A former Castle Pines contractor has been arrested in Tennessee at the request of Boulder prosecutors, who have charged him with stealing as much as $1 million.
Major Morgan III, 28, was arrested Aug. 7 in Murfreesboro, where he has lived since May, and booked into a county jail. He is being held without bond before an Aug. 21 hearing.
Four hours before Morgan was detained at his home, the arresting officer received a call from a detective in Boulder, Sharon Ramos, who said that Morgan was wanted for felony theft of $100,000 to $1 million, along with being a fugitive from justice, police records show.
Morgan was charged Aug. 9 with one felony count of theft, which could result in a sentence of four to 12 years in prison, along with fines and restitution costs, if he is convicted.
As BusinessDen first reported this month, Morgan took deposits from dozens of Colorado homeowners and business owners but didn’t finish their projects before moving to Tennessee and filing for bankruptcy. That has drawn the attention of Front Range police.
“There are at least four county prosecutors and one state looking into how he handled his business affairs,” Tom Connolly, the trustee who is overseeing Morgan’s bankruptcy case, said during a meeting between Morgan and 35 of his alleged victims on July 17.
Allison Weber, a marketer in Highlands Ranch who is owed $68,000 by Morgan, according to his bankruptcy filings, had mixed emotions when she heard of his arrest last week.
“I don’t want him to do this to other people and I think he needs to be caught, so I am happy to hear that he is in custody,” she said. “However, I know he has a small child.”
Weber and her husband paid Morgan and his company, M3 Designs, $68,000 for a pool installation. She says that M3 worked on the project for a few weeks without permits, county regulators put a stop to that, and Morgan kept their money. The Webers were left with a hole in the ground, mounds of dirt and more than $30,000 in damage to their yard.
“Everything he was doing was done incorrectly,” she said of Morgan. “I do believe that he didn’t know what he was doing. And the money we sent him was way more than what he did.”
Kate Casanova, of Denver, is an artist and art professor married to a professional musician. She and her husband say they paid Morgan $131,000 to build a studio in their backyard.
“We really liked Major,” Casanova said. “We thought he was young, hungry, professional.”
They bought gifts for Morgan’s newborn child and paid him money they’d saved over 14 years. But the studio project didn’t get past the permitting stage before Morgan went bankrupt and the couple doesn’t have the cash to start again. They’re working out of a cramped garage.
“I was hugely relieved to hear that he had been arrested because it seems pretty obvious that this is how he operates and we didn’t want him to potentially be scamming anybody else,” Casanova said. “It also means that we are closer to getting justice in our own situation.”
The Boulder Police Department declined to turn over its police reports on Morgan, claiming that its investigations are still open, and noted it has three ongoing cases involving him. The Boulder County District Attorney’s Office declined to discuss its case against Morgan.
Morgan’s bankruptcy lawyers, Rob Cohen and Gary Brown with Cohen & Cohen in Denver, did not return requests for comment. Morgan does not have a defense attorney.
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