‘It’s Been Six Years of Torture’: After the Hurricane Came the Con

It was the giant whiteboard that did it, they said.

After Hurricane Sandy destroyed their homes in October 2012, many Long Islanders fell hard for Cody Trey Lawrence, a sweet-talking contractor from Texas. To pitch the services of Turnkey Contractor Solutions, the company he partly owned, he used a whiteboard the size of a picture window to lay out his project management prowess. He detailed how he kept track of each home elevation and reconstruction project.

In the chaotic years after the storm that left thousands of people shifting from one temporary location to the next, the Turnkey whiteboard promised order. And to dozens of desperate homeowners, Lawrence seemed like a savior. Plus there was the hook: Turnkey was cheaper than almost everybody else.

“Many of us were at the point where you took what you could get, and you crossed your fingers,” said Lori Bacigalupo, whose house in Island Park was left uninhabitable after the hurricane.

The family moved five times in six years, and to this day, the repair work on their home remains unfinished. This is largely because of the mess made by Lawrence, who left Long Island before the job was finished.

“I know we’re still in better shape than many others, but what I would do to get my old house back,” Bacigalupo said. “It’s been six years of torture.”

Bacigalupo and her husband, Dean, are not the only ones who feel this way.

“There was a point where I thought he was just a bad businessman,” Mia Vogt, of Massapequa, said about Lawrence. She is one of about three dozen homeowners claiming that Turnkey did not complete its contracted work. “But now I think he’s fraudulent.” Amid the thousands of Long Islanders on the South Shore who lost their homes, for the dozens of those who hired Turnkey, the situation is doubly bad. Not only have they been left with unfinished restorations, many of them are furious that rogue contractors have gone unpunished. In addition, many are angry that state and local governments didn’t respond fast enough to their concerns.

“I pay my taxes, I vote in every election,” Dean Bacigalupo said. “So when I approach them with a big problem like this, I expect them to respond. All we’ve done is wait.”

As towns along the Florida Panhandle start to assess the damage from Hurricane Michael and plan their next steps, homeowners in Long Island offer a cautionary tale of how natural disasters can leave a different type of debris after stormwaters recede: endless paperwork, unfinished homes, displaced families, foreclosures, overworked contractors and caseworkers, miscommunication, suspected fraud and enormous debt.

The day after Sandy hit New York, the Bacigalupos, who had evacuated, returned to Island Park to assess the damage. Like most of the homes in this small village in Nassau County, their three-bedroom ranch had been ravaged. Although the house was still standing, every room had flooded.

“I was screaming, hysterically crying,” Lori Bacigalupo said.

The neighborhood looked like a war zone, Dean Bacigalupo said. Emergency personnel conducted search-and-rescue missions. Police officers, firefighters and volunteers from across the country worked tirelessly to clean up debris, including boats in the middle of the street.

Despite the devastation, the community pulled together. Lori Bacigalupo said workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, local officials and nonprofits like Long Island Cares, as well as the Salvation Army and American Red Cross, distributed water, food, clothing and household goods immediately. Owners of local stores handed out gift cards and vouchers. The Village of Island Park paid for trash haulers.

The Bacigalupos were awarded $149,000 from their flood insurance policy. They cobbled together an additional $71,000 from savings and Dean Bacigalupo’s 401(k) to renovate. The family’s Christmas photo that year shows the couple’s two sons, 12 and 9 at the time, standing in their skeleton of a house. The family bounced around, staying with relatives, then a Marriott and a Best Western. Without the regular use of a kitchen, they spent a lot of money on takeout. The emotional toll of losing a home led to many sleepless nights.

“It was a strange time,” recalled Dean Bacigalupo, a middle-school social studies teacher and an adjunct assistant professor at Hofstra University. “The boys would play “Minecraft” and would build their structures higher, with sump pumps.”

The Bacigalupos were better off than many Long Islanders who did not have private flood insurance or savings. Many were waiting on money to come through from FEMA; others applied for loans from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

There was also a third, lesser-known option for funding that homeowners tapped: Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery awards. These grant awards, which come through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, may become available after the president makes a major disaster declaration and Congress approves them.

The Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery, a state agency established by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in June 2013, is in charge of distributing the grant money. This was a godsend to many families, but it came with strict deadlines to show proof of successful rebuilding. The lack of caseworkers, local government staffers and skilled contractors made those deadlines even more difficult to meet.

By May 2013, the Bacigalupos’ first round of renovations had been completed by a local contractor, resulting in a brand-new kitchen and an extra bathroom. But they knew their low-lying house, a stone’s throw from Hog Island Channel, would most likely flood if another strong storm came, so they signed up for the state storm recovery agency’s NY Rising Homeowner Recovery program, which provided grant awards to, among other things, elevate homes. Initially, the Bacigalupos were told that they would receive about $170,000, a low figure that surprised them. They called their caseworker (assigned to them by the state recovery agency) to report that contractors were quoting them a figure of about $330,000 to elevate their house. They were told that these companies were price gouging; the state would not be offering more money.

