CEO of failed Jacksonville business Latitude 360 to pay feds $3.8 million, may face prison
The founder/CEO of a Jacksonville company whose Latitude 360 restaurant and entertainment complexes were mired in legal battles nationwide has pleaded guilty to not paying taxes withheld from employees’ wages.
Brent Brown, 55, could be sentenced to up to five years in prison under a plea deal reached last week that admits just one of the 17 criminal counts he was indicted on in 2022.
Brown agreed in the deal to pay $3.8 million in restitution for payroll taxes that prosecutors said included money withheld from employees and taxes the company and its subsidiaries owed on their own — some of which weren't mentioned in the criminal charges.
If Brown lives up to his part of the agreement, prosecutors agreed to recommend that the judge handling his case reduce the points counted against him in a scoring system used to help decide whether a defendant goes to prison.
How it started: Planned development at Avenues to offer luxury bowling, theater, more
The plea deal resolves one of the most consequential disputes in a string of court cases that marked the business since it was called Latitude 30, the name chosen at least by 2009 for a combination bowling alley, arcade, movie theater and restaurant/sports bar inside a former Toys "R" Us store at 10370 Philips Highway.
Latitude 30, named for Jacksonville’s place on mapmakers’ north-south positioning system, opened in 2011 in the presence of a 900-person crowd, some Jacksonville Jaguars and team mascot Jaxson de Ville. Within months, close to 20 contractors who worked on the building had filed liens claiming they were still owed money and the state had filed a warrant asserting it was due almost $50,000 in unpaid taxes.
By the time its current name was adopted in 2014, the company had added venues in Pittsburgh and Indianapolis. But a University of Florida business professor said that year that a report showed the company was $92 million in debt and by the year’s end the company had faced about 60 lawsuits, including one by its former chief financial officer.
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By the end of 2015, the Internal Revenue Service filed liens for $493,000 and the state wanted $147,000.
The Philips Highway operation closed in January 2016, as did one in Indianapolis. Efforts to open operations in Albany, N.Y. and Syracuse, N.Y. were shelved.
A Pittsburgh-area sheriff’s office filed a 34-count warrant in 2017 claiming theft of services and 33 counts of passing bad checks.
A federal grand jury in Jacksonville indicted Brown over unpaid payroll taxes in early 2022, laying out separate counts for each quarter of 2015 for operations in Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis and Albany., plus one charge for the beginning of 2016 in Pittsburgh.
No date has been set for Brown’s sentencing.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: CEO of Jacksonville-bred Latitude 360 pleads guilty to not paying taxes
