Bankruptcy

Just months after Erickson Retirement Communities filed for bankruptcy, the company's new owners say they are poised for expansion with the same business model that seized up along with the housing and credit markets last year. Local entrepreneur Jim Davis, whose Redwood Capital Investments LLC bought Erickson for $365 million this month, said the Catonsville-based company is more financially sound than ever after wiping out most of its debt through the bankruptcy. That will enable Erickson to move forward in the next year with new housing at about a dozen of its existing communities that are not fully developed, he said.

The closing of the steel mill at Sparrows Point overwhelmed Bob Jennings. Too young to retire at 59, he faced a gloomy job market for local manufacturing workers and a bureaucracy that couldn't get him timely training help. He felt like a failure. No, no, his wife said, "the system is the failure," but she couldn't convince him. On a cold Saturday morning, he wrote her a short note of apology, walked to their shed and shot himself. Troy Pritt, 44, also worked at the Baltimore County mill.

Jason Pharmaceuticals Inc. grew fat when Oprah got thin, and thin when Oprah got fat again.That much is agreed upon by everyone connected with the Owings Mills-based marketer of the Medifast diet plan. But the agreement ends there.After rising to $51 million in annual sales during the late 1980s, the skyrocket that was Jason Pharmaceuticals landed last month in Baltimore's federal bankruptcy court, asking for protection from creditors while it reorganizes.Members of Jason's founding Vitale family say the company can recover from the slump that hit the liquid-diet industry after television talk show host Oprah Winfrey regained the weight she had lost on a rival plan called Optifast.

A Wednesday bankruptcy filing by Synagro Technologies Inc. means growth and new jobs for the Baltimore area as the waste recycler consolidates its headquarters in White Marsh. The Carlyle Group LP-owned company, which had been co-headquartered in Baltimore and Houston, said Wednesday that it would use bankruptcy to restructure debt and sell its assets to EQT Infrastructure in a $455 million deal. The company filed for a Chapter 11 reorganization of its debts in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and said it expects the sale to be completed in two to three months.

The Society Hill hotel and restaurant in Mount Vernon will be auctioned April 29, two years after the owners of the elegantly restored 15-room inn stopped making payments on a mortgage from the pension fund for Baltimore's police and firefighters.The foreclosure had been delayed by a bankruptcy filing by Society Hill Associates L.P., the partnership that redeveloped the hotel and granted the mortgage lien to the pension fund in 1983.But last October, U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge James F. Schneider agreed to lift the automatic stay that bars creditors from seizing assets of debtors in bankruptcy, allowing the foreclosure.

Regional department store chain Boscov's Inc. filed yesterday for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and said it would close 10 stores, including anchors in three of the Baltimore area's largest malls, as the company suffers from slumping sales amid the housing and credit crunch. Boscov's, based in Reading, Pa., will begin liquidation sales immediately and will close those "underperforming stores" when the entire inventory is sold, which officials estimate will take one to two months. About 1,400 employees, including about 400 in the Baltimore area, will lose their jobs.

Outdoors and military surplus store Sunny's Surplus is back in business less than a year after declaring bankruptcy for the second time in a decade - though on a much smaller scale. The retailer has opened three stores in Annapolis, Westminster and Frederick. It had 15 stores in January when it sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It closed all of the stores at the time. Michael Weinman, who was the majority stockholder of Sunny's parent company and a member of the founding family, created an entity called New Sunny's to buy the company's remaining assets after most of them were sold in going-out-of-business sales earlier this year.

Gary Rohrer hoisted the cherrywood end table from the showroom floor and turned it upside down. "There it is," he said to his wife Marjorie, pointing to the green Statton Furniture label imprinted underneath. For 82 years that label has been synonymous with high-end, high-quality traditional furniture. But soon it may mean high-end collectors' items. Statton, the Hagerstown company that has been owned by the same family for four generations, is going out of business. A company once as solid as the cherrywood its workers crafted into ornate furnishings, Statton has struggled to make sizable profits for years.

Erickson Retirement Communities, the national chain of campus-style senior living facilities, emerged from bankruptcy Friday less than six months after filing the Chapter 11 case, attorneys said. Catonsville-based Erickson is being sold to Redwood Capital Investments LLC, a Baltimore-based investment firm, for $365 million. The sale — expected to close by the end of the month — and a post-bankruptcy reorganization plan have been approved by a federal bankruptcy court in Texas, attorneys for Erickson and affiliated debtors announced.

Sanford "Sandy" Harris, a bankruptcy attorney and partner in a downtown Baltimore law firm, died of congestive heart failure Saturday at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Pikesville resident was 80. Born in Baltimore and raised on Mount Royal Terrace, he was a 1940 graduate of City College. His studies at the University of Maryland, College Park were interrupted by service in the Army Air Corps during World War II. After working briefly in retail, Mr. Harris earned his law degree in 1956 from the University of Baltimore and was elected to the school's Heuisler Honor Society.

