents for allegedly engaging in discriminatory advertising practices, according to court documents.
The lawsuits allege realtor associates working for the defendant brokerages listed rental property advertisements that rejected individuals who receive Section 8 assistance, a federal program which pays landlords the balance of a rent payment that exceeds 30 percent of a renter’s monthly income. The Florida Realtors Association sent out an urgent legal alert to its membership to remind them that discriminating against Section 8 tenants violates Miami-Dade and Broward laws.
from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/12/24/south-floridas-most-head-turning-lawsuits-of-2018/ via IFTTT
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nicolesrollins · 6 years ago
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South Florida’s most head-turning lawsuits of 2018
From left: Craig Studnicky, John Yanopoulus, Philip Spiegelman, and Brenda Nestor
In 2018, South Florida’s real estate industry saw longtime business partners going through bitter divorces, buyers seeking to get out of luxury condo deals by accusing developers of construction delays and false advertising, foreign governments and investors suing local companies over allegedly fraudulent real estate investments and sizzling disputes over allegedly unpaid six-and-seven-figure commissions. Here’s a look back at the 10 most scandalous lawsuits filed in the past 12 months:
1. Craig Studnicky and Philip Spiegelman built International Sales Group into one of the region’s leading luxury condo brokerages during a quarter century’s worth of peaks and valleys in South Florida’s real estate cycles. The company outlasted recessions and the market bottoming out in 2008, but it may not survive an internal civil war between the ISG founders.
Over the summer, Studnicky and Spiegelman sued each other in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over control of ISG. Studnicky wants to force Spiegelman out and keep ISG in business. Studnicky wants a judge to dissolve the company. Both partners made scathing allegations against the other. Spiegelman accuses Studnicky of burning “through large amounts of cash” that ISG made in sales commissions, and failing to deliver any profits. Studnicky alleges Spiegelman’s “overbearing narcissism and obnoxious personality” alienated an original founding partner, employees and clients.
2. Vulcan Investment Partners, a fund founded by a group of leading Mexican businessmen and financial experts, had plans to go on a voracious buying binge when it announced six years ago that it planned to invest $150 million to purchase 1,200 single family homes throughout South Florida. Turns out that 41 properties Vulcan ended up buying were actually financed with allegedly pilfered funds from the Mexican state of Veracruz. The state sued Vulcan Dynamic Realty Fund and its CEO Inaki Negrete, Miami-based Nexxos Realty and its managing member Ana Maria Velasquez, and Delaware-based ACE Realty Holdings.
The Veracruz government claims the money used to buy the properties was stolen by Javier Duarte De Ochoa during his term as the Mexican state’s from 2010 to 2016. Duarte is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges in Veracruz after he was captured last year in Guatemala. Veracruz is seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages and additional punitive damages, as well as control over the properties.
3. Jupiter developer Nicholas Mastroianni II has become somewhat of a guru in the world of EB-5 financing and investing. As founder of U.S. Immigration Fund for EB-5 Investment, Mastroianni has raised tens of millions of dollars for a number of major projects, including his own $170 million Harbourside Place in Jupiter. But nearly 80 Chinese investors in the Jupiter development sued Mastroianni in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleging he defrauded them by intentionally falling short of a $100 million capital fundraising goal.
Mastroianni, who’s been linked to President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, as well as to the Kushner Companies, vehemently denies the allegations and in a statement said that his company invested close to an additional $34 million in equity to “ensure all investors would receive their immigration benefits…. In addition, all investors have been, and continue to be, paid interest and their investment remains superior to the developers equity.”
More than 60 of the 78 plaintiffs have received their green cards, but have not been paid back, according to their attorneys.
4. Brenda Nestor lorded over Victor Posner’s estate for nearly 15 years until she was abruptly removed as its personal representative in 2016 for allegedly disobeying court orders to provide a full accounting of her management of the late corporate raider’s assets. So earlier this year, she sued the national law firm Akerman for breach of fiduciary duty, legal malpractice and civil conspiracy.
Nestor, a former-girlfriend-turned-business-associate of Posner’s who was named the primary beneficiary of his $321 million estate in 2002, alleged that she suffered damages as a result of “negligent and reckless” legal advice Akerman provided to her court-appointed successor of Posner’s estate. That successor, Philip von Kahle, sued the estate’s insurer to claim a $23.1 million bond she had posted back in 2002 that allowed her to operate Posner’s real estate business through his estate.
Von Kahle alleged that Nestor caused the Posner estate to lose $375 million in value to negative $50 million during her tenure as personal representative. In November, Nestor voluntarily dismissed the complaint.
5. Canadian developer Pierre Heafey and the Peluga family helped save the long-troubled Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach project two years ago by becoming 51 percent owners and infusing $100 million in the development. But shortly after the condo-hotel finally opened this year, Heafey and the Pelugas, who own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, became entangled in a legal battle with the Conrad’s original developers, Jose and Joseph Cabanas.
Between February and March, both sides sued each other for breaches of contract, self-dealing arrangements and delaying a $40.9 million sale of the property at 551 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. The Heafey-Pegula company alleges that the Cabanas partnership has refused to execute part of the agreement that allows the Heafey-Pegula company to buy 20 percent of the condo-hotel units. The lawsuit claims the Cabanas partnership initially agreed to consummate the deal after Heafey and Pegula raised their offer from $37.5 million to $40.9 million last October, when the Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach opened for business.
6. Stephen Hess was expecting to have 3,635 square feet of living space in the three units he bought at Muse Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. Instead, he lost about 400 square feet in each unit after realizing the floor plans included exterior areas such as columns, corridors and balconies that are not part of the units, according to a Miami-Dade Circuit Court lawsuit Hess filed against development entity PMG-S2 Sunny Isles LLC, which is controlled by Property Markets Group.
Hess is seeking to recoup more than $7 million in deposits he put down in 2014 and 2015. The buyer alleges a disclaimer in the sales materials was tiny and unreadable. Hess clams it violates Florida law regarding conspicuous type, which requires at least 10-point bold type. Attorneys for the developers refuted the allegations.
7. Local developer Ari Pearl agreed to leave a joint venture with the Chetrit family in 2017 to develop a massive five-phase development on the Miami River, consisting of 1,678 residential units, 330 hotel rooms, 266,000 square feet of retail and office space, and more than 2,000 parking spaces. But more than a year later, Pearl is trying to collect half of the $2.25 million that was part of the separation package.
Pearl is suing the Chetrit-controlled Miami River JV LLC in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for $1.125 million, the third and final payout as part of a settlement between the two. By paying Pearl, the Delaware-based joint venture company agreed to release and waive all claims against the joint venture, including “his employment by JV or his acting as a consultant to or on their behalf,” according to a 2017 contract that’s attached to the suit as an exhibit.
8. Yamile Espinosa and her company Miami Grand Realty brought a big-time buyer to look at units at Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences. But when her client closed on a $5.5 million and a $440,000 boat slip, the developers and their in-house sales director muscled her out of a commission, Espinosa alleges in a May lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Espinosa claims she is owed roughly $356,400, representing the 6 percent commission she would have made on the sale.
Espinosa sued Marina Palms Realty, its manager Michael Internoscia, and Marina Palms Residences North and Marina Palms Residences South, the development entities. All three companies are owned by The Plaza Group and The Devstar Group, which built the two-tower project at 17201 Biscayne Boulevard through a joint venture. According to the lawsuit, Internoscia sold the penthouse and the boat slip in early 2017 to Pablo Otero and his company Blue Marlin without Espinosa’s knowledge or participation, even though Espinosa is alleging he was aware that she represented the buyer in previous transactions at Marina Palms.
9. Hotelier John Yanopoulos, who developed the W Fort Lauderdale, allegedly keeps disappearing on high-profile friends who give him six figure sums for investments. Former NFL running back Julius Jones, who claims Yanopoulos befriended him during one of his South Florida vacation, is suing the hotel developer in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for failing to repay $300,000 from a $500,000 loan. Yanopoulos missed a September 2013 deadline to satisfy the loan and it took him another two years to pay back $200,000, Jones alleges.
To date, Yanopoulos has not repaid the balance, yet was able to purchase a $3.1 million mansion in Pinecrest in March 2017, according to the suit. In 2016, Magic City Casino co-owner Isadore Havenick sued Yanopoulos for allegedly welching on a $500,000 loan.
10. Christopher Benjamin, an indigent man born with Albinism which caused him to develop problems with his sight, forced the Florida Realtors Association to place its member brokers on notice about violating local laws against discriminating against low-income renters. Benjamin filed civil lawsuits against 46 Miami-Dade and Broward brokerages and dozens of listing agents for allegedly engaging in discriminatory advertising practices, according to court documents.
