Self-styled entrepreneur owed investors money. Then she brought her pitch to Paradise [The Sacramento Bee]

Tricia Cohen left a trail of broken promises and unpaid debts years before she began taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from Paradise wildfire survivors and failing to complete their homes.

Her customers in Paradise say that Cohen talked them into giving her Cubic Quarters homebuilding business the bulk of their insurance payouts after she promised to supply them with fire-resistant homes, prefabricated in China, that would arrive at their properties in shipping containers.

The homes never arrived, and Cohen’s seven Paradise customers still don’t have a finished house more than three years after the most destructive wildfire in California’s history destroyed everything they had.

Cohen’s too-good-to-be true sales pitch sounded familiar to three of Cohen’s former investors who spoke to The Sacramento Bee about the woman they knew around 2005 as Patty Cohen.

They said Cohen told them back then she had a line on linens, gloves and bags and other items manufactured in China. They loaned Cohen hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they said the profits Cohen promised never came.

Cohen never returned their cash, they said, despite them obtaining court judgments against her.

Cohen didn’t return emails and phone messages from The Bee.

Before Paradise, deals end badly

Back in 2005, Susan Fascitelli worked at a Seattle-area architectural firm. She said she was referred by a colleague to Cohen. She never met her in person.

“She talked a lot on the phone to me — hours, hours on the phone,” Fascitelli told The Bee, “and really gained my trust.”

Cohen’s pitch seemed simple enough — and lucrative.

Patty and her then husband, Michael, who split their time between the homes they owned in Florida and Nevada, had a business called Cohen Marketing International.

“Patty informed me that CMI was in the business of supplying products to hotels and cruise ships,” Fascitelli would later write in an affidavit filed in Washington’s King County Superior Court. “She also informed me that the business was doing well, but had occasional cash flow shortages.”

Promised she’d make several thousand dollars in a matter of months from the interest the Cohens would pay her, Fascitelli in 2005 began loaning Cohen a total of $159,000, beginning with an initial payment of $50,000, Fascitelli wrote in court documents.

Bill Gartz, one of the partners in the firm where Fascitelli worked, said he, too, found the Cohens’ pitch appealing.

Unlike Fascitelli, he actually flew to Nevada to meet the couple.

Gartz said Cohen and her husband told him they were building a company that would supply towels and linens — imported from China — to the big hotels in Vegas.

It was a weird meeting. Michael Cohen angrily refused Gartz’s request to meet with the Cohens’ partners overseas.

“You’re going to steal my contacts!” Gartz said he remembers Cohen telling him. Michael Cohen couldn’t be reached for comment. Numbers listed as his in court papers and public records either were disconnected or belonged to someone else now. An email address Cohen Marketing International used back in 2005 sent a bounce-back message indicating the account had been deleted.

Despite the red flags, Gartz agreed to loan the couple $104,000, which they never repaid, according to court papers.

“In a way, he said, “shame on me.”

Around the same time the Cohens were borrowing money from investors in Washington, they were soliciting Florida businessman Russell Gay, the owner of a wasterskiing equipment company called Masterline USA.

Gay said they told him they had a line on waterski gloves and other gear. Their supplier was in China.

Gay said he met the couple several times including at their Florida home. He described them as approachable and “very Christian.” They told him they’d done business with a major waterskiing equipment supplier.

Gay said he loaned the couple a few thousand dollars, which they quickly paid back — with interest.

Then they asked him for more, he gave it, and then he waited for a repayment that never came. When he asked about recouping his investment, the Cohens — once quick to meet with him — went silent.

“It’s just like, man, they just screwed you and go dark,” Gay said. “Next thing you know, you hear about all these other people they’ve screwed.”

A Florida judge granted Gay a $76,000 judgment in 2006. He said he never received a dime from the Cohens. Fascitelli and Gartz also received court judgments. They said they never collected any money from the Cohens either.

The Cohens were hit with at least two other judgments. In total, courts in Nevada, Washington and Florida awarded the Cohens’ business partners a combined $736,111 in judgments issued between 2006 and 2008.

A much more powerful creditor was hounding the Cohens, too.

In 2007, the IRS put a $190,905 tax lien on their Altamonte Springs, Florida home. The agency also placed a lien for the same amount on a property listed in their names in Henderson, Nevada. The liens covered unpaid taxes from the late 1990s.

It’s unclear from online records whether the tax debts were paid off.

Investor pleads for lost cash

Remarkably, Fascitelli and Patty Cohen emailed each other for several more years after the Washington court granted Fascitelli a judgment against Cohen.

