The Beach Named for a Cable, Rebuilt Through a Lawsuit

Cable Beach carries two histories that don't usually sit on the same stretch of sand: an 1892 telecommunications landing that gave the place its name, and a 21st-century international fraud case that decided who would own its skyline. Both are documented, dated, and, in the second case, still working their way through the legal system's aftermath.

The Cable

In 1892, a submarine telegraph cable came ashore at Goodman's Bay, near Cable Beach's eastern end, connecting the Bahamas to Jupiter, Florida — the first direct telegraph link between the islands and the United States. The beach took its name from the landing. For the next half-century it stayed largely undeveloped shoreline; organized tourism didn't arrive until the 1940s.

The Bahamian Riviera

Development accelerated through the 1950s, when Cable Beach's growing hotel row earned the nickname "the Bahamian Riviera." The Emerald Beach Hotel opened in 1954 as the first air-conditioned hotel in the Bahamas, with the largest casino in the country at the time — the site was later redeveloped as the Crystal Palace Casino, which closed in February 2015; the Wyndham/Crystal Palace towers were demolished in October 2018. In 1958, Howard Deering Johnson opened his hotel chain's first location outside the continental United States on the same strip.

The good years didn't last past independence. Bahamian independence arrived in 1973, and in the unstable period that followed, several Cable Beach hotels failed. The Progressive Liberal Party government under Lynden Pindling bought a number of the struggling properties outright; a wave of re-privatization followed in the 1990s once the Free National Movement took power. By the early 2000s, Cable Beach's hotel stock — the Crystal Palace Resort, the Nassau Beach Hotel, and others — was aging and, in places, still government-adjacent.

Building Baha Mar

Bahamian-Armenian developer Sarkis Izmirlian began assembling Cable Beach parcels in 2005, with the goal of consolidating the tired hotel row into a single mega-resort. His company, BML Properties, broke ground on 21 February 2011. The project that became Baha Mar was financed by a $2.45 billion loan from the Export-Import Bank of China and built by China Construction America (CCA), a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned construction conglomerate — 70 percent of the labor force was brought in from mainland China rather than hired locally. The plan called for three hotel brands — Grand Hyatt, SLS, and Rosewood — 2,200 rooms, a 100,000-square-foot casino, a 30,000-square-foot spa, and a Jack Nicklaus golf course across 1,000 acres. Completion was targeted for late 2014, then set at 27 March 2015, a date BML Properties announced and staffed toward.

What the Court Later Found

The deadline was missed, and for years the public explanation was ordinary construction delay. A 2024 ruling from the New York State Supreme Court told a different story. Justice Andrew Borrok, hearing BML Properties' suit against CCA, found that CCA had breached its contractual "Best Interests Obligation" at least six times and committed fraud at least four times — engaging in what he called "outright sabotage" of the project it had been hired to finish.

The ruling's specifics read less like mismanagement than misdirection. At a November 2014 meeting in Beijing, CCA told BML it urgently needed $54 million to pay subcontractors ahead of the March opening; BML wired the money, and CCA used the exact sum to buy an unrelated property, the British Colonial Hilton in downtown Nassau — a maneuver the judge called "an absolute sham and shakedown." Through January and February 2015, with weeks left before the deadline, CCA reassigned its head scheduler off Baha Mar to unrelated projects in Panama, and the master construction schedule went unupdated for weeks at the point it mattered most. Roughly 700 Chinese construction workers were released to go home for Chinese New Year between December 2014 and February 2015 without replacement labor arranged, while CCA continued to represent to BML that the project remained on track. The ruling also found CCA executives had charged personal purchases — scarves, golf equipment, cigars — to project funds.

Bankruptcy, Sale, and Reopening

BML Properties, its cash exhausted after the missed deadline, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2015 with the resort reported at 97 percent complete. Construction stopped entirely for close to a year. In October 2016, Perfect Luck Holdings — a subsidiary of the same China Exim Bank that had financed the project — took control of the bankrupt property. Two months later, in December 2016, Hong Kong's Chow Tai Fook Enterprises bought Baha Mar outright and finished the job. Izmirlian, who had personally lost his firm's $845 million equity stake, said afterward that he had conceived of Baha Mar more than twenty years earlier "only to see it ripped out of my hands at the brink of opening by CCA." He filed suit in New York in December 2017.

Under Chow Tai Fook, Baha Mar opened in stages: the Grand Hyatt in April 2017, SLS that November, Rosewood in June 2018 — six years after groundbreaking and roughly two and a half years past the original public target. The resort has operated normally since, hosting the annual Bahamas Championship college basketball tournament at its convention center every year since 2021.

The Verdict, Nine Years Later

The October 2024 ruling closed the legal question but not the ownership one. BML Properties' damages claim started from its lost $845 million equity contribution, with interest compounding from a May 2014 breach date the court identified, reaching $1.6 billion by the time of the judgment. That money is owed to BML Properties — the bankrupt entity, not to Izmirlian personally, and not in any form that returns the beach to the family that spent two decades assembling it. Cable Beach's resort skyline stands today because a nine-year fight over who broke a $4 billion construction project was finally decided in a Manhattan courtroom, long after the buildings themselves were finished by someone else.

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