Sunday, May 17, 2009

Did May Town Center developer Tony G. stiff ad firm and was this the first time he has stiffed clients?

After reading a local story on the plans of an Atlanta-based advertising firm to pursue legal action against May Town Center developer Tony Giarratana on a separate project the week before last, I waited to post this to see if anything would come of it. No word, yet.

However, I've received e-mails from a friend of Bells Bend with details on a lawsuit against Tony G. filed in the late 1980s/early 1990s by allegedly stiffed contractors that sound like the latest pending legal action. It feels radioactive to me, and I'm wondering why local business journalists covering proposed developments do not bother to dig into the history of developers in order to bag anything beyond cursory references to past economic conditions.

If Giarratana has a pattern of stiffing clients, that pattern would undermine his credibility on May Town Center.

2 comments:

  1. Gee, Mike--I think Giarratana's record is pretty well known. He's an aggressive developer who thinks big, rides waves, and when the tide goes out often turns out to have been swimming naked. He's not the only Nashville high-flyer to have been caught like that when the eighties' boom went bust. I suspect the business media sees this as hardly worth reporting. The problem is that that each boom brings out a new cohort of people who swallow the hype.

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  2. Outside of generalities w/o any particulars (like, Tony G. filed for bankruptcy in the 80s-90s because of a slow market) there are no analyses of his history that I can see, but maybe I'm not reading in the right places. Can you recommend some more substantively entailing sources that I have missed?

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