The third in a series of posts about how Dirt Candy came to be built. Thrills! Chills! Evil plumbers! Mentally ill contractors! Shakedown artists! Ransom demands! If you’re thinking of opening a restaurant, then read these entries and avoid my mistakes. Plus, there is entertainment to be had in reading about bad things happening to other people, so I’m offering my bad things to brighten up your day.

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.(Read Part One, read Part Two)

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Anthony was finally gone in June, which was a month after we’d been slated to open. Around half the construction money had been spent and I barely had any restaurant to show for it. On top of that, after all the leveling that Anthony spent his time on, one side of the restaurant was still three inches higher than the other and everything had to be re-leveled. On top of that, even though Moto was back in the picture and contracted to finish the job, there were two loose threads: my missing materials, and Jerry the plumber.

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Jerry was Anthony’s sub-contractor, and since the plumber is the guy who deals with Con Ed and gets your gas turned on, and since there was a lot of gas work to be done in this space, I was extra nice to Jerry. When Anthony didn’t pay him on time, I paid him directly. After Anthony left he said to me, “You can trust me. I’ll make sure your gas gets turned on for you.” Attentive readers can guess where this is going. Rather than firing Jerry with Anthony, I had him stay on since he was installing the pipes during the Anthony/Moto transition and I wanted to keep some work moving on the restaurant. This will come back to haunt me later.

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The other loose end was the fact that a lot of my supplies had gone missing when Anthony took a powder. Some of it was nuisance stuff he pilfered to make my life more difficult: a stereo receiver, the covers for the power boxes for my LED lights, light fixtures. The big deal were the specialty materials that went missing:  tabletops, the recycled kirei wood the restaurant is made of, the recycled flooring. The kirei was the big problem as shipments only came into NYC twice a year, and we were months away from another shipment arriving. The most galling thing was that Anthony had already charged me for these materials, I had invoices from him with the payments for it itemized.

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Kirei wood.

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I called Anthony a few times, and finally he had his lawyer get in touch with me. Oh, of course Anthony was going to turn over this material, he just wanted to make sure he was legally protected first. Then his lawyer said that the materials were his, and that I’d merely paid for the labor involved in installing it. Seeing that it actually hadn’t been installed, this was a bit rich. Then – silence. Nothing. I started looking around for replacement material. Craig, the architect, went back to the drawing board to come up with an alternate plan using materials we could find in the city or that were considerably cheaper and not recycled. Paying twice for this stuff was going to kill me.

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Suddenly, after three weeks, Anthony’s dad called. “I have your materials,” he says. “And I’ll allow you to buy them back from me. It’s $20,000 worth of material, but I’ll give you a bargain price of $12,000.” I offer him $2,000. He demands $8,000. We settle for $4,000. But it has to be there within 5 days, and I won’t accept it after 10AM on the last day.

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So much drama over this?

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The last day gets there, 10AM rolls around, nothing. I call. Anthony answers the phone and claims they’re right at the corner. “Which corner?” I ask, because there’s only one corner they can drive down and they sure aren’t over there. Anthony loses his temper and screams that the deal is off because I’m “a brat” and I “ask too many questions all the time.” I can understand his problem. If people were always asking Anthony questions, how was he ever going to rip them off?

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Finally, at 11AM they show up. Then they drive off to make a point, and come back at 11:05. Anthony’s daddy gets out of his car looking like he’d slept rough on a barroom floor the night before and tells me he has a quarter of my materials but he’ll get the rest to me over the next couple of days. More yelling ensues. He’s screaming at me in the street, I’m screaming back. “Just f—king take it the way I’m giving it to you!” he howls. Then he huffs off back to his truck and delivers the rest of the material in a few trips that day. Then he hands me some Staples Superstore legal form saying that I won’t sue him. I happily sign it. He looks at the restaurant, “Yeah, this place is going to look good when you finish,” he says and then gets in his truck and drives away and I never saw any of them again.

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They’d pushed our opening back by months, ripped me off for close to $70,000, stolen thousands of dollars of materials that needed to be replaced, and made me pay double for my hard-to-get materials. And the thing that bothers me the most is that they pretty much got away with it. It would have been better if I’d been robbed at gunpoint.

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Next week: Jerry breaks the building. Moto breaks my heart.

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