THE CONTRACTOR AND THE CONGRESSMAN
Inside Stephen D. Contarino's decade-long pattern of unlicensed construction fraud — and the $56,050 gamble that finally brought a felony warrant to his door.
Author’s Introductory Note: Before publishing the long-awaited Part Two, The Finalé Exposé, I believed I was finally putting this investigation to rest after months of uncovering evidence, reviewing court records, and speaking with victims. That sense of closure lasted only moments. An unexpected phone call revealed new developments that compelled me to place the exposé on hold before publication. Yet another—and what would prove to be one of the most egregious and flagrant criminal acts in Stephen D. Contarino's long-running saga of deception—had just come to light.
Prologue: The Barn That Wasn't
The Florida sun was already climbing hard over a quiet stretch of Sarasota County property last December, the kind of humid, unhurried morning that makes a two-story pole barn feel less like a construction project and more like a promise. A congressman's land. A contract, signed and sealed. Half the money already wired.
Imagine the scene as the homeowner did that day: lumber stacked in neat rows, the outline of a foundation staked into the grass, a contractor named "Danny" walking the property with the easy confidence of a man who has done this a hundred times before. He had. That was the problem.
Four months later, the barn would fail inspection. Four months after that, the man calling himself Danny would be sitting in a jail cell on a felony warrant, and the congressman who paid him $56,050 would be one name in a much longer ledger of people who trusted
Stephen D. Contarino with their money, their property, and their peace of mind.
This isn't just a con. It's a system — one built over fifteen years, refined LLC by LLC, alias by alias, victim by victim — and thanks to a decade of documented judgments, licensing violations, and lawsuits, it very nearly ran undetected straight through the office of a sitting member of the United States Congress.
I. A Pattern, Not an Accident
Let me be clear about something before we begin.
Over the past four to five months, I combed through court records, cross-referenced Sunbiz filings, and sat with victim after victim who handed this man their savings in exchange for a promise he never intended to keep. I believed, as I closed out the second half of this investigation, that I had reached the end of the story.
I was wrong. A phone call told me otherwise.
An anxious acquaintance reached me with word that Contarino had just been arrested — not in his home county, but somewhere else entirely. Manatee County law enforcement had picked him up on an out-of county warrant. That detail alone was strange. Contarino is, by every account I have gathered, a creature of habit. He does not wander far from his home base. Something had pulled him outside of it.
For the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, that was all anyone could tell me. Booking Number 2023006531. An out-of-county warrant. Nothing more.
Then the record caught up with the rumor, and the rumor was worse than anything I had guessed.
II. What the Record Already Shows
Before we get to the congressman, sit with what the public record shows, because none of what follows happened in a vacuum.
Contarino's license as a general contractor was rendered null and void as of August 31, 2008. For roughly fifteen years, he has built things for people — additions, structures, entire pole barns people were counting on to shelter equipment, animals, dreams — without the license that is supposed to stand behind that work. Not a lapse. Not an oversight. Fifteen years of building on borrowed legitimacy.
In 2021 alone, three separate legal judgments were entered against one of his LLCs, totaling more than $51,000. A search of Sunbiz turns up a sprawling list of companies where Contarino appears as registered agent — DBAs and LLCs layered over one another like a nesting doll, each one a little harder to see into than the last. It is a structure built for exactly one purpose: to make it easy to take a homeowner's deposit under one name, and very hard for that homeowner to ever collect a judgment from any of them.
Three themes recur in every documented case. He presents himself as a licensed general contractor. He delivers work that does not meet code. And the money — the homeowner's money — does not end up doing what it was paid to do.
This is not speculation. It is the shape of a pattern drawn from public filings and the accounts of the people who lived inside it.
III. December, a Barn, and a Congressman
Toward the end of last December, U.S. Congressman Greg Steube entered into a contract for the construction of a two-story pole barn on his own property. The man who signed it identified himself as "Danny" — not Stephen — representing two entities at once: Contarino Country Creations, LLC, and Contarino Construction, LLC. He identified himself as both contractor and owner of each.
Congressman Steube paid $56,050 across two installments, split evenly between the two LLCs — $28,025 to one, $28,025 to the other. A structure, again, built for splitting money across entities rather than concentrating accountability in one place.
I am not personally acquainted with Contarino, and I do not pretend to understand what calculation — if
there was one — led him to run this play against a sitting member of Congress. But the record suggests he ran it exactly the way he has run it against dozens of homeowners before: the same aliases, the same LLC shell game, the same confidence that no one on the other end would check.
Someone finally checked.
IV. The Inspection That Unraveled It
The work failed a Sarasota County inspection. That is the sentence that ends this scheme, and it is almost anticlimactic in its simplicity — because for every other victim documented in this pattern, there was no inspector standing between them and the loss.
Congressman Steube halted all construction on his property on April 13, 2023, and did what apparently no one else in this story had the resources or the reflex to do quickly enough: he investigated his own contractor. What he found was not a paperwork error. Contarino was not a licensed general contractor. He had performed work without the required license, failed to carry workers' compensation for his crew, and racked up violations beyond that.
Research any contractor before you hire them. License searches are public record, available free through the Florida DBPR website. It is the single easiest way to have avoided everything documented
in this report — and the one step none of Contarino's other victims had reason to think they needed to take.
V. The Warrant
On Tuesday, September 12th, a felony warrant was issued for Stephen Contarino. Law enforcement moved quickly. He was taken into custody in Manatee County, held there, and then transported to the Sarasota County jail, where he was booked and released on bond.
The charges are not minor. Two third-degree felonies under Florida Statute 489.127(1)(f) and 489.127(2)(c) — governing unlicensed contracting — alongside a charge under Florida Statute 440.405(4)(a)(3), tied to the workers' compensation failures. Arraignment was set for November 17, 2023.
VI. The Man He Targeted
It is worth understanding who was sitting across the table from Contarino when he made this decision, because it says something about the audacity of the attempt.
Greg Steube was born and raised in Manatee County, the son of Brad Steube, who served as the county's sheriff for nearly forty years. He served in the U.S. Army JAG Corps from 2004 to 2008, deployed to Iraq under Operation Iraqi Freedom, and returned home with seven decorations, including the Army Commendation Medal and the Parachutist Badge. He went on to represent the Sarasota-Manatee area in the Florida House of Representatives, then the Florida Senate, and now serves Florida's 17th Congressional District.
This is not a man without the standing or the means to investigate a bad contract. That Contarino proceeded anyway is, in its own way, the most revealing detail in this entire report — not because Steube was uniquely vulnerable, but because Contarino apparently did not calculate that he might not be.
VII. The Total
Here is where the pattern becomes a number.
Contarino is currently facing three open civil cases in Manatee County. Two of them alone seek $114,000 in damages. Add the $56,050 taken from Congressman Steube. Add the liens that have surfaced alongside these filings.
The total of funds Contarino is documented to have taken, or been ordered to repay, this year alone comes to $181,050.
That is not a bad year. That is a business model with a receipt.
VIII. What This Isn't
This is not a story about one congressman's bad luck with a contractor. It is a story about a system — DBPR licensing, Sunbiz LLC registration, county inspection — that allowed one man to operate for fifteen years without a valid license, moving from homeowner to homeowner, until the one time he happened to target someone with the standing and the resources to stop the money before it disappeared into another shell.
Every other name in this pattern did not have that. That is the story underneath this story, and it is the one this publication intends to keep telling.
Accountability
There is no ruling, no bond payment, no felony conviction that gives back what Contarino's other victims lost — the deposits, the unfinished structures, the months spent chasing a licensed contractor who never existed. A congressman's halted pole barn made headlines. The homeowners who came before him did not get that kind of leverage, and most of them never will.
That asymmetry is the actual subject of this report. Not one man's arrest, but the fifteen years it took to arrive at it, and how many people paid for that delay before the system finally, almost by accident, caught up.
Court records, DBPR licensing status, and Sunbiz filings referenced in this report are matters of public record. Nothing in this report constitutes legal advice.