Juan Awais, 5 Others Charged in $5.8M Hialeah Condo HOA Fraud
A two-year sheriff's probe accuses a property manager and five others of draining association accounts. For anyone buying or lending on South Florida condo stock, it is a new line item to check first.
Six people, including property-management company owner Juan Awais, 60, were arrested and accused of diverting at least $5.8 million from Miami-Dade condominium and homeowners associations, concentrated in Hialeah, under a two-year Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office investigation called Operation Sundown, deputies said.
Why it matters
Awais and three co-accused, identified by authorities as Juliet Ramos, 37, Johana Perez Tapia, 31, and Delma Alonso, 53, face racketeering, money laundering, organized fraud and grand theft charges, according to Local 10 News. Two others, Cynthea Louise Waltz and Michael Irizarry, were arrested separately by Pembroke Pines police. All are presumed innocent unless proven otherwise. For agents, buyers and lenders, the case reframes what counts as diligence on South Florida condo stock. An association’s reserve balance and its assessment history are no longer the only numbers worth checking. Who controls the management contract, who owns the vendors on the books and whether the board actually understands what it signed are now part of the same underwriting question.
The numbers
Investigators allege the scheme used falsified invoices and affiliated shell vendors to bill associations for roofing, security, landscaping and renovation work, then routed the money to accounts tied to the accused, according to Local 10 and CBS News Miami. Miami-Dade Sheriff Rosie Cordero Stutz said “the board members of these associations apparently had no idea what was really happening,” per CBS News Miami’s report. Deputies said the $5.8 million figure is what investigators have documented so far and that actual losses may run higher. The alleged targets were described as elderly, primarily Spanish-speaking volunteer board members in Hialeah properties.
What’s next
The Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office is prosecuting the case, and deputies say Operation Sundown remains active, with the possibility of additional charges or victims as the accounting continues. The arrests land five months after Hialeah’s mayor signed an executive order creating a city HOA task force, citing property managers who “don’t care about the property” and only seek profit across the city’s more than 26,000 condo units, a warning that this case now puts a criminal record behind. For anyone underwriting a deal in Miami’s condo market, whether a conversion, a bulk buy of distressed units or a loan secured by association-controlled reserves, the move now is to pull the management contract, the vendor list and recent board minutes before closing, not after.