Nothing about the 111-year-old Packard Plant is neat, clean or simple -- not its series of foreclosure auctions and not its current status.
"This is typical blackmail," says Fernando Palazuelo.
A fresh dispute pits the iconic site's buyer, a Peruvian developer, against past owner Dominic Cristini, JC Reindl reports atop the Free Press' front page.
Cristini . . . has threatened to hold up redevelopment efforts for the desolate site unless new owner Fernando Palazuelo pays him money for a piece of the land that Cristini says he still technically owns.
As well, Cristini, 54, claims Wayne County botched the foreclosure of the plant site last year and believes he could make a claim of ownership over most of the parcels that make up the 40-acre site. In a face-to-face meeting last week, Cristini told Palazuelo that for a price he would drop his claims. . . .
Palazuelo told the Free Press that Cristini is after $3.5 million and recalled how he told Cristini and [adviser David] Wax in a Feb. 24 meeting that he would not pay that amount. . . .
“This is typical blackmail,” Palazuelo said in a phone interview from Peru. “We are lawful owners of the Packard Plant. . . . I told David Wax and Dominic Cristini that Christmas is over.”
That doesn't mean a deal can't be worked out, suggests a downtown Detroit lawyer representing the foreign developer. Joe Kopietz of Clark Hill's real estate group tells Reindl that Palazuelo doesn't rule out a smaller payment to avoid a court fight.
Palazuelo won the east-side site for $405,000 last fall in a Wayne County auction. Wax tells the Free Press that there are still liens on many of the 42 parcels, including rights controlled by Cristini’s Detroit company, Bioresource.
Over at Curbed Detroit, editor Paul Beshouri notes that Cristini "went to prison in 2006 for selling ecstasy out of an abandoned school" near the Packard complex. The site's "Pay Me" headline references this classic 1990 scene:
