Deal May Secure Paramount Ranch for Park Agency : Conservancy: Under the tentative accord, the state would pay $1.55 million less than the $19.3 million it offered for the land two years ago.

Two years after an unsuccessful attempt to buy the Paramount Ranch in Agoura, former home of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, state park officials may yet wrest the scenic tract from developers through an unusual deal approved Monday night by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

Under the tentative agreement with Union Federal Savings Bank of Brea, the conservancy will buy delinquent loans on the 320-acre tract, and then foreclose on a development firm that is millions of dollars in arrears.

The deal calls for the conservancy to pay the Brea-based thrift $17.75 million in principal and interest--$1.55 million less than the $19.3 million the conservancy offered for the land two years ago.

The oak-studded tract “has been everyone’s highest priority . . . at least for the last three years,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the conservancy, prior to the unanimous vote of the agency’s board.

“It is tremendously exciting to see something that a lot of us thought would never happen,” Edmiston said. “All of a sudden, out of the blue, we get the opportunity to protect one of the most important parklands in the Santa Monicas.”

The deal, still subject to approval by the bank’s board, requires the conservancy to put up $500,000 to acquire the note, with the balance of $17.25 million due in 18 months. Ultimately, the conservancy hopes to resell the property to the National Park Service to go with an adjacent tract the Park Service owns.

But Benjamin M. Reznik, lawyer for the property owner, Paramount Ranch Estates Inc., vowed to fight foreclosure. “I certainly hope they know what they’re getting into,” he said.

Edmiston said the conservancy will move quickly to foreclose and voiced doubt the debtor can come up with all it owes. He estimated the firm’s obligations at $22 million and said it has not made a payment since obtaining the first of two loans late in 1988. Neither Reznik nor bank officials would discuss specifics of the loans.

“Given the current market, we’re pleased,” said Ron Griffith, general counsel for Union Federal Savings. “It’s . . . a good deal for the bank.”

Like the national park holdings next door, the Paramount Ranch site is part of the historic Paramount movie ranch where many Westerns were filmed. State and federal parks officials have long hoped to preserve the tract for its own sake, and protect the Park Service’s adjacent 436 acres.

Those hopes seemed doomed in 1989, when county supervisors approved construction of 150 residences, and developers rejected the conservancy’s $19.3 million purchase offer.

The allegation that the development firm made no payments on its loans deepened the mystery surrounding the company and its late president, Ezra Raiten, 38, of Northridge who died in September with his son and two others in the crash of Raiten’s private jet near San Luis Obispo.

Raiten’s Paramount Ranch Estates secretly acquired the project for $13.5 million from businessmen Art Whizin and Brian Heller in December, 1988, a few months before the development was approved. Heller continued to represent himself as a principal, and Raiten’s ownership did not surface until last year.

Early in 1989, the conservancy twice made purchase offers to Heller without knowing Raiten had taken over the project.

Raiten’s checkered past might have accounted for the secrecy. In 1983, he spent several months in prison on forgery and check-fraud convictions. In 1986 he was fined and placed on three years’ probation for trying to run down his mother-in-law and her boyfriend in a car.

At the time of the plane crash, the Federal Aviation Administration was seeking to revoke Raiten’s pilot’s license because he had not disclosed his criminal record on the application.

Shortly after his death, a Union Federal Savings official said the bank had no inkling of Raiten’s background. “We were as astonished as anybody,” said Mike Hooper, vice president and director of marketing.

In a deposition in 1990, Raiten stated under penalty of perjury that he was sole owner of Paramount Ranch Estates and hence sole owner of the property. Reznik, however, said Monday that the land belongs to Raiten’s father, Meir Raiten, through ownership of a parent firm, Raiten Development Corp. It was uncertain when the elder Raiten acquired the land.