"Career fraud people"

This was an enjoyable bit of background on our old friend Stuart "Neil" Fisher. The fact that he finally agreed to an extended interview is probably an indication that even he thinks his options for fighting the WTC development in court are exhausted. Fisher and his associates may be "career fraud people," as one attorney refers to them in this story, but career fraud people do get to know things in the course of their work. The next phase of this story may be enlightening.

Meanwhile, Fisher is refusing to give up. He’s got a hearing in the bankruptcy case scheduled for next month; in court records for that case, he lists as a potential asset the money he would make from filing a malpractice claim against Davillier. And while the court system in New Orleans hasn’t been kind to him, he said his next step is to expose the city’s "conspiracy and corruption" before a national audience.

"This is the next '60 Minutes' article,” he said. “I’m telling you."

It's also very possible is a public threat by Fisher to go public with embarrassing information he may or may not have. In which case he's expecting, as usual,  to be bought off.

Dead litigant walking

When this is finally over, Fisher will be the last one to know about it.

Having failed to block the project in Louisiana courts, Stuart “Neil” Fisher has now scrapped what had been his backup plan to get the case revived in Florida.

Fisher's company, Two Canal Street Investors Inc., filed for bankruptcy in a Florida court last month, hoping to use that forum to file a new complaint against City Hall in New Orleans. But Two Canal has now asked the Florida court to dismiss the case.

And Fisher’s attorney, David Lloyd Merrill, has left the case, apparently unconvinced that the arcane legal maneuver had a chance of actually salvaging Two Canal’s lawsuit, once the Louisiana Supreme Court refused to take up the case. In a court motion in Florida he cited “irreconcilable differences.”

Fisher, reached by phone Tuesday, said he asked Merrill to step down.

"I’m not used to having people tell me that I can’t do things. I need people to say, 'I can do it,' and see what happens," he said. 

Fast forward to sometime in 2020. Headline: "Stuart Fisher Escorted From Four Seasons Lobby Carrying Sack Full Of Informational Pamphlets"  I'm here for that. Can't wait. 

Getting close to the end of an era

Stuart Fisher is almost out of options.

The Louisiana Supreme Court on Thursday declined to take up a lawsuit against the city of New Orleans over the former World Trade Center building, a legal challenge that has held up redevelopment plans for more than a year.

A company called Two Canal Street Investors Inc., one of the losing bidders for the redevelopment project, argues that the city's process for selecting a contractor ran afoul of state law.

He's still got one more trick shot to try in bankruptcy court but...  well, it was a helluva run, wasn't it?

Heroes

Have we talked lately about how much we love Stuart Fisher?  The dude will not stop.

The firm that has asked Louisiana’s highest court to consider its suit challenging the World Trade Center building’s redevelopment in New Orleans has filed for bankruptcy in a Florida court, a move that could let it dodge much of its more than $6 million in debts.

The company's owner sees the bankruptcy and related court proceedings as a Plan B, should the Louisiana Supreme Court refuse to take up the World Trade Center case.

“The best thing I can do is to bring it (to Florida) and see if I can get a fair shake,” said Stuart “Neil” Fisher, owner of Two Canal Street Investors Inc. “If I’m wrong, I lose. If I’m right, (the WTC project) would probably go for a rebid.”

It's a little disappointing to see Fisher has abandoned the tack of challenging the constitutionality of a state law passed last year at the mayor's urging specifically to shut down this lawsuit. It's a bad law.  Maybe we can come back to that at some point in the future. But for now, it's remarkable that despite everything the mayor and his allies have done to push this project forward through Fisher's obstructions... nevertheless he has persisted.

He can't just be doing this for sport, though, right?  For a while it looked like he was angling for a buyout. Fisher famously bought Two Canal Street Investors Inc for $10 after its bid had already failed.  If he were looking to flip it over into a quick profit, he should have completed that deal by now.  If that's the play, it's well past time to call in Sidney Torres and film a Very Special Episode of The Deed 

But I'm starting to wonder if something else is up.  Fisher says his goal is just to force the thing back up for rebid.  Who would benefit from that?

Not yet begun to fight

The latest ruling on the long-drawn-out Trade Mart litigation came down today. The appeals court judge sided with the city and Four Seasons.

