Olivia Alvarez looked like an easy mark when she took over the bookkeeping for her husband’s concrete construction company in June. She was 43, pregnant and grief-stricken.
Her husband, Gabriel Alvarez, had died in a car accident May 24, leaving the bilingual elementary school teacher with the job of managing the business with her brother-in-law. Since Guillermo Alvarez runs the construction crews and speaks little English, it was up to Olivia to go to the contractors and ask them to settle the accounts.
Nearly $400,000 in bills were outstanding, and the Alvarezes had to pay their suppliers.
The contractors would look the soft-spoken Mexican immigrants in the eye and lie.
“They told me any bill that was older than three months they wouldn’t pay,” Olivia said, as her week-old son, Gabe, cooed on her lap. They would say that they couldn’t find any invoices or that the check was in the mail.
Yeah, right.
Never mind that the concrete had been poured, the work done and the houses sold. Never mind that Alvarez Brothers Construction had paid for the high-priced concrete and steel.
The contractors refused to pay. They thought Olivia would just go away.
“I see this an awful lot in the construction industry,” said Jay Fernandez, the lawyer Olivia has retained. “The contractors are opportunistic. They see a guy who doesn’t speak English and a pregnant woman, they’re both Hispanic, and they decide to just not pay.
“The power differential is huge.”
But when the contractors decided to stiff Olivia Alvarez, they picked on the wrong woman.
Olivia and her husband immigrated to the U.S. legally in the 1980s and became naturalized U.S. citizens. He started the small construction company with his brother, who is a permanent legal resident. Olivia won a scholarship at the University of Colorado at Denver and completed a master’s degree two years ago.
They worked hard, reared two children, paid taxes, created jobs and served their community.
It wasn’t easy. Over the past eight years, Olivia has undergone two cycles of treatment for breast cancer.
Now she’s a single mother on a two-month maternity leave from her teaching job and is struggling to manage the finances for the construction company along with caring for a new baby.
“For many years, her husband operated with handshake agreements,” Fernandez explained. “When they would finish the work, he would just go into the office of the president of the company and get paid.”
When her husband died, Olivia sent invoices to the companies for the work that had been completed over the past several months. When they didn’t pay, she contacted them personally. That’s when the runaround started.
“They tried to trick us,” she said. “I told them, ‘Just because my husband died, you think this is fair?”‘
They ignored her.
Big mistake.
“We’re in the very early part of this case,” Fernandez said. “She’s out of pocket about $150,000 on materials alone, and they can’t say the work wasn’t done because they sold the homes.”
It seems self-evident, but Fernandez is prepared for a battle. He said it happens all the time.
“Contractors are very practiced at not paying,” he said. “It’s endemic throughout the industry, and most of the time they get away with it. The subcontractors often are working on the jobs from daylight till dark and usually don’t have the energy or the gumption to get involved in a lawsuit while they’re still running a business.”
But though Olivia is tired, lonely and sad, she has no shortage of gumption. She has a baby to support. She has lost her husband and both breasts. She’s not about to lose her house because some greedheads think they can rip her off.
“They need to do what’s right,” she said as she calmed little Gabriel. “They need to keep their word.”
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
