Judge rejects RICO suit over loans to failed Las Vegas resort

LAS VEGAS — A federal judge ruled Monday that a lawsuit filed over accusations of faulty loans tied to a failed Las Vegas strip basketball arena and resort didn’t pass muster, as it didn’t meet a required legal deadline.

TACSIS APC and Ken Limson sued under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. They argued that a handful of people and organizations fraudulently led them to issue seven loans, at over $2 million, for the failed All Net Resort and Arena that would have housed an NBA expansion team.

However, U.S. District Chief Judge Andrew Gordon found that the plaintiffs filed the 2024 suit over four years after learning the defendants supposedly failed to repay the loans and didn’t secure them with surety bonds. The deadline to file under the RICO Act is four years, leading him to grant the defendants’ motions to dismiss.

“Although it seems unlikely that additional facts could cure the statute of limitations issue, I grant the plaintiffs leave to amend their complaint if they can plead additional facts to support a RICO claim within the limitation period,” the judge wrote.

Failure to file a new suit by Sept. 2 will lead the judge to close the case.

According to the plaintiffs, they issued seven short-term loans to All Net over 2018 and 2019. Four of the loans had defaulted by the fifth’s issuance, leading to Limson receiving a one-tenth of 1% equitable ownership interest in the project.

However, all loans ultimately defaulted, and the surety agreements were breached. The plaintiffs sued in November 2020 in Los Angeles Superior Court. During that suit, they found that the surety bonds guaranteeing the loans were forged or fraudulent, they argued in their complaint.

The filing of the Superior Court lawsuit proved to be a key date on the calendar that prompted the judge to grant the motions to dismiss.

The defendants are divided by the judge into different categories. One of them — All Net Land Development LLC and David Lowden, called the land development defendants — argued the plaintiffs knew about the injury when they filed suit in Superior Court. That would mean the December 2024 federal suit fell outside of the four-year window.

Other defendant categories include the attorney defendants, Messner Reeves LLP and Torben Welch, and the All Net defendants, All Net LLC, Dribble Dunk LLC, Loring Jacobs, and businessman and former NBA player Jackie Robinson.

Plaintiffs argued the discovery of the fake surety bonds happened during the discovery process. That would make it a new injury, with a new legal deadline. The loss of Limson’s ownership interest, which happened when the Clark County Commission shuttered the project in November 2023, was also a new injury.

“The complaint in this case was filed on December 10, 2024, and seeks damages only for the amount of the seven loans, trebled under the RICO statute,” Gordon wrote. “It does not seek damages for the fraudulent surety bonds or for the loss of Limson’s ownership interest. The [Superior Court] complaint seeks damages for the same loans and for the failure of the surety bonds.”

That means the plaintiffs knew about the harm the defendants supposedly inflicted on them when they filed the Superior Court suit, the judge wrote.

The plaintiffs didn’t argue that the discovery of fraudulent bonds injured them. Instead, the injury claimed was All Net defaulting on the loans, followed by AGS Assurety and Timothy Arellano failing to pay on the surety bonds. TACSIS APC and Limson knew about both when they filed the Superior Court suit, the judge ruled.

The loss of Limson’s ownership stake also didn’t qualify for the legal timer to restart.

“The complaint does not ascribe any tangible value to the ownership interest other than to say that it was ‘worth potentially millions of dollars in the future as the popularity of the stadium grew,’” the judge wrote. “But this potential is theoretical because the complaint also alleges that the entire project was a ‘Ponzi scheme’ and ‘nothing more than a house of cards.’”

Attorney Jon Weininger, representing All Net Land Development LLC and Lowden, praised the ruling in a statement to Courthouse News.

“On behalf of the property owners, we are pleased that the court correctly decided that plaintiffs’ RICO claim is time barred and must be dismissed,” Weininger wrote. “For far too long, the plaintiffs have pursued spurious claims against the property owners only to have their claims soundly rejected by the courts. We hope that with today’s ruling, plaintiffs’ meritless legal campaign against the property owners will finally come to an end.”

No other attorney involved in the case could be reached for comment via email.