In business and life, speculator full of contrasts

While neighbors and those affected by his land deals are short on kind words, some business associates and fellow churchgoers speak of his generosity.

By ROBERT FARLEY and JEFF TESTERMAN
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 29, 2002

TAMPA -- Boxes and boxes of lottery tickets were stacked in the conference room of Don Connolly's construction business. In all, there were more than 30,000 tickets, some employees recall.

A half dozen staffers scoured through them.

It was 1988, and Don Connolly was going for the big score. One employee said buying the 30,000 tickets was his last-ditch effort to save the business that allowed him to drive a Ferarri with a vanity plate boasting, "B4 30."

The Lotto hunt went on for days. Every now and then, a small winner was found, but not the ticket Connolly was looking for -- the one with the six numbers for the $32-million jackpot.

Months later, his multimillion dollar construction business was bankrupt.

"When he was at the top of the game, he was awesome," said Warren Stevens, a former salesman for Connolly's construction company who recalls seeing the thousands of lottery tickets. "He could've been on the cover of Forbes Magazine if he had played his cards right."

Thirteen years later, Don Connolly has found the limelight. Dan Rather is talking about him. So is Rush Limbaugh.

He's the man who paid $848 for a small lake in North Pinellas and put a fence partway around it, painting some of it pink, when the homeowners balked at paying $30,000 each. The man who paid $2,000 for some submerged land near South Pasadena and tried to sell it back to 61 waterfront homeowners for $100,000 apiece. The man who paid $3,700 for a small property in Brandon that provided the only entrance to a 232-unit apartment complex, and then threatened to demolish the roadway unless he was paid $7,500 per apartment.

A St. Petersburg Times examination of Don Connolly reveals a man whose genius for finding ways to rebound from bankruptcy time and again is seemingly matched by his ability to upset many of the people whom he meets as businessman or neighbor.

He has been called a bottom feeder, an extortionist, an "American terrorist."

And yet this is the man who donated 30 bikes to migrant workers last Christmas. Who once gave a $200 tip to a struggling waitress. Who donates books for Bible study and Sunday school classes.

To some associates and friends, he is a hardworking embodiment of the American Way, a man of character and faith.

Connolly's Bible reading inspired him to select an Old Testament name for his Jabez Land Trust, the company that purchased the entrance to the Brandon apartment complex.

A character in the book of Chronicles, Jabez found good fortune after he prayed to God "to bless me and enlarge my territory . . . and keep me from evil."

Don Connolly found instant success as a businessman. In 1981, just six years after he graduated from Brandon High School, he set up a construction company that specialized in building medical centers and walk-in clinics all over the country. Before long, Don Connolly Construction Co. was handling as many as 10 $1-million projects at once.

"He went from nobody to No. 1 in that industry," said Joseph Kaller of Tarpon Springs, who worked for Connolly's construction company for three years.

The company's success afforded Connolly an extravagant lifestyle, Kaller said.

"I've seen him buy two Ferraris in a week and two helicopters in a month," he said. "That's the kind of money he was making."

Connolly was fanatical about clothes, Kaller said, spending thousands of dollars on suits, mostly grey with pinstripes. Kaller said Connolly's philosophy was that company representatives ought to be better dressed than the doctors who were their clients.

The business boomed, but financial problems developed when about 20 lawsuits were filed against the company alleging improper construction work.

"He collected money from the clients and never paid the (subcontractors)," Kaller said.

Connolly Construction closed its doors in January 1989. Four months later, it filed a petition for liquidation under Chapter 7 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, listing assets of $2.27-million and debts of $4.66-million. At the same time, Connolly filed Chapter 7 bankruptcies for himself and a second company, Claypire Development.

In the next few years, Connolly launched several businesses: a used car dealership, a boat trailer manufacturer, an auction firm. All ran into problems.

Connolly called his used car company Kinjite Motors and operated it from three Hillsborough County addresses from 1992 to 1994. It seemed to be doing well. When state Department of Revenue investigators looked into the business, they found Kinjite had made sales totaling $3.8-million.

They also found that the company had paid the state only a fraction of the $634,477 in sales taxes Connolly collected.

"The act of theft provided the defendant with an improved lifestyle and unfair and illegal advantage over his competitors," one state agent wrote after Connolly was charged with tax fraud.

Kinjite squeezed some car buyers, according to courthouse documents.

One buyer, Judith A. Myers, sued Kinjite after buying a Pontiac Grand Am there. Myers complained that she was allowed to test drive the car for only a couple of blocks "because the fuel was low."

When she got home, her husband found faulty brakes, steering problems, a mirror that fell off and a tire with a nail in it.

Myers went back to Kinjite, but Connolly had her cited for trespassing. She sued in small claims court and won a judgment for $1,023.

In 1997, Connolly took a plea deal on the Kinjite tax charges that left him without a criminal record but put him on probation for 15 years and required restitution of $134,000.

Connolly had already set up another business: Navigator Aluminum Boat Trailers, a manufacturing and sales company in Zephyrhills.

That business didn't last long, either. It closed in 1998, leaving an array of unhappy boat dealers, finance companies and customers.

Among them was Bombardier Capital, a Vermont company that financed the trailers Navigator sold to boat dealers around Florida. Bombardier sued after a Fort Walton Beach dealer said he never received some trailers Connolly was paid for and claimed to have delivered.

Bombardier lost $68,000 because of the unaccounted-for trailers. In a deposition during the lawsuit, Connolly said all the records for the trailers had been lost.

Bill Mason, owner of the Boat Outlet in Fort Walton Beach, lost $8,000 in his dealings with Navigator. The trailers had faulty brakes, Mason said.

