Yesterday, it was publicly revealed that Insomniac Events is suing the trio of promoters who partner with the live events producer on Miami’s famous Club Space and Factory Town venues.
The federal lawsuit, filed on August 4 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleges breach of contract and bad-faith conduct by Miami nightlife magnates David Sinopoli, Davide L. Danese, and Jose Gabriel Coloma, and seeks undisclosed damages exceeding $75,000 and additional financial relief to protect Insomniac’s brand and upcoming events. Insomniac acquired a majority stake in Club Space in 2019.
A detailed look at the complaint reveals a multi-year dispute centered around the trio’s operation of Club Space and eventual partnership with Insomniac on Factory Town, wherein the event producer claims its local partners, collectively referred to as “CDD,” demanded “outrageous” sums of money and used nefarious practices to try to “bully” them out of the partnership, including an alleged smear campaign against its founder and CEO Pasquale Rotella.
Since the story went public, Sinopoli, Danese, and Coloma’s camp have vehemently denied Insomniac’s claims and characterized the lawsuit as “a negotiation tactic to scare us.” In local media reports, they’ve instead accused Insomniac of trying to squeeze them out.
We pored over the strongly worded and heavily redacted public version of the 51-page complaint and broke down the complete saga below.
Timeline alleged by Insomniac:
- 2016-2019 – Under the name “Space Invaders,” CDD purchased Club Space in 2016 and ran the club for three years. Insomniac alleges mismanagement is to blame for the owners not having secured a long-term lease or formal rights to the Club Space brand.
- 2019 – Insomniac bought 51% of Space Invaders & Club Space; secured long-term lease and brand rights. Revenue grew 700% in the next six years. Each CDD partner earns $8M, acknowledging the partnership as fruitful by comments about making their “first million together,” according to the complaint.
- 2021-2022 – Partnership begins to expand to Factory Town. Insomniac funds 100% of necessary safety improvements, overhead, and event production costs, totaling over $40 million in commitments.
- 2023 – Insomniac and CDD sign 10-year Factory Town lease; Insomniac commits to over $22M in rent in the first year alone. Insomniac alleges CDD secretly purchased a stake in the Factory Town property and stood to profit from the new lease. CDD claims full purchasing transparency.
- 2024 – CDD removes name from signed agreements prior to legal execution; demands more money, control over brand previously restricted by non-competes. Withholds event revenue. Insomniac alleges CDD threatens a smear campaign against Pasquale Rotella.
- 2025 – Mediation with Judge Hanzman fails; CDD allegedly takes $3 million, blocks ticketing/social media access to Hocus Pocus, and conspires with Club Space landlord. CDD allegedly tells interested parties they’ve regained control of Factory Town and Club Space.
- August 4, 2025: Insomniac sues.
Response from CDD
Speaking with EDM Maniac on August 22, attorney Bruce A. Weil, who represents CDD, called Insomniac’s filing a “whimsical fabrication,” and characterized the suit as a case of “corporate greed and squashing out the local guys.”
He further threatened “ramifications for alleging things in a federal court filing which are false,” including CDD’s intent to file motions that strike their “sham pleadings” and request evidentiary hearings “to show that the things that they say are patently false.”
“Insomniac wanted us to continue,” Weil said. “They basically took the Factory Town deal. We [CDD] were doing events there. And they signed the lease behind our back. They don’t operate as an honest company with integrity like my clients. My clients are handshake guys. When they tell you something, they’re their word and that’s why the community is behind them: because they know who they are.”
“We’re supposed to be running it, and they just keep going behind our backs,” Weil said.
In a statement shared with EDM Maniac on August 25, Insomniac’s attorney, Jordan Shaw, said, “The defendants’ conduct, comments, and threats since the filing of the complaint have been consistent with our allegations. We, however, need not resort to threats or personal insults. Instead, we will continue to focus on the facts. And if those facts are unsealed, we believe the truth will be readily apparent.”
