Deltona, FL – 2 West Volusia men are charged with stealing over $20,000 in granite bought by a paving company and then selling it at well below market value for their personal profit.
53-year-old Charles A. “Chuck” Fantozzi of Deltona and 32-year-old Kenneth R. Austin of Orange City are both out on bond as of 5:30pm Wednesday, according to Volusia County Jail records.
Fantozzi was arrested on Monday and left VCJ after posting #30,000 bond on charges of grand theft and dealing in stolen property.
Austin is free on $67,000 bond on those same charges as well as driving with a revoked license, possession of marijuana and possession of drug paraphernalia.
Austin was arrested on October 1st, the same day the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office received a call from Timothy Phillips, the President of P & S Paving in Daytona Beach.
According to the arrest report, Phillips claimed Fantozzi was a P & S subcontractor who owned a dump truck and had been using the P & S company account “for a while” to steal loads of granite from Conrad Yelvington Distributors.
Investigators believe Fantozzi would use the P & S account to fill side orders for granite and then sell that granite at well below market value to other people, keeping all the money from those sales for himself.
The report shows another man contacted P & S claming Austin – who worked for Fantozzi as the dump truck driver – offered to sell him a load of #7 certified granite for $350 instead of the normal going rate of around $1,500.
That man, according to VCSO, reached out to P & S after Austin told him where he and his boss were getting the stone from and a sting operation was quickly set up between that man, P & S and VCSO.
Deputies say the man agreed to buy 3 loads of stone from Fanozzi and it was soon after that when P & S hired Fantozzi’s truck to haul 3 loads of the same stone from Conrad Yelvington to the P & S facility in Daytona Beach.
Instead of delivering that stone to P & S, VCSO says Austin delivered it to the man’s home in New Smyrna Beach. Deputies waiting nearby pulled Austin over soon after he had dumped the stone on the Freemont Street property and drove away.
When questioned, Austin claimed he’d been working for Fantozzi for 2 months and had made at least 6 such similar deliveries at Fantozzi’s orders, even though the invoice in all those deliveries indicated the stone was to go to P & S.
Investigators think Fantozzi & Austin stole at least 20 loads of granite from P & S over the past 3 months.
Mugshots below are courtesy of VCJ.
Charles A. Fantozzi
Kenneth R. Austin
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