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PhillyDeals: Tribal woes in Conn. won't affect Foxwoods here

The Mashantucket Western Pequot Tribal Nation, part-owner of a planned Philadelphia gambling hall, is trying to restructure its vast Connecticut casino's $2 billion-plus debt load so it can keep pulling in cash from a shrinking crowd of gamblers.

The Mashantucket Western Pequot Tribal Nation, part-owner of a planned Philadelphia gambling hall, is trying to restructure its vast Connecticut casino's $2 billion-plus debt load so it can keep pulling in cash from a shrinking crowd of gamblers.

"We'll be asking creditors to take a big haircut," a tribal adviser told the New London Day.

The Mashantuckets also own Foxwoods Development Co. L.L.C., a 30 percent partner in one of the groups that is trying to open a slot-machine gambling hall in Philadelphia.

The tribe's huge casino complex in southeastern Connecticut is called Foxwoods.

But "Foxwoods Development Co. is a separate corporation from the tribal gaming operations," Brian Ford, president of Washington Philadelphia Investors, which owns the remaining 70 percent, told me.

"Any financial exigency in the tribal gaming operations will have no impact on Foxwoods Development Co.'s ability to be a great partner here in Pennsylvania."

The group will bring its latest proposals before the state gaming board tomorrow, as my colleague Jennifer Lin reported Tuesday.

Win by losing?

Philadelphia lawyer M. Kelly Tillery is celebrating what he calls a free-speech victory in federal court in St. Louis for his client, bodybuilding.com.

The site was sued by makers of dietary supplements upset by attacks on their products from people posting on the Web site.

Tillery cited Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to argue you cannot hold Web site operators responsible for the claims posters make. The court bought it, dropping the site as a defendant. The site beat a separate claim in Idaho last year. Claims against the posters are still in court.

"If chat-room providers were subject to such lawsuits, the availability of these very important forums for the exchange of ideas and information would diminish, if not disappear," Tillery told me.

Yet such lawsuits haven't disappeared; they're actually increasing - 13 years after the act was passed, David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, told me.

He has just finished a statistical analysis of 133 court claims against Internet providers that raised a Section 230 defense. The providers win seven out of 10 in federal court. Only one in eight defamation claimants wins a judgment.

So why do Internet critics keep suing sites? "Plaintiffs are driven not solely because of financial interests," Ardia explained. "They're doing it because they're angry; they want vengeance. Driving up the costs of the defendant." So plaintiffs feel as if they've won, even if they lose.

Regrouping

Richard A. Ehst, who headed Sovereign Bancorp Inc.'s business lending in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; Warren Taylor, who ran retail branches in New Jersey; and Jim Collins, who handled the Bucks-Montgomery region, have quit Sovereign and joined their old boss, Jay S. Sidhu, at Phoenixville's five-branch New Century Bank. This happened soon after Sidhu raised $17 million for the bank in the United States and India and took over as chief executive officer.

Ehst replaces Jim McKeighan as New Century chief operating officer. "It's an amazing opportunity," a chance to run something that is growing fast, Ehst told me. Taylor will head retail banking. Collins will head "alternative delivery systems," including online.

Sidhu ran Sovereign before he was forced out in a shareholder rebellion that led to Sovereign's sale to Spain's Banco Santander S.A.

Where the money is

A former four-person Sovereign business-lending team, led by veteran Philadelphia banker L. Raymond Stankus, has moved deeper into Chester County, to DNB Financial Corp., of Downingtown. Stankus will head DNB's commercial-banking arm, which is trying to fill what president Al Melfi calls a vacuum in small-business and middle-market lending as local banks keep getting sold or run out of money as loan losses rise.

Melfi said DNB loans and investments had doubled, to $630 million, since 2005.

"We talked to seven or eight local banks. DNB had money to lend," said Gary Huddell, co-owner of America Process Lettering Inc. (Ampro), which employs 75 at its Primos uniform-printing and embroidery plant.