A Louisiana appeal court upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit over the city's lease of the World Trade Center building to a Four Seasons developer, although the disgruntled investor who claims the city's selection process intends to appeal to the state Supreme Court.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal refused to overturn Orleans Civil District Judge Tiffany Chase's decision to throw out the case in November.

Florida real estate investor Stuart "Neil" Fisher and his company Two Canal Street Investors sued the city and the New Orleans Building Corp. in April 2015 to block the city's lease of the 33-story building to a development team led by Carpenter & Co. and Woodward Interests.

Yeah so Fisher still isn't going away. If nothing else, that dude certainly does have The Sta-mi-nah. The article quotes him as saying, "The battle is far from over," so, you know, stay tuned.

Kind of neat that we get news about this property and Six Flags on back to back days, though.  We could run a pool on which of those gets resolved first.

Update:  Ha ha Fisher is also going to sue in federal court. 

He will complain in U.S. District Court, Middle District, that Act 516 of the 2016 Legislative Session, the law that requires cases such as Two Canal’s to move quickly, violated Two Canal’s due process rights.

It’s not clear whether a challenge on that point, rather than on the project itself, will automatically hold up construction. The project’s backers have said that the litigation over the project stopped them from getting title insurance.

That's actually pretty interesting. The law in question was passed as a favor to the mayor in direct response to Fisher's lawsuit.  It probably needs to be challenged regardless of the questions about the WTC project itself.

Oh also.. 

Still, Fisher, who said Wednesday that he is still open to talks about a settlement, is showing no signs of letting up without one. The settlement doesn’t have to come in the form of cash, he added.

“If it doesn’t get resolved, this litigation will be tying us up for at least another year, if not more.”

What would he like in lieu of cash? 

Groundwork

The Trade Mart appeal was heard today.  A ruling could come any time within the next month. So, conceivably, we could know by Mardi Gras whether or not they can finally start making that Four Seasons... or if they have to start over... or if Stuart Fisher will ever get his ten dollars back.

The other day, contractors were spotted outside "preparing the soil" for the start of work. So it seems like they're pretty confident.  We'll see.

Heroes

Stuart "Neil" Fisher is a goddamned hero.

A developer whose company failed in a bid to convert the former World Trade Center building in New Orleans into a hotel and condominiums is challenging the latest dismissal of a lawsuit to stop the job from going to another team. He's also secured a new legal team to handle the lawsuit after the first walked away.

Attorneys for Two Canal Street Investors Inc. (TCSI) filed their notice to appeal Judge Tiffany Chase's dismissal late Tuesday afternoon, just ahead of a Wednesday (Dec. 1) deadline. TCSI's principal, Florida investor Stuart "Neil" Fisher, said in a phone interview the appeal will reveal the "conspiracy, fraud and bid-rigging" that resulted in the Carpenter-Woodward team winning rights in May 2015 to redevelop the city-owned 33-story tower.

"We are far from being over," Fisher said.

Hollleeee crap you cannot kill this dude off. He has not yet begun to fight.  A few weeks ago I suggested we campaign to have Fisher named Gambit's "New Orleanian Of The Year." This was before I knew he had the sta-mi-nah to keep this thing going. We're gonna need a bigger trophy now.

2016 is the Year of the Con Man and Fisher certainly fits the bill there.  It is also the year of the con man frustrating the ambitions of neoliberal corporatist politics (to a small and unproductive degree, of course, but still) and Fisher's lawsuit has done exactly that to Mitch Landrieu's attempts to put the WTC building "back into commerce" as a hotel. The value of this is complicated. Of course we'd all like to see the building put to good use.  We're not thrilled about yet another hotel there, of course. But that's the way things go lately. It's something we can live with under the right circumstances.  We're not convinced these are the right circumstances, though.

Now Fisher is a crackpot and his suit is not likely based on the most... well.. accurate of suppositions. But his statements are worth noting because the instincts behind them are interesting.

Fisher contends the Carpenter-Woodward proposal was the worst for taxpayers based on its upfront payment to the city -- lower than the other proposals. Jones Lang LaSalle, the commercial real estate advisory the city hired to handle the proposal process, determined the Carpenter-Woodward proposal had the biggest upside when including the property taxes generated over the 99-year lease with the city.