The lawsuits allege realtor associates working for the defendant brokerages listed rental property advertisements that rejected individuals who receive Section 8 assistance, a federal program which pays landlords the balance of a rent payment that exceeds 30 percent of a renter’s monthly income. The Florida Realtors Association sent out an urgent legal alert to its membership to remind them that discriminating against Section 8 tenants violates Miami-Dade and Broward laws.
from The Real Deal Miami & Real Estate News News | & Curbed Miami - All https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/12/24/south-floridas-most-head-turning-lawsuits-of-2018/ via IFTTT
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walterfrodriguez · 6 years ago
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South Florida’s most head-turning lawsuits of 2018
From left: Craig Studnicky, John Yanopoulus, Philip Spiegelman, and Brenda Nestor
In 2018, South Florida’s real estate industry saw longtime business partners going through bitter divorces, buyers seeking to get out of luxury condo deals by accusing developers of construction delays and false advertising, foreign governments and investors suing local companies over allegedly fraudulent real estate investments and sizzling disputes over allegedly unpaid six-and-seven-figure commissions. Here’s a look back at the 10 most scandalous lawsuits filed in the past 12 months:
1. Craig Studnicky and Philip Spiegelman built International Sales Group into one of the region’s leading luxury condo brokerages during a quarter century’s worth of peaks and valleys in South Florida’s real estate cycles. The company outlasted recessions and the market bottoming out in 2008, but it may not survive an internal civil war between the ISG founders.
Over the summer, Studnicky and Spiegelman sued each other in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over control of ISG. Studnicky wants to force Spiegelman out and keep ISG in business. Studnicky wants a judge to dissolve the company. Both partners made scathing allegations against the other. Spiegelman accuses Studnicky of burning “through large amounts of cash” that ISG made in sales commissions, and failing to deliver any profits. Studnicky alleges Spiegelman’s “overbearing narcissism and obnoxious personality” alienated an original founding partner, employees and clients.
2. Vulcan Investment Partners, a fund founded by a group of leading Mexican businessmen and financial experts, had plans to go on a voracious buying binge when it announced six years ago that it planned to invest $150 million to purchase 1,200 single family homes throughout South Florida. Turns out that 41 properties Vulcan ended up buying were actually financed with allegedly pilfered funds from the Mexican state of Veracruz. The state sued Vulcan Dynamic Realty Fund and its CEO Inaki Negrete, Miami-based Nexxos Realty and its managing member Ana Maria Velasquez, and Delaware-based ACE Realty Holdings.
The Veracruz government claims the money used to buy the properties was stolen by Javier Duarte De Ochoa during his term as the Mexican state’s from 2010 to 2016. Duarte is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges in Veracruz after he was captured last year in Guatemala. Veracruz is seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages and additional punitive damages, as well as control over the properties.
3. Jupiter developer Nicholas Mastroianni II has become somewhat of a guru in the world of EB-5 financing and investing. As founder of U.S. Immigration Fund for EB-5 Investment, Mastroianni has raised tens of millions of dollars for a number of major projects, including his own $170 million Harbourside Place in Jupiter. But nearly 80 Chinese investors in the Jupiter development sued Mastroianni in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleging he defrauded them by intentionally falling short of a $100 million capital fundraising goal.
Mastroianni, who’s been linked to President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, as well as to the Kushner Companies, vehemently denies the allegations and in a statement said that his company invested close to an additional $34 million in equity to “ensure all investors would receive their immigration benefits…. In addition, all investors have been, and continue to be, paid interest and their investment remains superior to the developers equity.”
More than 60 of the 78 plaintiffs have received their green cards, but have not been paid back, according to their attorneys.
4. Brenda Nestor lorded over Victor Posner’s estate for nearly 15 years until she was abruptly removed as its personal representative in 2016 for allegedly disobeying court orders to provide a full accounting of her management of the late corporate raider’s assets. So earlier this year, she sued the national law firm Akerman for breach of fiduciary duty, legal malpractice and civil conspiracy.
Nestor, a former-girlfriend-turned-business-associate of Posner’s who was named the primary beneficiary of his $321 million estate in 2002, alleged that she suffered damages as a result of “negligent and reckless” legal advice Akerman provided to her court-appointed successor of Posner’s estate. That successor, Philip von Kahle, sued the estate’s insurer to claim a $23.1 million bond she had posted back in 2002 that allowed her to operate Posner’s real estate business through his estate.
Von Kahle alleged that Nestor caused the Posner estate to lose $375 million in value to negative $50 million during her tenure as personal representative. In November, Nestor voluntarily dismissed the complaint.
5. Canadian developer Pierre Heafey and the Peluga family helped save the long-troubled Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach project two years ago by becoming 51 percent owners and infusing $100 million in the development. But shortly after the condo-hotel finally opened this year, Heafey and the Pelugas, who own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, became entangled in a legal battle with the Conrad’s original developers, Jose and Joseph Cabanas.
Between February and March, both sides sued each other for breaches of contract, self-dealing arrangements and delaying a $40.9 million sale of the property at 551 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. The Heafey-Pegula company alleges that the Cabanas partnership has refused to execute part of the agreement that allows the Heafey-Pegula company to buy 20 percent of the condo-hotel units. The lawsuit claims the Cabanas partnership initially agreed to consummate the deal after Heafey and Pegula raised their offer from $37.5 million to $40.9 million last October, when the Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach opened for business.
6. Stephen Hess was expecting to have 3,635 square feet of living space in the three units he bought at Muse Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. Instead, he lost about 400 square feet in each unit after realizing the floor plans included exterior areas such as columns, corridors and balconies that are not part of the units, according to a Miami-Dade Circuit Court lawsuit Hess filed against development entity PMG-S2 Sunny Isles LLC, which is controlled by Property Markets Group.
Hess is seeking to recoup more than $7 million in deposits he put down in 2014 and 2015. The buyer alleges a disclaimer in the sales materials was tiny and unreadable. Hess clams it violates Florida law regarding conspicuous type, which requires at least 10-point bold type. Attorneys for the developers refuted the allegations.
7. Local developer Ari Pearl agreed to leave a joint venture with the Chetrit family in 2017 to develop a massive five-phase development on the Miami River, consisting of 1,678 residential units, 330 hotel rooms, 266,000 square feet of retail and office space, and more than 2,000 parking spaces. But more than a year later, Pearl is trying to collect half of the $2.25 million that was part of the separation package.
Pearl is suing the Chetrit-controlled Miami River JV LLC in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for $1.125 million, the third and final payout as part of a settlement between the two. By paying Pearl, the Delaware-based joint venture company agreed to release and waive all claims against the joint venture, including “his employment by JV or his acting as a consultant to or on their behalf,” according to a 2017 contract that’s attached to the suit as an exhibit.
8. Yamile Espinosa and her company Miami Grand Realty brought a big-time buyer to look at units at Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences. But when her client closed on a $5.5 million and a $440,000 boat slip, the developers and their in-house sales director muscled her out of a commission, Espinosa alleges in a May lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Espinosa claims she is owed roughly $356,400, representing the 6 percent commission she would have made on the sale.
Espinosa sued Marina Palms Realty, its manager Michael Internoscia, and Marina Palms Residences North and Marina Palms Residences South, the development entities. All three companies are owned by The Plaza Group and The Devstar Group, which built the two-tower project at 17201 Biscayne Boulevard through a joint venture. According to the lawsuit, Internoscia sold the penthouse and the boat slip in early 2017 to Pablo Otero and his company Blue Marlin without Espinosa’s knowledge or participation, even though Espinosa is alleging he was aware that she represented the buyer in previous transactions at Marina Palms.
9. Hotelier John Yanopoulos, who developed the W Fort Lauderdale, allegedly keeps disappearing on high-profile friends who give him six figure sums for investments. Former NFL running back Julius Jones, who claims Yanopoulos befriended him during one of his South Florida vacation, is suing the hotel developer in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for failing to repay $300,000 from a $500,000 loan. Yanopoulos missed a September 2013 deadline to satisfy the loan and it took him another two years to pay back $200,000, Jones alleges.
To date, Yanopoulos has not repaid the balance, yet was able to purchase a $3.1 million mansion in Pinecrest in March 2017, according to the suit. In 2016, Magic City Casino co-owner Isadore Havenick sued Yanopoulos for allegedly welching on a $500,000 loan.
10. Christopher Benjamin, an indigent man born with Albinism which caused him to develop problems with his sight, forced the Florida Realtors Association to place its member brokers on notice about violating local laws against discriminating against low-income renters. Benjamin filed civil lawsuits against 46 Miami-Dade and Broward brokerages and dozens of listing agents for allegedly engaging in discriminatory advertising practices, according to court documents.
The lawsuits allege realtor associates working for the defendant brokerages listed rental property advertisements that rejected individuals who receive Section 8 assistance, a federal program which pays landlords the balance of a rent payment that exceeds 30 percent of a renter’s monthly income. The Florida Realtors Association sent out an urgent legal alert to its membership to remind them that discriminating against Section 8 tenants violates Miami-Dade and Broward laws.
