Meredith Developer gets to keep road deposit

A Belknap County Superior Court judge has ruled that a Meredith developer can hold on to the security deposit he received when a Laconia condominium project changed hands last April.

Thomas Gary Coyne was the general contractor on record for the Beaver Pond Subdivision — a condominium development on Rollercoaster Road and had deposited $79,999 with the City of Laconia as a performance deposit for the road work.

The Beaver Pond Subdivision was financed by Financial Resources Mortgage Inc, and owned by the Good Earth Revocable Trust of which Coyne, along with FRM President Scott Farah's wife Susan, was one of the beneficiaries.

When FRM shuttered its doors last November and was later forced into involuntary bankruptcy, all progress on Beaver Pond stopped.

As part of the trustee process of liquidating FRM's assets, Beaver Pond was sold to the Brady Sullivan company of Manchester and Coyne's security deposit was returned by the city.

Coyne was not a principal of FRM, although he was a business associate of Farah's for many years and financed a number of his projects through FRM.

The latest court confrontation was part of an attempt by lender Drexey Smith of Florida to recover a small portion of what some have estimated was a $80 to $100-million Ponzi scheme.

In this case, Judge James O'Neil ruled that even though Drexey Smith of Florida loaned Good Earth $130,000 for Unit 36 at Beaver Pond, FRM had "no legal or equitable interest" in Coyne's security deposit because "it never passed into the bankruptcy."

Smith, through her lawyer Brandon Guida, has secured an pre-judgement attachment on Coyne's assets because he personally guaranteed Smith's loan to Good Earth, O'Neil said Guida presented no statute or rule that would force Coyne to deposit the security deposit into a court escrow until Smith's suit against him is resolved.