Bagging a Blowhard

A tenacious Aventura resident’s crusade leads to the arrest of a serial con man

By Randy Abraham

Miami-Dade County police charged unlicensed contractor David Carlisle Rasner with multiple counts of grand theft.

It took more than two years, but dozens of Aventura and Sunny Isles Beach residents who claim a con man scammed them out of more than $50,000 may finally get some justice — all thanks to the efforts of a tenacious nurse who cracked the case and helped track down the suspect.

Miami-Dade County police arrested David Carlisle Rasner, an unlicensed contractor and former Surfside resident, on May 16 and charged him with multiple counts of grand theft after he took deposits to install hurricane shutters on numerous condominiums and then vanished before completing the work, according to Miami-Dade Police Department spokesman Detective Juan Villalba.

Police believe Rasner, who presented himself as an agent of Coast to Coast Hurricane Shutter Corp., attempted to pass himself off as a licensed and insured contractor by using the license number of a legitimate local shutter manufacturer.

So far, Rasner, whose scam may have extended as far south as Key West, has been charged with 13 second- and third-degree counts of grand theft, but the continuing investigation could result in additional charges, Villalba said.

Dozens of Aventura and Sunny Isles Beach residents say they paid deposits to Rasner to install hurricane shutters on their condominiums in early 2006, but that he fled to Kentucky before completing the work.

After Hurricane Wilma swept through South Florida in October 2005, Gail Rohner and about 30 other residents of Mystic Point condominium in Aventura met with Rasner, on the advice of another neighbor, about installing hurricane shutters on their units. He promised that he could install them by June 2006, before the start of the hurricane season. Rohner, who moved from California to South Florida with her husband in 2004, gave Rasner a $5,800 deposit in March 2006.

“A lot of contractors said they were too busy to get work started right away, and a neighbor brought him in to speak to us,” said Rohner. “We assumed he was legit; we’re a gated community and we assumed they wouldn’t let just anybody in. … During Wilma, my husband was up all night holding down a window with rainwater coming in horizontally. We didn’t want to go through that again. The association let us all select our own installer, and we didn’t think the presentation sounded too good to be true.”

Rasner began the work soon after Rohner paid the deposit. But a day after putting up a few shutters, he came back and removed them. After talking with neighbors who had also contracted with Rasner, she began to get suspicious.

“He came and put my shutters in, took them down the next day, and then probably put them up on someone else’s apartment,” Rohner said. “I spoke to some other neighbors, and they said he was doing the same thing: putting shutters up, and then taking them down.”

After speaking to some of Rasner’s workers, Rohner got the feeling he was ripping them off, too. “Some of them said his payroll checks to them bounced,” she said.

Rohner contacted a friend, Florence Gottoive, who had given Rasner $3,000 to put up shutters in her Terraces of Turnberry condo and found she was also having difficulties getting Rasner to perform. “He never started the work, and he never showed up after I paid him,” Gottoive said.

Across the bay in Sunny Isles Beach, Audrey Bekoff, a former president of the Winston Towers 600 Building condo association, said Rasner also pitched his services to residents of her building, and that about 40 residents had paid him deposits.

“We were going to shutter the whole building — we’re 391 units — and he said we could have the shutters up by June 1,” Bekoff said. “I gave him $4,000; my bill was $8,000. After a while, when I asked him why he hadn’t started the work yet, he said the delays were due to delays working with the insurance companies. He could charm the skin off of a snake.”

As the weeks went by, Rohner began to fear she’d been scammed. Then, in June 2006, at the start of the hurricane season, she spotted an NBC-6 news clip on hurricane safety that featured Rasner as a hurricane safety specialist.

“That news clip must have gotten him a lot of business: People wouldn’t think they’d put a scam artist on TV. I wasn’t fooled by it, but I’m sure other people were,” Rohner said.

After initially being told by local police that her complaint was a civil case against a vendor, Rohner and some Mystic Point residents banded together to urge police to pursue the case as a criminal offense.

“We called a meeting and had 20 to 30 people from the complex, and we told the Aventura Police Department we would like to file a police report, but they said it was our word against his,” she said.

Impatient with the progress local police were making, Rohner, whose father was a police captain in charge of a detective squad in the Santa Barbara Police Department in California, decided to conduct her own investigation. “He took me out on police work a couple of times and taught me how to find contacts,” she said. “That’s how I got interested in finding Rasner. I know my father wouldn’t have let him go.”

Rohner surveilled Rasner’s North Miami Beach warehouse in hopes of spotting him. She got his license plate number, drove by his last known address on Carlyle Road in the town of Surfside and spotted his car. She knocked on the door and was greeted by Suzanne Garcia, whom records indicated was the president of Coast to Coast.

“I found out that he had moved in with her, that they had bought a house together, adopted a child and were building a larger, more lavish home, but then she had dumped him,” Rohner said. “She was very cordial to me — I didn’t tell her I’d been hurt by Rasner. I looked for evidence of him — men’s clothing — but I didn’t find anything.”

Soon after, Rohner’s husband called Garcia and told her their story — that Rasner had taken their money and didn’t complete the work. Garcia told him she had kicked Rasner out of the house and no longer had anything to do with him.

Rohner then turned to the Internet and Rasner’s attorneys. She discovered he was hiding at his parent’s house in Shepardsville, Ky., and she continued calling Aventura police, Miami-Dade police and the state attorney’s office.

After the Aventura Police Department issued a warrant for his arrest, Rasner turned himself in to Miami-Dade police on May 16, Villalba said. He is currently out on bond.

“I kept calling the police and I told them I knew where he was,” Rohner said. “A lot of people would tell me, ‘Why don’t you just give up?’ But I definitely didn’t want this case to die. I wanted to make sure that justice was served. It wasn’t just me; he took a lot of people’s money. Some of them were elderly women who could barely make ends meet, and he stole their money.”

To raise the money for her deposit, Rohner, a nurse, worked around the clock to care for a group of janitors who had gone on a hunger strike in 2006 when unionizing efforts with the University of Miami had stalled.

“They [the striking janitors] needed full-time care and, as a nurse, I have a passion for mercy and agreed to care for them,” recalled Rohner, who now works as a nurse in a hospice center. “They were working for menial wages; they didn’t get holidays off, and were trying to get unionized. I chose to stay with them because I believed in their cause. I lived in a tent and I’d get up at night to check up on them. I had a bucket of water to wash in, and there was an outhouse. That’s how I paid the down payment. I sweated that money.”

Last May, Rohner gave up all hope of Rasner completing the work and contracted with NFC Aluminum Shutters, a licensed and insured contractor, for $11,000. “They were fast, honest, reliable and didn’t ask for a down payment.”

She said she has considered suing Rasner for the money she is owed, but is unsure if she wants to continue fighting. “My nursing work takes a lot of energy out of me, and fighting this has taken a lot of energy out of me,” she said. “I’m not sure if I can keep fighting this.

“We’ve learned our lesson that you need to get a background check before you do business with someone.”