Tag: Ricky Trinidad

RV hustlers circle closer to the flame

Maybe it’s the heat, or maybe it’s just that these things run in cycles. Whatever the cause, it seems that the grifters who think RV parks are an easy con are suddenly circling closer to the flame. With any luck, they’ll self-immolate before causing too much damage.

One of my favorite flimflam artists, if only because of the scale on which he operates, is Ricky Trinidad, who for nearly two years has been casting his spell over the destitute town of New Castle, PA. After making a hash of things in Florida, where to lose your shirt in real estate suggests you might be dumber than a manatee, Trinidad apparently decided he would have an easier time of it in an area where hustlers aren’t tripping all over each other. And New Castle, desperate for any investment that might lift its moribund economy, was only too eager to roll over and have its belly scratched.

Thus began the age-old dance between seducer and seduced, a string of extravagant promises made easier to swallow because of Trinidad’s evangelical fervor—indeed, as he explained to the local press, he’d moved to New Castle after learning that it’s the home of Jubilee Ministries International. Tellingly, Jubilee asserts that its vision “is to come together as a militant, spiritual army that is arising and keeping rank so that we may take dominion and possess the land,” an aspiration that Trinidad apparently took to heart. Jubilee’s various enterprises are named “Royal” this and “Kingdom” that, and that too is a practice that Trinidad quickly emulated.

First on his list: “Royalty Camping,” touted last year as a luxury RV park that would draw tourists from all across the country, thereby turbocharging the local economy. Indeed, Royalty Camping was envisioned as merely the first in a series of campgrounds in half-a-dozen states, all offering “white-glove service” that would “change the RV industry.” Best of all, Royalty Camping would operate year-round because the 30-acre property would include a massive air dome spanning its RV sites, accessed through air locks and soaring so high that campers could have fires and outdoor barbecues and all that other camping stuff even in the dead of winter.

Apparently, no one blinked.

Thus unchallenged, Trinidad went on to extol two housing developments he was planning, “Kingdom Place” and “Royalty Place,” which would add more than 200 new homes to the area—most of which, he said last summer, would be built and sold by December 2023, thanks to an innovative modular construction technology he would be using. And then, at the end of this past February, even as he clearly had blown past his subdivision projections and was still just scraping roadways, Trinidad unveiled the crown jewel of his ambitions: “Preeminence,” a $52 million, five-story, mixed-use cluster of buildings in the heart of downtown New Castle, with retail, commercial and office space on the ground floors, topped by four floors of 200 “deluxe” apartments, a gym and a rooftop garden.

There was just one teeny problem: Trinidad doesn’t actually own the land where he wants to build Preeminence—the city does. And rather than attempt to buy the land, Trinidad wants New Castle to go into business with him in a so-called public-private collaboration that he insists is the next big thing in urban development. The result will be “transformational,” he has gushed, providing a housing magnet for middle-class families to move into the heart of the city, reversing an 80-year exodus that has more than halved the city’s population and catalyzing a resurgence in downtown property values. As to where all those new residents will find middle-income jobs in an area afflicted with a 26% poverty rate and average household income of just above $50,000, that’s something Trinidad has yet to explain.

But boy, does he talk up a storm otherwise.

After initially welcoming the effusive Trinidad as a possible economic savior, at least some local residents and politicians are starting to have their doubts—not least because of that whole public-private collaboration thing. If past is prologue, Trinidad’s history in Florida is hardly reassuring: by the time he ended up in Chapter 7 liquidation in 2022, Trinidad was at least $87 million in debt and juggling more than a dozen projects in the Miami-Dade area, plus a couple more in Illinois—a track record of lots of starts, few finishes and a host of stiffed creditors. Where would that leave New Castle if history repeated itself?

Indeed, Kingdom Place and Royalty Place, which Trinidad had projected would be completely finished by this summer, still have little to show other than a lot of raw dirt. Royalty Camping, meanwhile, has ditched the whole dome concept, erased any mention of a nationwide chain of RV parks, and so completely butchered its web site that it confuses project managers Gary Johnson and Gary Cox. The luxury campground’s latest design, meanwhile, is dominated by a new proposal for a 40,000-square-foot marketplace, while an announced signature “two-mile heated lazy river” is, if the site’s architectural drawings can be believed, just a figure-eight swimming pool no more than 35 yards long.

