Area Plumbing Firms Facing Fraud Charges

Three executives of a Highland Park plumbing firm were arrested and arraigned Wednesday on charges of bilking dozens of elderly residents out of thousands of dollars for unnecessary and sometimes totally fabricated household plumbing repairs, authorities said.

In a separate but similar matter, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office Wednesday filed multiple felony charges, including conspiracy and grand theft, against a second plumbing firm in Sun Valley.

In a case that first caught the attention of Los Angeles police last winter, an elderly woman was allegedly charged about $6,000 for extensive plumbing work on her home after she called one of the firms to complain of slow drainage, Lt. Fred Reno, who heads the Bunco Division, said.

‘Devious Means’

“They would do things like break pipes and spill water underneath a house to make it look like they had a drainage problem,” Reno said. “They would use various kinds of unethical and devious means to secure work from the victims.”

According to a statement issued Wednesday by Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, in several cases, “these firms charged individuals between $10,000 and $15,000 for unnecessary work.”

Reiner said that representatives of the firms would sometimes show customers deteriorated plumbing pipes, which they would misrepresent as having come from the customers’ homes, to convince them to contract for plumbing service. Plumbers would also pretend to be hard at work on repairs, occasionally banging on pipes, as a means of generating higher bills.

Several other plumbing firms in Los Angeles County are under investigation for allegedly using similar scams, Reiner said.

Arrested at Home

The investigations are being conducted by the state Contractors’ License Board, whose investigators joined Los Angeles police officers in Wednesday’s arrests of three men at Martin Plumbing & Heating Inc., 5660 York Blvd., Highland Park.

Michael Terrance Carr, the firm’s owner, as well as two brothers employed by him, Mark C. Ryder and William D. Ryder, were arrested at their homes and charged by the district attorney’s consumer protection division with 34 felony counts involving 30 instances in which customers were allegedly bilked by the firm.

All three pleaded not guilty in Los Angeles Municipal Court, where bail for each was set at $40,000.

The division also filed 24 similar felony counts against James Donald Tubbs, president of the Sun Valley firm, All Plumbing Services, Inc., 10723 Sherman Way. Also charged were Tubbs’ brother, William Ray Tubbs, the firm’s vice president, and Richard Fuglsby, a salesman and plumber.

The Tubbs brothers and Fuglsby have agreed to surrender to authorities Friday, when an arraignment hearing is scheduled, Thomas A. Papageorge, head of the district attorney’s consumer protection division, said.

Papageorge said the district attorney’s office also filed a civil suit against All Plumbing Services on Wednesday, seeking an injunction to stop it from conducting allegedly illegal business practices and asking for civil penalties and restitution to consumers.

Last month, at the request of the state attorney general’s office, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted a similar injunction against Martin Plumbing & Heating which, in effect, closed the firm, Papageorge noted.

Papageorge added that the number of victims alleged in the criminal suits “may just be the tip of the iceberg.” He said that many other people may have been bilked by the two firms.

“These cases are especially troubling because they involve primarily elderly people, an especially vulnerable consumer,” he said.