Irvine Firm to Buy Resort, Horse Track : Investment: Excalibur Holding Corp. has agreed to purchase a controlling stake in Mountaineer Park in Chester, W. Va., in a deal valued at nearly $8 million.
An Orange County investment company with a troubled financial past said Tuesday that it has arranged to buy a 606-acre horse racing track and resort in West Virginia in a deal valued at nearly $8 million.
Excalibur Holding Corp. of Irvine said it agreed last month to purchase a controlling stake of Mountaineer Park in Chester, W. Va., which offers thoroughbred racing, a 101-room lodge, a golf course and other resort amenities less than an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh, Pa., and southern Ohio.
“We want to expand off-track wagering and (horse racing) simulcast and the video lottery,” or slot machines, said Thomas K. Russell, Excalibur’s general counsel.
The agreement would be the second foray into legalized betting for Excalibur, which said it also is planning to develop a casino in Cripple Creek, Colo. The company is involved in a pilot program to install video gambling in the cabins of cruise ships.
Gambling is a sharp departure for Excalibur, which formerly operated a security guard company, Excalibur Security Services Inc. Blaming fierce competition, the security company filed for Chapter 11 protection from creditors in December, 1990, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
While under U.S. Bankruptcy Court jurisdiction, Excalibur sold its security guard operations for about $2 million last year to Security Bureau Inc. of Pittsburgh.
Excalibur then bought 118 oil and gas wells in the Midwest and created a subsidiary, ExCal Energy Corp., to manage the wells, according to the SEC filing.
Excalibur has agreed to pay about $3.5 million in cash for Mountaineer Park and would issue the sellers 500,000 shares of its common stock. It has also agreed to assume $3.7 million of the resort’s debts and provide an additional operating loan of $636,000.
Excalibur told the government that it had received $435,000 in loans from a company called Golden Palace Inc. of Bloomington, Minn., for the Mountaineer purchase and Cripple Creek development and that Golden Palace might provide additional loans.
