Developer vs. developer, continued

Nicolas Marsch, onetime La Jolla socialite and wealthy real estate developer, is apparently writing a book about his nemesis, Florida-based big builder Lennar Corp.

Up until recently, Marsch had a website touting his purported book, "Billion Dollar Lies: How Lennar Corporation Swindled Pensioners, Lenders, and Partners and Undermined the Foundation of Our Justice System."

There are several problems with this. First, on the website, he misspelled Lennar (to wit: "Lenner"). Second, he recently took down the website. Now, if you go to billiondollarlies.com, you see a message that the "Website is coming in January." (The original website touting the book was retrieved on googlecache.com.)

There is a third problem — a serious one. Back in the 1990s, Marsch and Lennar formed a partnership to develop a golf community in Rancho Santa Fe. The relationship became bitter. Marsch sued for damages and lost — a judge said he owed Lennar $54 million, not the other way around.

Marsch hired con-man/born-again minister/conman Barry Minkow, who proclaimed publicly that Lennar was run like a Ponzi scheme. Lennar stock tanked on Minkow's claim. (Minkow, who had run an enormous Ponzi scheme in Los Angeles, then got religion in prison, was pastor of San Diego Community Bible Church while running the Fraud Discovery Institute on the side.)

Following a flurry of court actions, Minkow was sentenced to five years in prison (his second confinement), and Marsch was told to pay more than $1 billion to Lennar, which didn't expect to get a nickel because Marsch and his company had gone into Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy.

In the lawsuits, Marsch was called untruthful by four San Diego judges and one in Florida. When I found out that Marsch was advertising his book in which he calls Lennar a bunch of liars and then took down the website, I wondered if Lennar had threatened to sue Marsch if such a book came out. Or did Marsch have second thoughts, realizing the courts had slapped him down thoroughly?

I asked Lennar if it had made threats against Marsch and whether it had seen the book, and if so, what it thought of it. I got a written statement from a Lennar spokesperson: "Since Nick Marsch first commenced litigation against Lennar eight years ago, three separate state court judges in California and Florida and one federal bankruptcy court judge in California have found Mr. Marsch was not truthful in court proceedings and have awarded Lennar over $1 billion in damages. These court decisions speak for themselves."

Marsch, meanwhile, didn’t respond to two calls.