Developer Files Civil Racketeering Lawsuit

SEASIDE, CA-A Los Angeles-based developer has filed a civil racketeering lawsuit against a Texas-based real estate management company hired by the city to negotiate a new hotel development between the city’s Bayonet and Blackhorse golf courses.

Filed last week in the Superior Court for the State of California in Monterey, the suit claims that several Texas-based individuals, working through BSL Golf Corp., rigged the selection process such that one particular developer candidate would win in exchange for BSL’s 50% ownership of the completed project. The lawsuit was filed by Danny Bakewell and his company, Seaside Hotel and Convention Resort Developers LLC, one of the developer candidates for the hotel project. It is an amended version of an earlier breach of contract lawsuit brought by Bakewell last year.

The suit claims that by February of 1998, even before the management company proposed that it conduct the impartial bidding process at no cost to the city, the company had already agreed with an eventual developer candidate to form a partnership with joint ownership of the hotel and never disclosed any of this to the city.