A Florida roofing contractor has filed a federal lawsuit accusing Tower Hill Insurance of engineering a criminal fraud prosecution that ran for more than two years - then collapsed one week before trial.
The complaint was filed September 15, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. It names Tower Hill Insurance Group, Tower Hill Prime Insurance Company, the law firm Zinober, Diana & Monteverde, and four individuals. The core claim is malicious prosecution, meaning the contractor says he was put through a baseless criminal case on purpose. The suit brings that claim under both federal civil rights law and Florida common law, and adds conspiracy on top.
It starts with a roof. After Hurricane Irma, the Rookery Pointe Homeowners Association in Lee County assigned its insurance claim rights to the contractor's company. That company submitted an estimate of approximately $414,000 for roofing and related work to Tower Hill. A subcontractor's permit application put the roofing portion at about $233,000.
Tower Hill's special investigations unit reported the claim to the Florida Department of Financial Services as suspected fraud in 2021, according to the complaint. DFS looked into it. The head attorney of the Economic Crimes Unit at the Lee County State Attorney's Office found there was "no criminal violation" - just a pricing dispute suited to civil court. DFS closed the investigation.
That should have been the end of it.
But the complaint alleges Tower Hill and its co-defendants did not let it go. A fresh DFS investigation into the same Rookery Pointe claim was opened in 2023, according to the filing. The complaint states that a DFS lieutenant apparently submitted the fraud tip, listing a Rookery Pointe homeowner as the complainant. That homeowner later testified he "never initiated an investigation with DFS" and the department "was not authorized to use his name at all."
The detective assigned to the 2023 case, the filing alleges, was not told about the 2021 finding of no probable cause. And the pricing gap at the heart of the new investigation was actually smaller than the one prosecutors had already reviewed and dismissed two years earlier.
Then there are the hidden estimates. The complaint alleges the defendants had estimates that backed the contractor's pricing - and buried them. An appraiser's estimate and one from AAP Claims were both higher than the contractor's company's figure, according to the filing. A third, from Catastrophe Response Unit, was described as "in line" with it. All three, the complaint alleges, were "concealed and conveniently omitted" from the criminal investigation.
The contractor was arrested in November 2023. The charges: insurance fraud and grand theft, both first-degree felonies that the complaint says carried a combined potential sentence of up to 60 years in prison. The filing reproduces a DFS press release from December 4, 2023, in which the then-CFO of DFS announced the arrest in strongly condemnatory language.
The case fell apart during discovery, according to the complaint. Witnesses gave "conflicting testimony or recanted prior statements altogether." The DFS detective who led the 2023 investigation allegedly testified there was no evidence the contractor had personally "drafted, prepared, or provided any specific estimate" to Tower Hill. Tower Hill's own SIU director allegedly testified under oath that he had "no idea" whether the contractor had ever prepared an estimate submitted to the carrier. Asked whether the contractor had "taken money from Tower Hill that he was otherwise not entitled to," the answer was blunt: "Not to my knowledge, no."
Evidence went missing, too. The complaint alleges a CD containing the complete 2021 investigative file - spreadsheets, presentations, the disposition memo - was "later lost or destroyed by DFS."
About one week before trial, the State of Florida formally abandoned the prosecution. Public statements attributed the dismissal to "a lack of evidence."
The contractor alleges the two-plus years of criminal proceedings destroyed his company. Vendors and referral sources walked away. The complaint seeks compensatory damages, punitive damages, lost profits, and attorneys' fees.
One defendant is not yet in the case. The plaintiffs sent a pre-suit notice to DFS under Florida law, which requires a six-month waiting period before a state agency can be sued. That clock runs out in January 2027.
For SIU teams and claims professionals, the case is a pointed reminder that a fraud referral does not end at the referral - if a prosecution built on it collapses, the insurer that fed it may find itself on the other side of a courtroom.
The allegations in the complaint have not been tested in court, and no court has made any findings on the merits.
