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While Fort Myers real estate agent Samir Cabrera was allegedly mismanaging two property investments along Fiddlesticks Boulevard in a way that would later lead to federal fraud charges, he also was attracting investors to launch a larger deal on the land next door.

That deal was called Daniels View. It was a more ambitious project, but land records and documents prepared for potential investors show that the structure of the two deals had much in common.

Allegations of fraud, unusual land transfers and undisclosed conflicts of interests are at the heart of the federal indictment that Cabrera faces on the Fiddlesticks properties. And while no one involved with Daniels View faces criminal charges, similar allegations of fraud involving the project are detailed in two investor lawsuits.

Both projects, Lee County property records show, involved land purchases through a company Cabrera controlled, then a second sale the same day for a higher price — what’s known as a flip.

In both deals, the final buyers were investors Cabrera had pooled together for what turned out to be high-risk ventures. In the Daniels View project, for example, documents prepared for investors show they would have seen little, if any, return on their money unless Lee County officials agreed to extend a road through the property.

Both deals have failed, and much of the money people invested with Cabrera — likely several million dollars — is gone. That includes an investment in one of the Fiddlesticks properties that Lee County Manager Don Stilwell, Cabrera’s father-in-law, has acknowledged making, and a second, larger investment of his that later transferred to Daniels View.

When contacted for this story, Cabrera, 31, who now works for a real estate company based in Miami, declined to answer specific questions about his management of Daniels View.

His trial on four counts of wire fraud in the Fiddlesticks deals is scheduled for August. He has pleaded not guilty.

As for the Daniels View lawsuits, he has denied allegations of fraud, and one of his attorneys said that a key element of the allegations about Fiddlesticks — that property flips weren’t disclosed to investors — never happened with Daniels View.

Fort Myers attorney Tom Smoot, who was hired by Cabrera last year to sort out the remaining assets in Daniels View, said the project may have attracted lawsuits simply because it is the only one of Cabrera’s multiple real estate deals with any value left to fight over.

“Daniels View has never been a criminal matter,” Smoot said. “It was a straight deal, straight deal meaning there was a full disclosure of the flip.”

Investors were informed of the risks, he said, and if they made poor choices, “sometimes it’s not someone else’s fault. Sometimes it’s your own fault when you lose money.”

A RISKY VENTURE

According to a copy of the business plan for Daniels View, the venture’s purpose was to prepare about 75 acres of agricultural land at the southwest corner of Daniels Parkway and Interstate 75 for the development of an office park, a shopping center and homes.

The potential profit to investors was described as a 276 percent “cash-on-cash” return.

In the business plan and other Daniels View documents Smoot provided, potential investors were told that the land could be resold later for $62 million, but that they would have to bear the risks of the initial purchase of the land for about $22.1 million.

The documents — which are portions of what is known as a private placement letter — highlight one risk in particular: that unless county officials permitted intense development on the Daniels View land and extended a multimillion-dollar roadway called Three Oaks Parkway through the property, the project wouldn’t succeed.

The financial terms of the deal described in the documents show just how much those investors would have been — or ought to have been — counting on the county’s actions to add substantial value to their land.

They would be purchasing three pieces of property altogether, and for the two largest parcels — ones with no direct road access — they would be agreeing to buy the land from the same Cabrera-controlled company that was involved in the Fiddlesticks land flips, STR & Associates, for a same-day markup in price of $6.6 million.

Investors also would be agreeing to a $13.2 million loan with a 13 percent interest rate that Cabrera had arranged to take out from the late commercial real estate broker Frank D’Alessandro, who was then Cabrera’s boss.

County land records show that is how the Daniels View transaction actually worked.

If the investors had absorbed other details presented to them in the investment’s term sheet and the accompanying subscription agreement, they would have seen that Cabrera was also likely to grant a substantial interest in the property to yet another company he controlled — a transfer described to investors as a no-interest loan that could help them buy more property than they would otherwise be able to afford.