As a sure sign that the masterminds behind this campground “design” have no idea what they’re doing, not a single back-in or pull-through site is angled to the road. Nor, according to the local planning commission, is there an adequate number of parking spaces to serve the vaguely defined “marketplace”—but not to worry. “This campground should not be looked at like a KOA,” Trinidad assured a reporter from the local New Castle News. “This is a regional tourism attraction.”

Actually, it’s nothing of the sort. Really—there’s nothing there. Other than a lot of bluster, that is, as with so much of what Trinidad touches. But that seems only to have convinced him that he needs to double down, as he also told the News last month that he’s “tired” of county residents bringing up his past financial history and the Florida bankruptcy. “I’m done trying to defend myself. I’m fine with people trashing me,” he magnanimously declared. “Anybody who does something great gets criticized. They can keep criticizing me. I don’t care about that,” he added, as he reeled off the company of criticized greats among whom he finds himself: Jesus Christ, Christopher Columbus, Elon Musk, Donald Trump.

Yes, Ricky Trinidad operates at a scale most other hustlers can only dream about. But his sights are set even higher.

Next post: while an affable Ricky Trinidad is busy selling snake oil, his far cruder counterpart in Arkansas and Missouri stands accused of wire fraud, theft and document forgery.

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RVing shenanigans of the past year

No, this is not a glamping tent, no matter how much it looks like one. It’s an Airbnb rental, which means it sits not in a campground but on a residential site—along with 12 others in Minnesota.

The end of one year and the start of another frequently prompts retrospectives by those seeking closure or looking to demonstrate their cleverness. Sometimes it would be better if they didn’t.

This week, for example, the RV Industry Association breathlessly announced its “top 10 highlights from 2023!” and led off with its 2023 Vacation Cost Comparison Study. Released last April, this 125-page analysis “found” that “RV vacations cost much less than other types of vacation travel, even when factoring in fuel prices and the cost of RV ownership.” “Found”— rather than “established” or “determined”—was an apt choice of verbs, given its overtone of accidental discovery.

Indeed, as I wrote here and here, the “comparison study” suffered from several analytical errors and oversights, leading me to conclude that “the argument that RVing is an economical way to vacation works only if such a vehicle gets deposited in your driveway for free and it never suffers any mechanical issues.” But at least RVIA was touting its cost-benefit analysis in an understandable if flawed attempt to bolster sagging RV sales, which despite such efforts continued their plunge right through the end of the year. There’s less excuse, however, for RVIA to continue promoting such questionable claims today, even if in the guise of a top-ten list of the past year. That’s like the White Star Line citing the April 2 completion of RMS Titanic as one of its highlights of 1912.

Perhaps RVIA leadership is just too lazy or too innumerate to engage in a bit of critical thinking about its output. As much can’t be said for the outright grifters that the campground industry has attracted the past couple of years, few of whom can claim ignorance of the scams they’re peddling. Take Travis John, for example. As I wrote last January, John was looking to raise $8 million from 10,000 or so investors so he—and they—could buy a campground. The sales pitch included a lot of trendy jargon about non-fungible tokens and how John’s company, Campers DAO, would use “latest blockchain technology and an innovative business model to turn a membership into an NFT asset.”

Apparently that innovative business model didn’t find a lot of buyers. And, of course, the whole airy-fairy world of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible anything began wavering, culminating in the November conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried. But by then John had already retreated to a hidey hole somewhere, announcing in April an indefinite delay of the Campers DAO launch while it went about “building more value.” Not a peep out of him since.

Meanwhile, the unbelievable promise of a full year of luxury RV camping for just $3,100 a year has proven to be just that, as two of the four partners in the Whispering Oaks Luxury RV Park in Arkansas filed suit in December against the other two. The aggrieved partners averred that it is “no longer reasonably practical to carry on” the business, not least because, they allege, Brian and Stacy Sides misappropriated business assets for personal gain, bounced checks and otherwise acted in ways that “damage and destroy the business.”

How shocking was that? It shouldn’t have been. As I wrote in April (what’s with this April thing?), Sides already had a record that included defrauding three Joplin, Missouri women out of a combined $29,000 for work he never performed. But when a local reporter earlier this year asked him about the incident, he responded with the classically moronic “there is another guy that done that” riposte. It goes without saying that not a shovelful of dirt has been turned at the luxury RV park site, its website has vanished, and so has the entrance billboard.

