An open letter to the paintball community!
There has recently been a statement describing someone that I used to call a close friend, as a ‘megalomaniac’, and while he most certainly does posses most if not all of the traits described as forming a megalomaniac, I personally prefer the term;
Parasite [par-uh-sahyt]noun
1. An organism that lives on or in an organism of another species, known as the host, from the body of which it obtains nutriment.
2. A person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.
3. (in ancient Greece) A person who received free meals in return for amusing or impudent conversation, flattering remarks, etc.
I put on my first game Armo-Geddon in November 2006 as a sole trader and then continued to run this as a one man band. Tim Barnett approached me and asked me to put on a game for all those going to America on one of his organised trips to D-Day. The game in question was Against all odds, through putting on this game and talking on a regular basis we had struck up a friendship and used to bounce ideas around. Tim stated that if he came on board we could make Shoreline more than a hobby, but a very successful and profitable business. Foolishly I saw pound signs and agreed to him joining me in Shoreline, and it changed from a sole trader to a Ltd company. The warning signs were there and for whatever reason I chose to ignore them. Tim at the time was bankrupt and wasn’t able to become a director so Suzy and I were directors with Nichola as company secretary.
During this time we would run events as a joint venture but it became clear that we both had different ideas. For me it was about putting money into the games, props, pyrotechnics and trophies etc but for Tim it was about making as much profit as possible and running the games as cheaply as possible. This at the time was Tim’s only way of making money for me it was still a hobby if I could make a couple of quid great but it wasn’t my main objective. We started to clash and the situation soon became untenable so we agreed to split as partners and go our separate ways. There were several instances during our ‘partnership’ that at the time were explained away, but as I look back there was a definite cause for concern. Namely surrounding our joint purchase of Aber Paintball; he had contacted the owners and asked them if they would sell it to him. They declined; he then approached the land owner (his uncle) and asked him to tell his tenants that he was selling the woodland and that the new owner didn’t want a paintball site on there. Which he duly did, and within the week the owners had contacted Tim to say they had changed their mind and now they would like to sell the business. So Tim and me for my sins inspected the equipment and site and came up with a price. The price was accepted and Tim had asked that because he was ‘cash poor’ at the time could we give a deposit of 40% with the rest in a month? The seller accepted and we took delivery of the site and lock up keys, a done deal.
He then informed the old owners that he had found out from the landlord (his uncle) that he was selling the land and the new owner wouldn’t want the paintball site on there anymore if the sale went through. He then went on to say that the 40% we’d already paid would cover the equipment and the remainder would be paid only if the site wasn’t sold. A term of 6 months was agreed, in that if we were still trading there at that time the rest would be paid in full. Of course that was all a fabrication to get the site at a knock down price and no more money was ever paid to his sister. Oh yes you heard me right, we bought the site from his own Sister! He gave me some tale of how she and her husband had swindled him in the past, so his conscience was clear, and his ‘moral compass’ was working just fine. This was a term he used a lot to ascertain that he was the just and righteous party in any dispute.
Around that time he was running his Parents restaurant The Kings Hall Restaurant & Carvery Ltd, which was packed every time I went in there but was apparently struggling, maybe because he had sacked most of the staff and now cooked himself in the kitchen. Only coming out when there was an issue, to literally throw people out, and I’m talking physically here, if they complained. Tim knew it wasn’t going to be long lived at this point, so decided to stop paying his suppliers, the largest debt was to his butcher to the sum of £80,000 when he finally folded the restaurant which included forging his own fathers signature, thinking he could just walk away, however he forgot that he had signed personal guarantees so still owed the debts. The solution was simple and easy for him, and it was to file for bankruptcy. Even the company cars that he and Suzy drove, which were registered to an old address, were kept, he said when they eventually find me to repossess them they can have them, till then they’re mine.