from The Real Deal Miami & Real Estate News News | & Curbed Miami - All https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/12/24/south-floridas-most-head-turning-lawsuits-of-2018/ via IFTTT
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hollywoodjuliorivas · 7 years ago
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The Congo River. Credit Christian Ziegler/National Geographic, via Getty Images With Conrad on the Congo River What counts as progress? I traveled to Africa to see what has, and hasn’t, changed since the author’s visit over a century ago. By MAYA JASANOFF AUG. 18, 2017 The smoked monkeys brought the point home. During my first day on a boat on the Congo River, I’d embraced the unfamiliar: how to bend under the rail to fill my wash bucket from the river, where to step around the tethered goat in the dark and the best way to prepare a pot of grubs. But when I saw the monkeys impaled on stakes, skulls picked clean of brains and teeth thrusting out, I looked otherness in the face — and saw myself mirrored back. I was the real exotica: the only tourist to take this boat in nearly a decade, and the only white woman, as far as the crew knew, ever. Expect to be kidnapped, people had warned me. Expect to have everything stolen and expect every arrangement to go awry. Bring your own mosquito net, waterproof everything twice and strap your cash around your ankle. The Democratic Republic of Congo, I read in my guidebook, was “a huge area of dark corners, both geographically and mentally,” where “man has fought continuously against his own demons and the elements of nature at large.” This, in other words, was the heart of darkness, which was why I had wanted to come. More than 100 years ago, a Polish sailor named Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski traveled to Congo to take a job as a steamboat captain on the river. The Congo Free State, as it was then called, had been founded in 1885 under the supervision of King Leopold II of Belgium with the self-declared mission of promoting progress and civilization, free trade and the abolition of slavery. Korzeniowski was supposed to stay for three years, but after just one round-trip on the river, from Kinshasa to Kisangani and back, he quit. Photo Joseph Conrad onboard a ship. Credit Culture Club/Getty Images Behind all the high-minded ideals, he saw a colonial regime of appalling greed, violence and hypocrisy, and he left in despair. He kept a diary of his journey and almost a decade later, in 1899, when he’d settled in England and Anglicized his pen name to Joseph Conrad, he transformed those notes into a novel called “Heart of Darkness.” The book describes a voyage up and down a river in Africa by a British sea captain named Charles Marlow, who is commissioned to fetch a renegade ivory collector called Kurtz. Marlow travels up the river enveloped by a sense of increasing mystery and encroaching danger. Kurtz, Marlow discovers, has become a tyrant in the jungle, his idealistic hopes for spreading European civilization in Africa perverted into a brutal injunction: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Photo A 19th-century depiction of an encampment on the Congo River. Credit Universal History Archive/UIG, via Getty Images The book has been read as many things, from an exploration of the individual psyche to a prophecy of genocide. Most of all, it’s a meditation on progress. Conrad indicted the European imperialists who plundered Congo in the name of progress even while he portrayed Africa, in terms that seem racist today, as irredeemably backward. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story The Democratic Republic of Congo has now been independent for nearly 60 years, almost as long as it was a European colony. Yet it is by any measure one of the world’s most dysfunctional states. Congo’s modern-day Kurtz was the kleptocrat dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, whose ouster in 1997 led to a civil war and some five million deaths. It has one of the lowest per-capita incomes and is ravaged by continuing rebellions in the east, an escalating conflict in the central province of Kasai and a national political crisis: President Joseph Kabila has refused to leave office despite reaching months ago the end of his last term. So what counts as progress? To try to answer that question, I went to Congo last December, to see the places Conrad had seen and take the measure of what has and hasn’t changed since his time. Kisangani, the innermost navigable point Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Bumba 100 MILES Congo River REPUBLIC OF CONGO Mbandaka Kisangani GABON DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO AFRICA Brazzaville Area of detail Kinshasa Boma ANGOLA By The New York Times In 1890, Conrad traveled on one of the first steamboats on the Congo River. The Roi des Belges had been constructed in 1887 out of parts imported from Europe, then carried up the rapids on the backs of 1,700 porters and assembled in Kinshasa, the capital then and today. Steamships were the engines of European civilization, bearing merchants, missionaries and militias into Africa’s uncolonized interior. Conrad hated them. More than a century later, with hardly any roads or rails linking most of Congo’s cities and with flights too expensive for nearly all Congolese, boats — belching tugs that push open barges with no facilities — are still the primary way people use to travel between Kinshasa and Kisangani, a commercial hub a thousand miles upstream. If you’re lucky, you can make the upriver journey in four weeks and the downriver journey in two, the same amount of time it took Conrad. I began my trip in Kisangani, the river’s uppermost navigable point and once a crossroads between eastern and central Africa, for the trade in ivory and slaves. In the city center were faded colonial bungalows and crumbling brick factories, interspersed with advertisements for diamond brokers. Not many boats venture so far these days: Fuel costs too much, and there aren’t enough goods to transport. The handful of vessels that were moored along the waterfront when I arrived weren’t leaving for another two weeks at best. But upstream stood one vessel in stately isolation, moored in a private stretch of waterfront. It belonged to Bralima, Congo’s biggest brewery, and was emblazoned with “Primus,” the name of the company’s signature beer brand. Four barges were lashed to the boat, stacked with plastic cases piled into 12-foot-high cubes like crenelations on a castle wall. Primus I was going to pick up some rice in Bumba, deposit the beer in Mbandaka and deliver the rice to Kinshasa. Miraculously, it was leaving the next day. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Officially, Bralima doesn’t allow passengers — a dinged-up metal sign disavows company responsibility for any “unauthorized” travelers — so it took a day of negotiation (and a payment) to persuade the captain to take me and my guides, a white expat and a native Congolese. But the next morning at dawn, I scurried on board with at least 80 other people toting stools, sacks, sleeping mats, tarpaulins, buckets and stoves. The first mate showed me to a cabin on the boat proper, whose two tiny decks housed just five cabins, the engine room and the bridge. Photo The vessel we began our journey on, Primus I, belonged to Bralima, Congo’s biggest brewery. Credit Maya Jasanoff As I walked down the barges, maneuvering around bollards, hatch covers, cables and ropes, I felt like I was peering into a series of living rooms. A family gathered around a game of ngola, scooping and dropping seeds in carved hollows on a wooden board. A group of men on low rattan stools were studying the Bible. A young man with a pair of clippers and a bamboo chair unrolled a poster of men’s hairstyles and set to shaving the crew members’ heads. I counted at least two chickens, two ducks and a tufted black mangabey monkey, which scampered around a plastic oil barrel held back by a short strap bound to his left leg with a hair clip; later, I’d discover a live crocodile tied up under the freezer chest. We were underway for only a couple of hours when the pirogues started to come, poled frantically by people trying to catch our boat. They tied up alongside and clambered aboard with wares to sell: deck furniture woven from cane, heavy wooden mortars for pounding manioc, baskets of charcoal for cooking and ngola boards to pass the time. In the diary Conrad kept on the river, he never mentioned whether canoes approached the Roi des Belges. In “Heart of Darkness,” the primary interaction Marlow and his crew have with the people on the banks comes when they’re attacked. As I watched the constant traffic between ship and shore, I saw none of the hostility portrayed in the novel, only interdependence. I suddenly remembered a photograph of the Roi des Belges from 1889, the year before Conrad’s trip, with pirogues tied up alongside, exactly the way I saw them outside my cabin. There’s a famous scene in “Heart of Darkness” where Marlow looks through his binoculars and sees what he thinks are “ornamental knobs” on a palisade around Kurtz’s house. Drawing closer he realizes they are human heads, barbarous trophies of Kurtz’s power. Some historians have suggested that Conrad based this detail on a real-life Belgian colonial official. I think Conrad had closer interactions with the African villages on the river than he ever let on: From what I saw of smoked monkeys, they make a pretty good model. Bumba, which used to be somewhere The Congo River is always changing, as sandbanks morph and shift. Conrad kept a detailed journal of the river as he traveled up, noting landmarks and turns and obstructions, sometimes sketching the profile of a stretch of bank to help him remember. But how to sail the Congo River has barely changed since Conrad’s day. The captain of Primus I showed me his only navigational aid: a crumbling atlas with mimeographed pages containing bird’s-eye sketches of the river, divided into 10-kilometer (about six-mile) legs. In shallow stretches, two men flanked the helm, turning sounding poles in the water to assess the depth, exactly the way they did in Conrad’s time. A third crew member stood on the beer cases on the prow and signaled readings to the captain by punching his fists in the air, like Black Power salutes. Continue reading the main story Photo Approaching Bumba. Credit Maya Jasanoff Thirty-six hours out of Kisangani, Primus I moored at Bumba to stock up on rice. I’d never heard of Bumba before, but in the colonial era, this used to be somewhere: part of a string of stations that drew the country’s economic spine. Upstream I saw rice warehouses, a palm-oil factory and vast sugar works. But the businesses have left, and the factories have shut down. An emblem of what once passed for progress has become a relic. