Wild man of Pinewild.

AuthorGray, Tim
PositionPrivate detective Bill Graham

Hired to dig up dirt, private eye Bill Graham slings mud in a rift over a Pinehurst residential development.

Bill Graham stands up behind his desk, his tie floating several inches above a trouser waistline forced out by his gut. His pudgy arms poke out of a short-sleeve plaid shirt. On the wall facing him is a flamed poster of Robert Dedman Sr., the well-tailored chairman and CEO of Dallas-based Club Corporation International. "An enduring example of exceptional leadership," the poster reads. At least it used to. In black-marker scrawl, Graham has substituted headache for example and deceptional for exceptional. Jabbing his finger at the poster, he announces, "Mr. Dedman looks like the king of England but is really just a gangster."

Statements like that, which a ClubCorp attorney calls "absolutely false," have gotten Graham hit with a libel suit and a gag order. They've also made him a thorn in the side of ClubCorp, the world's largest golf-club operator.

By trade, Graham is a private detective, but he's more agitator than investigator. His client, Japanese cookie-maker Tohato Inc., is tangling with ClubCorp in one of the nastiest legal squabbles Pinehurst has ever seen. The battlefield is Pinewild, a 2,100-acre gated development built around two 18-hole courses Tohato and ClubCorp own and ClubCorp once managed. When their partnership soured, Tohato sued ClubCorp in 1996 for mismanagement and brought in Graham to dig up dirt, paying him $2,000 a week.

As much PR man as PI, Graham has accused the company of crimes ranging from embezzlement to racketeering and called its executives crooks, thieves and trolls. Last September, ClubCorp sued him and Tohato for libel. When that didn't muzzle Graham, a judge hit him and his client with a gag order in June, claiming they had engaged in "the systematic circulation of false statements."

Graham's accusations, eye-popping but unsubstantiated by law-enforcement officials, go far beyond the Pinewild dispute. He claims ClubCorp is engaged in a nationwide scheme to bankrupt clubs so it can acquire them on the cheap. His goal: heap so much bad publicity on ClubCorp that it will settle with Tohato for part of the $25 million it seeks in the suit, filed in Moore County Superior Court.

"If Tohato truly believed it will prevail in the courts, it would not be engaging in such a frantic attempt to wage such an egregiously libelous campaign in the media," says ClubCorp's Dallas lawyer, Jack Wilson, in written response to questions from BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA.

Talk to Graham's boss - Koichi Sato, president of Tohato Realty USA Inc. - and it's clear the cookie maker wants more than money. Before it sued, Sato tried for more than a year to ferret out why the development wasn't meeting sales goals. (About two-thirds of the properties have sold, he says, noting ClubCorp projected all of them should have by now.) ClubCorp, he says, thwarted him, telling employees not to talk. On-site managers brushed him off when he inquired about such things as the development selling its timber at less than market value to a contractor - which Tohato alleges in its suit.

"ClubCorp spit in our face," Sato says. Bill Graham is Tohato's revenge: a big gob of saliva aimed right at Robert Dedman's nose.

Graham's campaign targets...

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