INSTEAD OF being in the business of reporting the news, WCAP’s managing owner, Sam Poulten, is again making news — and not the good kind.
A civil action was filed in February against the Lowell-based AM radio station that serves listeners in the communities of Lowell, Haverhill, Methuen, and Nashua and Salem, N.H. for breach of contract.
Sun reporter Melanie Gilbert has appeared as a guest of the station during its weekly Morning Show with host Gerry Nutter.
The 69-page document alleges that Poulten and his holding companies were guarantors of a commercial loan in the amount of $1,642,000, made by the Lowell Five Cent Savings Bank in June 2012. The loan was secured by mortgages on the four radio towers used to broadcast the station’s signal and a security interest on all business assets.
According to the suit, Poulten’s company, Merrimack Valley Radio LLC, breached the loan in 2019, and the bank made a demand against Poulten and his partners including Richard Lamarre, who negotiated a settlement with the bank in which his company, Merrimack Valley LLC, took over the loan documents.
Lamarre said in court documents that his company “stands in the shoes of the Bank as the present holder of the loan documents,” and asked the Trial Court of the Superior Court to foreclose on the radio towers and to sell all of the non-real estate assets to try to “achieve a sale that yields funds to repay the debt under the loan documents.”
The document lists the properties of 61 Market St., the place from which the station is currently broadcasting, and the 250-foot tall, four-towers directional arrays located on Totman Road that sit on the edge of the Lowell-Dracut-Tyngsboro State Forest, to settle the payment defaults.
Of interest, the court documents filed by Lamarre also indicate that the Lowell Development and Financial Corporation holds a separate promissory note in the original principal amount of $250,000 from 2009, that is subordinated to Lamarre’s claim. In other words, the LDFC may be left holding the proverbial bag once this case is adjudicated.
Lowell leadership like City Manager Tom Golden, a frequent guest on the radio station, and Assistant City Manager/Director of the Department of Planning and Development Yovani Baez-Rose sit on the board of the LDFC.
The present balance, according to court filings, is $1.2 million. The suit asks the court to foreclose on the properties “because the amount of debt greatly exceeds the value of the collateral.”
It’s not the first time Poulten and his business practices have landed him in court.
Last September, a civil lawsuit filed against Merrimack Valley Radio by former employee Teddy Panos resulted in a default judgment of almost $32,000 against Poulten, following an assessment of damages hearing held at Lowell District Court.
According to court documents, Panos filed suit on April 7, 2023 after Poulten ignored his December 2022 request to settle the claims without litigation.
In his complaint, Panos stated that Poulten failed to pay his wages, commissions, overtime and all other employment benefits from November 2019 to July 2022.
The July date coincides with Panos leaving the station to launch his multimedia venture InsideLowell, a website that combines digital news content with video, podcasts, blogs, event promotion, and social media posts.
Panos quit the station after more than 15 years as a personality on WCAP, the last three of them as uncompensated labor. He was not able to collect on his judgment.
Poulten has a history of legal claims filed against him including by The Sun in 2005. The case was settled a year later. According to previous Sun reporting, Lamplighter Green, Poulten’s homeowner’s association in Chelmsford, filed suit against him in January 2010, alleging embezzlement, larceny and fraud against Poulten and his companies, Telamos Inc. and Telamos Realty Trust II.
The association alleged that Poulten, a former real estate broker, had misused $12,000 of the association’s money to pay property taxes on his Chelmsford home and on another parcel. The lawsuit was disposed of when both parties reached an agreement.
American Express Bank sued Poulten in 2015 in a case that was resolved before a bench trial.
The station’s former general manager and majority owner, Clark Smidt, sued Poulten in 2011, alleging that Poulten put the station in financial peril. By June of that year, Poulten structured a deal to pay Smidt $90,000 plus $85,400 in 30 monthly payments for his 55% of the station. The deal made Poulten majority owner of Merrimack Valley Radio.
One year later, Poulten signed the deal to secure the $1.6 million loan from Lowell Five Bank.
