Delaware’s pizza patriarch is suing retired federal Judge Joseph Farnan Jr. over an alleged sour business deal.
Grotto Pizza founder Dominick Pulieri filed the case in Chancery Court earlier this month over the rightful ownership of the Sunview Motel in Rehoboth Beach.
Pulieri sold the motel to Farnan for $3.2 million in 2002 after being unable to make a balloon mortgage payment. The judge, who was considered a family friend, reportedly told him that the bank Wilmington Trust would not refinance the loan.
Pulieri claims there was a verbal agreement between the two that he could buy back the property on a dollar-for-dollar basis when his finances became more solvent.
In the complaint, he says he sold the motel at below market value and never publically listed the property.
According to court documents, Pulieri wrote to Farnan in April 2013 to regain control of the motel, but an attorney for Farnan later responded that the verbal agreement never existed and that he was “making things up out of thin air.”
Farnan sat on the U.S. district court bench for 25 years until 2010 and now owns a private firm.
The two had a similar swap in 2002, which stuck to the alleged deal.
Pulieri owed a $397,000 tax bill on a Dewey Beach property and couldn’t come up with the cash to pay it. He sold that property to Farnan for $2.8 million.
He eventually bought it back in 2006 for $3.1 million.
This suit has been in the works for a while.
The restaurateur filed a malpractice suit against the Duane Morris law firm and some of its attorneys in Superior Court last year for taking too long to file a similar case against Farnan.
It alleges the former judge of selling one of Pulieri’s properties for $4.1 million, but told him it only sold for $1.7 million. The statute of limitations eventually ran out and Duane Morris charged Pulieri for its time preparing the case.
That suit will go to trial June 2015.