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Shots goes down in flames

Shots goes down in flames

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Shots opened up in 2015 and I actually did a blog post on the when the bar wen it opened. The place had potential but as you can see from the pictures this place was not designed to be quiet and mellow.

There always seemed to be something off about John Harris. My wife’s Athletic Club dancers participated in many events at shots and I could never put my finger on it but I got a weird vibe from the dude. I thought his wife Judy seemed pretty normal but I never gave it much thought. A friend of mine once mentioned to me that John was a successful music producer from the states but I remember thinking that story doesn’t add up. Why would anyone who had a successful career producing music in the states want to start a bar down in Mexico. I could understand wanting to hang out here but work a bar business? It never added up but again I never really cared. Shots to me was just another bar in a small town in Mexico that already had a lot of bars in it.

The beginning of the end
Jon & Judy’s traveling billboard

Then of course came the traveling bill boards and flyers. It was a Mexican lawyer who came up with that idea and there is little doubt when the bill board and flyers were posted on the local forums the end game was about to play out for Jon and Judy Harris. I as was most of the community was completely oblivious to the premeditated sociopathic soap opera that Jon had perpetuated since he moved to San Carlos 5 years ago. The community of San Carlos has three main players that should be thanked for getting rid of Jon and Judy. Susan Sarnoski, the owner of the unit were Shots was, Fern Brucker, the VP of the Marina Condo HOA, and Bill Dill, the owner of the condo Jon and Judy were renting. 

It was around the 10th of October that Susan had contacted me about her problems with Harris. She directed me to a simple yet concise web site http://jonjudyharris.com/ were there was a plethora of information on how Jon didn’t pay his bills in San Carlos.  There was also information on his past business dealings in Chandler Arizona.

Shots was always under the by laws of the Marina Condo HOA. It would appear they started to violate those by laws the moment they moved in and set up shop. As many of us remember well Shot’s used to be called Ruby’s Wine Bar. Shot’s was never supposed to be a night club. It was supposed to be a lounge in the same vein as Ruby’s Wine Bar, which meant mellow and low key, specifically because there are residential condos in the same complex. The HOA rules governing noise are strict. No loud noise after 10 on the weekdays and 11 on weekends. It would appear that Jon planned on having a night club right off the bat so the noise rules were violated immediately and with great frequency. 

“He is exactly 13 months behind in lease payments. He agreed to purchase my units for his bar but said it would be a lounge. Instead it’s a nightclub and the HOA is fining me 5000 pesos a DAY for noise violations. I’m close to $2M pesos owed, more than what I agreed to sell the bar for. When I asked Jon to move, he threatened me and refused.” Said Susan Sarnoski, the owner of the the local where Shots called home.

“They seemed like really nice people, they really schmoozed me over, I am 71 year’s old and I’ve never run into anyone like that”. That’s was the first sentence that flowed from Bill Dill, Jon and Judy’s landlord, when I spoke with him about his experience. “They were schmoozers ya”, Said Fern Brucker , who was at that time the Vice President of  the HOA at the Marina Condos were Jon and Judy lived and of course where Shots was located.  Fern remembered clearly what she believed was probably the first, in what would be a series of lies, Jon and Judy told her. 

“One of the funny stories when we first met them, they told us the story about how they had met in Arizona, had fallen in love and then came down here and had a marriage ceremony on the beach. Well they had already been together and she had been using the last name Harris for 10 years, it was a fabrication, of course, then we didn’t know about all of their shenanigans up in Chandler” said Fern. Bill then interjected, “It was a make believe marriage story.”

Bill had rented out his condo to Jon and Judy and Fern was the VP of the HOA.

Rules were Made to be broken

HOA rules in Mexico are hard to enforce. I have written extensively on the subject. “Three years ago just to go back we had our annual meeting we have these by laws and people agree to them and ignore them because they had no teeth. So at our annual meeting it was voted on to have a large penalty, $5000 pesos for each occasion, it wasn’t just for Jon it was for people coming in here with 15 people and partying all night and keeping everyone awake, but Jon, that didn’t stop him, we put the penalty’s on him and he never paid a cent” Said Fern.

When the fines didn’t work at reducing the noise levels the Marina San Carlos got involved. Many people will remember when the parking lot was closed off at night. This was a direct result of Shots not abiding by the 10 p.m. weekday and 11 p.m. weekend noise rules. I remember actually going there like everyone else and simply parking on the other side of the Marina Terra Hotel or parking over by Hammerheads and just walking the rest of the way.

