Strip Club, Clock Lofts Tango In Court

There was no pole dancing in housing court.

But there were hours worth of legal tango on display as owners of a Mill River strip club sought to avoid eviction by outmaneuvering developers of a planned new complex of 130 affordable apartments and artist lofts in an historic former factory.

That maneuvering took place Tuesday morning and afternoon in the third-floor housing court at 121 Elm St., where state Superior Court Judge John Cordani heard four and a half hours of testimony from two lawyers and six witnesses in a case that pits the developers of the new Clock Shop Lofts complex against the owners of the Scores strip club at 85 Saint John St.

The property’s owners have been trying for months to evict the strip club to make room for environmental remediation and then renovation of the mostly empty complex into new apartments. The strip club’s owners have been fighting the eviction in court.

Cordani ultimately granted the legal adversaries an additional two weeks before having to make their final cases as to why the strip club must leave from, or deserves to stay in, its current home in a roughly 14,000 square-foot, street-level commercial space on the southern side of the 130,000 square-foot Hamilton Street former industrial complex.

Over the course of a long court day, Cordani frequently chastised both plaintiff and defendant for wandering afar from the argument at the core of the summary process eviction case, which is whether or not the strip club has overstayed its lease. The judge did agree that the eviction case is complex enough to warrant being pushed out until Feb. 12 so that the two sides have time to gather their legal thoughts and submit them to the court as post-trial briefs.

“Thank you,” he told the dozen adversaries remaining in the court room as he adjourned for the day at around 4:30 p.m. ​“It was nice to meet everyone, and I’ve been happy to hear your stories.”

Third Time In Court

Tuesday’s trial was the third time in four months that the strip club eviction case has made its way before Cordani’s bench.

Last October, the judge ordered Scores’ lawyer, Anthony DiCrosta, to quit stalling and submit a valid legal response to the attempted eviction. In December, Scores bought itself even more time from facing Cordani’s judgment when Fuun House Productions LLC, the holding company that owns Scores and that is owned by Peter Forchetti, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy the day before the case was scheduled to be heard in housing court.

At this week’s hearing, DiCrosta was back before the judge, fully prepared with Forchetti and two other witnesses to make the case that the Scores owners believe they have the right to lease the Saint John Street club space through 2020.

Hartford-based attorney Jay Lawlor, representing Taom Heritage New Haven LLC, the holding company owned by the Portland, Oregon-based developers of the proposed Clock Shop Lofts apartment complex, also came armed with three witnesses of his own to bolster his argument that the strip club’s lease expired last summer.

From when Cordani first called the case just after 11 a.m. to when he adjourned at around 4:30 p.m. (with a one-hour lunch break in between), the cast of characters that DiCrosta and Lawlor called before the judge included one of the former owners of the dilapidated industrial complex, the new developers, the strip club owner, and his former business partner, and a legal expert in residential and commercial real estate closings.

Female Landlords’ Dilemma

Lawlor’s first witness of the day was Rosanne Yagovane, one of the co-owners of TSJ Inc., which sold the former clock factory complex at 133 Hamilton St. to Taom Heritage New Haven LLC in June 2018.

“I’ve suffered many years and decades trying to see this building to a good end,” Yagovane said. That good end is now in sight, she said, thanks to new owners who specialize in historic restorations and who have gathered enough public and private dollars to conduct extensive environmental remediation of asbestos, lead, PCBs, and even radium still at the property.

From the start, Lawlor sought to establish through Yagovane’s testimony that her sister Paula is the only other co-owner of TSJ Inc., and therefore the only other person empowered to make or extend leases with tenants when TSJ owned the Hamilton Street property.

Based on Fuun House Productions’s legal filings to date, Lawlor anticipated that DiCrosta would argue that Yagovane’s brother Alan had represented himself as a co-owner of the complex, and had made an oral agreement with the Scores owners that would allow the club to stay in place through 2020, three years after the expiration of the final term detailed in Fuun House’s 2002 lease with TSJ.

“All I had Alan do was collect rent,” Yagovane said. ​“Period.”

But under DiCrosta’s cross-examination, she admitted that Alan did a little bit more than collect rent. He also helped out with building repairs, attended various meetings between his sister and the Scores owners, and served as an informal male authority figure and go-between for the female landlords and the male owners of the strip club.

“It was a really difficult situation as a woman working with these gentlemen,” she said of Forchetti and his past partners. On the business side, she said, the strip club business is dominated by men who do not always listen to women, even when those women are landlords.

