Post #195664 by CaseyJPS on Mon, Oct 31, 2005 8:37 AM

Aloha!

I hesitate to comment, but there does need to be some clarification. So many people in our community ask me "what happened?," and I pretty much glaze it over. I will make this as "appropriate" as possible.

The current Caliente tropics Resort "ownership" consists of Blue Sky Equity Partners (Roger Abbott etal of La Jolla) and Larry Miller of Tiburon. Larry Miller, an attorney who invests in commercial property throughout Palm Springs (plus about eight of his family members), is the partner we were involved with who pulled the rug out from under us, walking-off with our life savings dumped into the Caliente tropics Resort, plus over $145,000 in personal debt, not to mention the forgone incomes of two persons. Larry wrote a very clever (and convincing) contract with us in the Fall of 2000 which gave him the ability to shove us out the door 4.5 years later, sell an interest in the Resort to Roger Abbott, and stick us, with debt (hotel expenses) while still badgering us to put more money into the business. The IRS still claims we owe payroll taxes, for which the hotel will not take responsibility.

We worked for free, seven days a week, 24 hours a day, since September 30, 2000, never receiving one penny of compensation. The Resort never made a dime. The once-ailing infrastructure and massive improvements required a huge amount of maintenance and upgrading, which was never completed. Every dime was put back into the business. [Invested in the fringe of this were Bamboo Ben, Crazy Al, and Bosko as well.] Larry Miller etal and Roger Abbott, will walk away with our investment after they run the resort into the ground and drain it of any remaining quality of life.

They are deceitful, disrespectful, greedy, arrogant, and socially inept. Their existence is validated in how much money they can amass, at whatever cost. They absolutely do not care and they will never fit in (review your college psychology textbooks). It would never dawn on them to support this community or their own local community because they don't see the value in it. However, they are happy to benefit from the community and use whatever resources they can to profit. After 4.5 years of our lives and life savings invested in this project, as well as the tourism infrastructure of our local community (and our tiki community), we were offered $25,000 by Larry Miller to "sign-off."

The short version: We invested and got screwed. They will use our blood, sweat and life savings to leverage a real estate sale for a handsome profit, for which we will never benefit. As a footnote, I'll be moving by November 18. Reluctantly, I had to sell my family home (I was fortunate enough to take ownership in late 2002, after my fathers' death) to eliminate the hotel debt.

Moments over the past seven months have been a living hell and this community has been a HUGE bright spot. THANK YOU TO EVERYONE FOR THE SUPPORT!

Mahalo!