Other fantastical campground deals announced last year remain to be played out, including a luxury (aren’t they all, these days?) RV park in Danville, VA proposed by developer Joe Cubas, whose other bright idea is to make that town a Virginia version of Sturgis, SD. And, of course, there’s the grand design by failed Florida real estate developer Ricky Trinidad to build a “white glove” RV resort in Pennsylvania covered by a massive, transparent air dome. Local politicians in both municipalities have been tripping over each other in their eagerness to welcome these so-called revitalization projects, so one can only hope a brisk winter will shock some sense into them.

The seductive—if empty— promise of a financial bonanza for the locals is often enough to mute the critics when someone proposes a multimillion tourist development, but several notable exceptions were notched in 2023. Among them was the victorious campaign in Saugerties, NY against a proposed KOA glampground under the Terramor name plate, and the less heralded deep-sixing of a $30 million luxury (yes, again) campground proposed for New Hope, Tennessee. While the Saugerties battle featured a relatively media-savvy grassroots movement in a relatively economically resilient area, New Hope is “a wide spot on two-lane Route 156 that has one Dollar General, two beauty shops and a meat processing business,” as I wrote in, yes, April. But in July, after a bit of local agitation and a petition drive, the developer backed out.

Local resistance isn’t always effective, though, if an RV resort developer has exceptionally deep pockets and the locals are slow to cotton on to what’s happening. That’s been the story in Midway, Kentucky, where town fathers initially welcomed and then belatedly backpedaled from a monster project known as the Kentucky Bluegrass Experience Resort, projected to become one of the ten largest RV resorts in the eastern U.S. When the full scope of the proposal—and how it would impact the local community—finally sank in, Midway’s city council tried to block the project by refusing to extend municipal water and sewer to the site.

That was more than two years ago, but despite the lack of subsequent headlines, the developers didn’t just go away. Instead they played the long game, culminating in October in approval of an ordinance allowing RV parks to operate private sewer plants. Such private plants had been banned a couple of decades ago, after several local mobile home parks had private systems that failed, spilling raw sewage into local waterways. But history doesn’t repeat—does it?

Finally, one more example of perseverance against local opposition deserves spotlighting. Christine Wyrobek, told by her local planning commission in May (not April!) that she could not build a glampground on her 45 acres abutting Lake Vermilion, Minnesota, went ahead and did so, anyway. She’s just not describing it as a campground. As she explained to a Star Tribune reporter in September, her 13 campsites “fall securely within the county ordinance allowing short-term rentals for fewer than 180 days on residential property—which also allows for VRBO and Airbnb rentals.” And so glampground out, Airbnb rentals in.

Just when you thought all possible blurring of the lines about “camping” had been achieved. . . .

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RV parks a magnet for flimflammery

One of the images on Royalty Camping’s website, extolling developer Ricky Trinidad’s vision of year-round RVing under a massive air dome. See how many RVs you can count—there’s a bunch!

We can now confirm that campgrounds and RV parks are no longer backwaters of commercial real estate—indeed, that they have come to fill the niche once occupied by time-shares and dredged swampland. RV parks have become the latest get-rich-quick scheme (as see here, here or here), a siren call for grifters, flim-flam artists and speculators who wouldn’t know a blackwater valve from a city water connection but who will fill your head with visions of free-spending campers parking for a few days, dumping a load of cash and then moving on again. It’s just free money!

Is your community economically disadvantaged? Is it, perchance, located in a largely rural or agricultural area? Why then, you might be just what the hustlers are looking for, as they roll into town with their barrels of snake oil and their fast-talking prescriptions for all that ails you, weaving fanciful word pictures of the Truly! Amazing!! wonders that they will create. A first-class development—no, a royal development, fit for a king! White-glove service (whatever that means)! And a list of amenities as long as your arm, including not just a swimming pool but a lazy river—and get this: that lazy river will be in use all year long because the entire campground will sit under a series of humongous, transparent air domes!

Isn’t that beyond awesome?