(Later the state recovery agency, through amendments eventually made to its disaster action plan, seemed to admit that it underestimated home elevation construction costs on Long Island by about $129,000.)

The Bacigalupos then heard about Lawrence’s company, Turnkey, from several friends. Lawrence sat down with the couple. He had worked in the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina, he said, and he had extensive experience with home elevation. He mentioned other projects in the area and his whiteboard that kept them all organized. They were impressed.

Lawrence came to New York in late 2014. The Louisiana company he had worked for, seeing a major opportunity in a region still rebuilding after Sandy, sent him to the East Coast to drum up more business. He applied for and received his contractor’s license in the city, as well as in Nassau and Suffolk counties. He joined industry organizations to get to know the local contractors and studied up on how the area’s recovery system worked, including the bidding process for state and city-run reconstruction projects, as well as the NY Rising program. He attended meetings and spoke at industry dinners. Many contractors who worked with him all said the same thing about Lawrence at the time: He was pleasant, a hard worker, and he knew how to use his Southern charm.

Just a few years later, dozens of angry homeowners would retain a lawyer to explore criminal charges against Turnkey, calling Lawrence a fraudulent “storm chaser.”

“All I ever wanted to do was help people,” said Lawrence, who briefly returned to Long Island this month — to the office of Jerald S. Carter, a former Nassau County court judge, and Ronald J. Bekoff, a partner at Hession, Bekoff & Lo Piccolo in Garden City, to be exact (both are his attorneys) — specifically to give his side of the story for this article.

Lawrence ultimately left the Louisiana company that originally sent him to New York and floated among a few others before deciding to go into business for himself. In early 2016, he invited an old colleague from the New Orleans area, Jorge Urbina, to open Turnkey in Bohemia, just south of Ronkonkoma on Long Island. The two used savings and borrowed money to pay for the required workers’ compensation and liability insurance, Lawrence said. The firm didn’t have any startup or operating capital, butLawrence, who concentrated on sales while Urbina was in charge of the construction, said he was sure everything would be fine because projects were meant to pay for themselves, and Turnkey was lining up clients at a good clip.

That year, Turnkey had contracts for about 25 home elevation and reconstruction projects (averaging about $196,000 each) in Long Island, totaling $4.9 million in sales, according to Lawrence. “We crushed it the first year,” he said.

Lawrence had ambitious goals; he wanted Turnkey to have a national presence. Public records show that he was looking for work in Virginia and Connecticut in 2016. And after parts of southern Louisiana flooded twice, he returned to the area to bid for jobs there, too. George Kasimos, a flood-insurance-reform advocate from Toms River, New Jersey, recalled Lawrencemarketing his business at a lecture Kasimos gave in the Baton Rouge area in late 2016.

“He was giving out flyers to people, and I had to tell him to stop,” he said.

Claude Brown, a homeowner from Denham Springs, Louisiana, asked Lawrence to take a look at his home that had been flooded.

“He seemed like an honest person, very outgoing,” Brown said. Brown was given a quote that was about $75,000 less than that of local contractors. About a year later, Brown bit.

But Lawrence’s interstate hunt for clients hurt Long Island homeowners. When the Bacigalupos signed a contract with Turnkey for about $167,000 in February 2017, they were told the entire project would be done by that October. The problems started right away.

Once the home had been lifted and lowered as part of the elevation process, workers would show up only a few times a week, then quickly disappear. Some weeks they wouldn’t show up at all. Tasks that were supposedly completed looked shoddy.

“I would come home on my lunch hour to see what was going on, and I’d find one guy hanging out in my basement doing nothing,” Dean Bacigaluposaid.

The couple’s contract with Turnkey split their payment to the company in quarters to coincide with the payment schedule of the state disaster agency, which gave homeowners money in four allotments.

Since Turnkey relied on each quarterly payment from the homeowners, any hiccup in construction resulted in a cash-flow problem. Lawrence said Urbina didn’t hire laborers with great skill, which probably cost him millions of dollars, as work often had to be redone.

The Bacigalupos grew nervous, they said, when Lawrence asked for $2,000 in cash to build a back deck. Meanwhile, his workers had also damaged the front curb and sidewalk. Alarmed, the family called their caseworker, but that person had left and their case had been assigned to a replacement. Paperwork would get lost, Lori Bacigalupo said, and emails and calls were not returned.

“It was exasperating having to explain to each new caseworker what was going on,” and that’s only when the caseworker called back weeks later, Lori Bacigalupo said.

Months went by without any progress, so the couple hired an engineer to assess Turnkey’s work this year. The report was shocking: The house wasn’t even bolted properly into the new foundation.

“Forget about the emotional toll,” Lori Bacigalupo said. “We knew he was robbing us blind.”

For his part, Lawrence acknowledged that he was losing control of his business in fall 2017.

Brittany Rigoli, a former permit expediter at Turnkey, said Lawrencehad a hard time saying no to clients and underestimated Urbina’s labor management skills.

