Rapid City SD – The company that owns downtown Rapid City’s Rushmore Hotel & Suites filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on August 13 — the second time in just over a year that a Tzadik-affiliated entity has put South Dakota property into federal bankruptcy court, and the first time it’s happened to a property this visible.
Tzadik Mount Rushmore Hotel, LLC filed case 26-20751-SMG in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida, Fort Lauderdale Division, before Judge Scott M. Grossman.
The debtor is registered at 2450 Hollywood Blvd., Suite 503, Hollywood, Florida, and does business locally as The Rushmore Hotel and Rushmore Hotel. Its EIN is 87-3336109. Counsel is Jesse R. Cloyd of Agentis PLLC in Coral Gables. The filing fee was $1,738.
The petition lists estimated assets and estimated liabilities both in the $10 million to $50 million range, and indicates funds should be available for distribution to unsecured creditors — a designation that puts a floor under expectations without saying much about who actually gets paid, or how much.
A familiar name, a familiar pattern
Regular readers of the Sentinel’s Tzadik coverage will recognize the shape of this immediately.
Tzadik Management, run by Hollywood, Florida-based Adam M. Hendry, has spent the past year and a half working through a wave of bankruptcies tied to its South Dakota apartment portfolio — the joint-administration case out of Sioux Falls that closed this June, and the Rapid City end of that same portfolio, which included Star Village.
The Sentinel has covered Star Village’s deteriorating conditions, the nearly half a million dollars in delinquent utility obligations the city said Tzadik had racked up, the lobbyist Tzadik retained while missing permit deadlines, and Council President Stephen Tamang’s on-the-record assessment that the company has repeatedly shown it has the capacity to manage its image and hire professional advocates, but not to meet its basic obligations.
The Rushmore Hotel is a different kind of asset — a hotel, not an apartment complex, and a far more visible piece of downtown Rapid City than a low-income housing complex most residents will never drive past. But the ownership is the same, and several of the same questions are already resurfacing.
Who owns it
According to the Corporate Ownership Statement and the Equity Security Holders filing, the debtor’s ownership splits two ways: Adam M. Hendry holds 100 units of common stock, and a company called Nectar, Inc., based at 1368 Marion Street in Atlanta, is listed as holding 100 units of preferred stock and separately described as owning 50 percent of the corporation’s equity interests.
The paperwork wasn’t ready
The petition itself shows signs of having been filed in a hurry.
The original Equity Security Holders form, filed August 13, went in unsigned; the clerk’s office flagged it the next day as an apparent filing deficiency and directed the debtor to refile within two business days, which it did on August 14 — this time with Hendry’s signature.
More significantly, a separate deficiency notice filed August 14 lists nearly every substantive financial disclosure as missing: the Summary of Assets and Liabilities, Schedule A/B (Property), Schedule D (Secured Creditors), Schedule E/F (Unsecured Creditors), Schedule G (Executory Contracts and Leases), Schedule H (Codebtors), and the Statement of Financial Affairs.
All of it is due August 27. In practical terms, what’s public right now is a bare-bones petition — a case number, a debtor, an attorney, and a notice list. The real financial picture — the actual secured debt, the actual full creditor list, what the hotel is really worth on paper — isn’t public yet.
Also filed August 14, the same day as the deficiency notices: a motion, filed without a hearing request, to transfer the case from the Fort Lauderdale division to West Palm Beach. No explanation for the request appears in the docket entry itself.
What money has been named so far
A preliminary list of the debtor’s top unsecured creditors — 14 in total — gives an early, partial picture.
Western States Fire is owed the most at $116,595, followed by Pennington County at $113,494. West Plains Engineering, US Foods, Sysco Foods, and a cluster of Rapid City vendors and liquor distributors round out the rest, with amounts dropping off sharply after the top few names — down to $183 owed to Wolff Plumbing.
Because claims schedules haven’t been filed yet, it’s not clear what the Pennington County figure represents — property taxes, some other assessment, or something else — or whether it’s current or historical.
The county appears on the case’s official creditor notice matrix, confirming it has been formally noticed of the filing.
Under bankruptcy rules, governmental units get a longer runway to file claims than other creditors: the deadline for general creditors is October 22, but Pennington County and any other government body has until February 9, 2027. It is too early to say whether the county — or the city, if it has a separate claim — will collect what it’s owed. It is not too early to start watching.
One name on the creditor matrix stands out for a different reason: BankWest Inc., listed with a Pierre, South Dakota mailing address and a separate Rapid City address, but absent from the unsecured creditor list.
That combination — formally noticed, but not unsecured — is typically how a secured lender shows up on a docket before its collateral position is confirmed in the schedules. If BankWest holds the mortgage on the hotel, it would mark a contrast with the Sioux Falls portfolio, where Fannie Mae and an Indiana-based lender, Merchants Bank, were the dominant secured creditors.
Merchants Bank has separately alleged in court filings tied to that earlier case that Tzadik failed to pay property taxes on some of its South Dakota holdings and was made to write a check for $411,000 covering multiple counties — reported by The Real Deal as “Tennington,” Minnehaha, and Lincoln counties.
No Tennington County exists in South Dakota; it’s almost certainly a misprint for Pennington, though that hasn’t been confirmed against the underlying court filing as of publication.
The Hendry backstory
Hendry co-founded Tzadik in 2007 with Alex Arguelles and David Runyon.
Arguelles left the company in 2020 under a settlement that was supposed to pay him a share of proceeds as Tzadik sold off a multifamily portfolio spanning nearly 7,000 units across Florida, South Dakota, and Georgia.
According to reporting by the real estate trade publication The Real Deal, Arguelles says he was never paid; an arbitration panel awarded him $8.9 million in February 2024, and a Miami-Dade County judge converted that into a $10.6 million final judgment that October.
Hendry has moved to vacate it, arguing the arbitration process was mishandled. Tzadik’s own bankruptcy filings for the South Dakota apartment portfolio cited that judgment, along with tenant complaints and market conditions, as a factor in the collapse.
What’s still unanswered
- What happened around August 13 that made that the filing date — a foreclosure sale, a sheriff’s sale, an eviction action, something else?
- Is BankWest Inc. the secured lender on the hotel, and if so, for how much?
- Why the same-day, no-hearing-requested motion to move the case to West Palm Beach?
- What do the actual schedules — due August 27 — show about total secured debt, the complete creditor list, and the hotel’s real financial position?
- Will Pennington County recover the $113,494 currently listed, or does its claim, like others before it, end up going unpaid?
Sourcing
Case documents (Doc. 1–8) for In re Tzadik Mount Rushmore Hotel, LLC, Case No. 26-20751-SMG, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Florida, obtained via PACER. Preliminary creditor summary via Bondoro Insights case tracker. Background on Adam Hendry and the Arguelles litigation via The Real Deal (“Tzadik co-founder sues CEO Adam Hendry for $8M tied to multifamily deals,” May 8, 2024; “Alex Arguelles Wins $10.6M Suit Against Tzadik, Adam Hendry,” Oct. 15, 2024; “Tzadik’s South Dakota apartment buying venture goes up in flames,” May 28, 2025). Star Village and City Council background via the Sentinel’s prior reporting.
Accountability is a Funny Thing: Tzadik Brought a Lobbyist to a Deadline It Already Missed
Tzadik’s Bankruptcy Is Closed. Rapid City’s Bill is Still Open
Leave a Reply