LONG KEY -- Garabet Khatchikian sits on an antique chair in the Long Key home that used to be marketed on the Internet as Ocean Paradise Villa. But for the 63-year-old former mechanic, this six-bedroom mansion that he built with his wife in 1992 is paradise no more.

"I love this house," he says. "But I must sell it to survive."

It's been about nine months since Khatchikian was finally allowed to get back into his nearly 12,000-square-foot oceanfront home after a court battle with tenant Marcia Turner-Workman that dragged on for half a decade and, he says, left him all but broke.

It's also been four months since Turner pled guilty to nine counts of larceny for conning unwitting tourists into renting the mile marker 65.8 home, even though it was padlocked under court order. She's serving 15 years of probation and has been ordered to make restitution of $64,000 to the victims.

To look at the house now, it is easy to see why vacationers might have been willing to pay the $8,000 a week that Turner-Workman, 46, along with husband Denny Workman, were charging during the years they listed it as a vacation home.

On the backside of the property the Atlantic Ocean melds into a private beach, and from there into a pool, replete with swim-up bar.

Inside, the main level is elegant almost to a fault in the laid-back Keys -- its granite floor giving way to a wall studded with classical paintings that evoke the Old World.

From an alcove off the kitchen, an elevator shaft leads upstairs to the master bedroom, where a massive Jacuzzi provides views over palm trees and out to sea. And down in the basement is a billiard and poker room suited to the types of lively gatherings that Khatchikian says he and late wife Mary Jane, who died of cancer in 1999, enjoyed so much.

"This was my wife's dream house," Khatchikian says in a thick accent that betrays his Lebanese-Armenian heritage. "That's why I built it."

But for at least the past several years, the would-be holiday makers who passed all that money along to Turner-Workman never saw the place like this.

Turner-Workman leased the home from Khatchikian in 2000 with an option to buy and began renting it out as a vacation home. By 2004 the condition of the home was bad enough to prompt one renter, a former Jacksonville policeman named Ross Weeks who spent some $7,075 on the home, to report his case to the Monroe County Sheriff's Office.

Authorities took no action then. But after a still-unsolved September 2006 break-in and ransacking left the home trashed, Monroe County Code Enforcement deemed it uninhabitable. The following April the house was padlocked under court order.

Still, as detailed in Free Press articles dating back to 2007, Turner-Workman, with the assistance of her husband and a caretaker named Steve Huffman, kept marketing and taking deposits on the home. One Oregon family paid $9,900 for a family vacation in December 2007 and never got its deposit back. A family from Iowa paid a $2,100 deposit then had to find an alternative accommodation after showing up at the Ocean Paradise Villa in January 2008.

While Turner-Workman kept the scam going, she also was embroiled in a series of lawsuits with Khatchikian. On the one hand, she accused the homeowner of violating their lease by not selling the house to her for $1.5 million as required under the option portion of their contract. Conversely, Khatchikian attempted to evict Turner-Workman for accruing 19 code violations between 2003 and 2007.

In January of this year the court finally went through with the eviction. A trial on Khatchikian's suit for damages is scheduled for Dec. 7.

When he was able to get back into the home after the January ruling, Khatchikian found it in such disrepair that he was forced to undertake what turned out to be a five-month rehabilitation job costing $230,000, he said. Khatchikian's legal fees on the court battle have amounted to nearly $900,000, he added. Merely maintaining the large oceanfront home is a five-figure proposition each month.

It's all money that Khatchikian says he doesn't have anymore, forcing him to tap into the generosity of friends because the banks don't consider him worthy of a loan.

Under the circumstances, the canvas paintings, the granite staircase, the beach, the pool bar, the billiards table, the Jacuzzi -- even the view -- offer Khatchikian little comfort. He's listed the house for $2.9 million, furnishings included, and expects he'd accept a lot less. It would take $1.8 million for Khatchikian to be out of hock, he said.

As he sits on that antique chair, with a warm sea breeze washing through the European-styled great room, Khatchikian says that not even Turner-Workman's guilty plea brings him satisfaction.

"I don't feel good because these people, they stole my dignity, they lied to me," he says.

rsilk@keysnews.com