The parking lot closure didn’t seem to help much so the next strategy to try and rein in Shots noise issues was to shut off the water. At the Marina Conndos the HOA is in charge of paying the water bills. No units in the complex had water meters and Shots water bill was a flat fee of 40 dollars a month. That fee was basically covered in their HOA monthly dues but when Jon expanded the kitchen and bar and added another bath room the HOA noticed a large spike in their monthly water consumption. So the HOA started the permitting to get a water meter for Shot’s. That took about 8 months and during that time Shots had no water. That didn’t stop Jon from operating though. Jon pulled off several stunts to stay open. He installed a tinaco and cut through the common wall that Shots shared with the SBPA book store “Altered Tails” and tapped into their water supply. His father also had a boat at the Dock right in front of Shots and on several occasions he would simply run a long hose from the Marina San Carlos dock to his tinaco. When the Marina got wind of this his father’s boat was ordered off the dock. After loosing the Marina San Carlos water option he went after another one of his neighbors. Jon hit up one of the owners of a small unit in the Plaza Azul, the small cut out section just west of Shots, and asked the owner if he could store some stuff in his unit. So the owner let Jon use his unit for storage of his tables.

“Jon just reconfigured the water and he changed the locks, when the owner came back he found out that Jon had told everyone he was renting or leasing the unit.” Said Fern Brucker.  Bill Dill interjected, “Somebody said he was running a hose from that unit.” After getting kicked out of the storage unit he was borrowing he was forced to pay a delivery truck for water. It would be 8 months before CEA would finish installing a meter and hooking him back up to the city supply. You got to hand it to him, he was certainly resourceful.

Then there was the grease extractor.  After expanding the kitchen, he installed a huge stainless steel grease extractor with an electric motor that was in complete violation of HOA rules. The owner of the condominium were the grease extractor came out of took Jon to court. It is unknown what became of that law suite but the HOA had had enough and dismantled the whole thing. John filed a law suit against Fern and Carina the property manager after the extractor was removed and returned to him. Fern remember the day clearly. “Well I was teaching a water aerobics class” said Fern, “and he is coming over yelling at me, I am gonna get it, you will find out Fern, my daddy has lots of money, that was always his thing, my daddy has lot’s of money and I’m going after you.”

Bill’s Story

Bill Dill had the unfortunate luck of renting out his Condo at the Marina San Carlos to Jon and Judy shortly after they arrived in San Carlos. They lived at his condo pretty much until the bitter end.

By the time it was all over Jon and Judy got off with two years of free rent and it took Bill about a year and around 50,000 pesos in total expenses to be rid of them. It was around the middle of December of 2019 that Jon and Judy mysteriously and with out notice simply vacated his condo. About 6 weeks before they left the condo Bill gave the HOA authorization to turn off Jon’s magnetic card that allowed them access to the Marina Condos and elevator. That didn’t deter Jon, he found someone to recode his access card.

When they “moved out” of his condo Bill was to find out quickly that Jon and Judy, while no longer living in his condo, were not quite out of his life or technically his Condo for that matter. It would soon make sense why Jon and Judy mysteriously left the condo without any fuss. By some odd quirk the manager of Shots, a man by the name of Jesus, moved in right after Jon and Judy moved out. Neither Fern nor Bill could immediately explain why Jesus moved in. When they told me the story it eventually dawned on me why. Only Jon and Jesus know what transpired between them but I imagine a scenario something like this. Jon has a long jaded history of stiffing people out of the money that he owes them. Jon most certainly owed Jesus money since he was the manager of Shots; so he says to Jesus; look, I am getting kicked out of my condo but why don’t you move in right after I move out, I will give you the magnetic key I reprogrammed and the key to the front door, and we can make the owner pay you to leave. As we all know in Mexico possession is 9/10ths of the law here right? They call that extortion in the U.S.A. Here in Mexico we call it business as usual. I have no idea if Jon discussed that with Jesus but that is exactly what Jesus and Jon tried to do to Bill. About a week after Jon vacated Bill’s condo, Bill went up to check on it and low and behold Jesus was living there. “They moved out and god be known, I went up there like a week later and their manager was living there. I knocked on the door, he came to the door and I said you got to move out and he said no Jon and Judy gave it to me. I said you gotta be kidding me, here is the Trust I own this condo it’s mine and he said I am calling the cops. So he called the cops and the cops came over there and I was outside and the cops told me if I didn’t leave they were going to through me in jail.” said Bill.

