This Rolling Stone is gathering moss, a new lawsuit has brought to light.
The Rolling Stone Restaurant & Lounge in Los Angeles shut months ago, amid a tangle of lawsuits with more than $10 million squandered and two arrests for fraud by advisers to former NFL player Dwight Freeney, who ended up owning the place in the end.
The restaurant in Hollywood, a short walk from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, was only a licensing deal for the iconic magazine.
But it was hyped as a lucrative brand extension and being positioned as the possible start of a national chain.
Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner said at the time, “We’ve been looking for the ideal opportunity to expand the Rolling Stone brand for some time and we are thrilled to be working with Lucky Rug Group.”
The heavy lifting was to be done by Irish-born Niall Donnelly and local real estate developer Joe Altounian through a company they had dubbed Lucky Rug Group.
The 10,000-square-foot restaurant was supposed to open in the summer of 2010, but it did not officially open until late spring 2011.
Shortly after the deal between Wenner and Lucky Rug was unveiled in 2009, Freeney appeared as a limited, 20 percent partner and put up $1.5 million to fund the restaurant’s build-out, according to a lawsuit that Freeney filed in January. He alleges that the law firm of Bayard P.A. and one of its attorneys, Stephen Brauerman, had a serious breach in its fiduciary relationship.
That’s because in March 2012, Eva Weinberg and Michael Stern were arrested by FBI agents and charged as co-schemers for embezzling at least $2 million from Freeney and his Roof Group, his company which had eventually taken over the Rolling Stone Restaurant from Donnelly and Altounian.
Wenner Media, citing pending future litigation, declined to comment.