MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

Sharron Lewis Miami Style staging by Elizabeth Calomiris for ICON Unit 1801

GETTING AHEAD OF THE JOB CON AT THE SOUTH BEACH ICON

3 July 2012 By David Arthur Walters THE MIAMI MIRROR Miami Beach Suite 1801 at the ICON at 450 Alton Road in South Beach offers a perfect example of how a general contractor can get a job without a license or a permit, and make plenty of money for himself and a small fortune for a speculator on a single condominium remodeling project. A exemplary photograph of one of the completed rooms in Suite 1801 appears today on the main webpage of Sharron Lewis Design Central. The unit had been foreclosed on and thoroughly trashed when lead residential designer Elizabeth Calomiris, who had been engaged by the late Sharron Lewis to carry on her Miami Style for the company, designed the outstanding renovation. Jihad Doujeiji, Sharron Lewis bereaved
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MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

husband, owner and sole manager of the furniture manufacturing, interior design, and construction operations, arrived with his crew and worked Ms. Calomiris wonders under the heading of one of his familys cover firms, Audy Group LLC, whose publicly listed members are the three brothers, namely Jihad, Imad, and Zeyad. Audy Group LLC billed the owners real estate agentBragi Sigurdsson, then broker and part owner of Sigurdsson Schechter Luxury Real Estate and now with Sothebysnearly $80,000 for the construction. Sharron Lewis Design Central billed about $87,000 for the furnishings, for a grand total of $167,000. Mr. Sigurdssons principal, Gerald Jonas, trustee for the federally qualified profit sharing plan of Jonas Builders, Inc., a Wisconsin construction and real estate company, had purchased the wrecked condominium from First Bank Puerto Rico on December 15, 2010, for $1,800,000, and sold it on June 13, 2011, for $3,400,000, leaving a gross profit of $1,600,000. Deducting $167,000 for renovations, and estimated commissions of $ 170,000an additional finders fee in merchandise may have been paid by the contractor to Mr. Sigurdsson, as is sometimes the custom in these deals, hopefully with the knowledge of the principalwould leave the profitsharing plan a net of $1,263,000 less Mr. Jonas expenses for administration. Such is the magic of good marketing, interior design, and remodeling. A fact that you may not like if you are a public-spirited person is that neither Gerald Jonas, nor Audy Group LLC dba Audy Construction, nor any of its member including Jihad Doujeiji had a general contracting license. Mr. Doujeijis wife, Sharron Lewis of Sharron Lewis Design, had one when the contract was signed in January 2011, which was prior to her tragic death from cancer in March 2011 after a protracted painful illness. Mr. Doujeiji failed to notify the Contractors License Board of her death and continued to present himself qualified to contract under her license number. But at this juncture we shall not stand on formalities given the fact of Mr. Doujeijis emotional distress and confusion during the ICON remodeling. Instead, we shall assume that his critically ill wife was supervising his construction activities. The point here is that, according to Beatriz Dooley of the City of Miami Beach, the construction work on ICON 1801 was not permitted, despite the fact that the owner/developer in charge, Gerald Jonas, is a seasoned Wisconsin contractor who should have known better. But how would the contractor and furniture company get into the building? Where there is a will there is a way to take care of building management, or perhaps slip by presenting false or invalid certificates of insurance to building managers who fail to scrutinize them and call the insurance companies for verification of the type of coverage if any; and inspectors who might be around must be managed or taken care of effectively. We seriously doubt whether Jihad Doujeiji and Gerald Jonas were the only persons who avoided permit fees at the ICON, a 40-story condominium complex with about 240 residences. The City of Miami provided Miami Mirror with a history of building permits for the building. There are a mere handful of minor violations noticed on that spreadsheet for the residences themselves. The units were provided builder-ready, meaning the spaces had walls but were otherwise bare
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MIAMI MIRROR TRUE REFLECTIONS

except for bathroom and kitchen fixtures, and in some cases flooring, all of the quality that upscale buyers would probably get rid of in the renovation process. The most frequent addition or replace is the flooring, for which a permit is rather easy to get, especially if you pay a permit fixer to get priority when time is of the essence. As we have seen in Getting Ahead of The Job Con at the Continuum, Mr. Doujeiji, acting as an unlicensed general contractor, had his permit fixer line up a flooring specialty contractor for Continuum Unit 2602 as 50 South Pointe Drive, and then the Doujeiji crew laid down the floor that was permitted to the license contractor, but went on to build out the rest of the unit without a permit. Apparently this is one of those everybody does it violations, the getting ahead of the job violation for which one might get a traffic ticket if caughtthe fact that there is an advertised double-permit fee for the unpermitted portion of the work is only a slight disincentive when millions of dollars in construction contracts are in the works. At the ICON, we count around 150 flooring and balcony waterproofing permits, and roughly only 50 permits for the renovations that most wealthy people and savvy real estate flippers would desire. We leave it to competent statisticians to estimate the extent of non-permitted renovations among the units that pulled flooring permits. We estimate that the City of Miami Beach lost around $1,000,000 in potential permit fees on that tower alone, some of which could be secured if the building were professionally audited. Extrapolate that among the total new condominium units in Miami Beach and the total is a whopping figure. Sharron Lewis Design staff refers all questions about permits, construction, licenses and the like to the manager, Jihad Doujeiji; he has not responded to requests for an explanation of his contracting exploits. The Miami Mirror asked Building Department officials to look into the ICON situation in midJune and to advise what will be done about it. An audit of the entire Icon building was suggested to quality control manager Linda Blanco. We noted that our ICON example appertains to the same unlicensed contractor, permit fixer, and owner as at 1800 Sunset Harbour TS3, where work had been ordered stopped because the enormous amount of construction completed did not match the work permitted, the demolition of an imaginary bathroom/kitchen! That location will be address in Getting Ahead of The Job Con at Sunset Harbour. Miami Beach officials are mute on the ICON as of this writing. ##

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