After that exchange Bill, wanting to done with this once and for all, offered to pay Jesus 40,000 pesos to vacate the condo. A few days later Jesus made a counter offer of 90,000 pesos to leave, at that point Bill refused to pay anything. Just a few days after Jesus’s counter offer Bill got a letter from Jon and Judy’s lawyer down in Obregon, insisting that Bill needed to pay them 200,000 pesos and they would give him the condo back. “I didn’t even answer, the message said you got 24 hours to answer this, I didn’t even answer” said Bill. Jesus was in the condo for about two weeks total, until Bill had the electricity cut off, which is no easy task.

To get the power cut off Bill was able to get the president of the HOA association to call in some favors from a contact he had over at the CFE in Hermosillo. Bill then had to pay off Jon’s bill, cancel his current contract and start a new one. He requested to CFE that since he was not using the condo that they cut the power to it. Jesus apparently lived there for at least a couple of days after the power was cut off until he finally gave up and left. It seems that Jesus and Jon either had poor communication skills between the two of them or perhaps they were not communicating at all. Who knows but clearly Jesus made a tactical mistake by not taking the money and running. Jesus could have walked away with 40,000 pesos. Did Jon convince Jesus they could extort way more than a measly 40 grand off of Bill? That only Jesus and Jon know but both were clearly wrong. The greedy con men walked away without cash in hand but Jon was still up two years free rent so he couldn’t complain to much. 

Susan’s Story

 Susan Sarnoski wishes she had simply typed Jon’s name into google before she signed the contract’s to rent and eventually sell her locals to Harris. If she had known about his combative past before hand she might have had second thoughts about dealing with Jon. When it became clear to her that Jon was jerking her around she filed a law suit against him and hired a private detective agency to do a background check. The two reports she shared with me consist of 36 megabytes and 274 pages of Jon Harris defending himself from multiple lawsuits. Going back over a decade. The PI report chronicals 16 civil cases and 6 bankruptcies, all in the state of Arizona with hundreds of thousands of dollars in money’s owed. Jon has quite a history of litigation behind him.  

The full open letter that Susan produced chronicling her sojourn with Jon and Judy Harris can be found at this link, but I will share one paragraph from it which is quite telling.

“With Jon’s claims of bar experience, a contract was signed and Jon and Judy said they would be updating the interior and opening a business called “Secret Society Marina Lounge”.  Instead, unknown to me, Jon and Judy changed the plan and it became Shots Bar and Restaurant; a nightclub with a DJ, bottle service and huge speakers, open until 3am.” Said Susan.

Jon also has a habit of threatening people that call him out for not paying his bills. Another excerpt from her letter. “When he stopped paying the agreed upon payments, I approached him only to have him become verbally abusive, vulgar and insulting. He also lied to me about his “problems”. He threatened not only to sue me but also to harm me if I tried to evict him. As of this writing, I hired an attorney in May of 2018 and filed a lawsuit for contract cancellation and tenant eviction.” Susan told me that Jon never contested that lawsuit.

She also added that, “We signed the original rental contract for one commercial space in October 2014. They paid rent regularly for 2 years. They signed a purchase contract for BOTH commercial units in October 2016. At the end of 2017 he was 8 payments behind. I hired a lawyer in spring 2018. So things immediately went south as soon as he made the expansion.”

Jon’s modus operandi never changed once he went, as I like to say, south of the border land of disorder. As a matter of fact, Mexico was made for people like Jon. Weak rule of law, easily bribed police and judges, and a judicial system that was designed to work for the betterment of the criminal than the honest business person. All that added up to a wonderful place to live for likes of Jon and Judy Harris.

But all good things do come to an end and eventually Jon made a huge tactical mistake. His Achilles heal would be the same thing that got Bill Dill’s condo back. La Comisión Federal de Electricidad, aka the CFE, aka the Electric Company. The moral of the story here is don’t fuck with your electrical meter. By 2019 Susan eventually realized that Jon had tampered with the electrical meters at Shots. Susan had two units and two separate contracts with CFE. She believes that sometime around may of 2018 Jon removed one of the meters and wired both units to run off of one meter. This was a huge mistake on Jon’s part. Now all Susan had to do was convince the CFE to do an inspection of the meters. Seems simple right? Well it wasn’t that simple.