Fisher, who is also suing Jones Lang LaSalle, contends the WTC property is tax-exempt, rendering any projections of property tax revenue moot. The Orleans Parish Assessor's website confirms the property is tax-exempt, although the Carpenter-Woodward proposal includes a payment schedule for property taxes.

The agreement is they're paying property taxes from which they are exempt?  Maybe Fisher is misunderstanding something. Although, if he is, this article doesn't tell us what that could be.  But that does seem kind of odd, at least to us laypeople. There is also this.

Fisher's Facebook page includes several posts with emails between city officials and representatives of Jones Lang LaSalle and Carpenter-Woodward, all dated before the winning proposal was selected. Fisher maintains the public records are evidence of collusion among the parties to ensure the bid went to the firm with the lowest upfront payment, which he said the mayor's office sought to keep any cash windfall out of the reach of firefighters with whom the city was negotiating a settlement in a lawsuit over decades of owed back pay.

Again, to be clear, I think Fisher is probably pulling most of this out of his butt. (I base that on nothing, of course. All I know is what I read in the paper.) But this allegation may be worth pursuing a bit. It does sound slightly out of character for the mayor who has been all too happy to pursue big up front sums of money in other legal disputes. The Wisner Trust and NO Public Belt situations come to mind as examples. Why would he opt in this case for the long term payment plan via these taxes that aren't really taxes?  Curious.

In any case, I've suspected for a very long time that there is more going on with regard to this deal than has been shared publicly. And I think it's worth examining further even if it takes humoring this con man's lawsuit for a while longer.

Heroes of 2016

Stuart Fisher

Though Fisher - a Florida developer who refers to himself on Facebook in part as an “anti-hero. Dealmaker. Fighter... Problematic King David character” - has vowed to appeal the dismissals, it’s unclear what success on that front he’ll have.

Pretty sure this is the end of the road for Fisher's action against the WTC redevelopment. It was fun while it lasted, though.

Humble suggestion for Gambit's New Orleanian of the Year

Stuart "Neil" Fisher

The increasingly bizarre litigation over the World Trade Center building appeared to quickly unravel Monday (Nov. 7) when neither the man behind the lawsuit nor any lawyers representing his company showed up in court to pursue the case.

Two Canal Street Investors' case against the city of New Orleans challenges the lease of the 33-story building to a Four Seasons hotel development team with plans for a $360 million renovation after a competitive bid process last year.

Stuart "Neil" Fisher, the Florida real estate investor who owns Two Canal Street Investors, didn't show up in Orleans Civil District Court for a hearing on whether the case should be dismissed -- 14 days before the case is scheduled for trial.

The hearing comes after Fisher, who has a track record of failed deals and bankruptcies, claimed a Jordanian investor named either Amjed Abu Neil or Amjed Neel and a Florida man identified only "Mr. Ed" had joined the company, according to attorneys defending the case.

"Mr. Ed, like the horse?" said Judge Tiffany Chase on Monday, referring to the 1960s TV show featuring a talking horse named Mister Ed, drawing laughter from the courtroom.

"Some of the things that have happened in this case -- you could not make it up," Chase said.

The judge has certainly got that right.  I wouldn't be surprised if Fisher's original plan was to show up in court wearing a hat and fake mustache and say he was actually this "Amjed Abu Neil" character.  Turns out what he actually did was even stranger.  After, apparently, faxing documents for the hearing to the wrong office, he spent the rest of the day attempting to submit them via Facebook.

Even though he didn't appear in court, Fisher posted documents to his Facebook page as the hearing was happening. He posted photos of himself last week that show him in the French Quarter, although he commented that he wasn't in the city at that time.

At one point last month, Fisher said in an email that he had resigned as president. He then posted a meme of the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger with the words "I'll be back. Soon."

This trial is set to begin (or be thrown out) November 21. 

Anyway, Fisher has managed to delay Mitch Landrieu's showcase development project for an entire year in spectacularly entertaining fashion.  He deserves some sort of recognition for that. Or, at least, he should get his $10 back.

So who bought out Stuart Fisher?

Can't imagine he's walking away without having received something for his $10 investment.

The lawsuit that has held up redevelopment of the old World Trade Center building in New Orleans for more than a year has taken a bizarre turn, with the head of the company that filed the suit abruptly stepping aside and his former legal team asking to be removed from the case.

