Rapid City SD – Adam M. Hendry is, on paper, one of the most closely supervised people in South Dakota real estate right now.
A federal Plan Administrator holds sole authority to sell his ranch, his hotel, and dozens of the LLCs that carry his name.
A confirmed bankruptcy plan bars one of his own companies from filing its own Chapter 11 for five years. A judgment creditor has a standing charging order on his membership interests in nearly everything he owns.
None of that has stopped him from signing agreements in three different capacities in the same week, personally guaranteeing debt on companies that are supposed to be under someone else’s control, or — in the case that gives this piece its name — watching one of his own companies retain its own lawyers to fight the man appointed to oversee his personal estate.
Signing for Himself, and for Everyone Else
Hendry’s personal Chapter 11 case (No. 25-14711, now assigned to Judge Mindy A. Mora) confirmed a plan in May 2026 that named Daniel J. Stermer as independent Plan Administrator, with sole authority to market, list, negotiate, and sell the LLC and trust properties tied to Hendry — including Cheyenne River Ranch, the roughly 16,800-acre spread listed for $86 million.
Hendry agreed to this. He signed a July 3, 2025 order specifically addressing “assets owned by entities owned or controlled by Adam Hendry” and establishing notice protocols before any of those assets could be sold (Doc. 103).
He has also, repeatedly, acted like the arrangement doesn’t apply to him.
Stermer’s own Doc. 530 (filed June 9, 2026) describes Hendry negotiating directly with a prospective Cheyenne Ranch buyer against the Plan Administrator’s explicit direction, telling the buyer by email that “if they want to make deal, they need to contact me directly.” Stermer asked the court to confirm, in writing, that he alone controls the sale.
Two months later, Stermer’s Doc. 38 went further: it accused Hendry of using the Rushmore Hotel’s own, separate Chapter 11 filing — a case Hendry put the hotel into on August 13, 2026, the eve of a scheduled state-court receivership hearing — as a way to shield that property from Stermer’s oversight entirely.
The September 8, 2026 settlement agreement that resolved a separate creditor objection shows the pattern most plainly.
Hendry signed it not once, but as himself, and separately as Managing Member of three different Tzadik entities — Tzadik Sioux Falls Portfolio III, Tzadik Properties LLC (Doc. 610, p. 24), and Tzadik Management Group LLC (Doc. 610, p. 25). The signature blocks for the other parties — the creditors, the purchaser, the new entity created to hold Star Village — were left blank in the filed copy.
As of this writing, full execution by every party hasn’t been confirmed.
The Guarantees Stack Up
A Plan Administrator can only control what’s already been disclosed. What keeps surfacing is how much of Hendry’s personal financial exposure was never confined to any single company.
In April 2022, Hendry personally guaranteed a $3.5 million preferred-equity investment that FC Sioux Falls Pref, LP made in TMG 2, LLC — one of the corporate entities under the same lead bankruptcy case as Star Village.
Under that Investment Agreement, Hendry personally holds 50% plus an additional 11.666% Class B interest in TMG 2; Tzadik Management Group holds another 37.132% (worth $22.9 million on the books); FC Sioux Falls holds 100% of the preferred class.
TMG 2’s underlying collateral is Tzadik Sioux Falls Portfolio I — the same 25-property portfolio at the center of the ongoing recapitalization fight with creditor Alejandro Arguelles.
Separately, in April 2025, Hendry personally signed Forbearance and Payment Agreements acknowledging Cheyenne River Ranch’s debt to that same lender, FC Sioux Falls. As of August 26, 2026, the ranch — sold for $23 million, with most of the proceeds already earmarked for other creditors — still owed FC Sioux Falls $5,138,518.19.
FC Sioux Falls alleges it was never given notice of Hendry’s personal bankruptcy case at all, despite Hendry personally signing the underlying agreements, and that the Plan Administrator says he didn’t know about the debt when he proposed distributing the ranch’s remaining proceeds to five other creditors instead.
And then there’s Arguelles. Alejandro Arguelles and Gatoralex Consulting hold a $10,645,377.97 judgment against Hendry, entered in Miami-Dade Circuit Court on October 8, 2024, plus a Charging Order reaching many of his LLC membership interests.