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story The first order of business for me there — as for any foreigner in any Congolese city — was clearing my presence with the infamous Direction Générale de Migration, charged with monitoring the internal movement of people and goods. That means showing your papers (passport, visa, yellow-fever certificate), which generally means officials finding problems with them, which means finding a solution, which means giving someone “money for beer,” as the local euphemism goes. On a makeshift bulletin board on the wall were pasted dozens of passport pictures of foreigners who’d passed through Bumba over the decades. From one quadrant stared a succession of strong-browed European nuns frozen in black and white; from another peered the spit and image of Sigmund Freud and the browned 1970s Polaroid of a tow-haired little boy. After an hour of hard haggling, my guide bargained the Bumba authorities down from $40 to $20 to let me walk freely through the town. The place felt like the set of a western, the road red dust and every facade like a false front. Small traders set up what passed for shops in the unlit hollows of concrete buildings. There were scarcely any mopeds, let alone cars; just squeaky bicycle taxis with red and yellow crocheted cushions for seats. Continue reading the main story Photo The boat, Primus I, transformed into a bustling, haggling market. Credit Maya Jasanoff One day was enough to get a feel for Bumba, but Primus I stayed for three. All day long men with calves like clubs trotted down planks from bank to barge, balancing one, two, even three 50-kilogram (about 110-pound) sacks of rice across their shoulders and smoking marijuana between runs to dull the pain. When there was a soccer match on, the crew set up a small generator-powered television on the freezer chest. Boys in pirogues sidled up in the dark to watch. Our boat, with its reliable generator, fully functioning motor and more or less reliable schedule, was the most developed thing in sight. River life, a way to get by As we left Bumba, I sat on my stool on the prow, drinking instant coffee mixed into ginger broth, and watched the forest rise again around us. Since Kisangani, the riverbank had been a ceaseless curtain of green, tall and taller, with canopies so majestic they seemed like forests in themselves. Here and there a small village appeared in a clearing, a few thatched huts on stilts — to the eye, no different from the ones I’d seen in 19th-century photos. However basic they looked, though, they were on the vanguard: the one part of the forest linked to the mechanized, urban world, thanks to boats like ours. In front of the Primus sign, Jeanne, the strong-looking woman who served me my tea, had set up a stall of shiny packets of biscuits, AA batteries and small bags of salt — urban luxuries unavailable in the forest — which she sold, at a premium, to the river dwellers in pirogues. Photo A checkerboard on sacks of charcoal onboard Primus I. Credit Maya Jasanoff What seemed like a way to get from here to there was also, I was coming to realize, a way to get by. Most of the people I spoke to had been educated to do one thing, but in an economy without viable wages and jobs, ended up doing whatever else they could find. Jeanne used to study law; now she did washing and cooking on the boat, tended her onboard shop and bought sacks of rice en route to sell in Kinshasa. Nadine, a generous woman with gold-edged teeth, used to work for the central bank but couldn’t live on the pay. On the boat she got up before dawn every day to mix a batter for beignets, which she fried up and sold for breakfast at five cents each. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story In the midafternoon heat, as I lay on my bunk rereading “Heart of Darkness,” batting away tsetse flies, I had an uneasy sensation that for all that I’d come to Congo to follow Conrad, he’d never felt farther away. “Everything is hateful to me,” he once told a confidante. “Men and things, but especially men.” Yet I was having precisely the opposite experience: On board Primus I, I was becoming part of a dynamic floating village, where things had become familiar and people were becoming friends. Such a rich country, such poor people: That was the universal refrain. One evening I watched the sunset on the prow with members of the crew. The fundamental problem in the country was bad governance, they all agreed. But how to fix it? Some championed radical protests to unseat Mr. Kabila. One person said the problem was lack of infrastructure; another said that even if you built hospitals and roads, nobody had money for a doctor or a car. One said he wanted the Belgians to come back because they actually invested in the country. Another reminded him that the Belgians pillaged, too. From Mbandaka to Kinshasa, the last leg On the 10th day we reached Mbandaka, the biggest town between Kisangani and Kinshasa. It would take at least a day and a half to unload the beer, so I checked into a hotel for a night, hoping for a brief reunion with tap water. The Nina River Hotel, Mbandaka’s best, was well situated on the river bank and had a swimming pool and a dining room with red upholstered chairs and chandeliers. Posted rate: $350 a night. But there was no water in the hotel, and electricity only between 6 p.m. and midnight. Continue reading the main story Photo The Congo River. Credit Alex Majoli/Magnum Photos I took a walk down the riverfront road, past a market of thatched stalls tumbling down the muddy slope and street vendors in the shadow of colonial bungalows, when I spotted something startling. Behind a whitewashed wall stretched a shipyard for Onatra, the national transport agency, and on the grassy bank sat the rusted-out hulls of four or five old steamers. I approached a group of men sitting in the shade outside the office and asked to have a closer look. One of them led me to the craft that had caught my eye. The Yanonge, he explained, was a wood-fired, stern-wheel paddle steamer built in 1928 from pieces cast in Hoboken, Belgium, and assembled in Kinshasa. It had a 250-horsepower engine and traveled at nine kilometers (about six miles) per hour, the same speed as the faster boats now. It had electricity, showers, a kitchen and refrigeration. I’d never imagined I would see something so similar to Conrad’s Roi des Belges, and the feeling of proximity to the past was electrifying. And then, just beyond the hull of the Yanonge, I saw the passenger boats of today, so overcrowded and so squalid they look like refugee camps. Conrad was rightly skeptical about imperial promises of progress. I left the shipyard sickened by a hideous realization: Measured in relative terms, most people in Congo were probably better off 100 years ago. We left Mbandaka the next day for the last leg of the journey. I sat outside Nadine’s place while she cooked dinner and talked to her mother, a jowly lady who never smiled. Nadine’s mother had been traveling up and down the river since she was 18. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story What are the biggest differences between boats then and boats now? I asked. “These aren’t boats,” she said. “Then, there were boats, with cabins, restaurants. This” — she paused — “this isn’t a boat, where everyone sleeps under the stars.” I asked her if the river had changed. “The river hasn’t changed.” I asked her if the forest had changed. “The forest hasn’t changed.” But, I hazarded, it was a lot taller closer to Kisangani than it is here. Has it always been like that? “The forest hasn’t changed.” Early the following morning we entered the deep, narrow stretch of the river that runs straight down to Kinshasa. There were no more pirogues; villages now had huts with walls and solid roofs. The forest had thinned out, and I could see how, if you traveled upriver, as Conrad had, you might imagine it closing in around you. Yet the river itself would widen, I now knew, and the more time you spent on it, the more you might feel the deepening warmth of familiarity, and human contact, in place of Conrad’s alienation. That, to me, was progress. Maya Jasanoff is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of the forthcoming “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.” Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
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onepercenterza · 7 years ago
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Let us not forget who this so called saint actually was and stop praising a him! 18 July, just to help a world that has lost the plot, straight... again! Nelson Mandela was convicted for actual acts of terrorism, and while in prison continued to support the ANC's terror campaign. In 1985 PW Botha was prepared to sit and discuss his release if he would renounce violence, which he refused. When released by that veraaier De klerk, the smoke and mirrors show of "forgiveness" & "uniting the nation", was part of a well thought out plan, as we found out at his death, he was still an active leader in the SACP. The old guard, still had the SAP, and the Defence Force, back in 1994, so he had to put on the show, so that they could slowly disarm and disempower us, as we now see. MANDELA WAS NOT A SAINT, AS HE HAS BEEN SOLD TO THE WORLD AS, BY NWO BACKING! As every year, on this day when all the pathetic sheeple rush to do their 67 minutes in honor of him, I am using 67 minutes to post the names of 67 victims of terror, some of which are for bombings he signed off on, specifically the Church Street bombing of 20 May 1983 (this information is freely available on the internet from the TRC records) FEK YOU NELSON MANDELA, AND EVERY SCUM TERRORIST THAT HAS EVER STOLEN OXYGEN ON THIS EARTH, MAY YOU SUFFER IN OUTER DARKNESS FOREVER... Rest in peace, you who are the ones who actually need to be remembered, and honored today... I start as each year, with children that died and while this landmine was the work of APLA, Nelson Mandela and them were partners in crime... DE NYSCHEN, Carla (10) 15 December 1985, game farm near Messina planted landmines, a particular a henious act of infamy as the following 4 minors listed in the same incident were siblings and friends siblings, whilst on holiday DE NYSCHEN, Marie (2) 15 December 1985, game farm near Messina DE NYSSCHEN, Grizelle (7) 15 December 1985, game farm near Messina VAN ECK, Jacoba 15 December 1985, game farm near Messina VAN ECK, Michael Ignatius (2) 15 December 1985, game farm near Messina VAN ECK, Nelmari (8) 15 December 1985, game farm near Messina SEGAGE, (first name not given) (8 months old) 17 August 1986, Karino Nelspruit (Her mom was also killed, see further down) killed when her home was attacked with a hand grenade by MK operatives in Mamelodi Transvaal on 10 May 1988. Her father was a member of the SAP. Her mother was severely injured in the attack. Three MK operatives applied for amnesty for the incident. Two were granted and one was refused amnesty (AC/2000/199). KULELE Patience (14 Months) 10 May 1988 The following Landmine incident, in which 4 relatives, who the ANC were "freedom fighting" were killed near Barbeton in ‘Operation Cetshwayo’ an MK landmine campaign in the Eastern Transvaal. Three MK operatives were granted amnesty (AC/2000/111). See ANC landmine campaign. SITHOLE, Joel Jiga 28 March 1987, Diepgezet Barbeton MOTSA, James Bhangu 28 March 1987, Diepgezet Barbeton MSIBI, Msesi Tryphina 28 March 1987, Diepgezet Barbeton MSIBI, Sibobo Christina 28 March 