A&E Dumped Richard Davis And Trademark For Con-Man?

On an episode of A&E’s popular reality series Flip This House, Atlanta businessman Sam Leccima sits in front of a run-down house and calls buying and selling real estate his passion. Now authorities and legal filings claim that Leccima’s true passion was a series of scams that included faking the home renovations shown on the cable TV show and claiming to have sold houses he never owned. “This is, indeed, a con artist,” said Sonya McGee, who says Leccima took $4,000 from her in an investment scheme. McGee and others say Leccima’s episodes of Flip This House, A&E’s most popular show, were elaborate hoaxes. His friends and family were presented as potential homebuyers and “sold” signs were slapped in front of unsold houses. They say the home repairs — the lynchpin of the show — were actually quick or temporary patch jobs designed to look good on camera.

Leccima says he never claimed to own the homes. While not acknowledging his televised renovations were staged, he didn’t deny it and suggested that A&E and Departure Films, the production company that makes the show, knew exactly what he was doing. When it recently learned of the claims against Leccima, the cable network pulled reruns of his episodes off the air and wiped his mentions from its Web site. Leccima, 36, presented himself as a successful real estate investor during the 2006 season of the cable show, which depicted him buying, refurbishing and reselling Atlanta-area homes for profits of $77,000 and more. But Leccima doesn’t have a real estate license — it was revoked by the Georgia Real Estate Commission in 2005, with the panel ruling he “does not bear a good reputation for honesty, trustworthiness, integrity, and competence.” Now he’s under investigation by the Georgia Secretary of State’s office for securities fraud.

Atlanta-area real estate records show Leccima never owned several of the homes he’s been shown fixing up on television. WAGA-TV in Atlanta, which first aired the claims against Leccima, has shown footage from inside one of the homes, which had mismatched wooden floors and unpainted patched walls that were out of the view of TV cameras on Flip This House.

McGee said she attended what was billed as a wrap party at one home. But when the party was shown on “Flip This House,” it was presented as an open house at which someone expresses interest in buying the property. McGee said appearing on the TV show made it easier for Leccima to find such investors: “As soon as that first episode aired, he got phone calls from people saying, ‘I love you. Where can I send you some money?’”

This is what A&E canned Richard Davis and Trademark Properties for . . . an alleged con-man? Now Richard is and Trademark are featured weekly on TLC’s The Real Deal which airs Saturday nights with repeates on Sundays. This also isn’t the first time their have been allegations that Flip This House is staged. One of the other flippers, the Montelongo’s were rumored to have hired actors for their flips as well as not actually making the renevations. I enjoy the Montelongo’s shows but the other flip teams are terrible. A&E looks to have two new flip teams for this season, but none of them can live up to Trademark. TLC’s The Real Deal is a great show that is was Flip This House was and should be.