On a cool spring morning in April 2014, Gina Champion-Cain sat inside a Boston courtroom where for more than an hour a federal prosecutor questioned her about an $8 million real estate scam that had victimized developers around the country.
The San Diego restaurateur was not there as a suspect. She was one of the victims.
She and two other partners, who wanted to transform a downtown San Diego block into a $325 million office, hotel and luxury condo high-rise called Cosmopolitan Square, had lost $360,000 in the scheme.
When Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Goodwin began her questioning, Champion-Cain rattled off some details about herself for the Boston jurors — details that by then were familiar to those in San Diego who had over the past 15 years seen her rise to the upper echelon of business.
She described herself to Goodwin in simple, broad . She said she owned a real estate company and that she also owned and ran a hospitality business.
What Champion-Cain did not say that day eight years ago — nor what anyone in the courtroom could have known — was that she was in the early years of orchestrating what would become the single largest Ponzi scheme ever uncovered in San Diego.
By the time it unraveled five years later, the fallout was staggering. Hundreds of victims — among them close friends, retirees and financial institutions who had been promised healthy returns if they entrusted their money to her — had been bilked out of hundreds of millions of dollars
The scheme also landed its mastermind in a federal prison camp in Northern California for 15 years.
For years, Champion-Cain’s investors had no reason to doubt that the high-interest loans they were making to bar and restaurant owners were anything but legitimate. It made sense to them that mom-and-pop businesses would need some help early on purchasing pricey liquor licenses. And investors were reassured that a major escrow company, Chicago Title, would keep their money safe.
In reality, no loans to bar and restaurant owners were ever made. It was all a fiction, fabricated by an ambitious woman determined to keep her growing business empire afloat with other people’s money.
Now more than a year into her prison term for fraud and obstruction of justice, the 57-year-old Champion-Cain has said little to untangle the mystery of why a seemingly successful CEO would perpetrate a fraud 50 times larger than the one she fell prey to.
Perhaps a clue lies in a deposition she gave in an unrelated case two years before she testified in Boston — right at the start of her scheme. Impatient with a series of questions from a lawyer, she blurted out an answer which, in hindsight, reveals the single-minded ambition that drove her to create an image of success.
“I’m a deal maker,” Champion-Cain said. “All I do is I try to get deals built, make money for my investors, and hope all turns out well.”
But in the end, very little did.
Viewed through the lens of time, the arc of her professional life now feels like a chimera, a conceit crafted from savvy marketing and Champion-Cain’s own cunning as a persuasive storyteller. She had regularly been featured on local magazine covers and snagged seats on the boards of respected San Diego institutions — from housing and redevelopment agencies to a San Diego business school. She even co-founded a bank.
On paper, the résumé of the now-deposed chief executive of a company that once employed as many as 700 people chronicles her rise as a pioneer in downtown redevelopment and the overseer of a thriving hospitality conglomerate that traded on San Diego’s laid-back vibe, with concepts like Patio, Surf Rider, Luv Surf.
But a trail of settled lawsuits, a felony conviction, and dozens of interviews with San Diego developers, investors, and former co-workers and friends suggest otherwise. Champion-Cain would not talk to the Union-Tribune for this series and declined multiple requests for an interview.
Long before she invented a phony lending scheme, her self-described persona as a downtown developer was seen as part invention, part exaggeration, say some of the key players who helped shape the city’s core more than two decades ago.
A more accurate title, they suggest, would be broker or consultant — or perhaps connector.
“Yes, she was involved in downtown things but not in the way she portrayed it — I own this, I own that, I did this, I did that,” said Howard Greenberg, president of Trilogy Real Estate Management, which has a portfolio of 1.5 million square feet of mixed-use properties downtown and in surrounding neighborhoods originating in the late 1980s.
To this day, he still finds galling a 2003 San Diego Magazine cover story in which Champion-Cain and his late partner — and prolific developer — Bud Fischer, are pictured on a giant Monopoly board meant to illustrate downtown land ownership. Take a guess who’s standing on the priciest square, Greenberg said.