“He trusted Jorge too much, and he should have managed the workers,” Rigoli said. “All of us tried very hard to keep things going, to fix things.”

During exit interviews conducted late last year that had been recorded on video, according to Lawrence, former workers said Urbina had been fattening time sheets, hiring ghost workers and keeping the profits. Lawrence said he has kept a list of names suspected of being ghost workers, as well as some receipts given to him from former workers, who said Urbina had asked them to send money to his native Honduras. Despite landing about 70 new clients in Long Island in 2017, Lawrence still tried to expand his business. Public records show he was looking for jobs in Houston. At the same time, Turnkey’s profile was benefiting because the company had landed on a list of preferred vendors for New York state-run projects. Lawrence had also been chosen as one of three general contractors to work on a $9.3 million home elevation project in Brooklyn and Staten Island run by the St. Bernard Project, a nonprofit.

And yet Turnkey had little money. Rigoli said she was asked to co-sign on a company credit card. Another employee said she used her own personal credit card to buy building supplies, and while she was partly reimbursed, she said she is still owed about $10,000. In November, Lawrence said, he took out a $500,000 loan from a short-term business lender, which he cannot pay back.

In February, Urbina left Long Island, cutting off ties with Lawrence, who left two months later.

(Turnkey is no longer on the preferred vendor list and was fired from the St. Bernard Project this year.)

In the end, about 40 households in Suffolk and Nassau counties claim that Turnkey never finished contracted work. About 30 of them joined a private Facebook group, and they have estimated that Turnkey took about $4 million in federal grant awards for jobs that were not completed. Some say Lawrence knew when to cut out on the job (after the home was lowered) so legally it would not look like contractor fraud, a criminal act, but a breach of contract issue, a civil dispute.

“I even accused Cody of running a Ponzi scheme,” said Bruce Borg, who had contracted Turnkey to raise his home in Amity Harbor. “You can’t keep blaming your partner for doing a crappy job. At some point, he must have realized what he was doing was illegal.”

Not every homeowner got as far as the Bacigalupos. Keri Malone’s house in Moriches has been up on cribbing since September 2017. Brown, who encountered Lawrence in Louisiana, said work on his home stopped after Turnkey demolished just half his house. Brown filed complaints with his state contractor licensing board, state attorney general and local police department. Lawrence was charged with contractor fraud and misapplication of payments, and a felony arrest warrant was issued for him in February.

While homeowners were dealing with this mess, they also started to panic about looming project deadlines. Owing to federal regulations, the state must close out programs that use grant awards within a certain time period. Therefore, the NY Rising program requires homeowners to reach specific milestones in order to get their grant payments.

Because of a skilled-labor shortage, many people had to wait months, some even a year, before work began on their houses. Homeowners, worried that they wouldn’t get subsequent payments, or worse yet, would legally be required to return funds they had already accepted, made numerous calls to the state recovery agency and consumer affairs departments. Some had liens issued on their homes from irate subcontractors who hadn’t been paid by Turnkey. Most were confused as to what to do next.

The phone calls worked. The state extended deadlines until the end of 2019 for about 2,000 homeowners. A state recovery agency spokeswoman said that as long as homeowners can prove they used the grants for required work, they will most likely not have to return any money. When the Nassau and Suffolk consumer affairs departments revoked Lawrence’s contractor’s license in the spring, he left New York to find work elsewhere. He claimed that he tried to hand over unfinished projects to other subcontractors, but the state recovery agency prevented him from doing so.

“This is not true,” said Catie Marshall, a spokeswoman with the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery. “GOSR had no contact with Turnkey and would not be able to stop it from referring a job or recommending another contractor.”

District attorneys in Nassau and Suffolk counties have opened up formal investigations on Turnkey, but charges have not been filed.

Lawrence started working in Port Lavaca, Texas, for TopNotch Services and Remodeling, but he said he hasn’t been doing much these days. Spooked by his April arrest in Texas on the warrant issued in Louisiana (he posted bond on technicalities before he could be extradited to Louisiana), he said he’s been trying to keep a low profile.

“I think about what has happened every day,” he said. “I ran out of money.”

Homeowners who recall Lawrence highlighting his project management skills in front of his whiteboard aren’t convinced he’s simply bad at math. In addition to exploring criminal charges against Turnkey, they have also contacted the FBI, as well as the IRS.

Last summer, the Bacigalupos, still living in a rental, decided to take charge. While waiting on the state recovery agency to deliver hardship funds (money made available to those mired in contractor disputes and other unforeseen struggles), they found a new contractor to fix all of Turnkey’s mistakes.

In August, the family moved home, even though there was still work to be done. They’ve used more than $100,000 of their own money so far, they said.

But the problem is bigger than faulty contractors.

Dean Bacigalupo said it was clear that the country’s disaster recovery system was broken. “Because no one can say the system works when thousands of people still haven’t finished fixing their homes six years later,” he said.