If you want to meet a real con-artist and master manipulator, hire Garry Bryant. Here is how his scam works. When he shows up to quote your job, he will go on and on about how he is the #1 landscaper on Angie’s list, how he was a church worship leader for 30 years, how he is meticulous at completing the details of your project, and how he may not be the cheapest (which he is not) but he does the best work around. He will even tell you that he has a crew and equipment when all he has is 1 shovel, 1 rake, a beat-up wheelbarrow, and women/children for laborers. Then, once he has you hooked, he will start agreeing to anything if you give him 50% cash up front. You can have him sign a contract, show him pictures of what you want, and go to extremes to explain in detail your expectations and he will agree to it all as long as you give him half the money up front. He will even come back multiple times, after the contract is signed, to promise you more work for an even cheaper price just to get more cash out of you. This continues until he finally believes that he has gotten everything he can get without actually doing any work. At this point, you are already caught in his trap and there is nothing that you can do. You have already lost, and he has already won. From here, Garry spends every last dime you gave him with absolutely no concern for how he is going to pay for material or if he is spending more than the profit he was supposed to make. He will even tell you what he is spending your money on and don’t think, like I did, that he has a business credit account to pay for material later. (No bank would ever loan this guy money. That is why he uses his customers for interest free loans!) In my case, he bought his wife a diamond ring and took her on multiple vacations; he paid off at least 3 other customers to get out of agreements that he made and broke; and he paid the IRS thousands in unpaid taxes. Now that he has spent all his profit and some of your material money as well, the excuses start for why he can’t work. I swear this guy has over 50 reasons to not work and when they finally run out, he only works 4 hours, half of which he talks on the phone or walks around trying to figure out where he last stopped weeks ago. He even gave me the excuse after being off work for a month with Covid and fully recovered that he still had to quarantine since he gave it to his wife (making him immune) and he works outside alone! I then caught him walking around Home Depot, talking on the phone, like nothing was wrong! These excuses continue until the first big purchase of material is required and, surprise, he has no money to pay for it. Here is where you have 3 choices: 1) pay for the material yourself and hope that he pays you back like he will promise, 2) delay the project for months while he tries to work other jobs to pay for the material to finish your job, 3) threaten to sue him and he will threaten to file bankruptcy and completely screw you. In my case, since it was a choice between losing the $14,000 that I already paid him or $5,000 extra for material, I chose option #1 and hoped that he would eventually pay me back like he promised. (He didn’t!) The excuses to not work continue and the project still falls months behind schedule despite your best efforts to pay for material, equipment, laborers, and even do a large portion of the work yourself. You eventually lose all hope of this nightmare ending while your kids play outside every day in a construction war zone left unfinished. In my case, the project that he said would be done in 3 months was still not finished 15 months later! After I finally quit paying extra for supplies and killing myself to help him, the quality of his work tanked to all-time lows, and I ended up having to redo most of it myself. The truth is that Garry cares nothing about leaving you a maintenance mess for years to come. It makes no difference to him if you have weeds throughout your yard, your gardens, your gravel areas, or if he cracks your driveway so bad that it falls apart the first time you drive over it. (He literally spread 1 inch of gravel for a parking area and said it was good.) That is when I finally lost it and kicked him off my property. He was literally creating more work for me than if I just finished the project myself! In the end, I have never in my life met someone more afraid of an honest day’s work than Garry. He will literally run over stuff in your yard with his truck in fear of being in the sun too long and getting him to work more than 4 hours/day, before 11am, on any real or made-up holiday, more than 2-3 days/week, or on the weekend is near impossible even when he is 15 months behind schedule and owes you $5,000 in material money above his original quote. He is truly a master at using his “nothing is my fault” victim mentality to manipulate his customers into trusting him, only to steal their money and trash their property and tools. I even had to buy him a rake when a different customer locked his 1 rake in their backyard and wouldn’t give it back until he finished their job! (WARNING!) He is a hypochondriac, who always thinks he is sick and can’t work, when it’s really because he never works that he feels so bad after doing manual labor. He claims to be extremely forgetful and yet refuses to look back at the contract he signed or believe what you tell him he agreed to. He claims that he hates Democrats and their free handouts and yet he uses his costumers as his own personal bank and steals money from them by making up charges that they never agreed to pay to avoid paying them back. (He even has a buddy who pretends to be your friend just to get information to help Garry back out of his contracts and promises.) Garry also has absolutely no idea what he is doing as a landscaper and just makes stuff up, assuming that his customers are too dumb to know the difference. For example, he literally told me that the sand dirt he got was great because birds pooped on it!! He also lost me $1,000s worth of dirt because he was too arrogant to follow my advice and grade the property in sections. He left loose sandy dirt on a hillside, exposed to rain, for months before finally putting sod on it and then when it all washed, he tells me it was “an act of God” and not his fault. As usual, Garry again had no money to replace the dirt. He is also the type of person who rushes over to point out mistakes from other contractors, but if you say anything about his work, you are a micro-manager and a perfectionist. I’m sorry, but my dad was a stone mason for 40 years and Garry knows nothing about professional stonework. No professional uses 4-6 inch mortar joints to lay stone rather than shaping the stone to fit. Yet again, Garry did not have the correct tools, so he literally used a handheld wood saw to cut stone and when it didn’t work, he used absurd looking mortar joints instead. He also did not mix the stone and used all the large stone at 1 end of the sidewalk, leaving a noticeable size difference on the other end. And if it is not level, Garry cannot lay a straight line in stone to save his life. As with everything, Garry thinks that he is an expert and refuses to listen to anyone because he has been doing this for 30 years. The reality is that he has been scamming people for 30 years and just getting away with it because you can’t sue someone who has nothing to lose. You just end up losing more money in legal fees.