More on Brian Davis and Urban Echo
May 29, 2023
by Steve Thomas
Last week, I wrote about a lawsuit recently filed by Urban Echo Energy, which is owned by self-professed prospective Washington franchise buyer Brian Davis, filed against Bank of America. You can read my first column here. As a reminder, I’m an attorney in real life (my given name is not Steve Thomas, so you can’t look me up), and formerly represented Bank of America, so I have an obligation not to disclose privileged information about Bank of America. That having been said, I have no current contact with Bank of America or inside information about this lawsuit, and I never worked for the law firm that currently represents Bank of America in this lawsuit, McGuireWoods LLP.
I’m not going to repeat the prior column here, but in summary, Urban Echo alleges that it presented Bank of America with two bank drafts – which are essentially the equivalent of cashier’s checks – for $5B and $100M, respectively, for deposit in an account controlled by an Urban Echo subsidiary, Urban Echo Capital Heights, LLC. According to the petition, Bank of America neither deposited the two bank drafts nor returned them. Urban Echo alleges conversion, which is legal-speak for a civil theft allegation, and replevin, which is a request for the court to return the converted materials. While I felt obligated not to get into too much detail about Bank of America’s positions because of my conflict of interest, I said that much about this matter didn’t make sense, and that Bank of America likely has reason to doubt the validity of the bank drafts.
Subsequent events
Since that initial filing, Urban Echo filed a request for an emergency temporary restraining order that asked the court to order Bank of America to either immediately deposit or return the bank drafts. The trial court judge, Deborah L. Boardman, from United States District Court for the District of Maryland (as opposed to the Magistrate Court, which is below the District Court and typically adjudicates many standard pre-trial motions on behalf of the District Court) then issued a letter and held a telephone conference this past Friday. Unfortunately, the transcript of the telephone conference was not available in The Hog Sty’s media-level federal court system account, but the court’s letter was available, and it is has a couple of interesting things in it.
Most importantly, the letter stated that the court refused to issue the requested TRO without Bank of America having an opportunity to respond. The court did not have to do this, and actually has the legal authority to issue a TRO ex parte, meaning without the presence of the other party. That appears to be an indication that the court has doubt about Urban Echo’s allegations, rightfully so. The letter additionally pointed out that, because the owners of the Washington franchise had already accepted an offer to sell the franchise, with no indication that “the owners would renege on the executed contract”, Urban Echo would be in the same position as it is currently – that is, still not able to buy the team. The letter indicated that that was the reason why the court chose to allow the bank to participate.
Bank of America has been given until June 5 to file a response.
The bank drafts
After publication of my column last week, we did a segment about the lawsuit on last week’s episode of The Hog Sty Podcast, and that’s when the story really got crazy. On the show, I pointed out that I hadn’t gone into detail about the bank drafts in last week’s column, but that the signature of the account holder from which the funds were being drawn was from someone named Tarciana Rodriguez, as Administratrix of the Estate of Severino Garcia Santa Romana. At time of recording, I hadn’t had a chance to research Ms. Rodriguez or the deceased Severino Garcia Santa Romana. Instead, I merely pointed out that this was the signature of someone who has no apparent connection or reference to Urban Echo, which made no sense, particularly since it was someone administering an estate.
While I was talking, my colleague Alex Zeese did a search for the name “Severino Garcia Santa Romana”, and found an absolutely insane story that sounded for all the world like a script straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, like, on the level of the trainwreck one that’s about to be released, not the good, older films. If you want to read about it, check out this website. Obviously, none of this is verifiable, but the gist of the story is that Santa Romana, who was supposedly an ex-CIA operative (huh?), stole more than a trillion dollars – yes, “trillion” – worth of Japanese gold back in the World War II era. Allegedly, then, somehow with the involvement of former Phillippines president, the late Ferdinand Marcos and another CIA operative, the gold ended up deposited with Citibank in the name of Santa Romana. According to the website, Santa Romana’s heirs, including, most prominently, his widow, have been fighting over it ever since.
That’s nuts. Again, I can’t verify this craziness – it could very well be straight from the minds of an imbecile like Disney’s Kathleen Kennedy, better known as The Woman Who Turned Star Wars into Woke Nonsense. If it is, in fact, true, I have no idea how it happened that a former NFL player-turned shady businessman like Brian Davis could have (1) met the administratrix of this estate in the first place, and (2) talked the estate out of $5.1B. Honestly, without having any inside information, it strikes me as highly improbable.
If a miracle has occurred and entire story is true, then there’s going to be some sort of contract or investment agreement between Urban Echo and the estate of Santa Romana that Davis will need to produce very quickly. I’m shocked that he hasn’t done so already.
It seems more likely that this is a scam of epic proportions. If so, Davis could have already put himself in a massive legal bind, including a variety of possible criminal charges, including bank fraud, and financial sanctions from the court. Also, his attorney needs to be careful as well, because if the attorney had knowledge that this story is untrue, but filed a petition anyway, he could be at risk as well. I suspect that the reason that the petition included a verified statement from Davis is to protect the attorney. Anyone with any semblance of common sense would doubt this story, so I’d imagine that the attorney probably insisted that Davis swear to it in the petition before he was willing to file; that way, the attorney can tell the court in good faith that his client has sworn to it and he has no evidence to contradict the sworn statement.
What happens from here? God only knows. At a minimum, I’d expect Bank of America to file an immediate motion to dismiss and motion for sanctions, for which Davis / Urban Echo will need to produce an agreement with the Estate of Santa Romana or face possibly severe consequences. Either way, it’ll be entertaining.