$12,000 driveway prompts scam fear

Richard Hart of James Island thought he was getting a great deal on a new asphalt driveway, until he got the bill for more than $12,000.

"If I had known it was going to cost me that much," Hart said, "I would never have agreed to it."

Hart, who is 74, was among a number of people who called The Post and Courier after reading a story in Friday's paper about a paving contractor who was arrested last week on the Isle of Palms.

When Hart and his wife, Anne, saw the story, they thought the same man might have installed their driveway last month.

Hart said a man knocked on the door of his Edmonds Street home on June 21 and offered to repave his driveway. Hart, a retired Bell South employee, has lived in the house since it was built in 1968.

The man told Hart that he'd just bought out a couple of local paving contractors and was doing some work in the area.

"He said, 'I've got extra material,' " Hart said.

The man kept complimenting Hart's house and remarked about how beautiful his lot was, Hart said.

"He was a very nice guy," Hart said. "Very pleasant."

A new asphalt driveway sounded like a good idea. Hart asked how much it would cost.

No written estimate

"He said his dad was the one who did all the estimating, and he was playing golf, " Hart said. With his father playing golf, there would be no real estimate, the man told Hart.

The two men talked back and forth, never really agreeing on a firm price. A cost of 30 to 40 cents per square foot was bandied about, but again, nothing was firm, Hart said.

"He said, 'I'm guessing around a thousand,' and I thought he meant a thousand dollars," Hart said. "I told him to go ahead."

Work was started the very same day. A crew of about a dozen men showed up around 2 p.m. and had the job finished by 4:30 p.m., Hart said.

"He had two or three large dump trucks, a front-end loader, paving machines. They were well-equipped, very well-equipped."

Hart was impressed with how quickly the work was completed.

And he liked his new driveway.

The next day, the man came by the house to work out the cost. He told Hart that his father was still busy and unable to do it, Hart said. "He borrowed a measuring tape and went out and measured the driveway," Hart said.

The bill was $12,000.

Hart was floored.

He didn't have enough in his checking account, so he wrote one check for $8,000 and a post-dated check for $4,000.

After picking up those checks, the contractor went across the street and sold an asphalt paving job to Virginia Nieland, who is 73.

"He told me he'd just done Richard Hart's driveway and the way he talked, I thought he'd known Richard for a long time," Nieland said.

As was the case with her neighbor, Nieland, who is retired from the Medical University of South Carolina, agreed to allow the work to be done before having a firm idea of how much it would cost.

"I thought it would just be a couple of thousand," she said. Again, the crew was in and out fast, installing her driveway in a couple of hours on June 23.

While installing the driveway, the crew damaged one of her underground sprinkler heads. "They said they would fix it or pay for it," Nieland said.

The next day, another man, who told her he was the contractor's son, came by to calculate the cost and get paid. He worked out a price of $10,000 and she gave him a check that was not to be cashed until the following Tuesday.

He also gave her a phone number to call and she tried calling it several times over the weekend because she wanted her sprinkler fixed. She got no answer.

"By Monday, I was so worried, I went down to the bank to stop the check," she said.

While at the bank, Nieland talked on the phone with the contractor's son and ultimately agreed to let him go ahead and cash the check, she said. But her sprinkler is still broken.

Nice but expensive

Both Hart and Nieland are happy with their driveways so far, but now that they suspect the work was performed by a con man, they are wondering just how long those driveways will last.

Both feel they paid too much. And both said they would not have ordered new driveways had they known the costs up front.

They called the Charleston County Sheriff's Office to file reports.

Sheriff's Maj. John Clark said another man from James Island, 83, also filed a report with deputies on Friday.

Tommy Edward Clack, the man who was arrested Tuesday on the Isle of Palms, was staying in a $3,000-per-week vacation villa, Clark said.

Clack, of North Myrtle Beach, is being held in the Cannon Detention Center awaiting extradition to Maryland, where he is charged with theft, operating without a home improvement license and making false statements to police. He also has four counts of swindling pending in Florence County and has been banned from doing any paving business in North Carolina.

Clark said Clack is considered a suspect in the James Island cases and is being investigated. Clark said people who think they may have been victims of a driveway paving scheme should call their local law enforcement agency to file reports.

Experts advise that people get written estimates before allowing any contractor to perform a job.

Hart was told his driveway was 1,775 square feet. According to an online asphalt driveway cost calculator at www.buildingjournal.com, it should cost about $3,167 for a driveway of that size in Charleston.

According to a June 7 news release from the N.C. Attorney General's office, Clack's method of operation in North Carolina was similar to the stories told by Hart and Nieland.

He claims he's already in the neighborhood and can give them a break because he has materials left over from other jobs.

The crew starts the work immediately and finishes hastily using poor quality materials, the release said.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Because of a reporter's errors, the year in which Richard Hart's house was built was incorrect, as was the spelling of his wife's first name. The Post and Courier regrets the errors.

Reach David W. MacDougall at 937-5655, on Twitter at @davemacdougall or on Facebook.