Surprising news emerged in 13th Circuit Court this week about Sugar Loaf Resort, once a mainstay of winter sports activity and year-round employment in Leelanau County but which has been shuttered for some 10 years.

Convicted felon Remo Polselli and his wife Hanna Karcho Polselli of downstate Bloomfield Hills still appear to be controlling the fate of Sugar Loaf despite repeated claims to the contrary by the person officially listed as owner of the defunct ski resort, Kate Wickstrom.

The Polsellis are currently the subject of several federal court actions, including a suit filed this month by a Florida businessman who accuses the couple of multiple offenses including extortion over a business deal gone bad and employing a thug who in late December 2009 physically assaulted the businessman and left him “on the floor, bloody and incoherent.”

In addition, Remo Polselli is the subject of a petition filed last month in federal court in Detroit to enforce an IRS summons in connection with money he is still believed to owe from his previous criminal conviction on tax evasion charges.

Also, last month, a suit that Hanna Karcho Polselli filed against the IRS in federal court was dropped after a judge determined that Hanna Karcho is, in fact, Remo Polselli’s “alter ego” and that she has been attempting to hide his assets.

Meanwhile, Polselli’s “Waterfront Hotel Ventures, L.L.C.,” which currently owns the St. Clair Inn downstate, last year declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and sought reorganization under the federal law. However, a Feb. 8 hearing is slated in a bankruptcy court in Detroit during which Polselli has been ordered to show cause why his business should not be liquidated under Chapter 7 bankruptcy laws instead.

Shortly after she purchased Sugar Loaf resort in March 2005, Wickstrom declared publicly that Polselli was “definitely out of the picture” – an assertion she has repeated several times since then.

But facts to the contrary emerged during a hearing Monday in a suit filed by waste treatment plant operator Sugar Loaf Service Company over an unpaid $500,000-plus sewer bill the company claimed Wickstrom owed. Named as co-defendant in the case was the holder of Wickstrom’s mortgage on the resort, Transcapital Bank of Florida, represented locally by Traverse City attorney Roy Jay Montney Jr.

Montney informed Judge Thomas G. Power during this week’s hearing that Transcapital no longer holds the mortgage on Sugar Loaf Resort – a fact that Sugar Loaf Service Company attorney Tom Pezetti, on the other side of the aisle, said he’d learned only Friday. Montney said that a corporation apparently controlled by Hanna Karcho Polselli had acquired the mortgage from Transcapital, and had subsequently assigned the mortgage to yet another bank.

“Does this mean we were all getting too close to figuring out what’s actually going on at Sugar Loaf?” Power asked the attorneys rhetorically. “Was this assignment made in Michigan? In the Bahamas? You wouldn’t want to tell us who the principals are just for entertainment value would you?”

According to documents obtained by the Enterprise this week from the Leelanau County Register of Deeds office, on Oct. 9, 2009, the mortgage was assigned by Transcapital Bank for $10 to a Michigan corporation known as 4500 Investments L.L.C. The corporation’s managing member is Hanna Karcho Polselli.

Also filed on the same date in the county Register of Deeds office was yet another assignment of a mortgage on Sugar Loaf Resort, valued at $750,000. The assignment was from 4500 Investments, L.L.C., to First Place Bank of downstate Southfield. That document, too, was signed by Hanna Karcho Polselli.

The two publicly available documents amount to the missing pieces of a paper trail outlining the Polsellis’ continued control over Sugar Loaf’s finances, from the time they sold it to Wickstrom nearly five years ago, to the present.

“Aha! The plot thickens,” Power quipped when hearing about the mortgage transfers in court on Monday.

In 2003, Remo Polselli was convicted of evading federal taxes in connection with one of his downstate hotel properties. He subsequently served more than a year in a federal prison before being released in 2004.

Polselli’s Pacific XIX Corporation, which had owned Sugar Loaf Resort since 1997, sold the property in 2003 to a corporation called S.L. 2002. It turned out that S.L. 2002 was controlled by Polselli’s wife, although at the time she signed the corporation’s paperwork using only her maiden name, Hanna Karcho.

S.L. 2002 sold Sugar Loaf Resort to Wickstrom in March 2005. Wickstrom’s mortage for the resort was assigned to Transcapital Bank that same year with no hint – on paper at least – that the Polsellis remained involved in any way.

Since 2005, however, almost nothing has changed at Sugar Loaf Resort – and many have wondered how Wickstrom could continue to make mortgage payments on the resort with the ski lifts remaining idle and the hotel vacant.

At least one potential buyer of Sugar Loaf Resort stepped away from a deal to buy the resort from Wickstrom in 2007 after his “due diligence” investigation revealed he was not really dealing with Wickstrom but with the “unnamed guarantors” of her mortgage.

No one involved in the case seems to know who might be funding the Polsellis – or if anyone is.

Court documents in the suit filed against the Polsellis this month by the Florida businessman contain a downstate Michigan phone number that the businessman was directed to call to speak with Hanna Karcho Polselli.

A woman at that phone number identifying herself as “Hanna” answered a call from an Enterprise reporter on Tuesday, but declined comment.

“I’m not sure what’s happening, but I’ll have my attorney call you,” she said.