The $800,000.00 Sale, Matthew (Part One)

You and your wife sold the Apothecary in late October/early November 2021 for $800,000.00 to former FinComm member Tom Porell and his business partner in a deal coordinated by Zoning Board of Appeals (then/current) member Sherry Gould.

Matthew, I don’t know if your wife called Sherry, or Sherry called your wife, and frankly, I don’t think it’s relevant. What’s relevant is that your wife (over two years ago) knew she wasn’t going to open and operate the Apothecary after all.

Instead of admitting failure and returning the license to the board so that some other entity could get up and moving, she set a price.

(Side note: Looking back now, I wonder if she decided when she lost the election, handily, that she didn’t owe Littleton a goddamn thing. I can almost picture her, looking at the abysmal returns, stomping around your house, saying, “Fuck Littleton. If those people think I’m going to bust my ass and get a shop open for them to collect 3% excise tax on, they’ve got another thing coming. Assholes. All of them.” That’s how I picture it.)

In the fall of 2021, your wife told Sherry Gould that she would sell the Apothecary for $1,000,000.00.

Well, as Tom explained it to me nine months ago, he and his business partner weren’t going to just hand over that kind of money. They, wise businessmen, decided to pay for (a not-inexpensive) business valuation.

The bottom line from that: Littleton Apothecary, LLC was valued at $600,000.00. There was no shop, no equipment, no fixtures, no inventory, no nothing. Zero material assets.

The only thing of value?

The HCA from Littleton upon which the provisional license (lots of paperwork, but nothing arduous) from the commonwealth (to start building out the shop) was granted.

No HCA: no provisional license. Don’t even bother to apply. Because without an HCA, you can’t do business.

The Apothecary’s HCA is our Select Board’s written agreement with your wife to allow your wife to operate a business.

Even so, your wife and buyers settle on $800,000.00.

Tom told me, how at the time, back in the fall of 2021, he thought it would be strange to give your wife $800,000.00 without ever having met her, and he suggested a weekday breakfast meeting with her: a face-to-face, quick, get-to-know-you, “tell her we’ll take good care of what she began” kind of meeting.

A great storyteller, Tom paints quite the picture of that cool fall day “right around Halloween” when he walked into As Good As It Gets in Acton for his pre-arranged, pre-scheduled breakfast meeting with your wife—and there, getting to his feet to shake his hand, is you, a member of the select board—the supervisory board of the license your wife is getting ready to cash in on—for $800,000.00.

Honestly, Matthew.

What were you thinking?

How did you think the two of you were going to pull that off?

The Nordhauses come into $800,000.00 and Tom Porell (and business partner) are now the face of Littleton Apothecary, LLC?

No aspersions to Tom and his partner, but your wife doesn’t get to pick who gets the license.

The Select Board does.

And that all gets done in open public meetings, where people from the community can ask questions, and—given the CCC’s recent social equity mandate—might mean that the Select Board needs to consider owners/operators who aren’t wealthy white men.

But Team Nordhaus would figure it out.

Two years ago, right around Halloween, at the end of that breakfast meeting, you and your wife both shook Tom’s hand, agreeing to receive $800,000.00 in exchange for a single-asset LLC.

Cannabis was legalized in November 2016.

As of those handshakes, five years had passed, and Littleton had reaped zero financial benefit from cannabis, and yet—here you two were: coming into “bank.”

TTYS,

Jkb