Attorney General Aaron Frey’s office inked a $350,000 deal with a Waldo County contractor after finding him unable to pay the $2.5 million that a judge ruled he owes to former clients.
The January deal with Jake Brown of Palermo was not communicated to those who alleged the former excavation contractor took upfront payments for shoddy and incomplete work. The Bangor Daily News detailed civil judgments against Brown and his company in an October story that came out one day before he was arrested on felony charges related to fraud.
Brown still faces criminal charges, but his deal with Frey’s office virtually guarantees that his former clients will only get pennies on the dollar back relative to what they lost. It shows how difficult it is to hold a contractor accountable and raises questions about what the contractor did with the money.
“How does that even begin to take care of all the people he’s screwed over? I’m about to have a total meltdown,” Dan Delano, a Wiscasset man who says he lost $60,000 to Brown, said after a reporter informed him of the settlement this month. “Some of the people are literally affected for the rest of their lives because of the things he did to them.”
Complaints to Frey’s office about Brown went back more than a year before last October. The attorney general filed a December complaint against the contractor that found Brown’s company performed defective work on at least 14 occasions since 2022 and did not complete work in at least 20 instances during. In a January order, a judge said Brown was liable for $2.5 million in restitution and barred him from doing any sort of excavation or construction work in Maine.
But Brown is “not currently able to to pay the restitution amount in full,” according to the settlement agreement. So Frey’s office is allowing him to pay $350,000 over the next 15 years, which is probably the most the government could get from Brown before pushing him into bankruptcy, former Attorney General Mike Carpenter explained.
Not contacting victims about settlement and repayment plans is routine, Danna Hayes, a Frey spokesperson, said. The office is an enforcement agency tasked with holding bad actors to account on the behalf of the people of Maine and not individual clients, she noted.
“As we collect and prepare for distribution of restitution secured by our office, we will have the opportunity to notify individual victims,” she said.
Carpenter, a Democrat from Houlton who served as attorney general from 1991 to 1995, said he was “really surprised” that clients were not notified. It was his standard practice to notify victims of a settlement, and he said victims should confront the attorneys on this case about that. Hayes said she had no knowledge of the office’s practices 30 years ago.
The total of the settlement fell short of the $400,000 in civil judgments that racked up against Brown in courts from York County to Belfast as of October. He did not contest any of them in court, although he denied to a reporter at that time that he owed large sums to clients.
A past number for Brown was out of service on Tuesday, but the attorney general’s office said he has begun to make monthly payments of $1,000. The office will make periodic distributions to victims several times a year, but spokespeople for Frey would not say how many victims will be receiving payments and how much they will receive.
These sorts of consumer protection cases are difficult for victims to resolve. The attorney general’s office got 560 complaints about home contractors in 2023 and sent 117 of those to mediation, according to WMTW. Only eight of those cases were resolved. That often leaves prosecutors or civil lawsuits born by those who lost money as the last line of defense.
Many of Brown’s former clients were brought together by Miles Hafner, who won a $278,000 judgment for work on a housing development in Litchfield and did research to assemble a list of clients. They complained to Frey’s office over the course of last year.
“Who decided that [$350,000] was enough for restitution?” Eric Moran, who gave Brown $25,000 in 2023 to work on his Bath home, said. “Also, what happened to all of the money that he stole?”