Before Susan knew that the meter had been tampered with she approached the CFE and tried to cancel her contract and thus have the electricity turned off. The CFE said that if she cancelled the contract they would immediately issue a new one in Jon’s name. There is a law that protects residents and businesses from being easily shut off but clearly the law can also protect the shysters as well. As long as there is an operational business or an occupied residence the CFE will not turn off the power. Unless of course the bill had not been paid. And that was a key issue for Shots. Jon was behind on his electric bills. By filling an extension with the CFE you can buy two weeks of time before they finally cut you off. By the end of October Susan received authorization for a partial disconnect of Shots electricity and by late November in order to end the nightmare that was Jon Harris she had to pay the balance owed.

“I had to pay the balance owed. At the end of November it was 30,000 pesos. On December 18th it was 10,000 pesos. I elected to wait. I already owed CFE another 25,000 pesos for the missing meter. I went back to CFE multiple times and they finally agreed to fix the wiring completely and restore my two meters back to my name and discontinue service permanently on December 18th. Actually I met with CFE on December 18th and they performed the disconnect on December 19th.” Said Susan.

If Jon had not removed one of her meters and wired both units to the meter that remained,  and kept up with his electric bill he might still be in business to this day. 

If I were writing this article for a publication in print I would be forced to call up the owner of Shots and give him his chance to tell his story. Luckily for me Susan shared with me several of Jon’s text messages to her. So Jon in a sense gets to tell his story without me having to interview him. The following then are a series of text messages that Jon sent to Susan. Some just before she cut off his electricity. In this series of messages it is clear that Jon plays the martyr with great zeal. Jon didn’t leave town though with out creating enemies and on at least one occasion he was actually a victim. On the 11th of September the tires on Judy’s Toyota Forerunner were slashed. The vehicle was parked on the Marina Terra side of the complex and as usual, as can be seen by the screen shot, Jon blames everyone else for all of his woes. Did Jon stiff an ex employee or a vendor? Only Jon knows who wished him ill but I suspect the list is very long indeed.

According to Jon there is no
problem with not paying his rent

Speaking of slashed tires Fern told me this at the end of our interview. “I think he is a psycopath, I wouldn’t be surprised if my tires got slashed, I worried about that, when his electricity was turned off a few weeks ago, I was walking my dog in front and Jon comes out, he is screaming at me, you think you beat me , I am gong to beat you, you will find out…. your gonna be sorry, that was just two weeks ago. Part of this whole thing is because he just threatens to sue everybody or he does sue people, he is suing our HOA now.”

Jon’s Story

This text message was sent to Susan in Febuary of 2019. Jon is telling her that he has paid all the HOA fees. Susan maintains that he was over a year late by the time he texted her.

“I would appreciate a call from you to talk calmly about the situation. They are not telling you the truths of the situation and are trying to use you to destroy Judy and I. We have been paying all HOA fees even they admitted that they missed payments in their accounting. We offered to pay an agreed amount on the fines, but it must be stipulated that the fine system making us close at 10 during the week and 11 during the weekend would be removed. We have a very good attny for the last 6 months and also a researcher for finding facts of law.  Please give us a call.”

This text from Jon is from Feb. 2019
he was over a year delinquent in HOA fees

This message is from October 2019. In the first message Susan was outside the bar talking about how she would lock it up.

“My wife and I are not your enemy. The enemy is cause and effect, the HOA and KiKi. It is what happened to Shots to stop us from doing business. I know you understand what has happened that has created the problem.  Stop what you are about to do. We need to work together to win. Please come and talk to us, what you are trying to do is criminal.  We have you on Video and Audio.”

Jon was over a year delinquent in his payments, Susan’s
fines from the HOA are over 1 million pesos by this time for his noise violations
Flyers that were placed on
Vehicles in the parking lot by Shots

These texts are when Jon saw the traveling bill board and flyers advertising that he didn’t pay his bills. It is also interesting to note that he claims his grease extractor was stolen. It was dismantled and given back to him, yet Jon is the victim in the scenario that he paints.

The beginning of the end
Jon & Judy’s traveling billboard
Susan was not sure what the hand cuff incident is about, immigration perhaps?

“I’m not running,,, I’m not quiting,, we will never quit… we had machine gun fire on Friday in the parking lot,,, we did not quit… we had our water shut off for over a year,,, we did not quit.. we had our furniture removed,, we did not quit,, we still have no parking and we did not quit.. my car was taken , our exhaust system for our kitchen stolen and now our life’s are being threatened. We will not quit.

And they tried to deport us five times one of them where they hang cuffed my wife and we did not quit.. and of course all the liqour fines that cost us over 300000. That were totally illegal and fake.”