The original partnership
In July 2019, Insomniac, which is half-owned by concert promoter Live Nation, purchased a 51 percent stake in Space Invaders, the operating company of Sinopoli, Danese, and Coloma that previously purchased Club Space in 2016. The suit alleges the trio, collectively referred to as “CDD,” was mismanaging the historic venue prior to Insomniac’s involvement.
As part of the deal, Insomniac helped the new joint Club Space ownership group re-secure the intellectual property rights to the club’s name and branding and negotiate a long-term lease with the club’s landlord to secure its future in downtown Miami. Both efforts, according to the complaint, had been neglected by CDD prior to Insomniac’s involvement.
In the six years since, the complaint contends that with Insomniac’s event management and safety expertise, Club Space’s annual revenue has increased by more than 700 percent, and that the mutually beneficial partnership has seen CDD take home over $8 million in salary. It alleges that CDD was grateful, acknowledging the partnership as fruitful by comments about making their “first million together.”
As it currently stands, Sinopoli, Danese, and Coloma each own just under 11 percent of Club Space. Its remaining minority stake is owned by other members of the Space Invaders ownership group, who are not involved in the dispute.
According to the complaint, CDD reports to the “Board of Space Invaders,” which is majority held by Insomniac. It also says CDD’s role is currently limited to front-of-house club management duties such as social media, marketing, curation, and promotion, some of which are jointly carried out by Insomniac. Meanwhile, the complaint says Insomniac has been solely responsible for the risk via capital investment—reportedly a point of contention throughout the dispute.
The next nightlife frontier
Following Club Space’s successful revival, Insomniac and CDD began collaboratively hosting events at Factory Town, a 6-acre venue complex on the site of a former mattress factory in nearby Hialeah, in 2021.
After holding successful preliminary events at the venue, Insomniac and CDD negotiated a handshake deal for a long-term property lease in 2023, in order to make the endeavor more financially sustainable and reduce event-by-event expenses. The deal was backed by Insomniac’s financial capabilities and the EDM giant’s $15 million investment for improvements to make the reclaimed venue safer and permanently equipped for large-scale events.
The suit claims Insomniac has taken on 100 percent of the costs associated with improving the venue and hosting events, including paying third-party businesses for the construction and dismantling of stages and other temporary infrastructure, ticketing services, sponsors, and other backend operations tasks. Meanwhile, the deal meant CDD, which was always in charge of promotion, curation, and management, would now be acting as contractors and would receive compensation on profits on a per-event management basis.
Factory Town fallout
Though it’s unclear exactly when the friction began, the suit alleges that during the initial handshake lease, CDD began demanding its fees based on total revenue instead. To strike a legal solution, the partners executed an official 10-year lease of Factory Town, with options to extend for two more decades, committing Insomniac to over $22 million in rent payments in the first year, according to the filing.
But here’s the kicker: the lawsuit claims, unbeknownst to Insomniac, CDD had purchased a stake in the Factory Town property and stood to profit from the new lease. The complaint alleges that during the deal talks, CDD misled Insomniac to believe the trio was helping to negotiate favorable terms, while they were instead brokering on both sides of the deal.
Speaking to the Miami New Times yesterday, Sinopoli told his side of the story: CDD had informed Insomniac of their real estate investment in the Factory Town property from the get-go.
“We had just signed up with Insomniac and our deal at Club Space, and we offered [Factory Town] to them for a real estate project because we had invested in the real estate. And we offered it to them to do events,” he told the outlet. “They at first didn’t really wanna do it. COVID hit, and then after COVID when we threw our first event there, they saw value in it. Over the next couple years, they tried to squeeze us out of it.”
A lease in limbo
Although CDD signed the lease agreement in January 2024, the filing claims that four months later, while Insomniac was pursuing approval from Live Nation, CDD removed their signatures from the contract, demanding more money, a greater percentage of ownership, and more control over the Club Space brand by being exempt from previously agreed non-compete restrictions.
The complaint also alleges that at this time, CDD withheld Factory Town event funds from Insomniac and threatened to file a lawsuit containing a 30-page smear campaign against Insomniac founder and CEO Pasquale Rotella as the basis for its demands.