1987, Diepgezet Barbeton Other landmine victims include 50% black South Africans... DE BEER, Hubert du Plessis (63) January 1981, farm road near Ellisras LE ROUX, Albert Marthinus, 2 November 1986, while riding on horseback at Diepgezet Barbeton MASILELA, Sophy 17 August 1986, on a road near Nelspruit MELUBA, Edward 26 November 1985, Near Messina MOTSA, Sixoxo Robert 28 March 1987, Diepgezet Barbeton NCUBE, Glabi Philemon 27 November 1985, drove tractor over landmine ROOS, Cornelia 17 August 1986, Karino Nelspruit ROOS, Johannes Jacobus 17 August 1986, Karino Nelspruit SEGAGE, Lindiwe 17 August 1986, Karino Nelspruit SINDANE, Manel Mtshiselwa (78) 25 March 1986, Nelspruit 20 May 1983, Killed by MK operatives detonating an explosive in a car outside the South African Air Force (SAAF) headquarters in Church Street, Pretoria. The overall commander of MK ’s Special Operations Unit. Two MK operatives were granted amnesty (AC/2001/003 and AC/2001/023).!!! Bombing order signed of by Nelson Mandela BOS, Sharon Desire DE VILLIERS, Johannes HENNING, Izak Jacobus (51) KHOHLIWE, Pendros Ntemo KIRTLEY, Wayne Lawrence LIEBENBERG, Riaan Hendrik MAGATSELA, Sekgoetsi Jim MAIMELA, Lengoi Moses MAIMELA, Mogale Judas MAIMELA, Lengoi Moses MEYER, Adriana Johanna Christina (40) MOGALE, Juda Maimela MOHLAHLO, Thomas Jonas NEL, Anton PAGE, Stephen John RAS, Jacob Johannes (37) SAMBO, Joseph Keane VAN JAARSVELD, Louis Martinus WALTERS, Stephanus Sebastian 23 December 1985, killed when two MK operatives detonated a bomb in a shopping centre, in Amanzimtoti, near Durban, in retaliation for a South African security forces attack two weeks earlier on ANC members in Lesotho. The explosion in Amanzimtoti. BENCINI, Irma Elfreda (49) SHEARER, Anna Petronella (41) SMIT, Cornelius (8) VAN WYK, Willem Arie (2) Shot dead in the Silverton bank siege in Pretoria on 25 January 1980. Three MK members held her hostage during a raid on the bank. Ms Anderson one other civilian and the three MK members were all killed during a gunfight after police stormed the bank. Several other people were injured. ANDERSON, Cynthia Valerie (19) DE KLERK, Anna Magrieta Susanna Jacoba (38) Killed in what became known as the Magoo’s bar bombing in Durban on 14 June 1986. Seven MK operatives were granted amnesty (AC/2001/128) PATTENDEN, Angelique (23) VAN DER LINDE, Julie The following were shot dead when ANC security guards from the ANC headquarters at Shell House Johannesburg opened fire on a crowd of IFP marchers on 28 March 1994. At least nine marchers were killed and at least one hundred were injured. Ten ANC security guards were granted amnesty (AC/2000/142). KHANYILE, Mziwakhe Jeremiah KHUMALO, Zantonto Johannes KOHLA, Conrad Ncobela (23) LANGA, Sibuku Petros MAJOZI, Mfanizakhe SITHOLE, Banda Wellington VILAKAZI, Siphiwe killed on 18 March 1990 when an Inkatha induna’s house was attacked with AK47s and grenades in Njobokazi at Mpumalanga KwaZulu by ANC supporters GUMEDE, Mntukathenjwa Dennis MAZIBUKO, Joseph Prison warders who wer killed when a member of an ANC self-defence unit (SDU) detonated a hand grenade while trying to escape from Leeuwhof Prison Vereeniging Transvaal on 18 December 1993. Three people died and nine were injured. One SDU member was granted amnesty for the incident (AC/2000/145). KOTZEN, Henry RANTSAILA, Peter SWANEPOEL, Jacobus MAPHUMANE, Hali Petrus 27 November 1992, killed by ANC tossed grenade in Sebokeng MELATO, David Moeti (24) 27 November 1992, killed by ANC tossed grenade in Sebokeng MOKOENA, David 27 November 1992, killed by ANC tossed grenade in Sebokeng MPHUTHI, Samuel 27 November 1992, killed by ANC tossed grenade in Sebokeng SMITH, Sanni Alina (52) 28 April 1992, Killed by a hand grenade thown into her house by ANC supporters SIBISI, Nomthetho Christian (48) June 1987, Was killed in a hand grenade explosion in Umlazi Durban
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nevesmose · 9 months ago
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Syndroma Holmiensis
Things are different now. That was the last advice Mikulin's father had given him. The Imperium is the biggest gang on the whole planet. The Night Haunter's gang. Stick with them and you'll do fine, son.
His father had lost an eye in a streetfight years ago and the bribe to fit an augmetic was far beyond their means. Mikulin tried to focus twice as much on the other eye instead, solid depthless black like those of every other Nostraman, as it gleamed with something like desperation combined with raw avarice.
Was it hope, he wondered? Something so rare on the Sunless World that they'd had to steal the Gothic word to describe it exactly. Whatever sibiliant kennings and poetic phrases his ancestors had used to subtly imply the possibility of a better future were gone now. Inefficient in comparison to the language of their new overlords.
Most of the time Mikulin found it hard to care overmuch. His ancestors had mined adamantium and murdered one another in the dark for century upon century and achieved nothing. Built nothing. Created nothing but further generations of void-eyed killers.
Until the Night Haunter came. He who flayed and freed Nostramo, pinned the planet down and eviscerated it inch by inch, block by block, heart by heart and corpse by corpse until nothing was left but order and a full stomach.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
It was natural for him to hold both thoughts simultaneously. He loved and feared his father too, didn't he? A strong provider, working shifts in the mine when the work was there and doing what he had to when it wasn't. But also a monster when he'd been paid and given the money straight back to the company bar.
When he was old enough to work they moved to the nearest great city, Nostramo Secundus. Dear Grey Place, the Adamantite City, a hive built into a vast outcropping of ore-bearing rock that jutted out into the roiling black ocean.
His father had called it a promotion, but the truth came out eventually. The mine bosses were scared that his drunken actions, his too-public offences against the new rules of society, would bring the Night Haunter to them. And the Night Haunter rarely found just one criminal worthy of punishment when paying a visit.
Far safer, therefore, to send the problem away into the teeming masses of the nearest hive city. Losing the work had destroyed his father but Secundus gave Mikulin a new razorgang to run with and all the freedom he was brave enough to steal. And he had the Night Haunter to thank for it.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
Mikulin cared little and knew less of the other demigods who had come later, surrounded by an inferno of blinding light and guarding their father the Emperor. Such events, occurring so far away in the capital, were of little importance to remote grey Secundus. Only the Night Haunter mattered because time and distance meant nothing to him. He could be anywhere on Nostramo, seeing and hearing all in his domain and dispensing punishment to the high and the low alike.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
Then the news reached Secundus that the Night Haunter had left to join his father and brothers in conquering the galaxy for humanity. Mikulin had looked up at the coldly glinting stars and felt a twist of envious fury in his gut. They had taken Nostramo's king from his people and wouldn't even use his name.
Konrad Curze, the Emperor had called him. An alien name from an alien being. Mikulin knew it was the Night Haunter who Nostramo's first Astartes followed into the void, him and no other.
They had tested Mikulin once for suitability. Just put your hand in the box on the servitor's chest. A brief sting and a few moments later the verdict was given - negative. Elevated hereditary cancer risk and other minor genetic flaws not meeting the threshold of mutation, the magos biologis announced before moving on to the next prospective recruit.
Stick with the Night Haunter's gang, his father had said. So Mikulin had apprenticed himself to the Administratum, serving the new Planetary Governor appointed in the Night Haunter's place. One of the first natives to join, they said.
Natives grated in his mind like two ends of a broken bone. We weren't natives before you came, before you took him away. We were ourselves. But things are different now.
The first time he really saw offworlders up close he'd just about managed not to stare, or grimace in the closed-off Nostraman way which, to the initiated, was just as expressive as a scream. Someone has put coins in your eyes, he'd thought irrationally, or broken glass in different colours. It happened sometimes as punishment for people who sold out their gangmates or saw things they shouldn't have.
It took him a long while to accept that it was just how they were, the same way they walked the street wrong, slowly, looking at the sights around them like prey. Behaving like that would get a Nostraman killed but, collectively, there seemed to be an indulgence for offworlders.
They didn't know what the people said or thought about them and they didn't have to care. Often Mikulin found himself hating them, hating their accents and their language at the same time as he learned to mimic both to rise up in their organisation.
The outsiders planned great things for Nostramo in the Imperium. We can make this world so much better, someone with eyes the colour of ice melting into slush told him. Mikulin said nothing.
They built Nostramo Secundus a botanical garden to rival any city in the Imperium. A vast adamantium-ribbed dome of glass filled with a kaleidoscope of verdant colour and shape tended by specialised horticultural servitors, the whole edifice illuminated by numberless ultraviolet and visible-spectrum lamps to allow the plantlife to thrive even on the Sunless World.
On the wall surrounding their creation, where Mikulin had to pass every day to reach the Administratum complex, the offworlders had commissioned some famed remembrancer to paint a mural of a lush, rolling Terran landscape lit by a rising sun and bearing the title LET NOSTRAMO FLOURISH.
The people of Nostramo Secundus hated it and the building it adorned. The cost of entry was high enough to exclude all but the wealthiest and every Nostraman visitor had to wear thick eyeshades or else suffer hours of headache and near-blindness, all just to look at plants. Mystifying.
Mikulin had access to the records of just how much power, water and heat the gardens drew away from the rest of the city. How many hab-tenements could the same resources support instead? He had calculated it once on a scrap of parchment and the answer sickened him.
The Night Haunter would have judged the creation in an instant, razed it to the ground and impaled the builders among the wreckage. Eventually Mikulin came to realise that the gardens were never really intended for him or any other native, only to improve the lot of the offworlders condemned to serve the Imperium on dark forbidding Nostramo.
Once, without thinking, he'd saluted an Administratum superior in the Nostraman way, hand clawed over his heart to say may it be torn out if I am untrue. The condescension and pity in their eyes had struck him like a physical blow.
