Ode to Mrs. Stacey Thomas
Forward
note for young adults:
Right now millions are still enjoying life as young adults.
You may be in this number. Yet, as you may be a young and restless private home
decision maker, you’ll very likely awaken one day and suddenly realize you can
no longer do a lot of the things in, on, and around your home. It happens. In
truth, this is mentioned since these revelations may also be useful to prepare
you against being in this sort of bind with dishonest home service contractors
during your twilight years. Subsequently, the facts and the circumstances
revealed here can be advantageous against getting ‘caught like this’ as a
senior when you are ‘old and still restless.’ Now for our commentary:
Of all the recent and not so recent accounts of these
attacks on our senior private home decision makers, this is among the most harrowing
of events that’ll really tear us apart. This unfortunate incident transpired a
while back in Cheektowaga, New York [ 2007]. To many of us, this story
represents an epitome of corrupt residential contractor depredation and
aggression against our senior private home decision makers. ‘Mrs. Stacey
Thomas’ is actually the pseudonym for the actual victim. For our purposes, let’s
just refer to her as Mrs. Thomas. She is the senior citizen who, in her efforts
to allay the discomforting fits of rage and negative innuendos of threat from
an inept home service contractor, wrote a lot of undue checks to him. This
report conveys how Mrs. Thomas hired a man who apparently didn’t know how to do
much of the work she needed done. In spite of not being as skilled as he
claimed, he still demanded to get paid. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine a
situation when you say you aren’t going to pay a contractor for not doing what
you hired him to, and he gets angry, then starts breathing all kinds of
threats? Or he goes through the motions or gives you a look suggesting if you didn’t
comply there would be repercussions?
The Hard Facts
It’s a fact that a lot of bad contractors can conduct
themselves so abrasively and not worry about legal consequences. Although there
are a number of seniors who really won’t tolerate being bullied, there are some
surprisingly caught in the presence of them, and are reasonably intimidated
into not visualizing an escape route. This was the predicament of Mrs. Thomas.
She was physically too frail and psychologically subdued at this point. She was
justifiably fearful of this man. She lived alone.
The awkward resident-contractor relationship began over the
phone. We’ll dub the deceptive home service contractor, Mr. Sykes. Evidently,
he was engaged making unsolicited cold or unsolicited phone calls to
prospective customers. We have no idea of how he managed to get her number.
Perhaps it was through the telephone directory used in those days, or online.
The report doesn’t go into depth about exactly what he said to convince Mrs.
Thomas to invite him to her house. There was only enough data to give us a
pretty good idea of how this collaboration began.
Of course, this is a very precarious situation, but as King
Solomon so aptly mentioned, in paraphrase: there’s really nothing new under the
sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9. In reality, when we give place to a great big mess, that’s
what we are going to get. Unknowingly, this is what Mrs. Thomas experienced. We
don’t know the number of calls he made before he finally connected with Mrs.
Thomas. But we can be certain that whatever he said was convincing enough for
her to give him the contract. One of the key snares Mr. Sykes reportedly used
during the first phone call was that he was a fair man. He probably gave her
the impression that everyone else was out to rip her off. Who knows what he
said or how he said it to convince her to open the doors to her home.
Conceivably, he said anything and everything he could to convince her that he
was an upstanding, honest, and squeaky clean sort of professional.
Flagrant Intimidation
Anyway, whatever Mr. Sykes conveyed to
clinch the deal, it worked. However, aside from that it does not seem
he was as useful as he pretended. Still in all, he did a lot of
collecting and spending of undeserved down payments. Ironically, in
the beginning, he promised to do a lot of the repairs,
refurbishments, and installations for hardly anything. He said his
rates were reasonable. Quite joyfully, Mrs. Thomas was ‘reasonable’
enough to write him the first advance check. Records do not specify
the amount, but one thing for sure, it was a lot more than he
actually worked for. None of the work he did in or around that home
matched up to Mrs. Thomas’ expectations. In spite of that, she
reportedly signed over to this man approximately 71, different
checks, over a period of about 7 months.
Believably so, some individuals will question Mrs. Thomas’
sanity in this case, others won’t. There’s no simple answer. We don’t know
exactly what specific forces were at work to cause Mrs. Thomas to continue
signing over checks to someone who was clearly a scammer. Objectively though,
this much we know: fear is a very powerful weapon, even more so because it
originates within us. We fear because it’s a natural response to unfavorable events
[ real, imagined, or both]. We fear, sensing that this will keep us from evil,
or from being hurt in some way. Yet to our disappointment, we are hurt, anyway.
