Tampa Mortgage Scam Hits Dozens
A rash of Florida mortgage complaints started landing on the desks of Tampa Police fraud investigators three years ago.
The gist: Low-income homeowners complaining that contractors promised home improvements they did not deliver.
Investigators Michael Mitcham and William Darrow determined that unlicensed contractors were behind the scam.
They were about to make arrests when they heard from Robert Robillard of the Hillsborough Consumer Protection Agency.
Investigators there had been getting similar complaints, and Robillard suspected something bigger - something involving bad construction and fraudulent Florida mortgages.
On Thursday, law enforcement investigators announced that they had found dozens of victims across Florida and fraudulent activity in at least 31 Florida mortgage loans totaling almost $3 million.
They said they had uncovered an elaborate scheme that involved everything from creating phony pay stubs to bribing employees at one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders.
The conspirators fleeced poor, mostly minority people, several of them in the wake of Hurricane Charley, investigators said.
The suspects treated themselves to trips to “play and party” in South Beach and Las Vegas, gambling and paying for strippers.
They said the ringleader even used some of the money obtained via the scam to buy his wife a $16,000 engagement ring.
It all started unraveling when people like Patricia Griffin, a Hillsborough County library assistant of 22 years, didn’t listen to her gut.
Her debts mounting, Griffin faced foreclosure in April 2004, when she found a flier on her door from a company called Florida Beautiful Construction Management.
Griffin needed home repairs but feared it was mortgage fraud.
“I had all these shysters who said they could do this, that and the other,” she said.
The company promised to secure her a new Florida home improvement loan to free her from foreclosure and pay for the many repairs to her rotting porch, deteriorating windows and old floors.
She didn’t sleep that night. It was too good to be true.
But she signed up anyway. Griffin got a $50,000 Florida mortgage, though she didn’t learn until later how she got it. She never had control of the money.
Workers from Florida Beautiful started the renovation project but walked off, never to be seen again. They left rot, windows unattached to the house, the wood porch unfinished and an incomplete paint job.
“I was just a really angry black woman, tired of being taken advantage of,” said the 54-year-old Griffin.
She filed complaints with the city of Tampa and Hillsborough County. As similar complaints came in, certain names kept popping up.
Darrow, one of the original investigators, said one name stood out:
“A lot of victims identified Mr. Almeida.”
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