Contractor Says He Did Not Abandon Sandy Job

TOMS RIVER, NJ -- A Toms River contractor who was charged this week with theft after he allegedly walked away from a job repairing and raising a home damaged in Sandy says he did not abandon the job.

Thomas Carlevale, 29, of Toms River, told the Patch that a contract dispute with the couple who owned the Seaside Heights home -- Mary and Nick Ditta -- over what he says was additional work that was not paid for is at the root of the charges.

Carlevale was charged Tuesday with theft by failure to make required disposition and failure to register as a home improvement contractor, said Al Della Fave, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office said. Carlevale has since posted the $50,000 cash bail set by Judge Wendel Daniels. Prosecutors say the Dittas paid him $22,000 up front for work and he walked off the job after spending about $4,500 on the work.

Carlevale, who said he has known the Dittas for 15 years and grew up with their daughter, says Nick Ditta initially hired him to replace fascia installed on the house by volunteers who were aiding dozens of homeowners on the barrier island after Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012.

Carlevale said the initial deal -- which he described as a “handshake contract” -- was for $2,500 to replace the fascia on the house. But Carlevale says that initial work soon ballooned, with Ditta asking him to replace the soffit and the siding, which he says were crooked. All work, Carlevale said, that was out of the scope of the original contract.

“I told him, ’This is going to cost you a couple dollars,’ “ Carlevale said, and Ditta, he says, said they would work it out at the end.

“I spent four weeks on this job,” Carlevale said, and when he sat down to prepare the final invoice, he said Ditta asked him to keep the extra items off.

“ ‘You’re going to be lifting the house anyway,’ “ Carlevale says Nick Ditta told him.

So, Carlevale said, he wrote up a contract for the house raising, which he said would require more workers -- electrical, plumbing as well as a subcontractor to do the actual raising -- and added the cost of the extra work he already had done onto it.

“It was just a quick estimate,” he said.

As the work got underway, however, they discovered significant damage to the wood frame of the base of the house -- a result of Sandy, he said.

All of that wood had to be replaced, he said, and was out of the scope of the original contract, Carlevale said.

Carlevale says he did the foundation and the blockwork, and that the company that did the actual raising of the house -- DeVooght House Lifters -- was paid. But Carlevale said ”a lot” of the $22,000 that the Dittas say they paid up front actually was reimbursement for the work Carlevale did on the siding under the unwritten deal.

As for the charges he was unlicensed, Carlevale said his license was valid at the time he wrote the contract but expired in March 2015, he says.

“I pulled all the permits” for the work to raise the house, he said. “They (town officials) wouldn’t have let me if I wasn’t licensed.”

Carlevale says the criminal charge is the result of Nick Ditta’s refusal to meet with Carlevale and his attorney to hammer out the details after the rotted wood was discovered.

“He said, ’Come up with a number and call me,’ “ Carlevale said. An invoice dated July 11, 2014, for the work including replacing the floor joists, the $9,000 charge for DeVooght to raise the house, and to properly hang the windows and doors of the home, which he says were crooked, shows a total of $26,500 for that work.

“With the original contract (for the fascia and siding work), he (Ditta) was $18,000 over what we had originally agreed to” on the house raising,” Carlevale said.

Ditta refused to sit down to discuss it, he says. At that point, he stopped work.

“My lawyer sent him a letter,” Carlevale said, and 60 days passed without a response. In the meantime, Carlevale says, the Dittas contacted 7 On Your Side, a consumer show on ABC 7 in New York, which did a report on the dispute.

Carlevale said the station contacted him but he chose not to speak, telling the station the matter was going to litigation.

“So they air his side of the story, but nobody knows the truth,” he said. “I’ll never work in New Jersey again because of that story.”

That story, he said, included the statement that the work was so shoddy that a stop-work order was issued.

“If my work was so shoddy, it (the concrete block foundation) should have been knocked down completely,” he said. But the new contractors didn’t do that; they built on top of portion of the block that was already constructed.

Carlevale says he is fighting the criminal charges, but more importantly fighting to clear his business name.

“I have it all in text messages,” he said of the discussions he had with Ditta about the costs. ”My name will be fixed in this town.”

(Photos provided by Thomas Carlevale show work in progress at the Dittas’ home in Seaside Heights, as well as rotted wood in floor joists.)