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Big losses, big disappointments in real estate dispute

"Everything but our dog..."

by Eric Jackson

This is the story of Bobby Hammond and Tammy Pace, who are set to fly out of Panama after an exhausting battle with an erstwhile friend, millionaire chocolate heiress Kim Opler. Surely Opler has her side of the tale, part of which she has vented in Colorado newspapers --- something she may yet regret. Someday she may talk to The Panama News or some other Panamanian medium about it, but let the reader be warned that this is the tale that adverse parties had to tell.

"Our deal was to buy, build and sell," Bobby Hammond explained: buy land in Bocas del Toro, build houses on it and sell. Most of the money was coming from Kim Opler, although he had invested in the project, too. Most of the work was coming from Bobby Hammond.

To set up the deal, in which Opler preferred to be a silent partner because at the time she was involved in a US divorce case that featured bitter arguments over the property settlement, attorney Nelson Carreola was hired to create a corporation in which Hammond's name appeared and Opler's did not.

Land was bought and subdivided, construction was ongoing, and at least one offer to buy came in, but was rejected as too low by Opler, a decision about which Hammond and his companion Pace concurred. But then an argument started over the books.

"We're not bookkeepers," Tammy Pace explained. "We were keeping track of expenses and giving the data to her. Hammond and Pace talked with Opler in Colorado, from whence they all hail, to try to straighten things out.

Little did they know that Opler had hired Carreola to represent her against Hammond and Pace, and two weeks earlier criminal and civil charges had been filed. Shortly thereafter seven cops appeared at their door in Panama City and took them away.

There is no question that Hammond had a business arrangement with Opler, but why was Pace arrested? The warrant said to arrest Hammond and collect evidence. "I was arrested as 'evidence,'" Pace explained. "I was never questioned."

But actually it was more than that. Hammond was taken to PTJ headquarters and left in a very cold room with just a cement floor. After an uncomfortable long while, a PTJ interrogator told Hammond that the only way that Pace would get out of jail is if he told them what the PTJ wanted him to stay. The PTJ man said that all Hammond had to do was sign all his property over to Opler and the case would be over. But Hammond owned things from prior to his business dealings with Opler, Pace ran a restaurant and had property in her own right, and the deal Hammond had with Opler was that she would pay him $1,500 per month while he ran the real estate business and that he would get a commission on sales. Hammond balked at giving up what was his before his arrangement with Opler, and insisted upon the benefit of the bargain that he had made with her.

After a few days, Tammy Pace was released from jail, but meanwhile Bobby Hammond was sent to La Joya Penitentiary for a month, then transferred to nearby La Joyita for four and one-half months, then to El Renacer near Gamboa for three nights and the lockup at Migracion for a night before being let out under house arrest.

So how did Hammond finally get out?

Well, it seems that Opler overplayed her hand. In a statement published in a Colorado newspaper she said that in Panama the way things are done is that one uses criminal charges to get an opponent in a contract dispute jailed until he or she is forced to submit. In her civil case, Pace alleged, "she demanded everything but our dog. She was asking for everything that Hammond owned and for Pace's Likitiki restaurant.

At the time when Opler launched her legal offensive, Pace had a 15-year lease for the premises at which Likitiki did business, but there were some legal problems with the lease. Opler hired the lawyer that Pace had been using in that matter to get the lease for herself and though Pace ended up losing the lease, Opler didn't end up getting it either.

Opler managed to get most of Hammond's and Pace's personal property sequestered, and to show everyone in town her upper hand, she rode around Bocas on Pace's son's bicycle. Pace and Hammond kept their dog, but lost their sailboats, personal effects and records into a black hole of sequestration. Back in Colorado, Pace claimed, Opler visited Pace's daughter at her workplace to taunt her.

And then she caused some papers to be filed with the corregidor, which stated that Opler was the legal owner of the house in Bocas where Hammond and Pace had lived for several years. A gang of cops came over and broke down the door, carrying away personal property and Pace's business records and other personal files.

The problem was, Opler was not the owner of that house and on the basis of that raid Pace and Hammond filed a criminal charge against Opler and several other persons, including the the corregidor. That legal counter-offensive began relatively early in the case, but took time to gather strength.

Meanwhile, things were grim behind bars for Hammond. In a bathroom slip and fall he broke his collarbone, and he received neither the pain medication nor the therapy that the doctor prescribed. Other medication that he had been prescribed for a permanent condition well before his legal troubles began would only get through him irregularly, and sometimes then only by smuggling tactics.

At La Joyita, he was in a cell block with 170 beds and more than 350 inmates. For the first seven weeks he slept on the floor --- "last to bed, first to rise." Eventually he had to buy a bed for $350. On average the water only came on for a couple of hours a day, and sometime there was no water for several days at a time.

"I saw much violence. There were stabbings and fights --- I was in three separate fights myself, over pure congestion. There's no way to get away from anyone. There's not even space to sit down."

The pavillion where Hammond stayed at La Joyita was set aside for foreigners, although some Panamanians ended up there and they often tended to make nationalistic claims against the non-Panamanian inmates. In that cell block there were people serving the maximum 20-year sentence for murder, and others awaiting trial for shoplifting. Mexican and Colombian drug gangs were well represented. Such order as was maintained in the cell block was had by dispute resolution agreements among five gang leaders of different nationalities, the most influential among them Chinese, whose deals were witnessed and supported by the Catholic priest who ministered to the inmates.

The case gained some notoriety both in Panama and in Colorado, and although the American Embassy here was not very effective at getting things like regular access to prescribed medicine, some statements that the embassy's Will Ostick made about the deplorable conditions at La Joya were picked up by the press in Colorado and friends began writing letters to the Panamanian authorities.

And the wheels slowly turned in the criminal case against Opler for the raid on the house that was not hers.

That forced a settlement in the civil case, which included the dropping of all criminal charges by both sides.

In the end, Hammond says that the settlement gave him what he said he was owed and wouldn't concede under PTJ grilling. "[Opler] has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars that we know of on attorney's fees," he claimed. On the other hand, most of his and Pace's personal property that was seized has not been returned to them.

"It's just a stupid situation, and an unnecessary situation," Pace added. As the couple were preparing to fly back to Colorado, calls kept coming in about Opler's attorneys insisting that papers had not been done precisely right and could Hammond and Pace please sign new ones. "If you want us to sign these papers, where is our propery?" was Hammond's response.

And how ridiculous can it get?

Would you think that somebody who, having expected to get richer quicker, would try to shaft an agent out of a real estate commission by having him thrown in jail, along with a completely uninvolved other person, would be conscientious about paying her lawyer bills? Apparently not. Nelson Carreola ended up suing Opler, claiming that she hadn't paid him. Hammond said that in that suit for legal fees, Carreola initially named him as a co-defendant. 

Jailed over a contract dispute: Bobby Hammond's and Tammy Pace's story
A competitive service sector: presentation at the recent Caribbean Business Forum
World shipping industry objects to steep rise in Panama Canal tolls