Beach Feud Fuels Factory Foreclosure

The city has moved to foreclose on a Mill River spaghetti sauce manufacturing plant due to unpaid taxes.

Meanwhile, the plant’s third-generation owner owes over $430,000 to a Morris Cove neighbor whom he took to court six times over 15 years over who owns the beach abutting their properties.

According to land records, the city filed three lis pendens notices on March 13 regarding pending civil lawsuits it has brought against Patrick Palmieri, the owner of Palmieri Food Products Inc.

Local attorney Alfred Onorato, representing the city, wrote in the notices that all three lawsuits are over unpaid property taxes at Palmieri’s three Mill River District properties, including the former Taino’s Cafe at 654 Grand Ave., a surface parking lot at 630 Grand Ave., and the Palmieri Food Products factory building at 150 Wallace St. / 145 Hamilton St.

The latter, which has been home to the 1920-founded, family owned spaghetti sauce company’s spaghetti processing, bottling, and distribution facility since the 1960s, is technically owned by 135 Bristol Street LLC, a holding company owned by Palmieri.

“The Civil Action is brought to foreclose real property tax liens from Patrick Palmieri by the plaintiff against the following described premises, and to obtain possession of the said premises,” Ornato wrote in the notices.

While none of the legal documents indicate exactly how much Palmieri owes to the city in back taxes on his Mill River properties, a review of Palmieri’s tangled legal history on the state’s judicial website shows that the local spaghetti sauce manufacturer is over $430,000 in the hole to his Morris Cove neighbor, Frank Cirino.

That’s after Superior Court Judge Angela Robinson ruled in July 2017 that Palmieri owed Cirino a total of $466,304.07 to compensate his neighbor, a retired former owner of a chicken market in Derby, for 15 years of legal fees, surveyor fees, emotional distress, and medical costs related to a series of lawsuits initiated by Palmieri in which the latter sought to lay claim to a beach behind a 10-unit Morris Cove apartment complex owned by Cirino at 1 Cora St.

On Feb. 20, 2018, local attorney Patricia Cofrancesco, representing Cirino, filed four judgment liens with the Superior Court against Palmieri in which she wrote that the sauce manufacturer still owed her client $432,519.28 of the original amount awarded by Robinson seven months prior. Cofrancesco filed the four liens on Palmieri’s three Mill River properties as well as on his two-family Morris Cove home at 8 Cove St.

“The defendant / counterclaim plaintiff [Cirino] presented evidence that he incurred attorneys fees and surveyors fees to defend himself against the multiple lawsuits initiated by the plaintiffs/counterclaim defendants [Palmieri]”, Robinson wrote in her 2017 in which she awarded Cirino over $466,000. ​“Further, the defendant/counterclaim plaintiff presented evidence that he sustained severe emotional distress and was forced to seek medical and mental health treatment because of the intentional actions of the plaintiffs/counterclaim defendants.”

The legal dispute between Palmieri and Cirino dates back to 2002, when Palmieri filed his first civil suit against his Morris Cove neighbor, seeking ownership of 140 feet of beachfront property adjacent Cirino’s 1 Cora St. apartment complex.

Palmieri claimed that he legally should have access to half of the beach behind 1 Cora St., right next door to his house, because the beach itself was created through an accretion of sand resulting from a jetty that the former owners of 8 Cove St. had constructed in the 1960s when the building was still used as the New Haven Marina and yacht club.

The manmade rock structure was built to shelter the boats from the tide and to prevent erosion and sand drift. Since it had inadvertently led to the creation of the beach behind his neighbor’s property, Palmieri reasoned, he should have claim to at least half of it.

In 2004, Superior Couty Judge William Hadden ruled in favor of Cirino, granting him ownership of the full beach.

Palmieri responded by hanging a banner outside of his Wallace Street sauce factory that called Hadden ​“a liar” and ​“corrupt.”

“I want to expose him for what he is,” Palmieri told the New Haven Register in 2005. ​“I am entitled to my opinion and that is my opinion. That guy is corrupt.”

Soon thereafter, Cirino filed a complaint with the police, accusing Palmieri of spraying him and a repairman with a gardening hose while the two stood on the beach behind 1 Cora St.

Palmieri told the Hartford Courant in a 2005 article that he had been watering his garden tomatoes when Cirino provoked him into a fight. ​“I’m watering my plants, minding my own business, when he starts screaming like a mad dog,” Palmieri said at the time. ​“Sure, I squirted my hose — he was on my property.”

The 2004 court ruling was just the beginning of the legal dispute between the two Morris Cove neighbors.

In 2008, Palmieri filed a civil action against Cirino alleging that the latter had trespassed on Palmieri’s property.

In 2009, Palmieri started another lawsuit seeking injunctive relief concerning alleged water run off from Cirino’s property onto his.

In 2010 and 2012, he filed two more separate lawsuits against Cirino, seeking ownership of the beach at 1 Cora St.

And in 2015, Palmieri brought still another lawsuit against Cirino, claiming that he deserved ownership of the beach on the same grounds he had articulated in the 2002 suit: that the jetty on his Palmieri’s property had led to the accretion of sand that created the beach in the first place, and that he needed access to the beach in order to property maintain the jetty.

In an April 2016 counterclaim filed by Cofrancesco on behalf of Cirino, Cofrancesco wrote that, through the many lawsuits against her client over the years, Palmier had ​“engaged in an ongoing and continuing pattern of abuse of process against the defendant / Counterclaim plaintiff which was primarily undertaken to accomplish a purpose for which civil process was not designed, to wit, — to indeed force the defendant / Counterclaim plaintiff out of 1 Cora Street as the plaintiff/Counterclaim defendant earlier threatened to do.”

She wrote that the many lawsuits and Palmieri’s extrajudicial behavior throughout the ongoing dispute had also incurred severe emotional distress in her client, resulting in his seeking of medical treatment for high blood pressure.

In the counterclaim, she wrote that, since Judge Hadden first ruled against Palmieri and for Cirino in 2004, Palmieri had undertaken a number of actions to intimidate, distress, and inconvenience her client, including pasting pictures of Cirino throughout the block with a caption reading, ​“Stalker”; directing loud blasts of music towards 1 Cora St. to disturb Cirino’s ​“peaceable enjoyment” of his property; starting large bonfires at 8 Cove St. that sent smoke billowing over Cirino’s property; lunging at Cirino with a plastic baseball bat, causing him to fall to the ground; and, of course, squirting him with a garden hose.

In 2017, Robinson ruled in favor of Cirino on the counterclaim, and noted that Palmieri had been defaulted from the case for not showing up to court and filing proper responses.

“The court finds that the defendant/counterclaim plaintiff [Cirino] is entitled to compensatory damages in the amount of $216,304.07 for economic losses,” she wrote in her judgment, ​“and $250,000 for non-economic losses for the Abuse of Process Claim and the Negligent Infliction of Emotional Distress Claim.”

Palmieri did not respond to multiple requests for comment by the publication time of this article. Cirino could not be reached for comment by the publication time of this article.

Despite the For Sale signs posted on Palmieri’s 150 Wallace St. food processing plant, city economic development deputy Steve Fontana told the Independent that, to the best of his knowledge, Palmieri Food Products is still using its Mill River factory.

“No Walk-ins welcomed,” a paper notice taped to one of the doors of the Wallace Street factory reads, ​“only seen by appointment.”