That large claim on the land’s value took effect when the Daniels View deal closed in June 2006. At that point, one investor’s lawsuit and the investment group’s attorney agree that Cabrera transferred a $6.9 million stake in the property to STRG & Associates through a promissory note. State records from the Florida Division of Corporations show that Cabrera, Todd Turner, Raymond DeMarco and Gilberto Ruiz were STRG’s managing members at the time.

All except Ruiz were also managing members of STR, the company involved in the property flip, as of May 2006. And all except Turner were among the “managing partners” in Daniels View, according to the investment term sheet.

DeMarco declined to comment for this story. Turner, the CEO of Fort Myers company CC Turner — a company that would have handled $2.2 million in consulting work to help rezone the Daniels View land, according to the documents provided to investors — could not be reached for comment. Ruiz, who, along with a group of investors from Miami, could receive the one remaining parcel of Daniels View land under the terms of a proposed settlement agreement Smoot is trying to arrange for Cabrera’s investors, could not be located.

The arrangement with STRG meant that unless the Daniels View property increased in value rapidly during the year before the investors’ “balloon” loan from D’Alessandro came due — and the appreciation was enough to cover the operating expenses and fees Cabrera and his associated companies could charge as managers of the investment — investors would have been lucky to break even at whatever point the property was resold.

Unless, that is, they had their road and their rezoning.

WAS A ROAD PART OF THE DEAL?

When a number of investors signed up for Daniels View, plans for an extension of Three Oaks Parkway, the roadway that would have opened the Daniels View property to intense development, were tentative. Those plans remain tentative today.

It is possible investors were not clear about how little initial equity they would have in the property — though Smoot, the Daniels View attorney, said investors received full disclosure, and under federal regulations on the sale of securities, Cabrera’s investors would have had to sign agreements showing they understood the project’s risks.

It is also possible, though, that investors thought that the land was a worthwhile gamble, despite the challenges.

They wouldn’t have been the only ones to view the land as potentially very valuable.

“It’s a great piece of real estate,” said Robert Wagner, a partner with Evans & Wagner Commercial Group, who said he is familiar with the property.

The key to its value, he said, is its location, right at the southwest corner of Daniels Parkway and I-75. That puts the property very close to Southwest Florida International Airport in a visible spot right next to an interchange on an interstate highway.

“God is not creating any more interchanges,” Wagner said. “The fact was that the value of the property was between $18 and $20 million.”

If that made the pre-flip sale of the larger portion of the Daniels View property for only $12.3 million seem odd to Wagner at the time, Smoot offered another point of view: that property flips can be misunderstood.

“A flip is a same-day transaction for a marked up price,” Smoot said. “It’s not bad if it’s fully disclosed. It’s the American dream.”

As with any investment, those who put their money into Daniels View had to decide for themselves how dreamy the deal Cabrera presented them truly was, and they were never guaranteed a profit.

But on one crucial point investors would have had to weigh — the probability of the extension of Three Oaks Parkway through the property — documents investors were given described that as highly likely to happen.

For Three Oaks Parkway, according to the investment term sheet, “the County’s plan is to take it all the way north to Fiddlesticks Blvd. connecting to Daniels Parkway. This will be a $30 million road project and one of the largest in Lee County. This is extremely important to the project and Three Oaks will run thru the South West part of the property and will give us access with an intersection and traffic light.”

Elsewhere in the document, there’s an assumption that six acres would be set aside for the new road and, therefore, not developed. It also states that Cabrera “will work closely with the County in order to ensure that these improvements will be implemented on a timely basis” and that “county government has already looked very favorably on the project.”

Also, while the business plan calls for spending about $1.4 million to take care of environmental issues on the site ahead of development, no money was set aside for improving nearby roads.