Damn you all, he thought, eyes stinging with a shame he couldn't begin to process. Take your costume-jewellery eyes and your costume-jewellery Imperium and leave us alone like we always should have been. Our world was already better. We were already better.
Mikulin loved the Night Haunter. Mikulin feared the Night Haunter.
Mikulin grew old slowly, the decay held back by juvenats and technology for as long as the Administratum had the budgetary headroom to provide. Nostramo seemed to rot quickly in comparison. The nobility and oligarchs reappeared with new names and faces but the same blood in their veins, the same corruption in their hearts, and no Night Haunter any more to excise them like a chirurgeon.
He didn't remember exactly when it happened, but one work cycle he realised that the Imperium was no longer the biggest gang on the planet. Work orders, requisitions, suicide statistics, every item of paperwork that used to filter upwards to the Administratum had slowed to a trickle and eventually just stopped.
Mikulin continued to attend the office and the Administratum continued to pay him, but in reality the alternative government of the gangs and nobles had slipped into place like a knife between ribs to quietly usurp both their functions.
Eventually the last offworlders left Secundus. No one would say whether it was voluntary. Their replacements were black-eyed and loyal only to the shifting politics of the warlords they followed. They funnelled the city's sparse resources to pay debts and shore up alliances before the newer, hungrier gangs overthrew them and were consumed in turn by their own children in the incestuous reproductive cycle that was as irredeemably Nostraman as the smog filling up their lungs.
Through it all, Mikulin of the Administratum was present, observed and said nothing. They treated him with something like respect - that rarest of things, an elderly Nostraman.
In the end it was Mikulin who finally closed down the botanical gardens. Let the plants rot and the gangs split the proceeds however they pleased. He left and went back to his tenement, hobbling slowly the same way he did everything else now, and went past that accursed mural once again.
It had been smashed and defaced countless times, the people of Nostramo Secundus giving vent to their fury at the image of an idyllic fantasy they would never possess. The rising sun was blotted out by an arterial splash of black paint and, above it all, someone had scrawled new blood-red lettering to change the painting's title.
LET NOSTRAMO PERISH.
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alfredrserrano · 6 years ago
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South Florida’s most head-turning lawsuits of 2018
From left: Craig Studnicky, John Yanopoulus, Philip Spiegelman, and Brenda Nestor
In 2018, South Florida’s real estate industry saw longtime business partners going through bitter divorces, buyers seeking to get out of luxury condo deals by accusing developers of construction delays and false advertising, foreign governments and investors suing local companies over allegedly fraudulent real estate investments and sizzling disputes over allegedly unpaid six-and-seven-figure commissions. Here’s a look back at the 10 most scandalous lawsuits filed in the past 12 months:
1. Craig Studnicky and Philip Spiegelman built International Sales Group into one of the region’s leading luxury condo brokerages during a quarter century’s worth of peaks and valleys in South Florida’s real estate cycles. The company outlasted recessions and the market bottoming out in 2008, but it may not survive an internal civil war between the ISG founders.
Over the summer, Studnicky and Spiegelman sued each other in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over control of ISG. Studnicky wants to force Spiegelman out and keep ISG in business. Studnicky wants a judge to dissolve the company. Both partners made scathing allegations against the other. Spiegelman accuses Studnicky of burning “through large amounts of cash” that ISG made in sales commissions, and failing to deliver any profits. Studnicky alleges Spiegelman’s “overbearing narcissism and obnoxious personality” alienated an original founding partner, employees and clients.
2. Vulcan Investment Partners, a fund founded by a group of leading Mexican businessmen and financial experts, had plans to go on a voracious buying binge when it announced six years ago that it planned to invest $150 million to purchase 1,200 single family homes throughout South Florida. Turns out that 41 properties Vulcan ended up buying were actually financed with allegedly pilfered funds from the Mexican state of Veracruz. The state sued Vulcan Dynamic Realty Fund and its CEO Inaki Negrete, Miami-based Nexxos Realty and its managing member Ana Maria Velasquez, and Delaware-based ACE Realty Holdings.
The Veracruz government claims the money used to buy the properties was stolen by Javier Duarte De Ochoa during his term as the Mexican state’s from 2010 to 2016. Duarte is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges in Veracruz after he was captured last year in Guatemala. Veracruz is seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages and additional punitive damages, as well as control over the properties.
3. Jupiter developer Nicholas Mastroianni II has become somewhat of a guru in the world of EB-5 financing and investing. As founder of U.S. Immigration Fund for EB-5 Investment, Mastroianni has raised tens of millions of dollars for a number of major projects, including his own $170 million Harbourside Place in Jupiter. But nearly 80 Chinese investors in the Jupiter development sued Mastroianni in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleging he defrauded them by intentionally falling short of a $100 million capital fundraising goal.
Mastroianni, who’s been linked to President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, as well as to the Kushner Companies, vehemently denies the allegations and in a statement said that his company invested close to an additional $34 million in equity to “ensure all investors would receive their immigration benefits…. In addition, all investors have been, and continue to be, paid interest and their investment remains superior to the developers equity.”
More than 60 of the 78 plaintiffs have received their green cards, but have not been paid back, according to their attorneys.
4. Brenda Nestor lorded over Victor Posner’s estate for nearly 15 years until she was abruptly removed as its personal representative in 2016 for allegedly disobeying court orders to provide a full accounting of her management of the late corporate raider’s assets. So earlier this year, she sued the national law firm Akerman for breach of fiduciary duty, legal malpractice and civil conspiracy.
Nestor, a former-girlfriend-turned-business-associate of Posner’s who was named the primary beneficiary of his $321 million estate in 2002, alleged that she suffered damages as a result of “negligent and reckless” legal advice Akerman provided to her court-appointed successor of Posner’s estate. That successor, Philip von Kahle, sued the estate’s insurer to claim a $23.1 million bond she had posted back in 2002 that allowed her to operate Posner’s real estate business through his estate.
Von Kahle alleged that Nestor caused the Posner estate to lose $375 million in value to negative $50 million during her tenure as personal representative. In November, Nestor voluntarily dismissed the complaint.
5. Canadian developer Pierre Heafey and the Peluga family helped save the long-troubled Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach project two years ago by becoming 51 percent owners and infusing $100 million in the development. But shortly after the condo-hotel finally opened this year, Heafey and the Pelugas, who own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, became entangled in a legal battle with the Conrad’s original developers, Jose and Joseph Cabanas.
Between February and March, both sides sued each other for breaches of contract, self-dealing arrangements and delaying a $40.9 million sale of the property at 551 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. The Heafey-Pegula company alleges that the Cabanas partnership has refused to execute part of the agreement that allows the Heafey-Pegula company to buy 20 percent of the condo-hotel units. The lawsuit claims the Cabanas partnership initially agreed to consummate the deal after Heafey and Pegula raised their offer from $37.5 million to $40.9 million last October, when the Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach opened for business.
6. Stephen Hess was expecting to have 3,635 square feet of living space in the three units he bought at Muse Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. Instead, he lost about 400 square feet in each unit after realizing the floor plans included exterior areas such as columns, corridors and balconies that are not part of the units, according to a Miami-Dade Circuit Court lawsuit Hess filed against development entity PMG-S2 Sunny Isles LLC, which is controlled by Property Markets Group.
Hess is seeking to recoup more than $7 million in deposits he put down in 2014 and 2015. The buyer alleges a disclaimer in the sales materials was tiny and unreadable. Hess clams it violates Florida law regarding conspicuous type, which requires at least 10-point bold type. Attorneys for the developers refuted the allegations.
7. Local developer Ari Pearl agreed to leave a joint venture with the Chetrit family in 2017 to develop a massive five-phase development on the Miami River, consisting of 1,678 residential units, 330 hotel rooms, 266,000 square feet of retail and office space, and more than 2,000 parking spaces. But more than a year later, Pearl is trying to collect half of the $2.25 million that was part of the separation package.
Pearl is suing the Chetrit-controlled Miami River JV LLC in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for $1.125 million, the third and final payout as part of a settlement between the two. By paying Pearl, the Delaware-based joint venture company agreed to release and waive all claims against the joint venture, including “his employment by JV or his acting as a consultant to or on their behalf,” according to a 2017 contract that’s attached to the suit as an exhibit.
8. Yamile Espinosa and her company Miami Grand Realty brought a big-time buyer to look at units at Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences. But when her client closed on a $5.5 million and a $440,000 boat slip, the developers and their in-house sales director muscled her out of a commission, Espinosa alleges in a May lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Espinosa claims she is owed roughly $356,400, representing the 6 percent commission she would have made on the sale.
Espinosa sued Marina Palms Realty, its manager Michael Internoscia, and Marina Palms Residences North and Marina Palms Residences South, the development entities. All three companies are owned by The Plaza Group and The Devstar Group, which built the two-tower project at 17201 Biscayne Boulevard through a joint venture. According to the lawsuit, Internoscia sold the penthouse and the boat slip in early 2017 to Pablo Otero and his company Blue Marlin without Espinosa’s knowledge or participation, even though Espinosa is alleging he was aware that she represented the buyer in previous transactions at Marina Palms.
9. Hotelier John Yanopoulos, who developed the W Fort Lauderdale, allegedly keeps disappearing on high-profile friends who give him six figure sums for investments. Former NFL running back Julius Jones, who claims Yanopoulos befriended him during one of his South Florida vacation, is suing the hotel developer in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for failing to repay $300,000 from a $500,000 loan. Yanopoulos missed a September 2013 deadline to satisfy the loan and it took him another two years to pay back $200,000, Jones alleges.