"Customers said their brakes were locking up and their wheels were falling off," Mason said.

Connolly also obtained a state license to operate an auction company called Don Connolly Auctioneers. In 1996, the company reported gross income of $1.4-million. Two years later, it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

The same year, Connolly again filed a personal Chapter 7 bankruptcy. So did his wife, Marcia.

After more than 50 creditors filed claims, the couple was granted a discharge of their debts in January 2000.

Last week, the probation department filed an order claiming Connolly has violated his probation on the Kinjite Motors charges by falling $13,303 behind in restitution payments. The order requires Connolly to appear before a Hillsborough circuit judge next month to show why his probation should not be revoked.

In theory, said Joseph Papy, regional director for the Department of Corrections, the judge could send Connolly to jail.

"I don't think we're near that point just yet," Papy said.

As the year 2000 dawned, Don Connolly had been to bankruptcy court five times in the space of 11 years. Once again, he quickly landed on his feet.

He became a land speculator. On Jan. 16, 2001, Connolly paid $2,503 for his first tax deed, for a small lot in Riverview. A month later, he sold it for $10,200, a 307 percent profit.

Since then, using partnerships called Alaskan Ventures, Connolly Family Land Trust, GGH Land Trust and Jabez Land Trust, Connolly has bought hundreds of properties: 109 in Hillsborough, 50 in Pinellas and more in Pasco, Manatee, Marion, Highlands and Palm Beach counties.

Connolly has said that painstaking research goes into every tax deed he purchases, with hundreds of properties examined for every one he buys.

Connolly declined to be interviewed for this story. In previous interviews with the St. Petersburg Times, however, he has defended his business as being the legal purchase of distressed properties.

"I'm just a hard-working landowner," he said.

"When people don't pay their taxes, this is what happens. I was willing to pay more than anyone else for this property."

Seffner resident Joseph Herndon, a close friend and occasional business partner of Connolly's for 10 years, said Connolly is a little more shrewd and a little more hardworking than the average businessman. He's a computer whiz who begins his days at 4 a.m., Herndon said.

"Don does all his homework," he said. "He's slick.

"He took a lemon and made lemonade out of it. That's the American Way. He didn't steal anything. He didn't rob anybody."

If county officials now think Connolly shouldn't have bought the properties at tax deed sales, he said, then they shouldn't have sold them.

Herndon said Connolly has offered him opportunities to invest in several of his land purchases, though he wouldn't say which ones.

"Everything we did was above board, and we made money," Herndon said. "He can spend my money any day.

"Donnie's done nothing wrong. He's an opportunist. I think they need more of us."

Connolly, 44, lives with his wife and three sons in the biggest house on Sakura Drive in the east Hillsborough community of Valrico. Next to the front door of the two-story, $182,000 home is a well-kept flower garden and a large American flag.

It is with amusement that some residents report Connolly objected when his neighbor recently put a chain-link fence around a retention pond between their homes.

Connolly's relations with his neighbors have not been harmonious.

Several years ago, he was the most vocal opponent of a neighborhood plan to put speed humps along nearby Meadowridge Drive. Connolly didn't like the idea of having to slow down to go over the humps.

"I just couldn't understand why he couldn't take five seconds out of his day to keep a kid from being hit," said Mike Clancy, a county water department employee and proponent of the humps who lives on Meadowridge Drive.

Connolly lost that fight. The county put in four speed humps.

But his most heated battle was with the neighbors who lived behind him. Their houses were in a different development, and they complained when in 1997 Connolly started parking cars -- dozens of them, they say -- along a small street that dead-ends a few feet from the back of Connolly's property.

"He's something else," said John Seaman, whose house backs up to Connolly's. "He's an American terrorist. He's a manipulator at its worst."

Seaman and Connolly butted heads several times over the car-parking issue. Connolly accused Seaman of threatening him with a cinderblock, court records show, and obtained injunctions against Seaman prohibiting him from having any contact with Connolly or his wife.

Seaman claims it was Connolly who threatened him.

Seaman and a neighbor later went to court to obtain a small piece of county-owned property that lies between the dead-end road and the back of Connolly's property. They won, and put up a fence to stop Connolly using their street as access to his home.

Resentment against Connolly remains high in the neighborhood.

"Is he a good neighbor?" asked Amy Robbins. "No. He's a bully."

"Bully" is among the more moderate names hurled at Connolly in recent weeks by irate homeowners and county officials around the bay area.

Connolly's friends say they have it all wrong.

Don Connolly is a hard-working family man, said Jeffrey Doles, a Christian music artist who knows Connolly through their church, Bay Life Church in Brandon. They attend weekly Bible study classes together.

"I know him to be a good man, and generous," Doles said. "He's helped out a lot of people in difficult situations."

This past Christmas, Connolly and his wife donated 30 bicycles to migrant workers. They also have donated numerous books for the Bible study and Sunday School classes.

People aren't hearing about Connolly's generous side, said Herndon, his business partner.

Once, when he and Connolly were eating together at a local restaurant, their waitress made a comment about how she was struggling to afford school clothes for her son, Herndon said. Connolly left the woman a $100 tip, he said. When the woman stopped Connolly in the parking lot and told him him he must have made a mistake, he gave her another $100.

"He is a generous man who reads the Bible every day," Herndon said.

Doles believes the outrage over Connolly's land deals is "a tempest in a teapot."

"People have their opinions," he said. "But a lot of the opinions are based on emotion and sentimentality and a lack of understanding about property rights.

"He's a reasonable man. He's just doing his work."

-- Times researchers John Martin, Kitty Bennett, Caryn Baird and Catherine Wos contributed to this story.

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Notary license may trip up speculator

Fence feud cools a little

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