This sale slipped by me yesterday

44 Mooreland Road, which went to contract in November, closed yesterday at $8.850 million. That’s a nice bit of change, but a far cry from the $17.999 million the ex-wife of Jimmy Cabrera of Antares infamy, began trying to sell it in 2012. It’s been a long slog.

Speaking of Antares, a scheming, thieving partnership that provided me blog fodder for years, Neil Vigdor wrote great article on the boyz back in 2009 detailing their rise and (deserved) fall:

They bought up real estate in Greenwich and Stamford like they were playing Monopoly.

They built backcountry spec houses the size of big-box stores, sat behind home plate at Yankee Stadium, and partied like rock stars with black metal American Express cards.

But Antares Investment Partners had a darker side. The same alpha male executives who loved the trappings of superwealth also risked hundreds of millions in investors' money on overleveraged, underperforming deals and tapped financiers who lined up to provide cash, never looking closely enough to see the cracks in the high-flying company's facade.

"I said to myself, This is going to end badly,'" said Matthew Allen, 37, an asset manager who worked for Antares from September 2006 until he was laid off in October 2007.

Antares is now a shell of its former self, when it controlled what company literature touted as $6 billion in real estate assets, including a 35,000-square-foot spec house, a pair of garden apartment complexes in Greenwich known as Putnam Green and Weaver's Hill, 82 acres of land it planned to develop in Stamford's South End and a stake in the swank Delamar Greenwich Harbor hotel.

Its principals, who built gated estates with what seemed to be easy money, are being personally sued for millions of dollars by the company that inherited their biggest development project.

As one former business associate of Antares put it, the company became "Greenwich's poster child for what went on in the rest of the world."

Said Frank Farricker, a Greenwich real estate broker and member of the Planning and Zoning Commission, "It's a freakin' disaster."

In the eye of the storm were James Cabrera and Joseph Beninati, the firm's founding partners, whose mercurial rise to success, insatiable appetite for real estate, oft-described "cowboy" attitude and penchant for the good life rubbed many they encountered the wrong way.

"Oh, these people in Antares, they're an example of the worst that's happened with new-money types. No class whatsoever," said Robert Tuthill, a former Putnam Green tenant who contracted to buy a condominium at the complex from Antares during an ill-fated conversion project.

Cabrera and Beninati could not be reached for comment.

A shooting star

To understand just how far the company fell, however, you have to go back the beginning.

Cabrera, 46, and Beninati, 45, became friends at Choate Rosemary Hall, the illustrious prep school in Wallingford whose famous alums include John F. Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson, Paul Mellon and Michael Douglas. They played football there. Beninati was born in the Bronx, N.Y. Cabrera was a postgraduate who went to Greenwich High School before Choate. [Meaning he was too much of a fuck up to go directly from high school to college — CF]

….. The Choate chums went into business together around 1997, founding Greenwich Technology Partners, a 600-person global systems engineering firm, according to Cabrera and Beninati's biographies. Greenwich Technology Partners was, however, "a shooting star that crashed and burned," by one account, with "not enough revenue and too much overhead," especially as the tech bubble popped.

Antares would follow the same trajectory.

…. [Cabrera and Beninati] also assembled a syndicate of some 30 investors, each of whom put up around $100,000, and used the money to buy a package of partnership interests owned by real estate mogul Seth Weinstein, principal of Stamford's Hannah Real Estate Investors, that included a stake in the Seaview House, a commercial office property in Stamford.

It was a meteoric rise for the new company, which was named Antares. There was no real rhyme or reason to the choice of name, other than the story that Cabrera and Beninati wanted to be listed first alphabetically in trade show books and other forums.

The business model was a simple one: Tap high-net-worth friends and family connections for money that the company could invest in single-family residential land in Greenwich.

Mistake by the lake

Antares came of age around 2003, with the company buying the project rights for a gated subdivision in Armonk, N.Y., called Cider Mill.

Around the same time, the company bought a tract on Taconic Road in Greenwich's exclusive backcountry, where there was zoning approval for seven homes on lots of 2.2 acres each, the asking price for which would be between $15 million and $18 million each. [A total failure, ending in bankruptcy and foreclosure — CF]

That would be chump change compared with how much the company wanted for a starter palace it was building, also in the backcountry.

Antares set the price at $28 million for the Lake Carrington Estate, a 35,000-square-foot stone monster that would come to symbolize the company, for better or worse.

Its style has been referred to as "stockbroker Georgian." The amenities, if you could describe them so mundanely, included a 36-foot-long indoor lap pool, a home theater, a 20,000-bottle wine cellar with its own tasting room, a squash/basketball court, and two elevators.

Smoke and A-Rod

A New York tabloid reported in July 2007 that New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez was a potential buyer of the estate.

Some on the inside suggested that was just smoke intended to up the ante.

"I don't think he even saw or went to the house," Allen said.

A-Rod didn't bite. Neither did anyone else, for that matter. A full two years later the estate is still on the market, its interior unfinished and a massive dirt pile left in the corner of the property.

Listed by Sotheby's International Realty for $14.5 million, the estate was put up as collateral in settlement negotiations with a group of investors who sued Antares Mansions over losses.

"Everyone thought at the time, if you build it, you'll sell it," Farricker said.

And here’s 44 Mooreland [CF]

Across the pond from the Lake Carrington Estate, the Antares bosses, each married with three children, built their dream homes. Cabrera's has been described as a classic New England-style house "on steroids" in the neighborhood of 18,000 square feet.

Beninati attempted to remake an Italian villa he and his wife saw on their honeymoon, flying in materials for the construction.

Beninati was widely considered the more extravagant of the two, employing butlers and maids, and driving a Bentley, Range Rover, Mercedes-Benz and Porsche Cayenne.

…. In the world of Antares, Gold Cards were for wimps. Most top executives had their own American Expresss Platinum Card from the company, complete with a $20,000 monthly spending limit that they were encouraged to exhaust, according to a former member in the firm's inner circle.

Never one to be outdone, Beninati carried an Amex Centurion Card, popularly known as the Black Card, in his wallet.

American Express requires a $5,000 initiation fee and $2,500 annual fee to carry one of the cards, which are made of metal, not plastic.

Membership perks include personal shopping assistance, concierge service, VIP access at special events, hotel and airline upgrades and free companion tickets.

Antares had box seats at Yankee Stadium that it used to woo deep-pocketed investors, as well as Knicks tickets at Madison Square Garden, one former high-ranking executive said.

All its execs had plasma televisions in their offices, and when they traveled, well, the sky was the limit -- a Gulfstream IV, one of several private jets the company had access to through fractional ownership programs. No longer in production, the G-IV sold for about $36 million and can hold 19 passengers, plus two pilots.

Beninati and Cabrera were also regulars at the bar and restaurant at the Delamar Greenwich Harbor, where still they own about 5 percent of the hotel, one of the company's few remaining assets.

The hotel frequently hosted current and prospective financiers for elaborate PowerPoint presentations on how much of a return they might get on their Antares investment.

Many of those investments turned sour as Antares' dreams of visionary development ran into real-world realities.

"It's been uncomfortable," Mallory, the hotel's majority owner, said of being linked to Antares. "It's been frustrating to have to have to continually explain the modest nature of Antares financial involvement in the hotel."

Read the whole thing. Antares is gone, Beninati has fled to NYC where presumably he’s found new suckers to play, and Cabrera remains in Greenwich, building, or happy to build 8-30g projects with other people’s money. It’s not a tale of MMadoff proportions, but it’s local, and it was fun to watch while it lasted.