After a competitive review process last year, the city chose a team of developers who plan to turn the former office tower at the foot of Canal Street into a Four Seasons Hotel and condos. However, one of the losing applicants, Two Canal Street Investors Inc., has been trying to block those plans, arguing the city broke state law in making its selection.

At the center of the dispute has been Stuart "Neil" Fisher, who bought TCSI after its proposal already had been rejected. He’s been accused of pursuing a frivolous lawsuit with the hope of scoring a quick payday in the form of a settlement with the city.

But Fisher stepped down as president of TCSI earlier this month and says he no longer has any stake in the company, though he insists that others will carry on with the lawsuit in his place.

Actually it's not entirely clear that he's walking away.  Something has changed, obviously. But that something is not necessarily the end of this lawsuit. 

Neither side would comment on the lawyers’ decision to pull out of the case, a step that still needs approval from Civil District Court Judge Tiffany Chase, who told both sides in a status conference this week that she plans to proceed quickly with a trial over the suit.

Fisher said Friday that a new team of lawyers and a “nationally famous litigator” could be coming aboard to handle the lawsuit, but he would not name them.

Fisher has "stepped down," and his lawyers are (maybe) off the case but he's still here hyping the mystery Superlawyer to be named later?  It's suggested by the other side that this is just a delay tactic. But if it is, then on whose behalf is the case being delayed?  This isn't the first time we've had trouble understanding just who the plaintiff is in this case.

Fisher bought the company but didn't file the lawsuit. Maybe. At some point he indicated that he wasn't even the owner of the company anymore. But we weren't told exactly who is.

In an interview in March, Fisher said he is no longer an owner of Two Canal Street Investors, but he is the president and "authorized representative of the owners, both foreign and domestic." Fisher said he has a group of new investors including a Wall Street hedge fund, all of whom he declined to name.

Now Fisher is leaving.. again? But not really? And the legal team is shifting around.. maybe. I still don't know who the actual plaintiff is in this case. And I know even less about who actually owns TCSI now. Somebody does, though. Or maybe this is just one of those perpetual motion lawsuits that keeps going under the power of its own inertia.

Correction: Misspelled Stuart in the title. That happens a lot. 

WTC lawsuit is back on for now

So that new state law the mayor had passed specifically to shut down the WTC lawsuit, isn't going to shut it down so easily.

At issue in the case before the 4th Circuit was whether Chase mistakenly ordered Two Canal to put up $750,000 in security — an amount representing court costs for Carpenter and Woodward, the city and the NOBC. When Two Canal didn’t do so within 10 days, Chase threw out the case.

That was incorrect, the appellate judges said, but for only some of the reasons Two Canal argued in a Sept. 15 hearing on the matter.

Although Two Canal attorney Daniel Davillier argued that Carpenter and Woodward jumped into the case voluntarily and thus by law couldn’t have their costs included in the security amount, the appeals court said the team’s costs could be included because they are an “indispensable party” to a case that seeks to void their city lease.

The problem is that Carpenter and Woodward want to include too much, too soon, the judges said. The two firms asked Two Canal to cover their deposition and expert witness fees, but such costs usually are considered only after cases go to trial, the court said. Certain costs the NOBC and the city aren’t paying now but will pay later can’t be included, either, it said.

If such fees were routinely allowed to be included in security payments, plaintiffs could be priced out of court, the judges said. “This would deprive a plaintiff of the opportunity to seek justice in a court of law,” they said.

The judges here appear to be directly rejecting the intent of a law passed this year at the mayor's urging that would make it more difficult to sue so called public benefit corporations.  It's not necessary to have a particular dog in the WTC fight to understand that limiting legal recourse against potentially corrupt big money real estate deals might be a bit shortsighted. 

WTC ruling may come soon

This report sure makes it seem like the judge is about to toss the lawsuit.  But it's hard to know since Fisher just kind of sues defensively at whim sometimes.

Fisher, who has issued a barrage of lengthy news releases during the case expressing outrage over the city's handling of the project, appeared in court Wednesday for the first time since the lawsuit began. Twenty minutes before the hearing started, Fisher filed a motion to have Chase recused from a separate but related lawsuit.