Next I need to tell you all about how Tim was very clever at alluding to something but never putting it in writing, I’m talking here about charity fundraising... He used to rent an inflatable shooting range which he’d set up at events, saying it was for ‘Help for Heroes’. But because he needed a big van to get it there those costs came out of the pot, even though he would have needed to hire a van anyway. Apparently he told me this was entirely legal because he was donating all the ‘profits’ to charity, not the proceeds! However it was always described verbally in such a way to make the interested parties believe that all the money was going to the charity, when in actual fact very little actually made it that far. At that point I’d had enough and this was the main reason I wanted to distance myself from Tim, but as ‘partners’ in the brand of Shoreline that meant one of us stepping away or selling. Tim stated that there was no way he would step away nor would he sell to me. We agreed that it was for the best for us to split and for him to buy me out, but as Tim was ‘cash poor’ he couldn’t pay me outright, so we made a ‘deal’ where all of the profits from Stargate 2010 would be paid to me as full and final payment for my half of the brand. The agreement included a caveat that as Armo-Geddon was mine before the partnership that I would keep it, and as he had organised trips to the US before the partnership that he would keep them. I would then set up on my own as Therapy Paintball & Pyro Therapy, we just had one last event to get through without in his words, it ending in a fist fight!
So the event came and player numbers were down but not by much on the previous year, Tim’s excel spreadsheet of the accounts showed a grand profit of approximately £97 and change! So he actually paid somewhere in the region of £48 for the Shoreline brand, I was gutted and to be honest embarrassed that he’d pulled my pants down so blatantly, but all I could do was walk away. After all I had got the most important thing that I wanted, disassociation from the parasite.
However that came at a price, he later took great pleasure in telling me that it was his aim to get rid of all the smaller game organisers, and yes that included me. Slowly it became clear that he was getting his way, a guy who is still very close to Tim gave me access to a closed group on UKScenario.com where Tim was discussing with some people I’d previously classed as friends to boycott my events. My next game was Bastogne, and numbers were low, too low for me to continue so I pulled the plug on my next event, MY event; Armo-Geddon. Within a week he had resurrected the event and managed to get hold of the trophy, something which still irks me to this day, that sword trophy was designed by me based on a prop that I hand made for the first game, the mahogany plinth it lies on was hand made by my Father and still holds sentimental value to me. It was bought and paid for by Nichola on her credit card when Shoreline was just me as a sole trader, and I have kept the receipt to prove it. I’ve also kept all the emails where Tim agreed that Armo would be mine. As far as I’m concerned Tim stole that trophy and the event from me, the man is not only a parasite but a thief.
As if that wasn’t enough, guys that had previously been friends started to turn against me, I had decided to leave paintball and was selling off my gear which included some new team uniform, a team mate had got dibs on my uniform and paid by PayPal but asked me to keep hold of them as he may well want some more gear off me as I hadn’t advertised my markers at that time. Then I found out that Tim had been saying to people that I had been talking behind his back, but to people who were close to him... Stating that I’d been telling all sorts of lies about him which was completely untrue, I’d kept quiet about it all mainly because I was embarrassed about it. It was a self fulfilling prophecy, if I said anything it was true, if I said nothing it would be deemed as true... The team mate I mentioned than messaged me saying he no longer wanted the uniform and could he have his money back. I saw that as a definite statement of which side he was on, so right or wrong I dug in my heels and quite bluntly said “no, it’s a done deal, if you don’t want anything else I’ll post the uniform to you”. I won’t mention the name but if you are reading this I’m sorry for being unreasonable, but in my mind you had sided with my enemy, which made you an enemy too. Tim was taking away from me the thing I loved, Paintball!
So I fell away from the paintball scene but I kept an eye on things from a distance, something that I’d managed to do was to smell Tim’s lies like a fart in a lift. He didn’t get turned away from the US for a fight in defence of Suzy’s honour as described by a recent journalist. For a start they don't turn you away unless there was a conviction. He was denied access because he made a false declaration on his ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization), in which he should have declared a previous conviction and imprisonment for possession with intent to supply a class A drug, namely cocaine.
