Two men were arrested Thursday over an alleged scheme that siphoned nearly $200,000 from a Hialeah condo association through inflated repair contracts, the latest in a string of South Florida cases testing whether Florida’s strengthened oversight of condo and homeowners associations is actually catching the fraud it was designed to stop.
Carlos Jose Mejia, 51, worked as property manager at Venetian Gardens at Country Club of Miami, a 21-building, 288-unit complex in Hialeah. He faces one count of organized scheme to defraud over $50,000 and 10 counts of receiving a kickback. Richard Thomas Murray, 62, of Boca Raton, owns AP Construction Solutions, the contractor whose work the scheme ran through; he faces one count of organized scheme to defraud. According to arrest warrants, the two men executed repair contracts at inflated prices from 2024 through 2025, and once the association disbursed funds to Murray’s company, he routed more than $185,000 back to Mejia in checks disguised as loan payments.
The case traces back to a CBS News Miami investigation that documented crumbling infrastructure at the property in 2024. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said that reporting is what prompted her office to look into the building in the first place. “Once the story broke, I asked my team here… to go out there and to see what was happening,” she said. A separate tip helped seal the case: roofing salesman John Kenney told investigators he’d brokered the original introduction between Mejia and Murray expecting a commission on the resulting contract, and filed a complaint after that payment never materialized…