Suffolk Downs bets big on lawsuit over Everett casino

With the Wynn Encore Boston Harbor casino nearing completion, the company that owns Suffolk Downs has filed a suit under the federal racketeering law against the project against Wynn and the company Wynn bought its Everett land from.

Suffolk Downs competed against Wynn for the Boston-area casino license, but lost. In a suit filed in US District Court in Boston yesterday, it is now seeking at least $3 billion in recompense - $1 billion for the direct losses it said it incurred, tripled, as allowed under the RICO law.

The company's suit hinges on the way Wynn bought the Everett land on which the casino is being built and the general unsuitability of its officers:

The Wynn Defendants were granted a license to operate their casino on a toxic waste site loaded with levels of arsenic still so high that a child day care center would not be permitted to be housed there, even after the site was remediated and the regulations amended to countenance higher levels.

Casino gambling has long been viewed as an industry particularly vulnerable to criminal influence as well as unusually likely to encourage political corruption. When Massachusetts decided to legalize casino gambling in 2011 after decades of discussion and debate, the enabling legislation contained numerous safeguards against those risks. The Wynn Defendants purchased the toxic site from an entity owned jointly by associates of La Cosa Nostra and a friend and former business partner of the Chairman of the Gaming Commission, Stephen Crosby. Not only did this sale run afoul of the Gaming Act, but this criminally-tainted entity was actually brought on to provide services to the Wynn Defendants and paid $100,000 per month per the terms of an Option Agreement prior to the Wynn Defendants' acquisition of the property. At least one of those "service providers" used threats and physical violence to further the Wynn Defendants' pursuit of the Gaming License. This was exactly the situation that the Gaming Act sought to prevent. ...

Subsequent public disclosures have revealed just how unsuited the Wynn Defendants were. Defendants Steve Wynn, Kimmarie Sinatra, and others were recently compelled to step down or were fired when Steve Wynn's long and sordid history of inappropriate sexual conduct was finally disclosed, together with their pattern of concealment through lies, omissions and pay-offs. Defendant Matthew Maddox, who has not yet stepped down, is no less culpable. These are the very same actors involved in the conspiracy to obtain the Region A License. 12. While certain of the bad actors have been forced out of the Wynn organization, and Steve Wynn's name has been wiped from its casino in order to appear to "cleanse" the Wynn entities so as to attempt to retain the Region A License, this does not change the fact that the license could not have been awarded to the Wynn Defendants in the first place but for the RICO predicate acts which include those described herein. Nor does it absolve any of the Defendants and others from permitting themselves to be drawn into a long-running criminal enterprise and conspiracy.xxxSSR was injured by the Defendants' RICO violations to the tune of well over a billion dollars, and is entitled to receive treble its actual losses, in an amount to be proven at trial, plus attorneys' fees and costs. The Wynn Defendants have also damaged SSR by violating [the state consumer-protection law], proscribing unfair methods of competition and unfair business practices, and SSR is entitled to all appropriate and available relief under that statute as well.