The nearly two dozen creditors of payroll firm AccuPay Inc. who jammed a hearing room in Baltimore's federal courthouse Tuesday left with no more answers than when they arrived. Bel Air-based AccuPay, which filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in March, is being investigated for allegedly defrauding clients, many of whom run small businesses in Harford County, by failing for years to remit their tax payments to federal and state tax collectors. The creditors meeting at the Edward A. Garmatz Federal Building, a routine step in the bankruptcy process, offered the first chance since the allegations came to light for creditors to get answers from owners of AccuPay, which shut down abruptly at the end of February.

The family owners of The Inn at the Black Olive in Fells Point hope a bankruptcy filing Thursday will give them time to try to attract investors and keep operating the 2-year-old boutique hotel, their bankruptcy attorney said. The Black Olive Development Co. LLC's Chapter 7 filing in Baltimore's U.S. Bankruptcy Court prevented a planned foreclosure auction of the 12-suite luxury inn on South Caroline Street from going forward Thursday morning. Chapter 7 permits an orderly liquidation of assets to repay creditors, but the case could be converted to a Chapter 11 reorganization if the company finds investors.

A Bel Air payroll company under investigation for allegedly not forwarding clients' tax payments to tax collectors has filed for bankruptcy. AccuPay Inc. filed a petition for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Baltimore, listing 95 creditors and debts of between $100,001 and $500,000. Chapter 7 allows for an orderly liquidation of a company's assets to pay off creditors. A bankruptcy attorney for the company's owners said Wednesday that his clients believe they will have funds available to pay creditors.

The bankruptcy of the development company behind the Westport Waterfront project can move forward as a Chapter 11 reorganization. Inner Harbor West LLC, one of the companies that developer Patrick Turner formed as part of his planned revitalization of roughly 43 acres in southwest Baltimore, sought Chapter 11 status shortly after an involuntary Chapter 7 petition was filed against the company by two creditors. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert A. Gordon's order allowing the conversion from Chapter 7 to Chapter 11 was entered Monday.

The only residents of the Westport waterfront last week were a gaggle of geese that commandeered a large puddle amid the brush and broken asphalt. The only structure was a battered chain-link fence, capturing wind-blown litter along the perimeter. By now the 43-acre tract, assembled and cleared over several years with millions of dollars and personal resolve, was supposed to house hundreds and bustle with office workers. There should be a towering skyscraper and a stadium. Instead, the development company that was going to make that happen is in bankruptcy and the future of the $1.4 billion Westport Waterfront project, thought of as a potential "Harbor West," is uncertain.

Several creditors of Commerce Corp. filed an involuntary bankruptcy petition against the Maryland-based distributor of lawn and garden supplies. In the petition filed last week, five creditors claim they are owed a combined $1.73 million from the Curtis Bay distributor and want it placed in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation. The creditors are DeWitt Co. Inc. in Missouri; Franklin Electric Co. Inc. of Indiana; Dramm Corp. of Wisconsin; and Premier Horticulture Inc. and J.R. Peters Inc., both of Pennsylvania.

The closing of the steel mill at Sparrows Point overwhelmed Bob Jennings. Too young to retire at 59, he faced a gloomy job market for local manufacturing workers and a bureaucracy that couldn't get him timely training help. He felt like a failure. No, no, his wife said, "the system is the failure," but she couldn't convince him. On a cold Saturday morning, he wrote her a short note of apology, walked to their shed and shot himself. Troy Pritt, 44, also worked at the Baltimore County mill.

It might have been trash-talking, but Jamal Lewis made good on his promise. The young Baltimore Raven broke the single-day rushing record by running for 295 yards in the 2003 home opener at the stadium newly rechristened for the company that had bought the naming rights, M&T Bank. Today, though, the now retired Lewis and M&T are linked in court rather than on the field. Lewis filed for bankruptcy in Georgia in April, listing $14.5 million in assets and $10.6 million in debts — among them, a more than $350,000 judgment on a defaulted loan from the bank whose name hangs over the Ravens' stadium.

The company affiliated with developer Patrick Turner that was planning to redevelop the waterfront of the Westport neighborhood in southwest Baltimore has filed for bankruptcy. Inner Harbor West LLC, the subject of a Chapter 7 involuntary bankruptcy petition filed by two creditors earlier this month, has asked a federal judge to convert the case to a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, according to documents filed Tuesday in Maryland's bankruptcy court. If the change is allowed, Inner Harbor West LLC could reorganize with trustee oversight and develop a plan to repay creditors.

Unsecured creditors in the RG Steel bankruptcy case withdrew Friday their request to sue the company's billionaire founder. The Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors had in January asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington for permission to go after Ira Rennert, alleging that his decisions in the months before RG Steel collapsed were aimed at worsening the company's finances to shore up his own. The committee said it might be able to recover...