Detail-minded O’Neill. |
Real estate mogul J. Brian O’Neill, who has made headlines by attracting Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, and other international luminaries to his Carnegie Abbey Club in Portsmouth, is among the bidders seeking to buy Newport Grand, one of Rhode Island’s two highly lucrative gambling parlors.Tony Marcella, a consultant to the O’Neill Properties Group, which is based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, confirmed Tuesday that it is in the hunt for Newport Grand. “They are currently doing their due diligence as we speak,” Marcella says. “Currently, there is no contractual agreement between the two parties,” although O’Neill Properties, “along with other people,” have expressed an interest in buying Newport Grand.
Newport’s CEO, Diane Hurley, issued a statement last December indicating that a possible sale of the property was among the options being considered for the former jai alai fronton, which, with Lincoln Park, helps to form the third largest source of state revenue. As the Providence Journal recently reported, the 4672 video lottery terminals at Newport Grand and Lincoln Park are expected to produce $305 million for the state this year.
Although Marcella expects the consideration of bids to be a slow process, Newport Grand continues to be seen as an attractive acquisition even as Harrah’s Entertainment and the Narragansett Indians, with an expected referendum on the November ballot, press their quest for a casino in West Warwick.
One major point of contention between casino proponents and backers of Newport and Lincoln is how the envisioned Narragansett-Harrah’s casino would pay a far lesser percentage of its revenue to the state than the two VLT parlors. Casino proponents, however, attributing the difference to the larger staff needed to operate casino, contend that there will ultimately be enough business to go around.
This much is clear: O’Neill wouldn’t be trying to buy Newport Grand if he thought doing so would be unprofitable.
Hurley and O’Neill couldn’t be reached for comment.
O’Neill Properties, which he founded in 1988, is described on its Web site as “a leading privately owned real estate development company specializing in identifying and acquiring abandoned or underutilized industrial sites, remediating and transforming them into high-quality, Class A commercial space or luxury multifamily live, work, and play communities.
“Behind that straightforward description,” the blurb continues, “is the true essence of the company: a unique vision that sees possibilities unimagined by other developers, a driving passion to always exceed expectations, and a powerful commitment to create unified places that improve people’s lives. Any developer can build buildings; O’Neill seeks to rebuild whole communities.”
A recent profile in the Philadelphia Inquirer described how the 47-year-old O’Neill, who bought the Carnegie Abbey Club in 2005, after becoming one of Philadelphia’s most successful real estate investors is “expanding to Newport County, a seaport known for its yacht builders and multimillion-dollar homes built for the Astors, the Rockefellers, and the Vanderbilts.” It descried his goal as becoming the nation’s biggest and best developer of super-luxury and affordable housing, and said he claims to have invested $200 million in the Newport area.
Besides Clinton and Gorbachev, George H.W. Bush and the Dalai Lama have also made appearances at Carnegie Abbey -- which the developer bought, according to the Inquirer, after growing “impatient with what he saw as lackadaisical service” for a cheeseburger.
O’Neill has a huge model of the Titanic in his Newport home, the Inquirer reported, as a monument to “arrogance and ignoring details . . . I keep it to remind me that all that keeps me from going broke is a humble attention to detail.”
