Arrests made in Florida in the wake of a pair of hurricanes revealed a disturbing common denominator.
As residents in Pinellas beach towns were displaced following Hurricanes Helene and Milton, unlicensed contractors and looters descended on the ravaged towns. In the weeks following the storms, law enforcement arrested 45 people and charged them with armed robbery, loitering, grand theft, vandalism, and trespassing, among other charges.
But one telling fact noted in a news conference in Madeira Beach last week is that 41 of those arrested were not U.S. citizens. Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri noted that these suspects are in the U.S. illegally and come from Mexico, Cuba, Columbia, Honduras, Venezuela, and other countries.
“We’ve never seen anything of this magnitude before, we’ve never seen this influx of people from out of the area that are clearly just here to steal and to pilfer and to do bad things and to target these vulnerable people,” he said at the press conference.
(Video Credit: Pinellas Sheriff)
“They’re going into people’s homes, they’re taking stuff, they’re rummaging through their things,” Gualtieri said. “In one case, it was an armed robbery where they went in and stole from them forcibly.”
“Deputies also made contact with nearly 200 people who appeared suspicious but could not establish probable cause to arrest them. Deputies instead told them to leave,” the Tampa Bay Times reported. “A majority of the suspects and the people deputies told to move along were not from the area, often in vehicles with out-of-state tags, Gualtieri said.”
A three-day undercover operation in Madeira Beach ended with 62 people arrested and facing over 100 unlicensed contracting charges. The sheriff noted that at least 75 projects were illegally completed to the tune of $250,000 by those who “held themselves out to be licensed contractors.”
Nearly every one of those arrests reportedly involved suspects with extensive criminal records.
“It’s really pretty telling and pretty sad that this whole operation was just on a couple of streets in Madeira Beach,” Gualtieri said. “This is just prevalent up and down the Pinellas beaches, from Clearwater all the way down to St. Pete Beach.”
”It‘s maddening,” he added. “This is the epitome of people trying to exploit others when they’re down and when they’re out and when they’re trying to rebuild and they’ve got nothing.”
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Frieda@bizpacreview.com
Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.
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