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.

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.