An 81-year-old Villager arrested last week on fraud charges faced allegations in 2020 he cut off a renter’s water and sabotaged the air conditioning unit.
Youseff El-Masry remains free on $4,000 bond following his arrest his past week by Lake County sheriff’s deputies on Sumter County warrants charging him with insurance fraud and organized fraud. Details about those warrants have not been made available in court files.
El-Masry has been in the headlines in his battle with the Community Development District 2 Board of Supervisors in a bid to save the addition he made to his home without the approval of the Architectural Review Committee. The home is located at 2164 Estevez Drive in Villa Vera Cruz in the Village of Santiago. After the deed compliance violation was reported, El-Masry went before the ARC to appeal for retroactive permission to keep his Florida room. The ARC did not grant his request. After his rejection by the ARC, El-Masry, who emigrated to the United States in 1968, went back before the CDD 2 board but stormed out of the meeting at Savannah Center when he was ordered to remove the illicit structure from his home.
El-Masry also owns the villa next to the one with the unapproved Florida room.
The next-door villa was the subject of a court case in 2020 with allegations that El-Masry was a less-than-sympathetic landlord.
El-Masry filed a lawsuit claiming the tenants owed him $3,400 in rent and utilities at 2166 Estevez Drive. The figure represented the amount he believed he was owed for May, June and July 2020.
The mother of the male tenant of the home wrote to the court in September 2020 claiming that El-Masry had refused to accept their money. In the letter, the mother claimed that El-Masry shut off the water at the villa and ordered her son and his wife to use a bucket and a hose, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. She also claimed that her son, who is mentally disabled, worked for El-Masry “cleaning up his nasty houses” but wasn’t paid “a dime,” according to the letter on file in Sumter County Court. She also claimed El-Masry sabotaged the air conditioning unit at the rented villa.
The home at the 2166 Estevez Drive was the subject of a deed compliance case later that year. At the time, neighbors complained that El-Masry allowed the property to deteriorate while he was living next door.
