Midwood contractor charged with collecting $700k for work he didn’t do
A construction contractor is accused of stealing more than $700,000 from a Midwood couple by charging for work he never did, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced Tuesday.
The 55-count indictment filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court charged Steven Crystal, the owner of House Doctor LLC, with larceny and forgery in an alleged fraud scheme that involved billing a local Brooklyn couple for work related to a series of home repairs, claiming additional costs to cut through bureaucratic red tape that didn’t exist.
According to the indictment, between December 2012 and February 2018 Crystal devised a series of schemes that involved expanding the scope of his initial minor home repairs to large-scale renovation projects and unnecessary work — a basement renovation and a balcony and roof construction project, for example — in order to extract large sums of money from the couple.