Stilwell

COUNTY MANAGER’S ROLE

By the point these claims went out to investors, Stilwell, the county manager, had invested a total of $300,000 with his son-in-law, according to records Stilwell released July 11. His investments included $100,000 on a property directly adjacent to Daniels View at 13701 Fiddlesticks Blvd., but there is no evidence that he would have seen the private placement letter that went to Daniels View investors.

It wasn’t until the following year, as a number of Cabrera’s other real estate investments across the county began failing, that Stilwell’s $200,000 investment share in a project called Evans-Fowler could have been transferred to Daniels View.

Given Stilwell’s job and his relationship to Cabrera, he has faced a barrage of questions about his investments with his son-in-law. Last week, Stilwell also faced calls by several county commissioners for an investigation into his earlier statements that he had no involvement in Daniels View.

More recently, Stilwell has said he wasn’t sure how his investment ended up in Daniels View. In a letter to commissioners earlier this month, he wrote that he had been initially “confused” about his investments after “the media pressured me to recall off the top of my head events that took place more than two years ago.” He repeated what he has said before: that he had truthfully answered commissioners’ questions.

Stilwell could not be reached for comment.

Smoot, the Daniels View attorney, said that, technically, there is still no agreement on when, how and if investors from a total of five other projects were formally transferred to Daniels View. The problem, he said, is that records for Cabrera’s management company, Cabrera Capital, were in a tangle when he was hired. The memorandum of understanding about the investment transfer involving Stilwell, for example, was never signed.

Stilwell’s stake in the project is real enough, though, that he would be among those Smoot said would receive a small payout in any settlement agreement for Daniels View investors.

And public records show that by January 2007, Stilwell held another kind of interest in the project — he had given his son-in-law a loan of more than $200,000 for Daniels View.

There are indications, though, that later investors weren’t told all the details of the project.

Thomas Messina Sr., who had started out with money in Cabrera’s Evans-Fowler project, has alleged in a lawsuit that during the phone conversation in which he was asked to sign a memorandum of understanding to transfer his shares to Daniels View, he wasn’t told major facts about the new project — such as the property flip through STR — let alone assumptions about the risks of the venture.

Messina claims he was transferred to Daniels View on Feb. 20, 2007. If Stilwell’s investments were transferred at the same time, that would be before he answered questions from county commissioners about his involvement in the venture.

FRAUD ALLEGATIONS

In the end, whether a top county official had a stake in the deal — and whether or not investors received any misguided assurances about road access or the likelihood of county approval — Daniels View investors allege there are other reasons why they would not have seen any return on their money.

According to lawsuits filed in Lee County last year by two investors — Robert Mengle and Messina — fraud was what doomed Daniels View.

Both investors allege that Cabrera took large amounts of money out of the company account for himself, just as federal prosecutors allege he did with the Fiddlesticks deals.

In the federal indictment, Cabrera is accused of embezzling $20,000 from Fiddlesticks investors along with extracting the paper profits from two undisclosed property flips, claiming more than $2 million in “kicker fees” for himself and others.

With Daniels View, the $6.9 million promissory note to STRG functioned as a way to secure the paper profits from the flips for Cabrera and his associates whenever the property resold. But according to Smoot, this wasn’t hidden from investors.

What Cabrera didn’t tell them — according to the lawsuits he faces — was how much money was leaving the company account, and where it was going.

Messina, the investor who transferred into Daniels View, filed suit against Cabrera and the Daniels View company in June 2007, claiming that more than $1.5 million was improperly paid to Cabera’s management company and to Cabrera’s employer at the time, the commercial brokerage D’Alessandro & Woodyard.

What is clear is that for whatever reason, many of the half dozen or so real estate investments Cabrera was managing while running Daniels View struggled financially. Court records show that Cabrera had transferred properties to his lender, D’Alessandro, to satisfy debts by the start of 2007.

By June 2007, court filings show that Cabrera’s remaining companies owed more than $21 million on four projects in foreclosure proceedings, including Daniels View and Fiddlesticks.

