Florescu Viorel freelance NYDN/Florescu Viorel freelance NYDN
Chancy Marsh IV, in front of his house on Prospect Ave in the Bronx.
There’s a firewall that will help homeowners after their house is consumed by flames.
A new state law mandates a legal separation between public insurance adjusters and the contractors they recommend to victims of house fires.
The measure, intended to protect fire victims from two-timing insurance scammers, was borne of a series of complaints filed against a City Island business that was operating as both public adjuster and contractor.
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“What they were doing was morally wrong,” said Chancy Marsh IV, whose family’s Prospect Ave. home was severely damaged in a 2011 blaze. “It’s a situation where the one company has an interest in the other, and they don’t have the victim’s interests at heart.”
Public adjusters are meant to work on a homeowner’s behalf, to ensure the best return for their insurance money after a catastrophe.
Marsh said that an adjuster who worked for Bronx-based Adjustrite had pushed his family into a contract with Venetian Contracting without informing them that both firms were in fact run by the same company.
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There was nothing illegal about the arrangement at the time, but it’s easy to see how it worked to the homeowner’s detriment.
Work on the Marsh home stalled several times, and costs skyrocketed — to the benefit of Joseph Armato, the owner of both companies, Marsh said.
“They take advantage of people in a traumatic state,” added Marsh, whose home is still uninhabitable. “We are ecstatic that what they did to us is now illegal.”
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Marsh and nearly a dozen other alleged victims of the Adjustrite/Venetian scheme rallied last year by creating a meet-up group, targeting Armato in an online campaign and contacting State Sen. Jeff Klein (D-Throgs Neck).
Armato did not respond to requests for comment on the passage of the law, but last year he told The News that what he was doing was not illegal. He was, however, fined $ 50,000 by the state Insurance Department in 2009, cited for operating without a license and “improperly soliciting business.”
Klein, meanwhile, wanted to make sure the law was clearer as to the relationship between adjustors and contractors.
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After he heard the heartbreaking stories of greedy general contractors and the work they were leaving unfinished, the lawmaker drafted the just-passed legislation. He named it the “Gayla Marsh Law,” in honor of Marsh’s mother.
Adjustors can be fined up to $ 1,000 and risk losing their license if caught steering fire victims toward contractors with whom they have a formal business relationship.
“What happened to the Marsh family was a tragedy,” Klein said after the bill was signed by Gov. Cuomo in December. “Public Adjusters should be fighting for homeowners, not hatching schemes to rip them off.”
dslattery@nydailynews.com
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