“There’s Bud standing in front of one of his buildings he had built, and there’s Gina, who was just coming onto the scene in front of some building she didn’t even own,” he said of the article. “That’s how I described Gina — all dressed up, this polished facade, but like the emperor with no clothes.”
To be sure, Champion-Cain would, within a decade, have a real brick-and-mortar empire. Grab-and-go eateries. Coffee shops. A home goods store stocked with artisanal sauces and kitchenware. A growing chain of Patio neighborhood eateries showcasing American comfort food — all housed within her company, American National Investments.
Over time, Champion-Cain’s entrepreneurial ambitions would accelerate into high gear as she pursued projects with seeming abandon — a co-working project in Petaluma, a housing development in Santa Rosa, an ownership interest in an Anza-Borrego resort.
Rather than just concentrate on expanding her restaurants — a daunting enough undertaking for even the most experienced restaurateur — she dove into new enterprises at a pace that puzzled even her top executives. There was a CBD line, cold-pressed juice and chocolate truffles, beachwear, vacation rentals, and an investment in a fitness accessory for infant car seats.
It wasn’t sustainable. By 2019, the veneer of success was in shambles.
A court-appointed receiver who took over management of company assets after Champion-Cain was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with fraud, reported that her ANI enterprise of 33 commercial and residential properties and 27 more restaurant and retail operations was facing an “acute cash shortage.” It was saddled with a monthly payroll of more than $1 million, $250,000 of monthly debt service, work stoppage on several construction projects, and demands from vendors for past-due payments.
Cumulatively, all of her business operations were in the red. As time ed, company executives began to question her judgment and her growing insistence that her Patio-branded ventures were valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.
“She was delusional,” said Brian LaGrange, former ANI executive vice president. “For the last year or two, I had no idea why we were doing this CBD line, a home goods store. Once I found out about everything, all this crazy stuff made sense.”
In retrospect, her most enduring legacy may well be the Ponzi scheme that ultimately ruined her.
A lawyer representing Chicago Title, which was responsible for overseeing the escrow s used to hold money for the liquor license loans she was peddling, suggested as much during a January video deposition of Champion-Cain in prison.
“You were an incredibly successful liar for eight years, weren’t you?” asked attorney Steven Goldfarb.
Looking straight at the camera, stone-faced, she nodded slightly.
“Correct.”
“One of the smartest people in our class”
A native of Ann Arbor, Mich., Gina Champion excelled during her high school years, taking higher-level courses and playing field hockey. A yearbook photo of her during her senior year shows her pictured with fellow of the student council. She was vice president.
Former classmates at Pioneer High uniformly her as exceptionally smart, popular, pretty and very nice. She was sociable but not necessarily one who had a huge circle of friends, they said.
“I she would pipe up and advocate for herself,” said Molly Morris, who was in the same graduating class as Champion-Cain. “She wasn’t misrepresenting herself but you got the sense there was a need for her to let people know she was smart.”
After graduating from Pioneer, Champion-Cain attended her father’s alma mater, the University of Michigan, majoring in philosophy and political science. He was an inspiring figure, she would tell the Union-Tribune years later, advising her and her sister that “we could do whatever we wanted to do, and no one could stop us as long as we put our heart and soul into it.”
An aspiring lawyer, she left her home state for California to get her law degree at California Western School of Law in San Diego. That’s where she met Jane Gilbert, now a defense attorney who roomed with Champion-Cain and two others in a Mission Valley condo while they were attending Cal Western.
“She was dating Steven then, who became her husband, and she spent a lot of time with him but also with us,” said Gilbert, who more than two decades later would become one of the first victims in her friend’s Ponzi scheme. “She was a lot of fun so we all bonded and hung out a lot.”