But, she assured Lawlor, DiCrosta, and the judge, her brother never represented himself as one of the landlords, only as a ​“hands on” man associated with the landlords.

“No Such Lease”

Next up on the witness stand were Josh Blevins, followed by Alex Dyzuba. Blevins is the director of historic redevelopment and government affairs for Reed Community Partners, the Portland, Oregon-based developers that own Taom Heritage New Haven LLC. Dyzuba is Reed’s construction director.

With Blevins’s and Dyzuba’s testimony, the Clock Shop Lofts lawyer tried to impress upon the judge that Scores did not disclose the existence of any kind of oral lease with TSJ when Taom took over the property.

“Our understanding was that there was no lease agreement” between Fuun House and TSJ when Taom bought the property in June 2018, Blevins said. ​“Nobody who works for Taom told me that such a lease ever existed.”

Dyzuba agreed. Under questioning from both DiCrosta and Lawlor, he said that Forchetti said nothing about a lease agreement that lasted through 2020 when the two met to discuss Taom’s closing off of a courtyard parking lot last summer to conduct environmental remediation.

Blevins said Taom expects to finish environmental remediation work in March 2019 and begin construction work on the 130 new apartments and artist lofts in June.

“Our First Fried Calamari”

Around 2:30 p.m., Scores attorney DiCrosta started calling his witnesses. First among them was Peter Forchetti.

Dressed in a black turtleneck and a large gold watch, Forchetti spoke in a raspy, post-sore throat whisper. He said he started working for Fuun House as a consultant in 2010, bought his dad’s shares in the company in 2015, and took over the entire ownership of the company in 2016.

Forchetti described Scores as a ​“gentleman’s club” complete with a steakhouse, a bar, and ​“dancing girls.”

“It’s a place to have fun,” he said.

Forchetti told DiCrosta that a fatal shoot-out took place at the club, then called the Key Club, in 2013. In the wake of that incident, he said, he and his partner Gene Arganese invested roughly $300,000 into the property to make it safer, cleaner, and more upscale.

“Trying to draw a better group of people,” Forchetti said. ​“Trying to attract a better clientele.”

That money, he said, went towards purchasing a license to rebrand the strip club as part of the national Scores franchise, as well as towards building a new kitchen, bar, floors, and walls for the lounge and steakhouse.

“October 2015 was when we served our first fried calamari,” he said in response to DiCrosta’s question about when the restaurant portion of Scores first opened.

The reason that he felt so comfortable investing so much money into repairs to the building, Forchetti said, was that Alan Yagovane, the landlord’s brother, had assured him during a meeting in early 2015 that Scores could stay in place until 2020.

Lawlor pressed him on whether or not that agreement was ever written down.

Nope, Forchetti said. It was all done by word of mouth and by a handshake. Plus, he said, he never thought twice about whether or not Alan was legally a co-owner of the property.

Because, he said, ​“Alan was the go-to guy.”

Haunted House

Arganese agreed. He took the stand after local attorney Paul Kaplan, whom DiCrosta introduced as an expert witness on real estate closings and who provided a brief overview of estoppel agreements.

Arganese said that he would have never invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into capital improvements at the Scores club if he didn’t feel confident in the supposed oral agreement with Alan Yagovane.

Arganese said he had also come to an oral agreement with Rosanne and Alan Yagovane to let him build out a haunted house on the second floor of the industrial complex.

“We were going to do a haunted production there,” he said. He said he stored his haunted house equipment there and completed building repairs instead of paying rent. He was quite surprised, he said, when he learned that TSJ had sold the property and that the new owners had no interest in maintaining either the strip club or the haunted house production.

Lawlor asked Arganese if he usually invests hundreds of thousands of dollars into a property based on nothing more than an oral agreement and a handshake.

Not usually, he replied. But based on his faith in Alan’s word, he said, he felt confident spending the money at Hamilton Street.

After the last witness had been called, DiCrosta asked Cordani to grant the parties some time to draft post-trial briefs before the judge issued his verdict. He said the case is complex enough that all sides need time to digest Tuesday’s testimony.

Actually, Lawlor said, the law struck him as pretty clear and simple. He asked Cordani to issue a ruling then and there.

Cordani demurred. He scheduled the next, and maybe final, dance between Scores and Clock Shop Lofts for Feb. 12.