Brokerage Tells Plan to Rescue Failed Project : Finance: Firm that helped sell elderly on Hill Williams’ real estate deal that collapsed wants to revive it.

TUSTIN —  A stock brokerage that helped persuade elderly people to invest in a real estate deal that went bust is now proposing to raise money to rescue the project and says it will forgo any profit.

Titan Value Equities said Thursday that it will try to raise $12 million to revive the crashed real estate empire of Hill Williams Development Corp.

Hill Williams and four limited partnerships filed for bankruptcy three months ago, leaving 5,000 investors--most of them elderly--out $90 million.

The state Department of Corporations then accused President Donald Hill Williams Jr. of running a Ponzi scheme--fraudulently paying old investors “profits” out of money put in by new investors and pocketing what was left. Williams has denied it.

The land Hill Williams owns in Orange and Riverside counties isn’t worth much unless a thicket of conflicting claims to it can be cleared away; much of it must also be made more salable by constructing roads, laying sewer lines and otherwise preparing it for builders. That’s the only way the investors are likely to get much money back when the property is sold.

But what’s left in Hill Williams’ bank accounts isn’t enough to do this: The company, according to bankruptcy records, had only $120,000 when it went under.

Titan--based in Tustin--is one of 30 or so financial concerns that sold shares in the limited partnerships to investors; another big seller was Colton Financial, a Newport Beach investment adviser. All these concerns are being sued by investors, who contend that the brokers should have known that the Hill Williams investments they were selling were fraudulent.

Titan says it wants to create a new company that would be owned by the 5,000 investors and whoever puts up the $12 million. How the two groups would divide any profits is still up in the air.

Titan would not make a profit--if there is any--nor would it get a piece of the new company for helping put the rescue together, said General Counsel Steve McGinnis.

The lawsuit did not goad Titan to come up with the plan, McGinnis said. “We started working on this before we got sued,” he said.

Another company, Butler-Popejoy Group in Irvine, has also come forth as a potential rescuer: It says it’s still wading through a morass of land records and financial ledgers left by the Hill Williams company, trying to figure out whether more money should be sunk into the land.

Said William J. Popejoy, a prominent former savings and loan executive: “It’s taking us longer than we thought to get our arms around who owns what--and who owes whom what.”