This error comes from the program trying to load a file which gives the distributional similarity mapping from words to clusters. It's trying to get it from the location that is specified in the training properties file (and you naturally don't have a file at that location). This happened because you don't have a properly initialized TaggerConfig object at the time readModelAndInit() is called. The way it gets initialized is unintuitive (was badly architected), but you're only encountering this because you're trying to use a non-public API.
Why can't you just use the public API as follows?
MaxentTagger base = new MaxentTagger("http://my.url.com/models/english-left3words-distsim.tagger");