To date, Yanopoulos has not repaid the balance, yet was able to purchase a $3.1 million mansion in Pinecrest in March 2017, according to the suit. In 2016, Magic City Casino co-owner Isadore Havenick sued Yanopoulos for allegedly welching on a $500,000 loan.
10. Christopher Benjamin, an indigent man born with Albinism which caused him to develop problems with his sight, forced the Florida Realtors Association to place its member brokers on notice about violating local laws against discriminating against low-income renters. Benjamin filed civil lawsuits against 46 Miami-Dade and Broward brokerages and dozens of listing agents for allegedly engaging in discriminatory advertising practices, according to court documents.
The lawsuits allege realtor associates working for the defendant brokerages listed rental property advertisements that rejected individuals who receive Section 8 assistance, a federal program which pays landlords the balance of a rent payment that exceeds 30 percent of a renter’s monthly income. The Florida Realtors Association sent out an urgent legal alert to its membership to remind them that discriminating against Section 8 tenants violates Miami-Dade and Broward laws.
from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/12/24/south-floridas-most-head-turning-lawsuits-of-2018/ via IFTTT
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juditmiltz · 6 years ago
Text
South Florida’s most head-turning lawsuits of 2018
From left: Craig Studnicky, John Yanopoulus, Philip Spiegelman, and Brenda Nestor
In 2018, South Florida’s real estate industry saw longtime business partners going through bitter divorces, buyers seeking to get out of luxury condo deals by accusing developers of construction delays and false advertising, foreign governments and investors suing local companies over allegedly fraudulent real estate investments and sizzling disputes over allegedly unpaid six-and-seven-figure commissions. Here’s a look back at the 10 most scandalous lawsuits filed in the past 12 months:
1. Craig Studnicky and Philip Spiegelman built International Sales Group into one of the region’s leading luxury condo brokerages during a quarter century’s worth of peaks and valleys in South Florida’s real estate cycles. The company outlasted recessions and the market bottoming out in 2008, but it may not survive an internal civil war between the ISG founders.
Over the summer, Studnicky and Spiegelman sued each other in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over control of ISG. Studnicky wants to force Spiegelman out and keep ISG in business. Studnicky wants a judge to dissolve the company. Both partners made scathing allegations against the other. Spiegelman accuses Studnicky of burning “through large amounts of cash” that ISG made in sales commissions, and failing to deliver any profits. Studnicky alleges Spiegelman’s “overbearing narcissism and obnoxious personality” alienated an original founding partner, employees and clients.
2. Vulcan Investment Partners, a fund founded by a group of leading Mexican businessmen and financial experts, had plans to go on a voracious buying binge when it announced six years ago that it planned to invest $150 million to purchase 1,200 single family homes throughout South Florida. Turns out that 41 properties Vulcan ended up buying were actually financed with allegedly pilfered funds from the Mexican state of Veracruz. The state sued Vulcan Dynamic Realty Fund and its CEO Inaki Negrete, Miami-based Nexxos Realty and its managing member Ana Maria Velasquez, and Delaware-based ACE Realty Holdings.
The Veracruz government claims the money used to buy the properties was stolen by Javier Duarte De Ochoa during his term as the Mexican state’s from 2010 to 2016. Duarte is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges in Veracruz after he was captured last year in Guatemala. Veracruz is seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages and additional punitive damages, as well as control over the properties.
3. Jupiter developer Nicholas Mastroianni II has become somewhat of a guru in the world of EB-5 financing and investing. As founder of U.S. Immigration Fund for EB-5 Investment, Mastroianni has raised tens of millions of dollars for a number of major projects, including his own $170 million Harbourside Place in Jupiter. But nearly 80 Chinese investors in the Jupiter development sued Mastroianni in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleging he defrauded them by intentionally falling short of a $100 million capital fundraising goal.
Mastroianni, who’s been linked to President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, as well as to the Kushner Companies, vehemently denies the allegations and in a statement said that his company invested close to an additional $34 million in equity to “ensure all investors would receive their immigration benefits…. In addition, all investors have been, and continue to be, paid interest and their investment remains superior to the developers equity.”
More than 60 of the 78 plaintiffs have received their green cards, but have not been paid back, according to their attorneys.
4. Brenda Nestor lorded over Victor Posner’s estate for nearly 15 years until she was abruptly removed as its personal representative in 2016 for allegedly disobeying court orders to provide a full accounting of her management of the late corporate raider’s assets. So earlier this year, she sued the national law firm Akerman for breach of fiduciary duty, legal malpractice and civil conspiracy.
Nestor, a former-girlfriend-turned-business-associate of Posner’s who was named the primary beneficiary of his $321 million estate in 2002, alleged that she suffered damages as a result of “negligent and reckless” legal advice Akerman provided to her court-appointed successor of Posner’s estate. That successor, Philip von Kahle, sued the estate’s insurer to claim a $23.1 million bond she had posted back in 2002 that allowed her to operate Posner’s real estate business through his estate.
Von Kahle alleged that Nestor caused the Posner estate to lose $375 million in value to negative $50 million during her tenure as personal representative. In November, Nestor voluntarily dismissed the complaint.
5. Canadian developer Pierre Heafey and the Peluga family helped save the long-troubled Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach project two years ago by becoming 51 percent owners and infusing $100 million in the development. But shortly after the condo-hotel finally opened this year, Heafey and the Pelugas, who own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, became entangled in a legal battle with the Conrad’s original developers, Jose and Joseph Cabanas.
Between February and March, both sides sued each other for breaches of contract, self-dealing arrangements and delaying a $40.9 million sale of the property at 551 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. The Heafey-Pegula company alleges that the Cabanas partnership has refused to execute part of the agreement that allows the Heafey-Pegula company to buy 20 percent of the condo-hotel units. The lawsuit claims the Cabanas partnership initially agreed to consummate the deal after Heafey and Pegula raised their offer from $37.5 million to $40.9 million last October, when the Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach opened for business.
6. Stephen Hess was expecting to have 3,635 square feet of living space in the three units he bought at Muse Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. Instead, he lost about 400 square feet in each unit after realizing the floor plans included exterior areas such as columns, corridors and balconies that are not part of the units, according to a Miami-Dade Circuit Court lawsuit Hess filed against development entity PMG-S2 Sunny Isles LLC, which is controlled by Property Markets Group.
Hess is seeking to recoup more than $7 million in deposits he put down in 2014 and 2015. The buyer alleges a disclaimer in the sales materials was tiny and unreadable. Hess clams it violates Florida law regarding conspicuous type, which requires at least 10-point bold type. Attorneys for the developers refuted the allegations.
7. Local developer Ari Pearl agreed to leave a joint venture with the Chetrit family in 2017 to develop a massive five-phase development on the Miami River, consisting of 1,678 residential units, 330 hotel rooms, 266,000 square feet of retail and office space, and more than 2,000 parking spaces. But more than a year later, Pearl is trying to collect half of the $2.25 million that was part of the separation package.
Pearl is suing the Chetrit-controlled Miami River JV LLC in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for $1.125 million, the third and final payout as part of a settlement between the two. By paying Pearl, the Delaware-based joint venture company agreed to release and waive all claims against the joint venture, including “his employment by JV or his acting as a consultant to or on their behalf,” according to a 2017 contract that’s attached to the suit as an exhibit.
8. Yamile Espinosa and her company Miami Grand Realty brought a big-time buyer to look at units at Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences. But when her client closed on a $5.5 million and a $440,000 boat slip, the developers and their in-house sales director muscled her out of a commission, Espinosa alleges in a May lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Espinosa claims she is owed roughly $356,400, representing the 6 percent commission she would have made on the sale.
Espinosa sued Marina Palms Realty, its manager Michael Internoscia, and Marina Palms Residences North and Marina Palms Residences South, the development entities. All three companies are owned by The Plaza Group and The Devstar Group, which built the two-tower project at 17201 Biscayne Boulevard through a joint venture. According to the lawsuit, Internoscia sold the penthouse and the boat slip in early 2017 to Pablo Otero and his company Blue Marlin without Espinosa’s knowledge or participation, even though Espinosa is alleging he was aware that she represented the buyer in previous transactions at Marina Palms.
9. Hotelier John Yanopoulos, who developed the W Fort Lauderdale, allegedly keeps disappearing on high-profile friends who give him six figure sums for investments. Former NFL running back Julius Jones, who claims Yanopoulos befriended him during one of his South Florida vacation, is suing the hotel developer in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for failing to repay $300,000 from a $500,000 loan. Yanopoulos missed a September 2013 deadline to satisfy the loan and it took him another two years to pay back $200,000, Jones alleges.
To date, Yanopoulos has not repaid the balance, yet was able to purchase a $3.1 million mansion in Pinecrest in March 2017, according to the suit. In 2016, Magic City Casino co-owner Isadore Havenick sued Yanopoulos for allegedly welching on a $500,000 loan.
10. Christopher Benjamin, an indigent man born with Albinism which caused him to develop problems with his sight, forced the Florida Realtors Association to place its member brokers on notice about violating local laws against discriminating against low-income renters. Benjamin filed civil lawsuits against 46 Miami-Dade and Broward brokerages and dozens of listing agents for allegedly engaging in discriminatory advertising practices, according to court documents.