Records also show that despite a second and third mortgage on the Daniels View property — including a loan from Stilwell — the company was only ever able to afford eight interest-only payments on the loan of about $144,000 per month.

The Daniels View company never applied to the county to rezone the land, and, instead, county records show that Cabrera sold off the bulk of the property for $17.6 million last July — which would have been at a loss to investors given what was owed on the property.

One investor, Mengle, claims that shortly before foreclosure proceedings began on Daniels View, only $176.75 remained in the company’s bank account.

At this point, if the lawsuits are settled, what assets are left in Daniels View will be split among 47 of Cabrera’s investors.

Their return: 36 cents for every dollar they put in.

___

SAMIR CABRERA’S REAL ESTATE DEALS

Fiddlesticks

• January 2006: Property flip takes place on 10 acres at 13701 Fiddlesticks Boulevard in south Fort Myers.

• Cabrera buys the property through a company he controlled, STR & Associates, for $3.9 million.

• STR resells the land the same day to a group of investors Cabrera had recruited for $4.8 million.

• Lee County Manager Don Stilwell is one of the investors with a $100,000 stake. In September 2005, he had invested another $200,000 with Cabrera.

• March 2006: Property flip took place at 13800 Fiddlesticks Blvd. STR bought the land for just over $3 million and resold the property to Cabrera’s investors for $4.9 million.

• June 2008: A federal fraud indictment alleges that Cabrera didn’t disclose his involvement with STR to investors on either Fiddlesticks property flip, took more than $2 million in “kicker fees” and embezzled $20,000 from investors.

• August 2008: Cabrera’s trial on four counts of wire fraud is scheduled to begin.

Daniels View

• May 2006: Cabrera recruits investors to raise capital for the project. Federal securities regulations would have prevented him from targeting people who wouldn’t be able to prove they were mostly experienced, savvy and wealthy investors. The project’s business plan requires Cabrera to invest very little of his own money in the project, yet given the way the investment was set up, he — and the layered collection of companies he controlled — would stand to make millions on the deal, even if the part of the plan that would enrich the investors never succeeds. For investors to see a profit, the property would have to be developed quickly and intensely. To do that, they would need county approval and road access.

• June 2006: Daniels View investors close on the land at the southwest corner of Daniels Parkway and Interstate 75. For one parcel, at 13700 Indian Paint Lane, they paid the seller $3.2 million directly. For two larger parcles right along the interstate with no direct road access, they paid STR $18.9 million, when STR had bought the land for $12.3 million earlier that day. Investors take out a $13.2 million loan from Frank D’Alessandro Equity Funding, and grant another of Cabrera’s companies, STRG, a $6.9 million promissory note on the property.

• January 2007: Stilwell loans his son-in-law more than $200,000 for the project.

• February 2007: Investors from other failed property investments Cabrera was managing are told they will be transferred into the Daniels View investment.

• April 2007: Daniels View faces foreclosure.

• June 2007: Cabrera sells the larger section of the property to Daniels Parkway JV Investment for $17.6 million — less than the $18.9 Daniels View investors paid the year before. The first investor lawsuit is filed on behalf of Thomas Messina.

• December 2007: Investor Robert Mengle sues Cabrera along with DeMarco, STR, STRG, Cabrera Capital, and Cabrera’s former employer, D’Alessandro & Woodyard, last December, describing the Daniels View as a fraudulent conspiracy. Mengle’s complaint alleges that Cabrera, as manager of the Daniels View investment group, had “hostile interests” to investors. He claims that Cabrera and others “pilfered the investors’ monies,” withdrawing “fictitious real estate commissions” that were hidden from investors because Cabrera didn’t turn over financial records to them when asked.

• February 2008: Stilwell tells county commissioners he is not involved with Daniels View.

• July 2008: Commissioners are scheduled to meet Tuesday to discuss investigating Stilwell’s involvement in Daniels View.

• August 2008: The smaller, remaining piece of Daniels View land could change hands, releasing what remains of investors’ money.