Under Construction

Rafi Moyal. Rafael Moyal. Under Construction. Our construction has been in progress for 18 months and cost us close to $600K.  Unfortunately, the only two trades that passed the city inspection were HVAC and rough plumbing (we did preplumbing for the grey water). Nothing else is ready for inspection. Our contract clearly states that GC (Rafi Moyal) gets paid on the completion of each trade or at least on major milestones. However, utilizing bogus payment requests, promises and shameless lies, we have paid him over 65% of whole project while he barely has completed 30%. He stopped all meaningful work for the last 3 months under various excuses - waiting for the windows, needing us to sign the new schedule, etc - only finally admitting that he has spent our $350K that we have paid up front for drywall, electrical, insulation, plumbing, irrigation, pool, and many other trades, and he does not have money to continue work without us paying more money upfront.
After initial shock and outrage, we have obtain legal councel and hired a construction forensic firm.
Despite stealing from us significant amount of money, Rafael Moyal is completely remorseless and feels justified in his actions.
Rafi does not have his own crew and hires the cheapest labor possible - people have changed weekly. Almost no one spoke English, and he preferred that we did not talk to his people directly.
Rafi does not use licensed subcontractors. When we have requested to get license numbers of all subcontractors, he was furious. He insisted that we have misled him since we did not tell him that we wanted licensed subcontractors. Finally when we managed to get a licensed subcontractor - it was a terrible experience. Rafi's HVAC contractor - Jacob Atias @ AirShart Inc -  had to redo his work three times and we had to pay 3 times the amount of initial contract. He acted unprofessionally by delaying the work, not following our requests and ultimately screaming at me for asking him questions. Again almost none of the workers spoke English, so communication was difficult.
Special note about carpentry: One of the main reasons we have hired Rafi Moyal is because he is a carpenter by trade and he has ensured that he can do any woodwork with great craftsmanship. Our budget called for $100K in all the wood work - kitchen, two walk-in closets, vanities for 4 bathrooms, build-in cabinets in the dining room, and build-in shelves in the living room. We have paid $85K up front. He have seen only the kitchen cabinets and they are of mediocre quality. Part of our kitchen is a butcher block that in Rafi's execution it has multiple cracks between the blocks. We were better off with IKEA kitchen(that would cost $18K).
The communication is extremely difficult - any comment (quality, time, budget, sequence, transparency) redirected back to us as accusations that we are too picky, we do not have experience, it should be like this, there is no other way to do it, we are too attached to the house and - my favourite - we cannot make up our minds and he cannot work like this because we change things all the time.
Our situation got so bad and lasted for so long because as we found out later our interior designer - Dorothy Macik @ Dorothy Macik Design (www.dorothymacik.com) was in cahoots with our GC. We have trusted her assuming that since we pay her $125 per hour, she is representing our interests. She continuously dismissed our concerns about Rafi's work and abilities as part of the normal process and she insisted that we should just keep going since Rafi is an honest and qualified contractor. Later we found out that she works from Rafi's house and have a side business of custom furniture with Rafi Moyal.
It has been the worst experience and Rafi Moyal should not have a CA license.
P.S. Before it went completely south, we have foolishly recommended Rafi to my sister. They had a smaller project, but it ended up badly as well. Rafi's quality was unacceptable (ex., he forgot to put the insulation into external walls before closing the drywall, and when the mistake was pointed out by my brother-in-law, Rafi got angry and told him that he should not be at the job site until everything is complete). They broke up the contract, but Rafi had to complete some works - like cabinets. However, Rafi refused to finish kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities to meet quality standards and my sister is $15K in the red.