I'm writing to warn others about the terrible nightmare we are going thru with L&T Development LLC and its owner Jonathan Hillert. He's a fraud, liar and a shyster.
He has taken our money of $29K and disappeared. He has not paid his vendors in over a year (the architect/engineer Charles Purcell of League City, TX who did the drawings and the permit expeditor Ms. Gina Morales), United Rentals from where he rented a concrete cutter.
This guy has stolen money from many small business owners taken money and has just disappeared as in our case after us paying $29,000 more than 52% of the total cost without doing the corresponding work for the amount paid.
He doesn't answer phone calls and or e-mails and hasn't paid his employees (we had to pay them this past Fri July 17th and also buy for supplies) and other vendors. I'll show proof.
We contracted him to do remodeling and construction for our restaurant we plan to start in Humble, TX. We paid him $5500 initially as a deposit in way back Apr 2 He lied to us that he'd put in the permit at the end of Apr and the delay was being caused by Harris County. See the date of his e-mail My 26th but in reality the application wasn't put in June 11th!
Jonhill10666 May 26to me, Morning Russell, It's not really up to the expeditor, they rush things as much as they can. No update on Friday, I've already put a call into her this morning... She is checking.
Here's the e-mail from Harris County health dept
On Tue, Jun 23 at 8:46 AM, Plan, Review (PHES) wrote:
Your application/payment was received/processed on 6/11.
The initial plans review was scheduled for 6/22 at 8:00AM.
The schedule shows that your appointment was rescheduled for 6/24 at 1:15PM.
We had a plan review appointment scheduled for yesterday (6/22) at
8:00am, but no one called in to review the plans and application.
We sent an email yesterday to the contact person on the application to call our main office and reschedule this appointment.
Plan Review / Preopening Dept.
HCPHES - Environmental Public Health Division
101 S. Richey Rd., Ste. G
Pasadena, TX 77506
Office (713) 274-6303
Here's the e-mail from the Architect/Engineer Charles Purcell who hasn't gotten paid, apologies for the all capital letters but this is how Charles sent me the e-mail
I did jon a favor and only
charged him $3,000.00. He has owed me $300.00 for over a year, and kept
saying he was going to pay me but, never did. I normally charge
$600.00 per drawing and $1,000.00 for the electrical load
analysis. ($4,600.00). As you can see, he got a bargain. And, since he
didn't pay he really got a bargain.
If he submitted my drawing with his title block to the city of
houston, that's a felony. And if he copied my seal onto those drawings
that's even worse.
Starting from June when demolition work began, we kept receiving invoices from Jon even though we complained that the corresponding work wasn't completed, he threatened to stop work. Thus we ended up paying $29K. We felt compelled to pay as the project was already delayed and starting Aug 15th, I have to begin paying rent and we haven't even begun operations.
I found out on Fri Jul 19th Harris County Engineering Dept rejected the Fire Code and on Monday July 20 I'm going to meet up with Charles who has agreed to help me out to get out of this mess.
But in the end, my money has been stolen by Jon, and he has disappeared. My wife is in tears as feels partially responsible. I was reluctant to pay but he threatened to stop work. What were we to do? In We ended up paying his "workers" and also for supplies which should be come from the payments made to him. BEWARE! Even if we don't get our money back, our only consolation is others don't fall victim to his scam. He should be in jail and out of business.
I put in a HPD police report for theft July 18 with incident # 927871-15.
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