The Moral of our story: be ever vigilant

I have seen this happen before here in San Carlos. In the food industry as well as other business’s like real estate and actually dive shops. Con men come and con men go. What is relatively fresh in my mind was the fiasco at the Marina Cantina. When the founders of Marina Cantina sold the business the buyer eventually rented it out. Almost exactly the same scenario as Shots. The new couple that leased Marina Cantina suffered bad timing and were operating around the 2009 economic crash. I remember those years well because everyone in San Carlos was hurting. In retrospect I think I should have left San Carlos because those were very lean years indeed. But many businesses toughed it out and many went under. Marina Cantina went under and as they did they stopped paying their fees to the owner but kept running the business, just like Shots. The final blow was the electricity. The owner was able to get the power cut and that was the end of the Marina Cantina.

The lesson to be learned here is to take a seriously close look at who you are leasing your property or business to. Check out thoroughly who ever you are thinking about taking on as partner. Are you going to invest money with someone that you don’t know very well simply based on the fact that they seem like nice people? Use the internet and type in the names. You will be surprised what you find. Do the due diligence or you might just be paying through the nose. Several of the con men that have come through this town were easily searchable online.

If you are renting a local or property, no matter what kind of contract you have with your renters under no circumstances should you allow the renters to put any utilities in their name. And many renters will demand that. I would also make sure that the CFE meter that is installed at the rental property have a new “Intelligent Meter”. This is the kind of meter that you read yourself. You put a readable card on top of the meter, then take the card to CFE in Guaymas Norte and then you pay. You then take the card back to your meter and the meter will read the card and apply the payment. Do not allow your renters to have access to this card. That means you are responsible for paying the electric bill. Put that in the rental contract agreement. You pay the bill. If they become delinquent on their payments then you are not going to pay the electric bill.

Protect yourself because in Mexico the judicial system is weak and corrupt. Labor laws are designed to protect the employee more than the employer. Make sure you have paid your IMSS fees on all of your employees and make sure they sign their labor agreements. Check out your partners and research them well. San Carlos can be a great place to live and do business in , but it can, if you are not careful, become a “South of the Border Land of Disorder” nightmare!

9 Responses to Shots goes down in flames

  1. Great article.

    We are landlords in the states (used to be in Mexico), and much of the advice you give regarding checking prospective tenants applies there as well.

    Google search all of these for prospective tenants before renting:

    1. Names and all variations thereof.
    2. Past residential addresses (much easier in the USA)
    3. US PACER system for bankruptcies and federal lawsuits (you’d be surprised at how many people have been in federal trouble)
    4. Local court records for all past addresses (sometimes free, sometimes pay). If someone fights every single traffic citation they received, they won’t be good tenants. If they have *any* unlawful detainers (evictions), don’t rent.
    5. All e-mail addresses
    6. All phone numbers
    7. All past business names
    8. US Sex Offender databases
    9. Credit check
    10. Contact past landlords

    Pain the butt and sometimes a bit of an expenditure of money, yes, but can save you from problems.

  2. Interesting info True Blue, at least in the states you can get people evicted, here it is so much more important it seems to be very vigilant indeed! Thanks for the comments, you to Umberto!!!!

  3. This is probably the most one sided, biased “article” I have ever read. Also, do you have spell check?

  4. It’s an opinion piece, the guy is clearly a con man, 16 civil suits and 6 bankruptcies….i suspect your a troll but certainly entitled to your opinion, as i am on my blog, you are more than welcome to challenge any of the statements made by those who were interviewed. I seriously doubt they were all bullshiting, it is clear who the bullshiter is in all this.

  5. *It’s You’re as in “you are a troll”

    I am simply stating that if *you’re going to post a very thorough article as such at least “interview” Jon and retrieve a statement from him. Whether you like what he’s has to say or not, he deserves to have his side of the story.

  6. I think his text messages pretty much stated clearly what his point of view is. After that, it’s simply a question of what he said and they said….. What they said is far more credible than what he said. If I were printing this in a newspaper and getting paid to write it, I would have had to have interviewed him but this is just for my blog. the whole point of writing this article was the make people seriously think about what it’s like to do business in this country it’s not easy and it’s actually far easier for people like Jon to use the weak judicial system to jerk people around…. Which is exactly what he did.

  7. KJ I dictate into my phone when I post comments……You’re often becomes your when you do that…….but on a different note, and I am typing this comment now, not dictating into my phone. I don’t give a shit about double checking my spelling or grammar. I do give a shit about informing people of what goes on here. And clearly your a bit on the anal side and I still think your a troll!!! Purposely spelled wrong to annoy you!! LOL…..

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