The lawsuits allege realtor associates working for the defendant brokerages listed rental property advertisements that rejected individuals who receive Section 8 assistance, a federal program which pays landlords the balance of a rent payment that exceeds 30 percent of a renter’s monthly income. The Florida Realtors Association sent out an urgent legal alert to its membership to remind them that discriminating against Section 8 tenants violates Miami-Dade and Broward laws.
from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/12/24/south-floridas-most-head-turning-lawsuits-of-2018/ via IFTTT
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alfredrserrano · 6 years ago
Text
South Florida’s most head-turning lawsuits of 2018
From left: Craig Studnicky, John Yanopoulus, Philip Spiegelman, and Brenda Nestor
In 2018, South Florida’s real estate industry saw longtime business partners going through bitter divorces, buyers seeking to get out of luxury condo deals by accusing developers of construction delays and false advertising, foreign governments and investors suing local companies over allegedly fraudulent real estate investments and sizzling disputes over allegedly unpaid six-and-seven-figure commissions. Here’s a look back at the 10 most scandalous lawsuits filed in the past 12 months:
1. Craig Studnicky and Philip Spiegelman built International Sales Group into one of the region’s leading luxury condo brokerages during a quarter century’s worth of peaks and valleys in South Florida’s real estate cycles. The company outlasted recessions and the market bottoming out in 2008, but it may not survive an internal civil war between the ISG founders.
Over the summer, Studnicky and Spiegelman sued each other in Miami-Dade Circuit Court over control of ISG. Studnicky wants to force Spiegelman out and keep ISG in business. Studnicky wants a judge to dissolve the company. Both partners made scathing allegations against the other. Spiegelman accuses Studnicky of burning “through large amounts of cash” that ISG made in sales commissions, and failing to deliver any profits. Studnicky alleges Spiegelman’s “overbearing narcissism and obnoxious personality” alienated an original founding partner, employees and clients.
2. Vulcan Investment Partners, a fund founded by a group of leading Mexican businessmen and financial experts, had plans to go on a voracious buying binge when it announced six years ago that it planned to invest $150 million to purchase 1,200 single family homes throughout South Florida. Turns out that 41 properties Vulcan ended up buying were actually financed with allegedly pilfered funds from the Mexican state of Veracruz. The state sued Vulcan Dynamic Realty Fund and its CEO Inaki Negrete, Miami-based Nexxos Realty and its managing member Ana Maria Velasquez, and Delaware-based ACE Realty Holdings.
The Veracruz government claims the money used to buy the properties was stolen by Javier Duarte De Ochoa during his term as the Mexican state’s from 2010 to 2016. Duarte is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges in Veracruz after he was captured last year in Guatemala. Veracruz is seeking at least $25 million in compensatory damages and additional punitive damages, as well as control over the properties.
3. Jupiter developer Nicholas Mastroianni II has become somewhat of a guru in the world of EB-5 financing and investing. As founder of U.S. Immigration Fund for EB-5 Investment, Mastroianni has raised tens of millions of dollars for a number of major projects, including his own $170 million Harbourside Place in Jupiter. But nearly 80 Chinese investors in the Jupiter development sued Mastroianni in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, alleging he defrauded them by intentionally falling short of a $100 million capital fundraising goal.
Mastroianni, who’s been linked to President Trump’s longtime attorney, Michael Cohen, as well as to the Kushner Companies, vehemently denies the allegations and in a statement said that his company invested close to an additional $34 million in equity to “ensure all investors would receive their immigration benefits…. In addition, all investors have been, and continue to be, paid interest and their investment remains superior to the developers equity.”
More than 60 of the 78 plaintiffs have received their green cards, but have not been paid back, according to their attorneys.
4. Brenda Nestor lorded over Victor Posner’s estate for nearly 15 years until she was abruptly removed as its personal representative in 2016 for allegedly disobeying court orders to provide a full accounting of her management of the late corporate raider’s assets. So earlier this year, she sued the national law firm Akerman for breach of fiduciary duty, legal malpractice and civil conspiracy.
Nestor, a former-girlfriend-turned-business-associate of Posner’s who was named the primary beneficiary of his $321 million estate in 2002, alleged that she suffered damages as a result of “negligent and reckless” legal advice Akerman provided to her court-appointed successor of Posner’s estate. That successor, Philip von Kahle, sued the estate’s insurer to claim a $23.1 million bond she had posted back in 2002 that allowed her to operate Posner’s real estate business through his estate.
Von Kahle alleged that Nestor caused the Posner estate to lose $375 million in value to negative $50 million during her tenure as personal representative. In November, Nestor voluntarily dismissed the complaint.
5. Canadian developer Pierre Heafey and the Peluga family helped save the long-troubled Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach project two years ago by becoming 51 percent owners and infusing $100 million in the development. But shortly after the condo-hotel finally opened this year, Heafey and the Pelugas, who own the NFL’s Buffalo Bills, became entangled in a legal battle with the Conrad’s original developers, Jose and Joseph Cabanas.
Between February and March, both sides sued each other for breaches of contract, self-dealing arrangements and delaying a $40.9 million sale of the property at 551 North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. The Heafey-Pegula company alleges that the Cabanas partnership has refused to execute part of the agreement that allows the Heafey-Pegula company to buy 20 percent of the condo-hotel units. The lawsuit claims the Cabanas partnership initially agreed to consummate the deal after Heafey and Pegula raised their offer from $37.5 million to $40.9 million last October, when the Conrad Fort Lauderdale Beach opened for business.
6. Stephen Hess was expecting to have 3,635 square feet of living space in the three units he bought at Muse Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. Instead, he lost about 400 square feet in each unit after realizing the floor plans included exterior areas such as columns, corridors and balconies that are not part of the units, according to a Miami-Dade Circuit Court lawsuit Hess filed against development entity PMG-S2 Sunny Isles LLC, which is controlled by Property Markets Group.
Hess is seeking to recoup more than $7 million in deposits he put down in 2014 and 2015. The buyer alleges a disclaimer in the sales materials was tiny and unreadable. Hess clams it violates Florida law regarding conspicuous type, which requires at least 10-point bold type. Attorneys for the developers refuted the allegations.
7. Local developer Ari Pearl agreed to leave a joint venture with the Chetrit family in 2017 to develop a massive five-phase development on the Miami River, consisting of 1,678 residential units, 330 hotel rooms, 266,000 square feet of retail and office space, and more than 2,000 parking spaces. But more than a year later, Pearl is trying to collect half of the $2.25 million that was part of the separation package.
Pearl is suing the Chetrit-controlled Miami River JV LLC in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for $1.125 million, the third and final payout as part of a settlement between the two. By paying Pearl, the Delaware-based joint venture company agreed to release and waive all claims against the joint venture, including “his employment by JV or his acting as a consultant to or on their behalf,” according to a 2017 contract that’s attached to the suit as an exhibit.
8. Yamile Espinosa and her company Miami Grand Realty brought a big-time buyer to look at units at Marina Palms Yacht Club and Residences. But when her client closed on a $5.5 million and a $440,000 boat slip, the developers and their in-house sales director muscled her out of a commission, Espinosa alleges in a May lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Espinosa claims she is owed roughly $356,400, representing the 6 percent commission she would have made on the sale.
Espinosa sued Marina Palms Realty, its manager Michael Internoscia, and Marina Palms Residences North and Marina Palms Residences South, the development entities. All three companies are owned by The Plaza Group and The Devstar Group, which built the two-tower project at 17201 Biscayne Boulevard through a joint venture. According to the lawsuit, Internoscia sold the penthouse and the boat slip in early 2017 to Pablo Otero and his company Blue Marlin without Espinosa’s knowledge or participation, even though Espinosa is alleging he was aware that she represented the buyer in previous transactions at Marina Palms.
9. Hotelier John Yanopoulos, who developed the W Fort Lauderdale, allegedly keeps disappearing on high-profile friends who give him six figure sums for investments. Former NFL running back Julius Jones, who claims Yanopoulos befriended him during one of his South Florida vacation, is suing the hotel developer in Miami-Dade Circuit Court for failing to repay $300,000 from a $500,000 loan. Yanopoulos missed a September 2013 deadline to satisfy the loan and it took him another two years to pay back $200,000, Jones alleges.
To date, Yanopoulos has not repaid the balance, yet was able to purchase a $3.1 million mansion in Pinecrest in March 2017, according to the suit. In 2016, Magic City Casino co-owner Isadore Havenick sued Yanopoulos for allegedly welching on a $500,000 loan.
10. Christopher Benjamin, an indigent man born with Albinism which caused him to develop problems with his sight, forced the Florida Realtors Association to place its member brokers on notice about violating local laws against discriminating against low-income renters. Benjamin filed civil lawsuits against 46 Miami-Dade and Broward brokerages and dozens of listing agents for allegedly engaging in discriminatory advertising practices, according to court documents.
The lawsuits allege realtor associates working for the defendant brokerages listed rental property advertisements that rejected individuals who receive Section 8 assistance, a federal program which pays landlords the balance of a rent payment that exceeds 30 percent of a renter’s monthly income. The Florida Realtors Association sent out an urgent legal alert to its membership to remind them that discriminating against Section 8 tenants violates Miami-Dade and Broward laws.
from The Real Deal Miami https://therealdeal.com/miami/2018/12/24/south-floridas-most-head-turning-lawsuits-of-2018/ via IFTTT
0 notes