He argued that Chase made biased decisions against him and had a conflict of interest through her campaign for a seat on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. Chase ruled against him and sent the motion to another district judge for second decision on the recusal.

Fisher sat with attorneys for Two Canal Street Investors, but attorney Daniel Davillier emphasized that Fisher was representing himself.

So that's fun and confusing.  Which is about par for the course with this saga. Anyway, you don't have to like Fisher. He seems super sketchy. But there are reasons to root for the lawsuit to go forward. I've written about that a bunch of times.  Most recently here.

Iconic sinkhole

Something is not quite right beneath "the most valuable real estate in the city." 

NEW ORLEANS - Closures near the foot of Canal Street are unearthing a problem many residents didn’t even know existed.

It’s a 50-year-old problem in the making.

Underneath the street, a tunnel which stretches from Canal to Poydras Street is starting to buckle and has caused a shut down in the area.

The tunnel was built by the city in 1966 as part of a planned Riverfront Expressway that would have run along the edge of the French Quarter.

“It was probably a temporary design made out of steel and they probably didn't paint it," says Levees.org engineer H.J. Bosworth. "Those unpainted structures under the City of New Orleans don't stand a chance."

Bosworth said the concern now is if the damage underneath will cause the street above ground to collapse. He said there are several layers of concrete that prevent major damage.

"The collapse wouldn't be catastrophic and things dropping like 20 feet or anything like that,” Bosworth explained. “Something like that collapses little by little."

In a sure sign that New Orleans is returning to form a decade on from the catastrophic Katrina event, we're finally back into a mode where things merely collapse little by little.

One such slow motion collapse may involve the deal to finally put another decrepit Canal Street property "back into commerce."

A Florida real estate developer who is challenging the city's lease of the former World Trade Center building for a Four Seasons hotel must appear for a deposition in New Orleans, a judge ruled Tuesday (April 19).

Stuart "Neil" Fisher of Palm Beach, whose previous investments in New Orleans include failed attempts to develop the Market Street power plant and Plaza Tower, was ordered to appear for questioning by lawyers representing developers who hope to convert the World Trade Center into a Four Seasons hotel.

Orleans Civil District Judge Tiffany Chase issued the decision over the objections of lawyers for Two Canal Street Investors, a losing bidder on the World Trade Center, who said even though Fisher is president of the company, he isn't directly involved in the litigation and can't be forced to appear in Louisiana.

Okay so, wait. If Fisher, who we previously understood to be the owner of Two Canal Street Investors, is not the plaintiff in its lawsuit, then who is, exactly? There seems to be some disagreement.

A lawyer for the Four Seasons team attacked the credibility of Two Canal Street Investors during the hearing Tuesday.

"Mr. Fisher has no right of action," said lawyer Russ Herman. "He has no interest in Two Canal Street Investors' presentation to the city of New Orleans...and so here is an individual who purchases for $10 a shell corporation just in order to file a suit, and it has no assets."

Herman said he traveled to Florida twice expecting to depose Fisher, but both times Fisher did not appear.

Charline Gipson, a lawyer for Two Canal Street Investors, said Fisher is not a plaintiff in the lawsuit, and Chase's ruling will be appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. Gipson also took issue with Herman's depiction of Two Canal Street Investors.

"Opposing counsel has spun a story of desperation...that is designed to block the truth from coming out in this case," Gipson said.

The lawsuit is scheduled for trial on Oct. 24.

In an interview in March, Fisher said he is no longer an owner of Two Canal Street Investors, but he is the president and "authorized representative of the owners, both foreign and domestic." Fisher said he has a group of new investors including a Wall Street hedge fund, all of whom he declined to name.

First of all, it's strange that Four Seasons is trying to diminish Fisher's role in TCSI's original presentation.  Their own countersuit alleges that Fisher was a "shadowy operator" attached to the team the entire time.

But the court required the records be produced, and Carpenter/Woodward filed some of them this week as exhibits. They include emails sent by Fisher at the end of 2014 and early 2015, detailing his role in putting together TCSI's submissions to the city, describing the time he'd dedicated and the $300,000 he was "personally responsible for" putting into the project and listing himself and his friend, Bill Broadhurst, as members of the "Two Canal Street Investors LLC Team."