Unlike Gilbert, Champion-Cain opted to not take the bar exam, choosing instead to get a master’s in business istration at the University of San Diego where she would later serve on the policy advisory board of its real estate center.
Gilbert describes Champion-Cain as most others do — charismatic, energetic and outgoing, fun-loving, often generous.
“Since I’ve known her, she’s always been like that,” Gilbert said. “Obviously, she entered a very male-dominated industry. She is smart, she has a good personality and she’s pretty. And I think it served her well and was part of why she was so successful.”
Over the years, they bonded over their mutual love of sports, attending Padres and Chargers games together. Champion-Cain had luxury-box seating at both sports venues and each year would invite Gilbert and her wife to her there.
Champion-Cain’s husband, who manages a manufacturing plant in Tijuana, recently filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. The two have been married for more than 30 years. Cain, who did not accompany his wife to her two court appearances, declined to be interviewed.
“He is a very quiet, reserved man, serious, very bright, but the polar opposite of her, which is why they probably clicked,” Gilbert says. “He let her take the spotlight.”
The couple never had children. Champion-Cain, though, always had golden retrievers that she doted on and would frequently bring to the office.
While Gina and Steve both went to the same high school, they didn’t know one another until a mutual friend introduced them in San Diego, said Bruce Smith, a longtime friend of the couple who also was an early investor in the Ponzi scheme with his wife, Kathy. To this day, he says he doubts his friend ever had a clue that his wife was operating a scam.
“She liked to be in charge,” said Kathy. “They came over to our house for dinner one time. She had a brand new little two-seater Mercedes and I go, ‘What happened to the Infiniti?’ and Steve looked at me and said, ‘I told her not to buy the car but Gina does whatever Gina wants to do.’
“And that’s Gina, if she wants something she would go out and get it.”
Although she wasn’t prone to bragging with her friends, Champion-Cain would frequently talk with the Smiths about her work, regaling them with stories about the new job she landed out of graduate school — a position with the Koll Company, a high-profile Orange County real estate firm, where she initially helped work on a $60 million overhaul of the La Jolla Village Square Mall.
Those who worked with Champion-Cain at the time her as bright and energetic, and that she was employed on the property management side of the company. “She was always ambitious, always wanted more,” said Glen Raiger, a former Koll executive now living in North Carolina.
Yet after she left the company and was on her own, Champion-Cain inflated her work at Koll — especially her role in redeveloping the La Jolla Village Square Mall in the early 1990s.
A former supervisor who did not want to be identified because he still works in the real estate industry said Champion-Cain was part of a team of people who worked with new tenants getting them moved into the shopping center.
But years later she had transformed that role into something far larger. “You would think she had done it all,” he said of her depiction of her work on the mall. “She was a property manager. But she was representing she did everything.”
More than two decades after the mall project, Champion-Cain was recasting it as the product of her company, ANI. At a 2017 San Diego County Economic Roundtable, she gave a presentation on real estate trends.
One slide was titled “ANI Real Estate” and showed photos of three projects. One was La Jolla Village Square. The project was completed in 1994. Champion-Cain formed ANI three years later, in 1997.
“She was really good and really smart at self-promotion,” said Holly Cloud, who worked with Champion-Cain at Koll, and later did interior design work for her properties and four of her homes. “She was the queen of self-promotion.”
Real estate cover girl
Champion-Cain’s determination to make herself known in a male-centric industry was strategic from the very beginning.
As she exited Koll and formed her own real estate and asset management firm, she hired a local public relations professional who was given a very specific mission — make sure everyone who matters in the downtown development world knows who Gina Champion-Cain is.
PR executive Jack Berkman, who himself was something of a downtown pioneer, having partnered on an Italian fine dining restaurant in the still edgy Gaslamp Quarter in the late 1980s, carefully honed her image as he began making introductions to downtown movers and shakers for his new client.
Before long, there was a trim Champion-Cain, with her megawatt smile and long black tresses, gracing magazine covers and featured in centerpiece business stories.
