R. Mark Bernstein lives in Cape Elizabeth and has worked in the building trades.

Imagine you want to build a house and you’re looking for a contractor to hire. Here is one who presents himself for your job. He floods you with promises about how great he is.

You start to look into his history.

He tells you what a great businessman he is, even though he has declared bankruptcy multiple times. He waves off this question with the excuse that he uses the laws to his own best advantage. Outside of bankruptcy, he has a reputation for not paying his suppliers, dragging them into endless court battles, quibbling over details until he wears them down and outlasts them in that battle arena.

His personal life shows no respect for behaving with propriety. He is on his third wife, and brags about abusing women and having affairs outside of marriage. He has a documented history of multiple court findings against him for fraud.

He did do one project for you, but that project ended in disaster. While unforeseeable outside events occurred, he did not manage them to minimize the damage, and simply blamed multiple “others” for trying to sabotage him. When that job was over, he refused to turn over the property to you, but gathered a bunch of his cronies to occupy the premises so that you could not.

He was twice charged with “high crimes” for his actions on that previous project, but both time beat the charges, reportedly with a jury that he paid off or threatened. In spite of all this, your acquaintances insisted he would make your new house great, again, so you were forced to go with him.

So far on the job, he has:

• To a great extent, ignored the promised design, and is constructing a house that meets the wishes of himself and his friends.
• Brought in an “efficiency” expert who has, across the board, arbitrarily cut many of the structural elements in the design.
• Fired many of the existing subcontractors who know how to do their jobs, and replaced them with incompetent toadies who are little more than pretty faces who all talk about how great he is and do absolutely whatever he wants.
• Fired many of the current building inspectors who would be independently looking at his work and reporting back to you objectively on how the job is going.
• Attacked with lawsuits many of the previous inspectors, now not even in those jobs, simply as retribution for ever previously criticizing his work.
• Attacked the trade schools that teach the proper way to do all these jobs.
• Attacked any outside reporters who observed his work and rendered any unfavorable opinion on it.
• Advanced his own other projects by diverting funds from your project to support his own interests.
• Lined his own pockets with huge sums of money from wealthy outsiders paid to get him to throw business in their direction.
• Alienated many of your existing neighbors and friends with his sole focus on building “his” house the way he wants.

Happy with what you’re getting ?