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Misplaced trust costs $100,000

By COLLEEN JENKINS
Published April 2, 2007

TAMPA - The two men stood on a front lawn they both thought was theirs. They avoided eye contact and did not speak.

A sheriff's deputy took the house key from one man and told him he risked a trespassing charge if he returned.

"I understand," the man said, before driving away.

The other man walked into the home he had once made beautiful and found it in disrepair.

"He was my best friend," he said of the man who had left. Now he felt like killing him.

* * *

Merrill Roberts, 65, lost his 2,277-square-foot Dana Shores home in 1997 to Nicholas Drossos, the man he called his best friend. He spent much of the past decade battling to get it back.

On March 9, Circuit Judge Claudia Isom determined that Drossos had obtained Roberts' home through "willful and deliberate fraud." She ordered Drossos out.

Roberts' victory came at a cost - $100,000 in attorney fees and a painful lesson about trust.

His ordeal began as a business transaction. Roberts, then owner of three Indianapolis nightclubs, had soured on a strip club venture in Clearwater in 1997 and wanted to ditch the business.

Drossos helped run the club, known then as Dancer's Show Club. He also had a broker's license and offered his services to sell the place.

Roberts remembers signing his name to a stack of documents Drossos handed him. He thought they were all related to the sale of his business. He didn't read them.

"He was my broker," Roberts explained. "I trusted him."

A year passed before he learned he had signed off on a land trust that gave Drossos control of the waterfront home at 3901 Doral Drive but kept it in Roberts' name.

Drossos and his wife, Joanna, were living in the home under the auspices that they would pay rent until they could afford Roberts' $185,000 asking price. When they told Roberts they were having financial difficulties and couldn't make rent, he paid the mortgage himself.

In April 1998, Roberts got an insurance check for a claim he had not made. When he called to ask about it, the company said they already had "Mr. Roberts" on the other line. It was Drossos.

Roberts decided the man was up to no good. The next month, he told Drossos to leave.

Drossos called back soon after.

"I own your house," Roberts recalls him saying.

Using his authority as trustee of the trust Roberts had unwittingly created, Drossos had shifted ownership of the house to his wife by a quitclaim deed. They obtained a $161,000 mortgage and paid off Roberts' mortgage.

Two months later, Roberts sued. He wanted back the approximately $75,000 he had put into buying and remodeling the house.

The house was in Hillsborough, but Roberts' attorney filed the lawsuit in Pinellas County because the documents had been signed there.

Drossos argued from the beginning that Roberts was a seasoned businessman who had intended to rid himself of all the property he owned in Florida.

"I didn't feel like I needed to hold his hand and lead him through this," Drossos said during his May 18, 1999, deposition.

The next day, Drossos gave a deposition in an unrelated personal injury case he had filed in Pinellas after a car accident.

He contradicted testimony from his earlier deposition. He faked a limp, Assurance Company of America said in a court filing.

Calling Drossos "a fraud" who had perjured himself at least 58 times, the insurance company persuaded a judge to dismiss the lawsuit. Drossos pleaded no contest to a perjury charge.

In February 2001, Drossos declared bankruptcy.

Roberts had his own problems. Out $65,000 to his third lawyer with no end to the case in sight, he felt like he was bleeding money. After finally convincing his lawyer that the case should be filed in Hillsborough, Drossos' bankruptcy halted its progress indefinitely.

Roberts got himself a new lawyer, Palm Harbor real estate attorney John Parvin.

* * *

Roberts reluctantly made what Parvin called a "devil's bargain."

To get around the pending bankruptcy, Roberts agreed to seek only the title for the Doral Drive home and not any attorney's fees or money judgment against Drossos.

Isom held a nonjury trial in January. Parvin argued that Drossos had a history of deceit related to the house. His key evidence: copies of Drossos' several mortgage applications, on which he and his wife said under oath that they were not parties in a lawsuit.

On the most recent loan application in June 2005, Drossos acknowledged that he had declared bankruptcy in the past seven years but his wife said she had not. Both are listed on their 2001 bankruptcy filing.

The couple got a loan for $540,000 on a home that now has a market value of $690,456, according to Hillsborough Property Appraiser records. They pocketed $160,000 after paying off another loan and other refinancing costs.

Isom determined that Roberts never intended to give his property to Nicholas and Joanna Drossos. The judge voided the trust documents and said the couple had no further right to live there.

* * *

Eviction day came March 21.

The process seemed as ritualistic and polite as a house closing between two strangers.

Drossos, 46, was not interested in talking to a reporter. "It's in the appeal process," was all he would say. His attorney, Thomas C. Little, didn't return calls.

Drossos left behind a haphazard mountain of boxes on the driveway. Chunks of tile were missing from the roof.

Roberts ordered the locksmith he had brought along to change the locks, then walked inside. His microwave, refrigerator, stove and water heater were gone. So was his bedroom suite and patio table set. Moldy insulation bulged from a wide hole in the corner of one bedroom ceiling.

He opened the door to the garage, finding a decade's worth of clutter.

"It's awful," Roberts said.

"Sorry, baby," his girlfriend, Symone McEwen, said as she hugged him.

* * *

Now that he has his house, Roberts isn't sure he wants to keep it.

He reported his appliances missing to the Sheriff's Office before heading back the Indiana farm where he has trained thoroughbred racehorses since retiring from the nightclub business. He will seek a hearing in Isom's court to see if he can get the appliances back that way.

Though he has been turned away by authorities on both sides of the bay before, Roberts hopes he might now make a case that Drossos should be prosecuted.

Convicting Drossos of mortgage fraud or some other crime would require a higher standard of proof than needed in civil court, said Wayne Chalu, who prosecutes economic crimes in Tampa.

Drossos still has his broker's license. Roberts said he will report Drossos' actions to the Florida Real Estate Commission.

"It's probably aged me 10 years," he said of his fight. "Just knowing that you've been swindled. Not just a little bit but a lot. And not by a stranger but a friend."

Colleen Jenkins can be reached at 813 226-3337 or cjenkins@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 2, 2007, 01:10:14]