Rapper Jay-Z may run this town, but he won't be staying at the J Hotel. The famed M.C., nee Shawn Carter, filed a $3.7 million lawsuit against investment firm Highland Capital Management and a small financial institution, NexBank, over dragging out renegotiations on a defaulted loan that would have financed Jigga's (tanked) West 21st building project – J Hotel.A sign that "big pimpin'" is on the outs?
According to the New York Post, the music mogul alleges that Highland purposely stalled his efforts to dodge foreclosure, abandon ship, and turn over the deed for the West Chelsea property to the company's investment chiefs. In doing so, Jay-Z claims that the firm leeched him of daily interest and fees that amounted to tens of thousands of dollars a day for a $52 million loan.
This is the latest (and hopefully final) news for the Brooklyn-bred-lyricist-turned-Tribeca-resident's hotelier saga after 2008's economic nose-dive halted development on J Hotel, turned financers into endangered species, and had The New York Times spewing building-boom doom in an article that quoted research positing that the city's landscape would be "virtually unchanged for two years."
Bad timing for Mr. Beyonce whose tycoon dreams led him to purchase the West Chelsea plot for $66 million in 2007, with hopes of turning the property into a 150,000 square foot flagship to a chain of J Hotels.
If this isn't a sign that "big pimpin'" is dead, maybe it's a sign that Jay-Z shouldn't retire his mike just yet. Patience, grasshopper.
