Wayne Newton Wins Restraining Order Against Landlord, Stalls Museum Plans

Rick Diamond/ACMA2012/Getty Images for ACM(LAS VEGAS) — Wayne Newton has won a temporary restraining order against his landlord, stalling plans to turn the singer’s Las Vegas estate into a tourist attraction.

Newton attended the Clark County District Court hearing on Thursday in which Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez said the developer, Steven Kennedy, must stay 50 feet away from the Newton family and their home.

Newton, long famed as “Mr. Las Vegas,” was sued by Kennedy, who claims he is obstructing efforts to turn his 40-acre Case de Shenandoah estate into a Las Vegas tourist attraction along the lines of Elvis’ Graceland. The suit also claims he’s been sexually aggressive toward the firm’s workers as well as careless by allowing his vicious dogs to bite people on the property.

Kennedy, head of CSD Management, said his company already has invested $50 million in the project, which was to include a dinner-theater and car-wash. He says CSD bought Newton’s property in 2001 and paid the singer $19.5 million, with the understanding that Newton and his family would vacate their mansion so it could be turned into a museum.

On Thursday after the hearing, the performer told reporters that he wished he had not entered the deal with Kennedy.

“Totally,” Newton, 70, said. “I don’t like vultures.”

The future of the museum is uncertain at least until the next court date, July 30.

“Time will tell if it is built,” Newton said on Thursday after the hearing. “It will not be built under the present circumstances of management.”

Kennedy’s lawsuit claims Newton deliberately frustrated CSD’s efforts, that Newton “never intended to cooperate” in the venture, and that the singer’s obstructionism goes way beyond just staying home.

Newton, it alleges, has refused to hand over a trove of keepsakes and collectibles intended for exhibit. They include, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Jack Benny’s violin. Newton also has failed, says Kennedy, to reduce the property’s herd of horses, which includes Arabians, from 55 to a more manageable 20. The property, as described in the lawsuit and in the local press, comes with an extensive collection of exotic animals.

The court filing levels a variety of charges, accusing Newton of engaging in animal mistreatment, “obnoxious sexual behavior” and allowing his dogs to terrorize CSD workers.

In a statement, Newton’s attorney, Stephen Peek, dismisses CSD’s claims as “nothing more than a preemptive effort on the part of the plaintiffs to intimidate the Newtons for their own benefit.” Its salacious and meritless accusations, he says, are meant only to deflect the Newton’s forthcoming counter-suit, in which, Peek says, they will charge CSD with having mismanaged the project, spending “exorbitant amounts of money,” and failing to secure building permits in advance of construction, “which caused the Fire Department to shut down construction on the Visitor Welcome Center.”

Newton once reigned supreme as the highest-paid performer on the Vegas strip, but audiences and critics in recent years have not always been kind to the 70-year old performer. In 2009, a reviewer for the Las Vegas Review-Journal uncharitably referred to Newton’s singing voice as having been “trashed, perhaps irreversibly.”

Kennedy’s claim says that before CSD undertook renovations, “Casa de Shenandoah was, to put it mildly, in sad state of repair.”

Hundreds of tons of horse manure, it says, had accumulated on the property, towering in piles so high they rose half way up the 12-foot walls surrounding the property. Indoors, horses’ stalls “were saturated in a sea of standing urine emitting a stench so potent hat it made breathing unbearable.”

Penguin ponds “were disgustingly dirty, full of algae,” with birds sick or dying. The wallabies weren’t too happy either, forced to inhabit “a small, dung-filled dog kennel-like structure.”

In a statement, Newton and his wife counter by asking how Casa de Shenandoah could possibly have been in such deplorable repair if it was used in 2009 as the setting for the season finale of the TV show The Amazing Race. In 2008, they say, it was named one of the top five homes in the U.S.

As for the accusation that Newton abused animals, their statement says: “Wayne Newton has been named the top breeder of Arabian Horses in the world and has received accolade after accolade for his Arabian Horse Herd.” Rulers of foreign countries, they say, have purchased horses from the Casa de Shenandoah herd.

Finally, say the Newtons, the charge of sexual harassment is “completely fabricated,” and has no basis in fact. They say to date no complaint has been filed by the former employee.

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio