WHISTLEBLOWER SAYS: “2 MILLION IN CIVIL FRAUD!”
- Justus A.S. Clayfield
- Dec 1, 2024
- 11 min read
Updated: Aug 10, 2025
“In the roof industry, it’s all about ambulance chasing.” Jeff Gardner, manager of Troy’s Mini Storage in Sagle, Idaho had told me during episode #016 of Interesting People. “You’re going after the insurance company’s money, you’re not going after the client’s money. That’s where there’s room to do it wrong and there’s a way to do it right.”
Jeff experienced this before becoming a whistleblower when he worked at a start-up roofing company in Colorado.
“They had just got started.” Jeff clarified. “[They] hadn’t sold a single roof when they hired me. [So] I got on there, and I started selling. We started hiring more people and we started selling more roofs. Almost a year went by, and the first few roofs that I sold weren’t on.”
“What do you mean they weren’t ‘on’?” I asked inquisitively. “They weren’t installed?”
“They weren’t on the person’s house.” Jeff said bluntly. “I sold the roof, we took their insurance money, and the roof wasn’t on the house yet.”
“How does that happen?” I looked to understand what Jeff was saying.
“That happens by not putting the checks from the insurance companies into escrow, and then getting loans against your escrow account which is how a legitimate insurance company does it.” Jeff told me statedly. “You get an upfront check from the insurance company when you file a claim for a roof and then you hire a roofer. That upfront check goes into an escrow account usually. That roofing company then can either have its own money or borrow money against that escrow account to start the roofing and production [to] get everything done. Then there’s a second check that comes later and that’s usually what roofing companies use to pay their crew; pay everybody’s check. Job’s done, materials are paid for, here’s our second check. That’s where the honey is. The company I was working for was paying everybody out with the first check so that they could get a larger crew on the road.”
“Okay…” I continued listening.
“[To] sell more roofs.” He went on.
“Really?” I began to realize what he meant in all of this.
“So they could get more checks.” Jeff finished simply.
“So supplies weren’t being paid for first?” I asked, making sure I understood.
“Supplies were not being paid for first, and they’re not supposed to spend that first check until the roof is completed. That’s the law in Colorado.”
“Really?” I spoke in surprise. “So they just flat-out broke the law?”
“They flat-out broke the law.” Jeff confirmed. “I didn’t know, but as a salesman in Colorado, you are responsible for the actions of your company. When your company commits a crime, and you sold roofs under that company, you can be legally responsible. So after a while, I found out, and I also found that the owners of the company were actually using someone else’s company. The actual owners of the company lived in Arizona and were under the impression that we were in [a] growth phase [but] we weren’t making any money, and they weren’t getting any money.”
“But they thought they were getting money?” I questioned in disbelief.
“The actual, original owners thought that everything was legitimate.” Jeff answered in more detail. “So we were all getting paid. The actual owners in Arizona weren’t getting a dime because we were in a-” Jeff stopped to make air quotations with his hands. “-growth phase or something. I don’t know how they swung it, just a lot of fraud going on.”
“How was that dealt with?” I asked Jeff directly.
“I blew the whistle on the project with the original owner.” Jeff revealed without hesitation. “We got together on a job. He came out to try and work with us because he wanted to know what was going on with the company. Him and I ended up building a relationship and talking about everything that was going on with the company and we both agreed that it was not legal. There was no way that what was going on was legal.”
“How were they even getting away with it, in the first place, for so long?” This question was valid considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars being misappropriated.
“You have to blow the whistle on that type of operation.” Jeff explained to me. “There’s nobody there to come and check things out. As far as the homeowner is concerned, we’re waiting on materials. That was their whole thing. In Colorado, when you get a bunch of hail, you do end up on [a] backlog for materials for six months sometimes. In Colorado, after a big hail storm, hundreds of thousands of roofs will need to be replaced. There are tens of millions of dollars in the ‘chasing a hailstorm’ industry and getting roofs redone. So when I say that was the most interesting job I ever had, it was the first time I ever felt like I had to call out this business for doing this really terrible thing. As a company, between my salescrew and I (because I was in charge of the sales crew), we had done close to a quarter-million dollars in roofs.”
“Wow…” I muttered in surprise. “That’s nothing to scoff at.”
“Yeah, so when we blew the whistle with the original owners…” Jeff continued. “Basically, the owner and I, we went in and grabbed all the documents, grabbed everybody’s file, [and] grabbed all the information. We called the attorney general to let them know who was in charge of this operation and what their names were. One of them turned out to have a civil fraud case filed against them that they lost to the tune of two million dollars and [were] on the run from that civil fraud liability. He wasn’t allowed to do business in that state at all, so it became a big issue. We also found that those checks that they were taking and putting into bank accounts, they were then opening bank accounts in other states and getting loans against the money in these bank accounts. So they were committing wire fraud on top of that, and so they took a quarter-million and turned it into closer to half-a-million or three quarter-million in wire and insurance fraud. I was really glad I blew the whistle. They just said, ‘Thank you for letting us know everything, good luck.’ I didn’t have a job anymore.”
“That was it?” I looked for a more concrete ending.
“I was free and clear of anything because I truly had no idea and I did the right thing.” Jeff responded.
“So legally nothing happened to you?” I asked Jeff, wondering if he suffered any repercussions.
“Legally nothing happened to me.” Jeff began. “Legally nothing happened to the original owners. It’s crazy, it happens all the time in Colorado. You gotta watch what kind of roofing company you go with because there’s a lot of companies out there that don’t do it right.”
“You’ve educated me.” I told Jeff honestly, having never been informed in this way before. “That’s great information to have.”
“It is.” Jeff replied with a laugh. “When you file any insurance claim, on your car [or] home, you want to do a lot of work with who you go with to spend that money. If you pocket the money, that’s your right as an insurance carrier. You can just pocket the money and do the work yourself, but you still [have] to file the work that you did. You basically become your own contractor. If you hire another company to contract the work that you’re filing an insurance claim for, you have to do your due diligence because you could find yourself in the midst of a very tangled insurance fraud scheme.”
Jeff Gardner was born July 30th, 1986 in Denver, Colorado. Raised in a military family, Jeff spent most of his childhood in O‘ahu, Hawaii after which he eventually moved to various places in the country, including California, Washington, and Idaho. Finally, about six years ago, he returned to his family’s roots whose local heritage in Sandpoint reaches back to the 1960's. For the past two of those years, he’s functioned as the Manager of Troy’s Mini Storage; a facility local to Sagle, Idaho.
“How did you come into this position?” I had asked him towards the beginning of our first interview. “How did you come into working in storage?”
“The owners are family friends.” Jeff had quickly responded. “They had front-end people that they were turning over every six months. It’s kind of a boring job for some people.” Jeff chuckled heartily. “But they also wanted someone who could take over deliveries and take up more of a general management role as opposed to just front desk help, so they asked me to take over the job.”
“Did you ever work in storage before this?” I asked Jeff, wondering what his qualifications may be.
“No.” Jeff spoke aptly. “[This is my] first time doing the storage gig.”
“What do your daily responsibilities include?” I rephrased my question. “What does a job here look like?”
“Well, at the beginning of the month, I try to stick right here in this chair.” Jeff motioned to the office chair he was in as he answered from behind his desk. “For the first week, everybody’s trying to pay their bill. We have a ten day grace period, and I want to be in this chair for the first week as much as I can, but I also have to do barn deliveries. I have a truck and twenty-foot trailer and I drag storage sheds that are on skids up onto the trailer. Then, I deliver those to different properties for four-to-six months at a time. Or longer, I’ve had people rent them for ten years.”
Jeff had described this process in a different segment of the interview as somewhat precarious, but immediately followed up by confirming its repeated success over the course of twenty-plus years.
“I just picked one up the other day.” Jeff related to me a recent retrieval. “The whole bottom had rotted out almost because it had been sitting there for ten years in a wet spot, but that’s whatever. We got more than our money’s worth out of it.”
“Really?” I asked as Jeff let out another friendly laugh. “You did?”
“Oh yeah!” Jeff explained to me. “We rent them for close to $100 a month, and when you rent it for ten years at $100 a month… Those sheds only cost like $2,500 to build, so you’re really getting your money’s worth when you rent them out for ten years. When they get that old, we can just rebuild them. We can take all the tin off of it, then rebuild all the wood stuff, and put the tin back on.” Jeff snapped his fingers. “We’re back in business. We can go ahead and rent it out again.”
“So that’s a lucrative business?” I asked point-blank.
“Yeah.” Jeff agreed. “Renting them out is lucrative; great. Especially if you know what you’re doing [and] you’re building them yourself. It’s great, very lucrative.”
“What are the positive and negative aspects of working in storage?” I had written this question down beforehand hoping to learn more about the pros and cons of managing a storage facility.
“Most often when you need storage, it’s because you’ve had some sort of crisis event in your life.” Jeff told me honestly. “A lot of people come in here and they just got a divorce. They just got kicked out of their house, you know, they were evicted. ‘I’m going to prison. I gotta put my stuff in storage.’ There’s people that have these trying times and they need to store their stuff. We’re glad to be here for them in their trying times. We don’t ever want to take advantage of someone in their trying times. We try to keep things really affordable. We’re about 20% cheaper than any comparable storage facility in the area, and we like to keep it that way. We’ve been here a long time. You know, we’ve had people try [to] live in their units. It’s $100 a month, and if you can get in and out without me looking at you… They’re insulated, except for the doors. They’re not heated, but we’ve had people try [to] live in them, especially in the summer months. I’ve had to go out there and tell people that they can’t be spending eight hours at a time with the door closed inside their unit. [They’re] living in [their] unit at that point, and that’s hard. That’s sad, they don’t [have] other places to go. They have to go find some other place to be.”
“Legally, what is the problem with that?” I asked Jeff, referring to people living out of their units. “I understand why that’s a problem business-wise, but legally, what is the problem with that?”
“Well, first of all, when you rent space at a storage facility like this, you’re not actually renting the walls and the door, you’re renting the void in them. That’s why you don’t get charged sales tax when you rent here at the facility. If I give you a storage barn, you have to pay sales tax every month because I took you an actual product; I took you a physical thing. Here, you’re not actually renting something physical, you’re renting empty space. With that empty space, it doesn’t qualify as a home. It’s just empty space.”
“Oh…” I said quietly.
“You see what I’m saying?” Jeff asked me. “So you don’t have a toilet, you don’t have a roof, you don’t have walls, you don’t have a door. You don’t own any of that, you’re not renting that. We just built it around the empty space that you’re renting. That’s why we put deposits on there. If you damage my unit, I can’t be like, ‘As the renter, you need to file your renter’s insurance.’ Nope, you rented the space and I got suckered into this deposit. There’s liabilities and issues, but when you rent from a storage facility onsite, you’re renting the void. We own the doors, the walls, the floor; everything.”
“That’s very interesting.” I commented before moving on. “What is the positive side of working at a job like this?”
“Well, I mean, like I said, a lot of people are down when they come here and [we] can be really helpful.” Jeff then went on to give an example of this. “Last Christmas, I had somebody who was about six months behind on their unit and I had been contacting them every month. ‘Hey man, we really need to get some double-payments on here.’ I went out and I had to lock them out. It was one that was delivered to their property and that was his business. He had all his tools in there.”
“Oh, and you had to go to his property and lock him out?” I couldn’t help but engage myself more and more.
“I locked up his stuff, and I was like, ‘I need money before I can unlock your unit.’ So we worked out a deal.” Jeff went on. “It was around Christmas time, and he was going to give me a whole bunch of money and I was going to unlock the unit for him. I decided we’ve been working together, we’ve been having good communication. ‘You’ve been making monthly payments you’re not falling further behind, but you’re not catching up. I appreciate the effort. How about you only pay half of what you were going to pay and you spend the rest on Christmas gifts? Go do your thing. Then I’ll contact you in the New Year, and we’ll start making expedited payments two months at a time. Thank you so much.’ It was good for him, he was able to do Christmas, and we got him caught up sometime in April. It was good, it was beneficial for him. He was able to keep his business going. Everything worked out, but he was behind a lot and normally, that’s a point where [we evict]. If you have a storage shed, the eviction is pretty brutal because I own the storage shed. So if I evict you, I can’t take the shed full of your stuff. I have to evict you onsite which means that I just take all your stuff out of the shed, and I put it on a tarp, put a tarp over the top, I say ‘Bye!’, and take my shed. That’s rough. I’ve only had to do it one time. They were over a year late. Finally, we just said ‘Sorry, you’re thirteen months late. You’re not going to catch up. We’re not going to be able to work this out.’ We had to go and take all his stuff out, and retrieve our property. That’s a bummer.” Jeff repeated himself. “That’s a bummer.”
Despite the ups and downs of working at a storage facility, Jeff seems to do very well for himself in this position. In every customer interaction I observed, he represented himself professionally; always treating others with the utmost respect. Together, with his dog Max, he continues to manage Troy’s Mini Storage which is located at 20 Chevy St. in Sagle, Idaho. Jeff is usually available Monday through Friday, 9AM to 2PM to answer any questions. If you want to learn more about Troy’s Mini Storage, you can visit their website (troysminibarnsandstorage.godaddysites.com) or call them at (208) 263-0979.
Candidly,
JUSTUS A.S. CLAYFIELD
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