Like he did in the Panos case, Poulten has argued ill health to delay legal proceedings. In a May filing, Poulten told the court that “I have been dealing with health issues which have slowed me down,” and asked for 30 days to respond to filing of an answer in his most recent case, which the court allowed. In July, Poulten was seen vigorously marching in the Parade of Flags that opened the Lowell Folk Festival.
The court’s 30-day deadline has come and gone and neither Poulten’s response nor any other filings were part of the court record that was viewed by a reporter in Lowell Superior Court on Friday.
“Plaintiff seeks a safe harbor by means of obtaining a Court Order allowing it to take possession and control of its collateral, and to compel a turnover of all financial records, documents and funds relating to MVR,” Lamarre’s February filing stated. “The Plaintiff has a very high likelihood of success on the merits of its claims.”
The uncertainly as to the future of the radio station may be weighing on the station’s employees, several of whom have left its employ in the past few months.
Listeners tuning into the station, which bills itself as the “Voice of the Valley,” may hear only static if the suit is successful. The Sun will reach out to the lawyers for both parties for follow-up reporting.
Am I out of touch? No, it is the people who are wrong.
AN ESSENTIAL community hospital is on the verge of closure in Ayer, the immediate negative impacts of which have been stated so many times, there remains little point in going into detail much more.
People will lose access to medical services, the time it takes for those in Nashoba Valley Medical Center’s coverage area to travel to receive emergency care will increase, and people are going to die because of that. In the time this reporter has been covering this issue, not once have any of those facts been disputed by a single person.
Those same facts were reiterated again during Thursday’s state Department of Public Health hearing in the Devens Common Center, where hundreds packed into a function hall to get their outrage truly on the record for the DPH to see, and they sure did. Between the countless speeches by elected officials, first responders, nurses, doctors and residents, the message being delivered that night was unambiguous: the powers that be must keep NVMC and Dorchester’s Carney Hospital open using whatever levers of power they can pull.
The most stunning moment of the evening took place toward the beginning, however, when some were faced suddenly with the answer to the question: “Do the residents and hospital staff even want to hear from Steward at this point?”
Throughout this entire saga, there has been little public outreach on the part of Steward, with hospital staff having previously complained they had not once heard from Steward since the world learned of the company’s fiscal failures.
So it was to the shock of at least one person in the room when Steward’s Northern Group President and Chief Medical Officer Octavio Diaz stood up and approached the podium. To the shock of perhaps fewer people, the audience made their feelings known before Diaz even opened his mouth.
What followed was a stunning example of the boring dystopia in which we’ve found ourselves, in the form of a soulless corporate public relations statement that one could argue would have been better unread.
“I am an emergency medicine physician and have been working in hospitals in the commonwealth for more than 25 years. I recognize the importance of community hospitals and the important services they provide,” said Diaz. “Closing a hospital is painful, and nothing I can say tonight will make that any easier. But the decision has been made, and now we must move forward while keeping our patients safe.”
Later in the speech, Diaz would call the closure of NVMC “deeply regrettable, but also unavoidable.”
How is it that Steward could see the danger people are now going to be in, because of their failures, and allow themselves to even make a statement like that?
When the top executives at Steward are able to be given multimillion-dollar salaries, and CEO Ralph de la Torre is able to enjoy the Olympics in Paris, presumably with one of his two multimillion-dollar yachts, then the argument that these closures are “unavoidable” is laughable at best.
Nobody wants to work for no money, but most people also don’t screw up their company’s finances so badly that two, possibly three, hospitals have to close down, leading to severe negative impacts on thousands of people’s lives. Perhaps Mr. de la Torre and his fellow suits should forgo their salaries for a little bit to recoup some of the company’s finances. As has been suggested on this page quite recently, maybe those yachts could go to a better home, too. God forbid the wealthy live a little bit more like the rest of us so the rest of us don’t have to suffer.
What may have been the most out-of-touch thing uttered by Diaz, at least according to the reactions of the medical professionals in the room, was his assertion that “there are thousands of open jobs in Eastern Massachusetts.”
With everything else Diaz said, the crowd heckled and booed. With this statement, they simply laughed, almost in unison.
This week’s Column was prepared by reporters Melanie Gilbert on the WCAP lawsuit and Peter Currier on the DPH hearing for the closure of Nashoba Valley Medical Center.