Fear and insecurity are inseparable. In this case, the apparent terror forced
Mrs. Thomas to give him money to first allay the perceived wrath of his anger;
second, to stave off its flaring up, again. As a result, Mr. Sykes’ anger or
his displays of rage were menacing enough. In her own words: ‘When I would
complain about how the work was progressing, he would sometimes get very angry,
and assure me that the work was first rate.’ Then she goes on to say: ‘As I
felt intimidated, I always relented. Similarly, if I questioned a demand for
payment, he would sometimes become angry, and I would relent.' End.
Involuntary Submission
When everything is all said and done, he duped Mrs. Thomas into
submission to his demands for more payment. She was 88 years old, a
widow, and not in very good physical health. By appearance, she was
all alone without anyone else to turn to. This sort of thing gives
rise to the suspicion that she was targeted because she was a senior
living all by herself. Seniors
Targeted.
He had to be stopped, otherwise, he may have continued
siphoning money from Mrs. Thomas until she had none left. She could’ve lost her
home and most of what was in it. Fortunately, the break finally came when Mr.
Sykes, the contractor, attempted to cash another check at the bank. Grievously
so, this was the seventy-first check Mrs. Thomas wrote for him, as mentioned,
in the space of about 7 months. Now he was at the teller’s window to cash it.
Sorry, Mr. Sykes, but this time, the teller wasn’t going to cash it for you.
The teller righteously refused to cash the check. We can just about imagine the
expression on his face when that happened. It’s very likely he tried to coerce
the clerk as he did the 88-year old woman. But the teller wasn’t buying. In his
frustration, Mr. Sykes took off to get Mrs. Thomas to cash the check for him.
Evidently, she really wasn’t very happy about that . Then again despite this
being a bit too much for him to demand, her predicament was such that he left
no option. Doubtless he cared.
Judgment Day
As the story evolves, it becomes plausible that he was so
blinded by the prospect of collecting more undeserved money that he was unable
to see the trouble he was in. The teller was very probably familiar with the
fact that Mrs. Thomas was a physically and emotionally fragile woman in her
eighties. If not that, the teller might have suspected him of elder abuse.
Ironically, through forcing Mrs. Thomas to leave her home just to authorize the
bank to cash the check for him, it became that much more convenient for Mrs. Thomas
to be finally relieved of this flagrant abuse. It was a God-send. At least it
was for her. Apparently the contractor just didn’t get it. The bank was on to
him. Without a doubt, it doesn’t seem he realized the trouble he was in. He
just didn’t register the fact that it was game over.
Here’s how he was finally stopped: When Mr. Sykes, returned
to the bank with Mrs. Thomas, he waited outside. He probably thought he would
be getting paid again. He was getting paid all right, but not in the way he
thought. Needless to say, while Mrs. Thomas was in the bank, she was
interviewed and consoled by the bank manager. After hearing her story of being
traumatized by that man, the police were summoned. The ‘villain’ was identified
standing outside. Subsequently, law enforcement kindly arrested our hero, escorted
him to jail, and in time, the judge politely sentenced him to prison with full
restitution requirements. Seven years! Meanwhile, of all Mrs. Thomas went
through, she was impelled to live with the despair of having been divested of
over $82,000.
Summary
Special Emphasis: This report was originally released via the Office
of then Attorney General of the State of New York, the Hon. Andrew
Mark Cuomo. He became Governor of that state 2 years later, 2011. Finally,
in hindsight, it can also suffice to mention, although the Mrs.
Thomas' story first came to the author’s attention in 2010 [3 years after offenses], the sentencing was in 2009 [2 years later]. In effect when the author first saw the report, it was a year after he was sentenced.
Nevertheless this edited commentary can serve as a scathing warning of the fact that these attacks on or
against our senior citizens are not isolated to any specific time,
region, or place. They are very much on-going across the nation. On
the overall, there's no end to this pillage. However, by you taking a personal interest in this matter, you're perhaps even more informed about the high risk entailed hiring contractor without first know more about their consumer reputation. And we sincerely hope this has had a positive impact on your ambition towards being a head of the game.
Finally, you might find that it is to your advantage to regularly bear
in mind that there have been, there are, and there will be more
victims like Mrs. Thomas, more bullies like Mr. Sykes. Also:
You may want
to avoid being in this kind of situation, irrespective of age.
It
would certainly be helpful to be on alert through continually
developing your abilities towards knowing as much as you possibly can
about contract firms and the contractors who own them.
Be sure to
learn as much as you can about them before arriving at a hiring
decision.
You can also delegate the research to a trusted friend or
personal assistant. Hopefully, your protocol for hiring contractors continually improves.
'Every Contractor You See, Isn't What A Contractor Seems To Be'
