A civil jury looked at the same facts a criminal prosecutor is now using to charge a South Florida property manager with grand theft and perjury, and decided he owed the association he served exactly $1. That gap between two courts reaching very different conclusions from overlapping evidence is at the center of one of the more unusual property management disputes to work through Florida’s system in recent memory.
A $439,000 hurricane payout and a disputed “management fee”
The case centers on Michael Curtis and his company, BDM Property Management, which managed the Fairways of Sunrise condominium community. According to NBC6, the dispute traces back to a Hurricane Irma insurance settlement the association received in January 2020. Investigators say an unauthorized check for $439,000 was cut to BDM Property Management shortly after the settlement funds arrived, with the memo line describing it as a management fee tied to hurricane repairs, leaving the association with only about $5,000 of a payout that was supposed to fund storm recovery.
Curtis has defended the fee as compensation for work performed, telling reporters through his attorney that his billable hours on the hurricane recovery would have totaled roughly $840,000 at his standard $100-an-hour rate, and that he instead charged the association at a reduced $75 an hour. In his account, the $439,000 payment represented a discount, not a diversion. Homeowners and investigators arrived at a very different reading of the same paperwork.
A civil jury clears him, awarding $1
In the civil case brought by the Fairways of Sunrise association, a jury found BDM Property Management not liable and determined the company had not breached its fiduciary duties, awarding just $1 in damages. Curtis’s attorney, Elias Hilal, has described the verdict as vindication for his client’s account of the fee dispute. A defense verdict, even one accompanied by a nominal dollar award, is about as clean a civil win as a defendant can get.
Criminal charges built on the same transaction
Yet the civil verdict has not stopped a separate criminal case from moving forward. Curtis was arrested in January 2025 and charged with grand theft and perjury, with bond set at $100,000. The perjury charge stems from testimony in which Curtis allegedly told a judge he was “not aware” of any money paid by the insurance company, a statement investigators say is contradicted by records showing he signed the original settlement agreement himself in January 2020. Investigators also allege that during a June 2021 meeting with homeowners, Curtis falsely claimed the insurance company had dismissed the case entirely, concealing that the $439,000 payment had already been made and largely retained by his company. Curtis has pleaded not guilty to all charges, with a pre-trial hearing scheduled for October 24, 2025.
Civil and criminal cases operate under different standards of proof, which helps explain how a jury can clear a company of breaching its fiduciary duty in one courtroom while prosecutors pursue felony theft charges in another over the same underlying transaction. A civil jury weighs a preponderance of the evidence on a specific claim, fiduciary duty, while a criminal case must prove theft and perjury beyond a reasonable doubt, built around different elements, including whether Curtis’s courtroom testimony about the payment was truthful.
A license revoked, and other communities watching
Florida regulators have already acted on their own assessment of the case: the state revoked Curtis’s property management license, describing him in its findings as a genuine danger to the public, a decision Curtis is now appealing separately from the criminal proceedings. His company’s management portfolio reportedly extended beyond Fairways of Sunrise to other South Florida communities, including Windmill Lakes, Three Horizons East, and Colonies, raising the stakes for boards elsewhere reviewing their own past insurance settlements and management fee arrangements.
For the Fairways of Sunrise homeowners who watched a hurricane recovery fund shrink from $439,000 down to a few thousand dollars, the civil verdict closed one avenue for accountability even as it opened up how odd the overall situation looks. Winning a defense verdict in civil court did not make the criminal charges disappear, and it is that unresolved criminal case, not the jury’s $1 verdict, that will ultimately determine what happened to the money.
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