A year before the San Diego Magazine cover piece, a 2002 issue of San Diego Metropolitan featured Champion-Cain, wearing a lipstick red business suit, towering over the San Diego skyline. The article highlighted her ion for urban redevelopment as she prepared to take over as chair of the influential Downtown San Diego Partnership board.
“Gina was in her early stage of getting involved in the redevelopment of the Gaslamp and she brought me on because she wanted to create a higher profile for herself and to put information out there about her experience,” recalled Berkman, founder of Berkman Strategic Communications. “So I got involved in a series of stories positioning her as one of only a few women actively involved in Gaslamp. She was very excited about the press publicity.
“Without sounding braggadocious, it was a successful campaign.”
So much so, that his client was able to make the cover of that 2003 issue of San Diego Magazine when she didn’t even own the downtown property she claimed was hers, said Ben Tashakorian, senior managing director with the commercial brokerage firm, Marcus and Millichap.
He re the transaction vividly because it was his very first, and, he worried, maybe his last when the article came out stating that Champion-Cain owned the Arte Building on Sixth Avenue, as it was known at the time. He had specifically warned her before publication that she could not say that.
Once the magazine piece was published, she backed out of the deal, which had never closed escrow, Tashakorian said. The seller was furious.
“This was my first deal and I got conned,” he recalled. “After that, I never wanted to see her again. I realized she was just a fraud.”
Over the years, many more flattering pieces would follow, including features in The San Diego Union-Tribune and a tribute to Champion-Cain and Ingrid Croce on the cover of San Diego Woman magazine as the “First ladies of Gaslamp.” Champion-Cain was credited with helping bring the nationally known House of Blues to downtown San Diego, but she was not, as she sometimes claimed, the developer of the high-profile project.
As recently as her January deposition, Champion-Cain said she “built the House of Blues in downtown San Diego.” However, the former developer, Fifth Avenue Partners, told the Union-Tribune that she did not develop the project.
Greenberg describes her as a “guy’s girl.” Champion-Cain was as comfortable hanging out with girlfriends as she was mixing it up with powerful, strong men, whether it was golfing, playing cards or smoking a cigar, he said.
Doug Wilson, a veteran developer best known for his downtown Symphony Towers project, re meeting Champion-Cain in the mid-1990s at a time when his Douglas Wilson Companies was about 5 years old. She made an impression, he said.
“She had a clear persona and a sense of bravado. She wanted to meet me as someone who could open doors for her in the community,” said Wilson, whose diversified real estate firm includes a focus on managing distressed properties. “I sat back in the ensuing years and observed from afar her blossoming career. But I never truly understood what she was tangibly involved in from a project standpoint. Even today, I can’t look at a building and say this is something Gina Champion-Cain did.”
The San Diego City Council, though, found plenty to ire and decided to declare June 28, 2006, Gina Champion-Cain Day in a proclamation that devoted paragraph after paragraph to her civic activities and honors. The resolution also cited her service on multiple boards, from the San Diego Brain Tumor Foundation and the YMCA to the San Diego Repertory Theatre.
The high-flying Champion-Cain seemed to be at the center of things as downtown was starting to explode with new high-rises and tony condominiums. She even landed a seat on the city’s redevelopment arm, the now-defunct Centre City Development Corp.
But little-noticed litigation in the early- and mid-2000s tells a different story.
A lawsuit filed in 2007 over two downtown projects — the Acqua Vista residential complex in Little Italy and the Broadway Lofts at Fifth Avenue and Broadway, document Champion-Cain’s tendency to claim outsized credit in instances where she played a far smaller role.
In early 2000, she approached Joshua Genton, a former colleague from Koll who was now working for Los Angeles developer Watt Properties, according to a declaration by Genton in the lawsuit. She told him of two intriguing properties: a block in Little Italy bordered by Ash, Beech, Columbia and State streets that was up for sale and development, and also the old First National Bank building on Broadway.
