NBC's exclusive Colorama neighborhood
you can find Obama's and Ivanka,
but the biggest home belongs to a Bezos.
See Amazon embassy. In fact,
I think he's about to take over
this whole section of the city. It
may soon be the most famous DC
residents not named the White
House. Jeff Bezos paid 23 million
bucks for the old textile museum on South St
in northwest and promptly launched
a $12 million renovation.
To transform the museum into
his own private residence,
you're entering Citizen
Kane, level of cavernous size.
We got our hands
on all the blueprints and
permits filed with the city.
The 34,000 square foot mansion
includes eleven enormous bedrooms,
one grand ballroom.
There's a wine cellar,
a whisky tasting room,
even a movie theater.
Oh yeah, and 1006 light
fixtures turn the lights in the
living room on you guys.
Ever deliver Amazon boxes here?
Yeah, of course. Yeah,
you know who lives here?
The neighborhood's newest
power player, no secret,
his massive restoration hard to miss,
especially all those contractors
lining the street every day,
and we noticed many of those
vehicles were often parked illegally.
So we gathered up all the records
on every single parking ticket
handed out along this stretch of St.
Between October 2016,
when Bezos bought the mansion and October
2019 over that three year period,
we added up a whopping 16,000.
$840 worth of parking tickets.
535 citations in all 93 of them
handed out in a single month.
That's about 3 parking tickets
every day during that stretch,
and they were often for things
that could have caused a real
headache for people around here.
In addition to ignoring no
parking signs or parking in spots
reserved for residents,
we found tickets issued for
vehicles blocking crosswalks and
obstructing the path of pedestrians.
I
spoke with two different
contractors who confirmed to me.
They did work here at the Bezos home,
and they told me anybody hired to
be part of this renovation had to
sign a non-disclosure agreement.
So matching up every parking ticket
written out here to a specific
vehicle tide to the Bezos project
would be next to impossible.
But day after day,
we watched as workers left this
Bezos mansion and walked straight
out to their ticketed vehicles
like this van for an upscale home
electrical design company doing
work on the home records show.
At one point, it got 14 parking tickets.
In just three weeks then
there was this contractor.
He's behind that green van right
there and he's just chatting
on the phone during a break.
His parking ticket and his vehicle
staying right where he illegally left it.
By the way, that's his coworker
parked right behind him also
illegally also ticketed.
So we wondered who's paying all these fines?
Just curious, who pays
all the tickets? Is
that your company or is that Jeff Bezos
the worker not touching that question,
but a fair one to ask since we ran every
ticket we found through the DMV's website
and discovered more than $5600 worth of
the parking fines remain unpaid, some of
those unpaid tickets dating back years.
That is until we got involved.
We sent a list of every single parking
ticket we found to a source close
to the Basous construction project.
That source.
Responding this way quote from
the start of the project,
the general contractor worked to
mitigate the parking challenges in
the area by setting up offsite parking
and shuttles to and from the site.
He added the thousands of dollars
in unpaid fines we uncovered have
now been addressed.
All the outstanding tickets
in question have been paid.
The source told us.
Then again, as Ben Wofford,
a writer for the Washingtonian,
who's been covering the construction
points out with the renovation.
This expensive, unpaid parking tickets.
Likely aren't costing Jeff Bezos much sleep.
I would be surprised
if it even registered as a
line item on the, you know,
on the final inventory, the money
might not matter much to one
of the world's richest men,
but the parking problems have
put the squeeze on neighbors
forced to put up their own.
No parking signs, records show occasionally,
some even called the city to complain.
None of them agreed to speak
on the record for this report.
Perhaps in an effort not to alienate
their powerful new neighbor who was.
In town recently to inspect his new digs, you
know it looked like a Red Cross
relief zone more than a renovation.
I mean there were trucks idling,
cars moving in and out,
people hurling boxes like they were
putting out a fire on the Prairie. DC's
newest power player about to move in.
Just hope he can find somewhere to park.