The Baton Rouge contractor who, citing death threats, backed out last week of an agreement with the City of New Orleans to remove several Confederate-era monuments and days later found his Lamborghini torched to rubble is being sued in federal court by five disgruntled ex-employees.
In a class action lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, five former employees of H&O Investments, which does business as the grounds maintenance company H&O Lawn 360, are suing the firm, its owner, David Mahler, its lawyer, Roy Maughan, Jr., and several others affiliated with the company. The suit alleges that Mahler failed to pay his workers overtime and falsified tax returns by reporting them as contract workers when they were actually full-time employees.
According to court documents, the landscape laborers, all of whom live in New Orleans, did work for H&O in Louisiana and Mississippi. Court documents allege that during their respective terms of employment, which ranged from 2009 to 2015, the employees typically worked between 60 and 80 hours a week—not only on the job, but traveling between jobs and being assigned extra tasks at H&O’s headquarters when they returned from a day of work.
However, the employees claim they were “not paid overtime premiums for hours worked over 40 hours each work week,” according to the suit.
The suit also alleges the former employees received 1099 forms, meaning they were classified as contract workers for tax purposes, when they should have been “issued Form W2s for their wages, resulting in fraudulent information and increased tax liability for the plaintiffs,” the lawsuit alleges.
Calls seeking comment to Mahler and Maughan were not returned as of this afternoon’s deadline.
The lawsuit comes three days after Mahler’s new Lamborghini, estimated to be worth in excess of $200,000, was found torched in front of H&O’s Baton Rouge office on Opportunity Avenue. In the wake of the incident, Maughan told Daily Report there was no conclusive evidence that the car fire was related to the controversy over the Confederate monuments.
Last week, H&O notified the City of New Orleans it was cancelling its contract to remove four controversial Confederate-era monuments around the city. In a letter to the city, Maughan said Mahler and his wife received death threats because of the company’s agreement to remove the monuments. H&O was doing the work because it has a contract with the City of New Orleans to do small maintenance projects that fall below the public bid threshold.
—Stephanie Riegel
