SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT: Steel House Investigation

“I have been through hell and back again. I wake up at night and I can’t sleep. All I think about is Andrew Stallman,” says Audrey.

Stallman is the founder of Trans Atlantic Steel Suppliers located in Snellville.

Audrey hired him to build the house made of steel girders – considered by some as a stronger, safer alternative to traditional wood framing. She says she paid Stallman $79,000 for the steel framing work, but the job isn’t even half finished and workers hired to finish the job say most of the work is so shoddy, it will have to be re-done.

“It’s heart sickening. You work all your life and pay something off as you go and you end up with something like this,” says Audrey.

We tried to get some answers from Stallman the day the Snellville Police, armed with a warrant, searched his headquarters, confiscating computers and files. They also planned to arrest Stallman, but he fled from his near-vacant home a few blocks away.

“We’ve had several complaints about people who have purchased or made payments on a building from this company. But there’s been not any delivery of the product,” says Chief Roy Whitehead.

In Gwinnett alone, Stallman has been sued 14 times. And investigators say his trail of victims stretches into at least 8 other states, the Bahamas and Madagascar, Africa. A Washington-based consultant says Stallman owes him more than $100,000 in sales commissions on that project, which hasn’t been completed.

Eric Henderson says the government of Madagascar wired a half a million dollars to Andrew.

Stallman has also failed to pay workers in his Snellville office.

“He’s a damn crook and you can record me saying that,” said Brent Sokol, the husband of a victim. “He owes her a week and a half of pay that he never paid her for. Call on the phone from out of the country and fired her because she was demanding payment.”

And Stallman made no exceptions on who he’d take money from.

Beaver Ruin Baptist Church in Duluth paid him more than $76,000 to put up a multi-purpose center. Not only was the project delayed for months, Stallman’s failure to pay a subcontractor $37,000 resulted in a lien being placed on the church.

“We don’t want it to be said that Beaver Ruin doesn’t pay its bills so it’s been pretty hard for the church,” said church administrator, Reynell Jones.

But it’s even harder on folks like Audrey Frazier. She says she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown from the disaster left by Andrew Stallman – a man well-known for spending lavishly on dinners and fancy trips and limousine rides.

“He’s living high on the hog while we’re trying to scrape our money together and put this house under a roof,” says Frazier.

“This was supposed to be my dream home,” she says. She says it has now become her nightmare.

Police say Stallman is suspected of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars for materials and services that were not completed. He’s known to have a passport, but authorities don’t think he has left the country.

If you have any information about Andrew Stallman and Trans Atlantic Steel, Snellville Police would like to hear from you.