Contractor says he wasn’t contacted by FBI

Monday, May 19, 2003 | 9:53 a.m.

The president of a North Las Vegas construction company that completed work on the Jaguars cabaret said he has not been contacted by the FBI, whose probe of the Galardi family strip club empire includes building contractors.

Jeffrey Gremore, president of Distinctive General Contracting in Las Vegas, also said Friday afternoon that his company had to rectify numerous structural deficiencies when it inherited the Jaguars project from a previous contractor.

Gremore said his company, which has been in business for seven years, enjoyed a good working relationship with Clark County building inspectors when it completed work on Jaguars last year. Jaguars, owned by Michael Galardi, was one of the strip clubs raided by the FBI on Wednesday.

Gremore said he did not know why the FBI indicated in its search warrants that it was also looking into building contractors and possible payoffs to building inspectors.

"As far as the work that was done when we took over there was a difference between the plans and what was out there," he said. "There were structural integrity issues that needed to be taken care of and we took care of them. One problem was the installation method of the structural aspect of the building."

There were 110 inspections of work at Jaguars that resulted in disapproval by county inspectors, but Gremore said most of those problems were created by the original contractor, Jaehn Construction of Las Vegas. He said that was a higher than normal number of problems for a project the size of Jaguars, which was approved to be 20,620 square feet.

"The county did its job," Gremore said. "They went over it with a fine-toothed comb."

Repeated phone messages left with Jaehn Construction were not returned.