Watt eventually acquired both properties and developed each. But in a lawsuit filed after the deals were long done, Champion-Cain contended she was owed money for her role in each deal.
She said that she had an equity stake in the Acqua Vista project and was a t venture partner in the massive development with the company. In court papers, Watt officials denied those claims, with then-CEO Jim Maginn saying “neither Champion nor ANI had the experience required for such a significant role in such an undertaking.”
Instead, Watt paid Champion-Cain $7,000 a month for a year as a liaison to Centre City Development Corp. and other local entities. It was only in 2007, years after the project was completed, that Champion-Cain claimed in her lawsuit that Watt owed her money for the Acqua Vista project — though Maginn said in a filing in the suit that no documents backed up her claim.
The Broadway Lofts dispute was also a source of friction between Watt and Champion-Cain. She again claimed in the lawsuit with Watt that she was supposed to be a partner in the project — until Watt abruptly told her she could only be a broker working on commission.
She agreed and said she got deposits on 57 units but was never paid. Watt, in a countersuit, contended that she did not complete sales on any units, was never an equity partner in the project, and that the deal went bad for them because of bad advice from Champion-Cain. She told them to develop the property as live/work lofts, but the company claimed in its suit there was no market for that and it cost the company $4 million.
Watt also said that Champion-Cain imperiled the project when, in July 2005, she was appointed to the board of Centre City Development Corp. The company was negotiating with the agency at that time over the status of the property.
In a declaration for the lawsuit, Genton said that Champion-Cain exploited the conflict she had of working with Watt while the company negotiated with Centre City Development Corp. “Indeed, Champion was actually offering us advice on how to deal with CCDC while she was on CCDC’s board, and telling us CCDC’s legal and negotiating positions,” wrote Genton, who did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Just months after being appointed in 2005, Champion-Cain resigned from the agency.
Former co-workers couldn’t help but take notice as Champion-Cain’s profile continued to rise, wondering why. “All my former bosses at Koll were like, why is she on all these covers all the time?” Cloud said.
After the setback on the Little Italy and Broadway Lofts projects, Champion-Cain set her sights on a far more ambitious undertaking. She formed a partnership with two others to develop a parcel not far from Petco Park — the deal that would eventually bring her to Boston years later to testify as the victim of a financial fraud.
Cosmopolitan Square, with its planned hotel, condominiums, retail and office space, would be a huge development, likely her biggest ever. But it never came to . Searching for financing in early 2009, Champion-Cain and her partners found a private investment group out of Florida called BBDA Global Investment Funds.
The fund described itself in vague : It had connections with European wealth, and was a specialized investment fund based in Luxembourg, according to testimony in the 2014 federal trial of one of four men who had been charged with defrauding developers. Each would end up spending several years in prison.
At first, things looked good. By May 2009, a conditional agreement had been signed where BBDA said it was interested and in October said it would finance $300 million for the project.
Champion-Cain and the partnership had an option on the land and were told by BBDA to deposit $300,000 into a bank to secure the funding.
They did. And then, nothing. The first chunk of funding was supposed to come in February 2010. But February came and went, with no money.
By October, with the property owner increasingly anxious, Champion-Cain testified she was at wit’s end. “We are at the brink of losing everything and just trying to push to get some type of response that something positive is going to happen,” she said in court.
Nothing did.
“What happened to the project?” asked prosecutor Goodwin.
“It failed. It never got off the ground,” Champion-Cain answered.
And the money, the $300,000 deposit, the prosecutor asked, what happened when you tried to get it back?
“We never received it,” Champion-Cain said. She had personally put $150,000 into the deal, and now it was gone.
It was a stunning setback for a woman determined to burnish her image as a successful developer. The idea that she had been conned in the course of trying to develop her biggest project no doubt stung.
Yet within a year, she was doing the very same thing — starting with her closest friends, bilking them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
