BRECKENRIDGE — In a rare auction, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office on Friday sold a local outdoor store’s entire inventory for $56,000, ending an even more unusual story involving a nefarious Colorado retailer, a bilked creditor and hundreds of fleeced customers.
“In 20 years of doing this, I’ve never seen it line up as perfectly as,” said Ben Vinci, whose Vinci Law Office specializes in creditor’s rights and enforced the judgement against 123 Mountain and its owners, Olivier and Anna Sofia Goumas.
Most people who fall into deep debt easily dodge creditors, Vinci said. They move their product around and change the name of their company, forcing diligent creditors to pursue pricey legal action. But the Goumases never flinched while judges in both Jefferson and Summit counties moved swiftly alongside Summit County Sheriff’s deputies who oversaw the seizure of everything inside the Goumas’ 123 Mountain store in Frisco earlier this year.
“I think he thought he was above it all. He thought he had the system gamed,” said Vinci, who represented Greg Gantzer, the website builder who worked with Olivier Goumas to build an online store for his 123 Mountain but was never reimbursed.
The Goumases, who have apparently fled the country, left a trail of broken deals, angry landlords, fleeced creditors and complaining customers in Colorado, where they had 123 Mountain shops in Lakewood, Copper Mountain and Frisco. The couple fought more than a dozen lawsuits from vendors and manufacturers in 2012, 2013 and 2014. The Colorado Attorney General’s Office in March filed a complaint that accused the couple of deceptive practices, essentially selling gear they did not own to online customers, sending buyers different merchandise and then protecting themselves with a convoluted return policy.
Gantzer, who started legal action against the Goumases in 2012, finally won his money back on Friday, when five bidders pushed the price of 1,562 pieces of high-end mountaineering and skiing equipment to $56,000 from $10,000.
In a dirt parking lot Friday morning outside a Breckenridge storage unit overflowing with unopened moving boxes of gear, garbage bags with down jackets and sleeping bags, technical ski bindings, Austrian race and powder skis, boots and just about every toy a mountaineer could want, the bidding started low. But it didn’t take long for two bidders to push the price past $50,000.
That was too rich for Glenn Brady, a Breckenridge investor who was eyeing the piles of top-notch ski gear for his ski racing children and their teams. Last year he offered to buy Goumas’ store.
“I saw the writing on the wall. I saw the arrogant way he talked to people and, after 20 years up here, I know that people like that don’t stick around,” Brady said. “When I offered to buy his business, he kind of insulted me and talked down to me like I was some little crumb to him. So this is kind of fun to see.”
Patrick McCabe, a Colorado representative for Gantzer’s marketing and media businesses, said “it was more than a little satisfying” to go in and seize all of the Goumases’ inventory in March.
When the bidding started at $10,000, McCabe was worried Gantzer might not get the money he was owed, which was around $60,000, including legal fees.
“This is pretty much a break-even for Greg. Maybe he’s losing a little bit on the expenses, but this is great,” McCabe said.
