Antares downfall: how a real estate empire crashed and burned - Connecticut POST
They bought up real estate in Greenwich and Stamford like they were playing Monopoly.
They built backcountry spec houses the size of big-box stores, sat behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, and partied like rock stars with black metal American Express cards.
But Antares Investment Partners had a darker side. The same alpha male executives who loved the trappings of superwealth also risked hundreds of millions in investors' money on overleveraged, underperforming deals and tapped financiers who lined up to provide cash, never looking closely enough to see the cracks in the high-flying company's facade.
"I said to myself, 'This is going to end badly,'" said Matthew Allen, 37, an asset manager who worked for Antares from September 2006 until he was laid off in October 2007.....
.....Said Frank Farricker, a Greenwich real estate broker and member of the Planning and Zoning Commission, "It's a freakin' disaster." In the eye of the storm were James Cabrera and Joseph Beninati, the firm's founding partners, whose mercurial rise to success, insatiable appetite for real estate, oft-described "cowboy" attitude and penchant for the good life rubbed many they encountered the wrong way...... ...."The money was just too easy," said Charles Mallory, managing general partner of Stamford-based Clearview Investment Management and majority owner of the Delamar Greenwich Harbor hotel...
08/01/09 - 08/11/09 Blogger Chris Fountain discovers that Greenwich Time Reporter Niel Vidgor lacks the journalistic balls to report the truth
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