But since TCSI's team apparently agrees that Fisher isn't important enough to be deposed now, well, what the heck is even happening?  Are the former owners the plaintiff? According to that David Hammer story, at least one of the original owners is (was?) "back on board" with the litigation.

One of the original owners, local attorney Al Thompson, told WWL-TV he was initially against taking legal action, so he sold his stake to Fisher out of frustration. He says he's back on board with TCSI and now supports the litigation because of the "blatant misrepresentations of Carpenter and Co., et al."

Are the "new investors" the plaintiff?  Who are they?  Who is running this lawsuit?

Just as curious, why is the mayor so intent on shutting it down?

Legislation being pushed by Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration that attempts to fend off a lawsuit holding up a $360 million renovation of the vacant World Trade Center building was approved by a state Senate committee on Thursday (April 14).

This particular measure doesn't only affect this one lawsuit, of course. It also makes it more difficult for any aggrieved party to sue a so called public benefit corporation like, in this case, the New Orleans Building Corp.

The bill sponsored by Sen. Conrad Appel doesn't mention the World Trade Center specifically but changes what factors public benefit corporations can consider when picking a private company to lease public property. Public benefit corporations can award leases outside the standard public lease law.

The bill also requires anyone challenging a lease to pay cash or other security in order to file a lawsuit, an amount that could reach tens of millions of dollars on big projects. The bill would apply to both future and currently pending lawsuits.

So say, for example, you are a minority owned firm or maybe a neighborhood advocacy group challenging a NOBC decision.  Better have some kind of collateral on hand before you consider impeding the public progress.  That certainly seems like overkill. Especially so in this case where the mayor's allies assure everyone they are facing a "shakedown" artist with no real standing anyway.

"So this guy came and bought it for $10 and opportunistically has filed suit to...frankly, shake down the Four Seasons developers and the city of New Orleans, that's what's going on here," said Scott Whittaker, an attorney representing the New Orleans Building Corp.

If it's so simple, why are we running all the way to Baton Rouge for help?  Why are we taking out full page ads in Gambit this week?



Why are we hiding behind all these illustrious signatories?



Lookie there. I see Ron Forman, King Milling, Jimmy Reiss, Bill Goldring, Scott Cowen. Ordinarily when you see any one of those names attached to something it ought to be a red flag. Something is definitely fishy here.  You've got to think any local news organization worth its salt would be begging to see this thing go to court.  I mean, what reporter wouldn't want to see the depositions where decision-makers were asked how the mayor told them to vote and on whose behalf he might have made such a request?

Nobody at the Advocate, is too interested I guess. They just want us all to "move faster." 

It is a misfortune for the city’s workers and the tourism trade that the lowest-ranked contestant for the project, amid numerous high-quality proposals considered, is holding up jobs and progress with a legal challenge.

Had this been a case of a point or two in the ratings, maybe we would be less impatient with the delay. But the winning project to bring the Four Seasons hotel and condominiums to the city won far more points in the ratings closely considered by a panel of city officials and experts.

The Four Seasons proposal won by a mile.

Ha ha, it won by a miles worth of "points" distributed by "experts." Yes, that's one way of putting it. Another way to describe this process might go like this.  After the Mayor's favored Tricentennial Consortium lost the first attempt at bidding this out to Gatehouse capital, the city proceed to obstruct the project by shaking down Gatehouse for legal fees as a pretext to void the bid and re-start the entire process.  That then led to a second assemblage of proposals reviewed by NOBC's panel of the "city officials and experts" who eventually awarded their "mile of points" to Four Seasons.

But, ok, so the Advocate's "Our Views" correspondent doesn't want to get too far bogged down in all that.  Instead, he/she/it(?) wants us to think about the "property values."

The Four Seasons proposal, according to city consultants’ evaluation, would produce the largest amount of taxes for the city and would have “higher economic multipliers” than the other projects because it would increase property values and bring luxury travelers to New Orleans.

"Higher economic multipliers" because "property values and luxury travelers" is probably the purest distillation you're going to find of the trickle-down development theory deployed to the great injury of our city's poor and working classes since the moment Katrina's floodwaters receded.  You don't have to look far to see it in action. Just take a look around your neighborhood.

