“It can and should be a great venue for events and for special occasions,” Smiley said. “This operator was not the person to help realize that vision, which is why I pushed so hard to get rid of them.”
Skyline’s lawyer Michael Lepizzera said the company will work with the city to formally memorialize the settlement and voluntarily turn over possession of the premises.
“While Skyline is disappointed that this will mark the close of its operations, the owner is satisfied that a settlement has been reached,” Lepizzera said in a statement. “The original plan was to operate a top scale event facility on the city’s skyline for a minimum of 20 years, which was the term of the lease. Unfortunately, a confluence of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events (especially the pandemic) prevented my client from achieving its business goal.”
Skyline was headed by Rhode Island entrepreneur Michael A. Mota, and the company included his father-in-law, Joseph Ricci, and wife Jodi Mota. Louis Delpidio, a Boston nightclub operator, and David Pontarelli, a former city employee, were also involved when the company began leasing the building in 2016.
At the time, the Skyline at Waterplace group promised then-Mayor Jorge O. Elorza that they had big plans for the venue, which is perched at the edge of the Waterplace Basin.
But the company struggled almost from the beginning, citing issues with construction renovations. So, with Elorza as the chairman, the parks commissioners granted Skyline three abatements that totaled more than three and a half years of rent, in exchange for repairs to the facility. Mota also has claimed, without evidence, that Elorza granted a fourth abatement.
Skyline also received more than $1.8 million in federal COVID relief funds during the pandemic, money that was intended to help keep the business running. Around the same time, Mota launched and sponsored events at Skyline for his Hollywood mobster-themed entertainment and events company, VirtualCons, and his cryptocurrency, VirtualCoin, which was never operable.
Smiley has been trying to evict Skyline since April 2023, citing problems with late rent payments, unpaid taxes, fire code violations, friction with city officials — and recently, a bounced rent check in July and the discovery of the decomposed body of a former employee in August.
According to the police report, the owner of Skyline told officers that the man was homeless and had been given permission to stay at the venue, which had been closed since late July. A statement posted to social media on behalf of the Skyline, the Mota family, and the Ricci family denied that the man was living at the venue. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told the Globe that the mayor’s office it never would have approved letting someone live there.
Before the settlement was reached, Skyline had been heading for a trial in Superior Court this fall.
“This will enable us to close the chapter with this operator who I’ve been trying to evict now for some time,” Smiley said. “This business and venue has effectively been shuttered and only been doing a handful of events. It is a black hole on Waterplace Park and Basin.”
Committee Chairman John Goncalves and city councilmembers Juan Pichardo, Ana Vargas, Shelley Peterson, and Pedro Espinal voted unanimously to adopt the settlement. The terms were not released Monday. Representatives for Skyline could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.
“The Skyline space and Waterplace Park are important assets to the city,” Goncalves said in a statement. “With the Providence Parks Department taking over management of the property, we are looking forward to using the future of the space to enhance our city’s downtown.”
Steph Machado of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
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Amanda Milkovits can be reached at amanda.milkovits@globe.com. Follow her @AmandaMilkovits.