The September 2026 settlement extends that reach further: any new equity interests Hendry receives through the recapitalization deal must have their distributions paid straight to the Arguelles Creditors until the judgment is satisfied.
Hendry personally owes an additional $195,000 in legal fees under that settlement — payable, per its own terms, only after every other creditor in his personal bankruptcy case has been paid in full, and before he sees a dollar from any of his other entities.
Beyond the Four Cases
Public reporting on the Tzadik bankruptcies has mostly tracked four proceedings: the Sioux Falls/Rapid City portfolio cases, the Rushmore Hotel, and Hendry’s personal filing.
Hendry’s own confirmed plan lists more than 70 “LLC and/or Trust” entities tied to him in some form — a Georgia Portfolio and Georgia Portfolio II, a cluster of “Tzadik Eagle” LLCs (Bay, Briar, Oaks, Park, Millenium, Reserve), Tzadik Leasing LLC, L’Chaim 18 Inc. — none of them assigned to any of the four sale tranches, none of them currently before a bankruptcy judge (Doc. 444, pp. 13–14).
A direct pull of South Dakota Secretary of State records turns up 24 Tzadik -affiliated entities registered in the state.
Five of them have never appeared in any tranche list, any joint-administration order, or any bankruptcy filing this paper has reviewed:
Tzadik Sioux Falls Portfolio II, LLC
Tzadik Sioux Falls Portfolio IV, LLC
Tzadik South Dakota Portfolio, LLC
A dissolved entity called Tzadik Taylor’s Place 1, LLC (distinct from the real, active “Tzadik Taylor’s Place, LLC” already in bankruptcy)
Three “Managing Member” corporate shells built to control the LaCrosse, Woodlake, and Hidden Hills apartment entities.
One of those shells is itself a small case study in the gap between paperwork and oversight.
Tzadik Hidden Hills
Tzadik Hidden Hills Managing Member, Inc. — the corporation that exists specifically to control Tzadik Hidden Hills Apartments LLC, a property currently sitting inside the active federal bankruptcy case — received a delinquency notice from the state in April 2025 for failing to file its own annual report, and was administratively dissolved on June 16, 2025.
The underlying apartment complex remains under federal court supervision. The company that’s supposed to be managing it does not, at the state level, currently exist.
Tzadik South Dakota Portfolio LLC
The most striking find sits in the paperwork for Tzadik South Dakota Portfolio, LLC — a Delaware entity that filed for a South Dakota Certificate of Authority in June 2024 and has never appeared in any bankruptcy proceeding.
Its original filing listed its South Dakota principal office not at a Hollywood, Florida mail-drop like nearly every other Tzadik entity, but at 506 6th Street in downtown Rapid City — the office of Gunderson, Palmer, Nelson & Ashmore, LLP.
The filing was signed by Quentin Riggins, a partner at that firm. Riggins is also the personal trustee of Shalom on the Range Trust, the sole equity member of Cheyenne River Ranch, LLC, and it was Riggins who signed the Forbearance and Payment Agreements on the trust’s and the ranch’s behalf in the FC Sioux Falls dispute described above.
Whether that overlap reflects nothing more than a law firm handling routine corporate paperwork for a client, or something closer to an attorney with a standing role inside more than one corner of Hendry’s structure, is not something the public record answers. It’s a fair question, and an open one.
The Pattern That Predates the Paperwork
None of the bankruptcy filings, guarantees, or entity structures above required a single tenant complaint to happen.
The complaints exist anyway, and they run well before — and independent of — anything a judge has ruled on.
City Council Resolution 2026-066 recorded a $400 assessment against Tzadik Rapid City Portfolio I LLC for a property at 156 Crescent Dr., after the city said it notified the ownership in mid-April about raw sewage and sewer debris in the front yard. According to the resolution, the city ultimately had to send its own contractors to haul human waste and used toilet paper off the lawn and to the landfill.
At the July 20, 2026 City Council meeting, Councilor Callie Meyer read into the record staff-provided data showing Star Village recorded 105 violent crimes in 2025 — the highest total of any property in the city — with the pattern continuing into the first half of 2026.