On the opposite side, Weil told EDM Maniac that Insomniac went “behind our backs” when they struck the lease agreement.
“They don’t operate as an honest with integrity like my clients. My clients are handshake guys. They tell you something; they’re their world and that’s why the community is behind them, because they know who they are,” Weil said. “They wouldn’t work for them anymore. Insomniac, they tried to get us to go back to the fact that we entered into an agreement, we agreed to work together. It was clear we couldn’t, because all they wanted to do was sabotage us.”
Regarding the withheld funds, Weil said the $3 million allegedly taken by CDD was a sum of money approved by Insomniac to be solely handled by CDD, and that upon the agreement, CDD sent Insomniac $2.7 million in additional funds.
Though CDD has strongly denied the alleged smear campaign against Pasquale Rotella, sources close to Club Space confirmed to EDM Maniac that the working relationship between Rotella and CDD had deteriorated.
Last week, Sinopoli told the Miami New Times, “We don’t need to start a smear campaign. Everything in their complaint will be contradicted by documentary evidence that’s coming out very soon.”
A 16-hour mediation
In the fallout of the rescinded contract, the filing says the two sides then went into a sixteen-hour out-of-court mediation overseen by former Florida Circuit Court Judge Michael Hanzman, the details of which are heavily redacted from the publicly available document. The complaint claims that the parties reached an amicable solution and that in a private hearing, Hanzman ruled against CDD on material issues.
At some point in the aftermath of the mediation, the lawsuit claims CDD misrepresented to other industry professionals that they had won the hearing and were fully in charge of Factory Town, including talent booking and management, without legal precedent to do so.
Regarding the mediation breakdown, Sinopoli told the Miami New Times his group had informally agreed to continue the Factory Town partnership through 2025 and felt the outcome was “favorable,” but stood firm on their decision to walk away from the partnership in 2026.
Fall events
As of late, the drama is centered around operations for Factory Town’s upcoming Hocus Pocus and Art Basel events, respectively scheduled to take place over Halloween weekend and in December of this year.
Though this portion of the public filing is heavily redacted, it alleges CDD shared confidential information about these events, including budgets, organizational charts, marketing plans, ticket information, and email lists, with the manager of the ownership group in charge of Club Space’s corporate landlord. It claims CDD was touting the group as a new partner.
There also appears to have been an additional spat over the intellectual property rights for Hocus Pocus. Insomniac, which owns “most of the intellectual property and assets relating to Factory Town,” according to the suit, alleges CDD has attempted to claim the Halloween festival as its own, despite the fact that all events at Factory Town have been joint endeavors.
The suit claims CDD went rogue with their announcement of Hocus Pocus on July 21. It contends the announcement featured unapproved artwork that billed the show as a “Club Space Presents” event, and directed customers to purchase tickets via the Club Space DICE page, the passwords and access to which are solely controlled by CDD. The brand confusion issue for Hocus Pocus has since been resolved on the event’s social media and ticket pages.
The complaint also alleges CDD barred Insomniac from talent booking discussions for Art Basel and withheld login information that allows Insomniac to sell tickets, modify prices, and honor Hocus Pocus tickets that were purchased on the Club Space DICE page.
What’s next?
A countersuit is expected to come from CDD soon, and Weil told EDM Maniac that the Club Space camp will be requesting evidentiary hearings to share their side in court.
But for now, it appears both sides are attempting to resolve the dispute amicably and keep the dancefloors open.
Sinopoli told the Miami New Times, “the plan is to continue with all programmed events until the end of the year.”
Speaking to the same outlet, Insomniac’s Attorney, Jordan Shaw, said, “Without question, the goal here is peace. The goal is status quo. We were doing great things. We’d like to continue them.”
As it stands, Hocus Pocus 2025 will go ahead as scheduled at Factory Town from October 31 to November 1. Information for this year’s Art Basel programming has not yet been announced.
Featured image courtesy: Club Space.