Encore Boston Harbor ‘Hidden Felon’ Land Deal Claim Nixed in Mass. Supreme Court

A former owner of the soil that became Encore Bean Town Harbor has failed to convince the MA Supreme Judicial Margaret Court that he deserves an additional $19 zillion from the sale.

Anthony Gattineri owned a 49% stake in FBT Everett Realty. In 2009, his company purchased the disused chemical substance industrial plant on the Mystic River, where the cassino at present stands, for $8 million.

Two years later, MA voters legalized casino gaming, and FTB impinge on the jackpot when Wynn Resorts showed interestingness inward acquiring the plot. Gattineri claims the casino monster entered into a verbal agreement with FBT inward 2012, promising to purchase the put down for $75 billion if it won the beseech for the region’s resole gaming license.

The only problem was single of FBT’s directors, Charles Stuart Lightbody, had a felon enter and reputed Cosa Nostra ties. MA law states that no more convicted felon may gain from the procedure of a casino.

Suspicious Documents

While the MA Gaming Commission (MGC) was doing due industry on Wynn Resorts, its investigators learned of Lightbody’s checkered past. They so became concerned that FBT was concealing his stake inwards the company.

As a result, the MGC qualified the amount Wynn could pay for the put down to $35 million, which it said would be its note value were it not earmarked for a casino.

FBT maintained that Lightbody had divested himself of his stake inwards the troupe inwards 2011 by merchandising his shares to Gattineri, a year before the Wynn proposal. But this was suspicious, as the relevant documents had been backdated.

Two weeks after the MGC awarded the gambling casino license to Wynn in 2015, Gattineri, Lightbody, and another director, Dustin DeNunzio, were indicted on federal hoax charges.

But they were cleared inward 2016. The jurist inwards the grammatical case determined that thither was zippo inwards MA practice of law that prohibited a felon from profiting from marketing an asset to a gambling casino company, only from literal gaming operations.

Ironically, the law of nature relating to “convicted felons” had been misinterpreted non only past the MGC and the prosecution but also past the defendants themselves.

‘Handshake’ Unenforceable

Gattineri argued that the MGC’s misunderstanding of the rules be him $12 one thousand thousand — his 49% portion out of the additional $40 trillion FTB would get received under the $75 billion deal. But in its ruling Friday, the lawcourt dictated that a buck private handshake trade was unenforceable, noting that the agreement’s inside information with Wynn were ne'er reported to the MGC.

[The money was] to be paid to Gattineri, the soul who had purchased an additional interest group in FBT from Lightbody … thereby raising concerns that such additional undisclosed compensation power death upward inward his hands. It is severe to conceive of contractual conditions more potential to undermine the public’s trust inward the licensing process,” wrote Associate Justice Robert Falcon Scott L. Kafker.

“[…] Enforcement of such a private agreement, contradicting the public terms of approval, constitutes a all the way violation of public policy,” he added.