In its broad strokes, that kind of sales pitch is being repeated from one end of the country to the other. But if the particulars in the previous paragraph resonate especially for you, it’s because you live in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and you’ve been hearing a lot from Ricky Trinidad. New Castle is yet another wan Rust Belt city, 50 miles northwest of Pittsburgh and 100 years from its economic heyday, with a poverty level north of 20% and median household income roughly half the U.S. average. Ricky Trinidad is a failed Florida real estate developer who wears his religion on his sleeve and has never built or operated a campground in his life, but who has been assuring New Castle and surrounding Lawrence County that he has the answers to their economic prayers.

Specifically, Trinidad wants to build two small housing developments, The Kingdom Place and Royalty Place, as well as Royalty Camping, a 30-acre campground with approximately 150 RV and tent sites and a dozen “luxury cabins,” plus various sports courts, playgrounds, a large reception and recreation facility—and, of course, that lazy river. All those perks will attract people from across the country, creating a tourism boom for the county, Trinidad has promised. At the same time, the campground won’t be intrusive because, as Trinidad told a local reporter, “we’re going to berm all around it plus a six foot fence. It will be a 25-foot berm, like a hill.”

But that was early days. Even as Trinidad was speaking at public hearings and countering local objections, the germ of an idea that was being planted in New Castle was rapidly blossoming into something much bigger. Something revolutionary. As Royalty Camping proclaims on its recently unveiled website, “We’re changing the RV camping industry.” Exactly how isn’t specified, but apparently a lot of it has to do with putting the entire campground under a transparent dome—or maybe under a series of smaller domes. Whichever. Both concepts are mentioned on the site, but the particulars aren’t important. What’s important is that this innovation will make Royalty Camping “the only campground in the world offering indoor winter camping,” including the whole gamut of normal camping activities, such as BBQ grilling, fire pits, hiking and biking, swimming and so on.

And as the site makes clear, New Castle is just the beginning. A section titled “Locations” identifies seven such in five states, including Colorado, Utah and California, replete with stock photos of people doing fun things in the great outdoors—although no camping facilities actually exist at this time. As Royalty Camping concedes, it’s “in the process of determining several strategic and convenient locations” for a campground in each of these “locations.” But a guy can dream, right?

Trinidad’s vehicle for all this dream-weaving is his latest LLC, called Metrovitalization, born from the ashes of Metronomic LLC, a Florida development company that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September of 2020 with more than $87 million in debt. But Metronomic’s financial woes began months before Covid hit, becoming most evident when it stopped making interest payments on a $5.75 million mortgage, starting Dec. 1, 2019, and when it didn’t pay its 2019 property taxes. The bulk of Metronomic’s debts consisted not of mortgages, however, but of $51.3 million in unsecured loans owed to Qidian, a crowdfunding investment platform—an object lesson, perhaps, in the perils of such “investments.” Meanwhile, despite all that money sloshing around, Metronomic completed only one building and lost all 17 of its Florida properties.

Metrovitalization is picking up where Metronomic left off—literally, as its website list of past projects consists largely of architect’s drawings of incomplete Metronomic ventures. Both firms are described by Trinidad as very faith-based, an orientation into which Trinidad has leaned heavily in New Castle. “We believe in Evangelism and the revitalization spiritually of communities,” he told the New Castle News. Indeed, Trinidad added, he had ended up in New Castle after hearing about Jubilee Ministries International, which is led by New Castle-based pastor Dr. Mark Kauffman. His LinkedIn page further asserts that Trinidad “is passionate in sharing the word of God, through practicing living it in all areas of his life, leading Bible study groups and serving in multiple ministries for God.”

That kind of confessional sharing plays well in some quarters, where it justifies overlooking red flags and warning signs that would torpedo a more secular entrepreneur. “He’s a really good Christian guy who is investing in the community,” contended State Rep. Maria Brown, who represents the New Castle area and who recently took down her government Facebook page in response to a flurry of anti-Trinidad comments. The posts, she told New Castle News, made it seem like the developer is “a sketchy, despicable and untrustworthy man” and not the sort of thing she wanted to see on her page.

“Sketchy” in fact may be apt, but Trinidad is plowing ahead nonetheless. Although public hearing comments were all but universally opposed to the campground, citing its disruptive impact, township supervisors have approved a conditional use request—with certain stipulations, such as lengths of stay—and the proposed game-changing campground is now seeking additional county and state permits.

This being a fast-moving and ever-evolving scheme, it’s unclear whether Royalty Camping’s air dome(s) will be perched on top of the 25-foot berm or inside it. Either way, it will be an eye-catching testament to the power of faith.