TRANSCRIPT:
The length of time I have known Tom, he was always in trouble. Frantic, uncertain, definitely didn’t have it together, to a point where you couldn’t really talk to the guy—at all. Not even on a friendly relationship. That was long gone. He was definitely possessed with what he had going on, what he was doing. And yeah, you wanted to help him, but he wasn’t really there to help. There was always something else going on, some other motive.
When I saw him talk to others, and in particular sometimes to me–he was always, “You’re a second-rate citizen”. You didn’t know what you were doing, you were stupid, you were inconsequential in the big picture, he could do without you but he needed you so you needed to stay around and do exactly as he told you, even if it was wrong. If it was wrong, and you challenged him, he made life hell.
Well, from my position when I first experienced what it was like to deal with these situations that he had left behind, it’s best put to say that each one was in a state of confusion. And he had left this trail—like slime–across these subjects that had to be re-researched and then figured out again.
The projects that he supervised, the projects were left incomplete, there were thousands of dollars spent unnecessarily. When they were done or near completion, they had to be redone, they had to be re-planned and of course, refinanced. We could see too as a result of this that if we were to follow through with his plans, they would have never worked. They would have never actually handled what, the situation that we were trying to handle with this particular project. And so consequently it was this—one project, then another, then another, then another that we had to pick up and do again. And at the same time, had he never touched them in the first place, it would have been a lot easier.
I do know what we had to do to go back and reconstruct these projects. Talk to people—architects, engineers, contractors and sort of clean up their upset in order to get them to work with us again—to have some sort of—to build up some credibility. Where we would start them on the project and actually what they would traditionally say, “You’re a lot easier to work with.”
Tom had put a plant in that was for the infrastructure of our property. And he had no authority to do this, he didn’t get approval to do it, spent millions doing it and to date the thing still doesn’t work right. And we’re spending a lot of time correcting what he put in. And needless to say, the planning was off from the very beginning and we’re now having to compensate for that because it’s tied in directly with the operation of this property.
The only thing I can think that Tom did was basically make a mess of what was here and contribute to what was a deteriorating scene. Things that had to be rebuilt, re-planned, redone, refigured out, re-researched. We do that now quite simply, it’s no longer difficult. It’s not complex, it’s very easy to do. One reason why is because he’s no longer here—I can easily say that.