None of this is any concern to the Advocate's editorial board. Nor are they interested in a legal action which might bring to light the actions of our city's most powerful people in directing and profiting by such atrocities. But whether or not our media institutions decide this stuff is worth printing on a banner over Poydras street or if they prefer to bury it in a tunnel under Canal, it's still the sort of thing that causes the social and political fabric of your city to buckle and collapse; even if little by little.

Update: TCSI's request for an injunction was denied today.  So it looks like Four Seasons has the go-ahead to begin work. The lawsuit itself is still pending though.

Still going for the long con

This one nagging thing about the WTC redevelopment keeps popping up.

Investors who lost a bid to redevelop the World Trade Center building filed a lawsuit last week against the real estate consultants who advised city leaders in picking a Four Seasons hotel and condo proposal for the vacant tower.

Two Canal Street Investors argue in the lawsuit filed March 23 that the city's consultants made errors in analyzing five competing hotel proposals and skewed the offers in favor of the Four Seasons plan to manipulate the process.

This is an addition to a suit filed last year by the same plaintiff. It isn't likely to succeed. But it does have to potential to generate some sort of settlement before Four Seasons is allowed to proceed with the project.  And any settlement amount greater than  $10 will be a windfall for the con artist who bought Two Canal Investors just prior to the litigation.

It's an iconic "shadow," though

This is over a week old but I didn't want it to go un-flagged.  

NEW ORLEANS – A shadowy developer whose previous New Orleans projects have crumbled amid corruption and bankruptcy is now threatening to derail the Four Seasons project at the city-owned World Trade Center.

A development group named Two Canal Street Investors Inc. sued the city and the quasi-governmental New Orleans Building Corp. in April, alleging its proposed Hotel Alessandra project should have been selected over the Four Seasons proposal because it offered the highest rent payments to the city – up to $65 million immediately at closing and more than $3 billion over the 99-year lease.

Instead, NOBC's selection committee used a broader scoring process and picked the Four Seasons project by developers Carpenter and Co. of Massachusetts and Woodward Group of New Orleans. They propose to spend $360 million redeveloping the iconic X-shaped building at the foot of Canal Street, but only offered the city $5 million at closing and $773 million in rent over the life of the lease.

Back during the bid process, I had a little trouble sorting out all the players. I also handicapped the results badly.

One especially difficult thing to keep up with was there were competing bids from a group called "2 Canal Redevelopment LLC"  and another one called "Two Canal Street Investors." Neither ended up the winner.  But I thought one of them had the inside track. This was "2 Canal Redevelopment." I liked their odds because they were led by some of our favorite NOligarchs including Darryl Berger and Joe Jaeger.  Their chances seemed especially good since they offered to bribe power players donate $1 million to Xavier University and another $250,000 to the mayor's NOLA4Life initiative.

The latter group, "Two Canal Street Investors" is the subject of Hammer's story.  Their biggest public splash involved the bizarre Gondola-To-Nowhere ride that showed up in one of their proposals. They also had an operator, of sorts, on their side.

The key person left off TCSI's disclosures during the bidding process was Stuart "Neil" Fisher. He's best known locally for a 2010 email he wrote when he was involved in trying to redevelop the old Entergy smokestack building off Tchoupitoulas, the Market Street Power Plant. Urging his partners to stay with the project owned by his wife, T.J. Fisher, and Florida developer Michael Samuel, Neil Fisher wrote that former Mayor Ray Nagin would "get a piece" of the deal.

Later, federal prosecutors proved that Nagin got $100,000 in bribes from Samuel for his support of the Market Street project, which ended up going bankrupt. Nagin is serving the second year of a 10-year prison sentence.

Before that, Fisher made news in Baltimore for his role in a scuttled Ritz-Carlton project and in New Orleans for collecting millions of dollars in Hurricane Katrina insurance proceeds for the Plaza Tower without telling one of his partners, former Baltimore Ravens linebacker Michael McCrary. McCrary sued and was awarded $19 million in damages.

Meanwhile, the Plaza Tower, an iconic part of the New Orleans skyline, remains vacant more than eight years after Fisher sold his stake.

Fisher is now the sole owner of what's left of Two Canal Street Investors. He bought the company for $10 before filing suit.  So it could turn out to be a pretty good investment for him.  Likely he'll end up with some kind of buyout or settlement before the thing is over.  Because, really, every developer is "shadowy" and they all know how to play the game.