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Carolyn Healy Duka at home with the contract she signed for work that was never done.

The Ohio Attorney General's Office yesterday filed a suit against a home improvement contractor that could change the way courts deal with contractors who have previously been sued by disgruntled customers.

The suit names the Ashtabula based Jewell Contracting Co., its president, Randy Jewell, and two associates, alleging that they broke the state's Consumer Sales Practices Act in their dealings with at least eight homeowners in Lake and Cuyahoga counties.

According to the suit, Jewell Contracting; Jewell; secretary/ treasurer Mary Elliot; and salesman Peter Musarra violated the state's Consumer Sales Practices Act by failing to perform the work homeowners paid them for, doing substandard work, failing to get permits or licenses for construction work and failing to give customers receipts for deposits.

Yesterday's suit asks Lake County Common Pleas Court to bar Jewell, Elliot and Musarra from working in the home improvement industry statewide and seeks $25,000 in damages for each violation of the law.

In addition, the attorney genera) is asking the court to broaden, the state's consumer law by deciding that two previous unpaid municipal court judgments against Randy Jewell constitute a, violation of, the Consumer Sales Practices Act. The agency wants the court to enter that judgment into the Ohio Administrative Code, giving it the force of law.

Jennifer Detwiler, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Attorney General's Office, said that, for the first time, the office is trying to use the unpaid judgments to prove the contractor has a pattern of deceiving customers. That could make the contractor liable for past judgments and raise the civil monetary penalties in the current case.

More important, such a ruling would mean that in the future, contractors won't find it so easy .to escape their troubled pasts simply by relocating or renaming their businesses.

Homeowners who dealt with Randy Jewell and Peter Musarra are less concerned about the precedent than about seeing them punished.

"He deserves whatever he gets," Carolyn Healy Duka said of Musarra, who acted as the company's salesman.

She signed a contract with Jewell Contracting to tear down a deteriorating back room on her Eastlake home and build an addition that would include a laundry room. She paid $3,281 in the fall of 1998.

By the end of the year, work still hadn't started. She assumed the delay was because of the holidays, but in early 1999, she called the city's building department and found that no permits were ever issued.

"At first, all I did was cry. It hurt that someone would take money like that," she said.

Musarra, reached at his office in Beachwood, said he is no longer affiliated with Jewell Contracting. He said he sold his contracting business, First Hometown Construction, to Jewell, who renamed the company but never paid for it. Musarra said he stayed on with Jewell as a sales representative but severed his ties with the company in December 1998, when angry customers started calling him to complain about unfinished work. Musarra was awarded a $35,000 judgment against Jewell in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court.<more>