Fascitelli pleaded with Cohen to return her money.

“Can you give me some information to where you stand with the situation now?” Fascitelli wrote in a 2011 email she shared with The Bee. “Believe it or not, I still think of this very often, and kick myself for being such an idiot to give you so much of my money. It would be a dream come true, just to get my investment back. I am sure you think the same.”

Cohen replied a few days later.

“I am also working on developing a few Customers to try to get this paid back,” she wrote. “Please know I am confident progress is being made and I am fully committed to paying this debt we owe to you.”

In another email that year, rambling and filled with grammatical errors, she blamed a Chinese supplier for ripping them off and she said she was pursuing legal action in China.

“Bottom line, we are committed to collect the monies owed to you and will not give up until that has been done,” Cohen wrote. “Our Customer owes us several million dollars in commissions and we have found them to be very asset and cash strong. We are not chasing a pipe dream but literally can collect from them upon receiving a judgement or win a lawsuit.”

In the years that followed, Patricia Cohen wasn’t ready to give up her business aspirations, despite the judgments against her.

At some point after divorcing her husband in 2010, she created a website for a company called the Tricia Cohen Marketing Group.

On Facebook in 2016, an inspirational meme declared “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.”

Below it, Cohen linked to her marketing and Cubic Quarters websites.

She included the comment, “Oh sweet Lord! You defined me! Exactly!!! I was BORN this way!”

Tricia Cohen’s marketing website has since been taken down, but an internet archive shows it describing Cohen as a “global entrepreneur and business owner for over 18 years,” who “assisted other large firms in building their brand as well as taking products from concept to full execution.”

“For most of her career,” the site read. “Ms. Cohen has traveled extensively throughout Asia and Thailand overseeing development of product to supply to five star hospitality brands and Fortune Five Hundred Companies.”

Her Cubic Quarters website also has since been taken down, but the internet archive shows the company advertising homes and building materials with an international flair.

The company claimed to supply structures in South America, United Kingdom, Italy, France, Norway, Mexico, Asia, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

“We build residential and commercial structures,” its homepage read. “Our focus is on YOU, the customer. We have vast capabilities to produce all kinds of structures and will not limit you to our designs, we welcome YOURS.”

Broken promises in Paradise’s ashes

One day after the Camp Fire torched 12,000 homes, Tricia Cohen saw a business opportunity. She found a Facebook post from a disaster relief group that was helping fire victims. In the comments section, she posted a link to Cubic Quarters’ website.

She posted the same link on Facebook a month later, this one attached to a TV station’s report about the fire. “We want to help rebuild and offer less than wholesale to fire victims!” she wrote.

But it wasn’t Facebook that won over Cubic Quarters’ clients in Paradise. Cohen arrived in town soon after the fire, pitching a remarkable deal.

She promised homes for as little as $150 a square foot, a fraction of the going rate. The firm promised clients they’d be in their homes by Christmas 2019, less than a year away.

But excuses quickly piled up after the shipping containers from China never arrived.

The Camp Fire took their homes. But they had more to lose in the rebuilding process

Cohen ended up rarely returning to Paradise, and most customers said they communicated with her via email or over the phone as Cohen kept urging them to send her more cash for work on their homes using local builders.

In a rambling email filled with grammatical errors to her Paradise customers, Cohen rattled off a litany of reasons why Cubic Quarters was struggling to finish their homes, starting with tariffs imposed on Chinese goods by President Donald Trump’s administration, “making importing each item astronomically high and impossible to import.”

Then bad weather and the coronavirus pandemic made things worse: “COVID-19 happened in the middle of these builds as well as rain smoke winter shortages delays in getting dirt delays in getting cement.”

Cohen has told customers that one of her contractors was unproductive and that she had fired him.

Cohen nonetheless pledged to get the homes done, telling her customers: “At the end of the day I will be here as long as you want me to work on this.”

Customers said they never could quite figure out where Cohen was, though some told The Bee Cohen told them she’d been living in England.

The address listed on Cubic Quarters’ incorporation papers, filed with the state, is a UPS store in Dana Point, in Southern California.

The Butte County district attorney and the Contractors State Licensing Board are now investigating Cubic Quarters and its dealings in Paradise.

But most of the fire survivors who gave Cohen their cash said they have little hope of ever recovering what they spent.

For Fascitelli, the Washington woman who lost $159,000 to Cohen, it’s heartbreaking to learn that wildfire survivors now find themselves in the same situation she was in.

“I feel really bad,” Fascitelli said, “that she’s still at it.”

©2022 The Sacramento Bee. Visit sacbee.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.