Police Chief Don Hedrick, addressing the council roughly twenty minutes later, said the department faces “tremendous amounts of problems on these properties” that it doesn’t see elsewhere, forcing officers to be stationed there around the clock — pulling resources away from traffic enforcement, downtown initiatives, and “other city hotspots.” Committing that level of resource to one property owner’s holdings, Hedrick told the council, “is not fair to our community and it’s not fair to our city.”
A Star Village tenant told KOTA Territory News in April 2025 that the unit was infested with rodents and bed bugs at move-in, and that a broken heater went unrepaired for more than a month while maintenance said there was no money to fix it.
Separately, a Sioux Falls tenant named Nikki Loyd filed a $2.35 million claim in the Tzadik Sioux Falls bankruptcy case tied to a Fair Housing Act complaint (HUD File No. 08-23-6817-8) alleging the company refused disability accommodations; HUD terminated conciliation efforts in April 2024 without resolution. The dollar figure in her claim is her own unaccepted settlement demand, not an award or a court finding — it was filed to preserve her rights in the bankruptcy while the underlying HUD case continued.
Sioux Falls outlet KELOLAND has documented roach infestations, mold, and rising crime at Tzadik-managed properties there since at least 2022, prompting Mayor Paul TenHaken to call the company’s operating model “morally and ethically wrong” and a tenants’ union to form specifically to help Tzadik renters.
A Dickinson Press investigation found the same complaints — overcrowding, unsafe conditions, unresponsive management — at Tzadik properties in North Dakota.
The properties change. The complaints don’t.
The Man Who Ate His Own Tail
The clearest illustration of the contradiction at the center of this company doesn’t come from a tenant, a creditor, or a city official. It comes from Hendry’s own companies.
Tzadik Mount Rushmore Hotel LLC — the entity Hendry personally controls, and which he used to file the Rushmore Hotel into its own separate bankruptcy case — has, through its own counsel, formally objected to Stermer’s Motion to Enforce the Confirmed Plan (Doc. 55, p. 1).
It’s joined in that objection by two other Hendry-controlled entities, Tzadik Blue Hawk LLC and Tzadik Energy Portfolio LLC.
Together, captioned as “the Tzadik Debtors,” they are actively fighting, in federal court, the Plan Administrator appointed to oversee Hendry’s own personal estate.
BankWest, the hotel’s largest secured creditor at roughly $19.6 million, filed its own motion asking the court to enforce the confirmed plan and let Stermer auction the hotel — a motion filed in both the hotel’s case and Hendry’s personal case, and set on the same September 15 hearing (Docs. 56, 57, p. 1; Doc. 614).
BankWest’s separate motion to dismiss the hotel’s bankruptcy alleges Hendry diverted the hotel’s rents to unrelated entities he controls, and that the hotel can’t meet payroll without the bank voluntarily covering the gap — allegations BankWest has made, not findings any court has yet reached.
At the July 20 council meeting, with the crime data already read into the record and Council President Stephen Tamang publicly noting that the company had retained a paid lobbyist — Mitch Richter — while missing its own demolition deadlines, Mayor Jason Salamun directly offered Richter the floor to respond on the company’s behalf. Richter declined to speak.
Tamang’s assessment from that meeting still holds up against everything documented since: that Tzadik has repeatedly shown the capacity to retain professional advocates, reassure officials, and manage its public image, while failing to apply that same capacity to its basic obligations — to the city, to its own creditors, and, increasingly, to the estate its own founder is legally supposed to be surrendering control of.
What remains unresolved is not whether any of this happened. It’s why a company still fighting its own oversight, still guaranteeing debt across entities a court has already restricted, and still generating the same tenant complaints in three states, keeps being allowed to operate as though none of it does.
Sourcing
This piece draws on signed and sworn primary-source documents from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Florida (Cases 25-13865, 25-14655, 25-14711, 26-20751, and related dockets)
South Dakota Secretary of State business filings
Rapid City Council Resolution 2026-066
The July 20, 2026 Rapid City City Council meeting recording
KOTA Territory News (April 9, 2025)
Out-of-state context is drawn from KELOLAND News and the Dickinson Press.
Allegations made in filed motions and objections are attributed to the party making them and have not been independently adjudicated.
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