Inside the effort to get a Maine contractor to pay for shoddy and undone work

Police are investigating a Waldo County contractor whose company is the subject of several orders from judges to repay clients for poor and unfinished work across Maine.

The orders against Palermo-based JBRH Excavation and Welding Fabrication, which is owned by 35-year-old Jake Brown, total more than $400,000. Yet the money owed to Brown’s clients could stretch into the millions, according to interviews with people who said they paid Brown for work that was either never done or needed to be redone.

Those interviews and court records show a clear pattern: Brown has had clients sign contracts that made them pay upfront. After stopping work, he has ignored their efforts to recover money. He has also ignored civil court and mediation proceedings, drawing out the accountability process while more cases filter into the system.

“He’s taking people financially,” said Miles Hafner, who won a $278,000 judgment against Brown for work on a housing development in Litchfield. “He’s crippled them, and he keeps doing it.”

It shows that there are few protections for clients to know if a contractor already has lawsuits pending against them. Without Hafner, who spearheaded an effort to hold Brown accountable by assembling a list of his clients, many would have thought they were alone in having problems with him.

Clients say that Brown often presents himself early in these disputes as a sympathetic figure with a range of excuses for not finishing the work, including last year’s rain and the pandemic-era workforce shortages. Several of Brown’s former clients said they were referred to him by a more established contractor who was too busy to take them on.

These 2023 photos show problems with Palermo contractor Jake Brown’s work at a housing development in Litchfield, including foundations that are not flush with the ground, have cracks and improper drainage. Credit: Courtesy of Miles Hafner

Brown repeated many of those arguments in an interview, returning a reporter’s call on Friday to implore her not to run an article about him. During the call, he denied that he owed millions to his clients while falsely representing key facts of the cases that are facing him.

“I would have finished the work, but, you know, the biggest thing for me last year was I just got behind with all the weather,” Brown said. “I’m getting it taken care of, because I’m not going to further tarnish my name. … This is not what I set out for, for sure. … I don’t want trouble.”

Hafner, who owns Augusta Natural Gas, hired Brown last year to work on three lots for $165,000. The work was left unfinished and came with defects that Hafner had to hire other contractors to fix, including poor drainage and cracks in foundations.

At least four of Brown’s clients, including Hafner, have gotten civil judgments in courts from Alfred to Belfast. Three more are either in mediation with the attorney general’s office or plan to sue. On top of the more than $400,000 ordered in judgments, nine other people contacted by the Bangor Daily News said Brown owes them at least a total of $1.2 million. Hafner believes the total damage could be as high as nearly $4 million.

One of Brown’s former workers, Garret Leiter, said he got into business with Brown roughly two years ago but quit after employees’ checks started bouncing and clients reported fraud. Leiter said he watched several clients confront Brown in person about unfinished work.

Leiter, who alleges that Brown owes him more than $20,000, thinks that his former boss is a “pathological liar” who took upfront money to keep the business running and could not stop. Brown is a decent excavator but got into concrete not knowing much about it, he said.

“He got in over his head,” Leiter said. “Things go wrong, and then you can’t afford to cover it up.”

Brown denied that he didn’t pay employees but conceded that he still owes money “on a few of the jobs.” He also said he left work uncompleted on some jobs but “absolutely” intends to finish it and has the means to repay clients.

He went on to say that he is in mediation with some of the former clients. Yet Hafner’s attorney, Jeffrey Wallace, a Portland-based lawyer at Legal Ease LLC, said that is false.

Wallace said he once had a brief phone conversation with Brown but that Brown never responded to follow-up attempts to contact him. Brown has not responded to requests for mediation, has not shown up to court and has not responded to creditors, Wallace said.

Brown also told a reporter that he has set up a payment plan with Sidney-based Mainly Vending, which has a $34,000 judgment against Brown’s company. The company’s lawyer, Gregg Frame, said Monday that no such arrangement had been made.

While some businesses and contractors have swallowed the costs, some former clients say Brown devastated them. John Hibbard, 56, of Lisbon Falls, used the money he got from his son’s wrongful death settlement to buy land in Troy and pay Brown to do work on it so he could build a house there.

That home was supposed to be Hibbard’s fresh start, but Brown never showed up to do the work. He promised in August to finally do it but hasn’t responded to Hibbard since. Brown told a reporter Hibbard is exaggerating the cost of the work, that the situation doesn’t need to become a “big deal” and vowed to finish the job.

“I’m still living where I live, not wanting to be there, but don’t have a way to move, because he has all the money,” Hibbard said.

The contractor may soon face consequences. If Brown does not show up for a hearing scheduled with Hafner in the next few weeks, a judge will issue a warrant for his arrest, Wallace said. Both the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office and the Belfast Police Department are conducting criminal investigations into Brown, Lt. Cody Laite of the sheriff’s office said.

Brown said he was not aware of the investigations and has had no contact with police so far. Court records show that sheriff’s deputies have handed him notices of the cases against him.

It’s unclear whether clients will get their money back. One business owner who said he lost $60,000 to Brown is reluctant to spend more suing him. Hibbard said he can’t afford a lawyer. The ones who are taking action say they are trying to contain Brown’s damage.

“All I want him to do is go to jail so he can stop fleecing anybody else,” said Gary Boilard of Auburn, who is in mediation after saying he lost $15,000 to Brown on a Greenville project. “I don’t expect to get any money back, but he needs to stop.”