In Ed Koch’s City Money Talks and Tenants Walk
New York City will lead the fight for new housing … we won’t rest until the housing we so desperately need is built.
— Edward I. Koch, Inaugural Address, January 1, 1986
Amid the opulent glut of midtown’s overdevelopment, hundreds of people step around a human form under a blanket, and keep on walking. An acquaintance buys the early edition of the Times and reads the obits first in a desperately cynical attempt to find a vacant apartment in Manhattan. In Chelsea, a goon squad of addicts invades a building to frighten some elderly tenants into leaving so the landlord can own an empty building on the frontier of gentrification. In Brooklyn Heights, a shopkeeper has tears in her eyes because she can’t pay a 500 per cent rent increase for a new commercial lease. In Morningside Heights, an elderly black woman recalls her eviction by a powerful and tax-exempt institution of “higher education.” A Hispanic woman and her two children put their name on the list for public housing at the Housing Authority’s main office on lower Broadway. She is told there are 208,000 names ahead of her. She can expect an apartment in 35 years.
Meanwhile, Mayor Koch’s 1985 campaign promise to build 20,000 units of affordable housing is already violated, with few plans to help the neediest. After insisting last January that city land should be used for low-cost housing. Koch is selling the largest and choicest piece of city-owned turf — 200 vacant beachfront acres in the Arverne section of Queens — to megadevelopers for luxury high rises, as his aides make excuses about why a development like Brooklyn’s Nehemiah Project — under which 1000 row houses have been built for working people — can’t be duplicated on this site.
An analysis of campaign records shows that nine of the 15 biggest contributors to Mayor Koch, Comptroller Harrison Goldin, and City Council President Andrew Stein were developers or landlords. While the apartment vacancy rate is 2 percent, Koch insists there’s nothing that can be done about the tens of thousands of empty apartments being warehoused by property owners. For them, the best building is an empty building, and fires, accidental or otherwise, are often cause for jubilation. They piously tell judges it would cost too much to repair them, while planning luxury residences in their stead.
In Ed Koch’s New York, money talks and tenants walk. Greed, not need, controls land use. The crisis of shelter is more acute today than it was 90 years ago when the great journalist/photographer Jacob Riis was completing the last chapter of How the Other Half Lives. The venal dialectic of the “free market” of subsidized developers combines with absurd government policy to victimize New York renters. It is in this atmosphere that we once again offer our annual objective correlative of the housing jungle’s survival of the fittest: our bestiary of the 10 Worst Landlords of 1987.
Not all landlords are bad; many are decent and caring. These individuals represent a cross-section of avarice. Some, whose buildings may not be the most horrible, have developed highly sophisticated devices to harass their tenants; others regularly impose barbarism and brutality upon the least protected members of our society.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY has earned the top spot on this year’s list. The city’s third biggest landlord — behind only the city itself and the Catholic Church — Columbia is a wolf in sheepskin clothing, a tax-exempt evictor. Wrapped in the garb of academic enlightenment, it is one of the largest displacers of people in New York City. Columbia’s arrogance has led it into tumultuous real estate confrontations with its con1n1unity.
Columbia’s assault on the multiethnic, largely working-class neighborhood of Morningside Heights, on the edge of Harlem, has continued almost unabated for over 30 years. In the 1960s, the university devoured whole blocks of apartment buildings, then emptied them for its own purposes. Marie Runyon, a 71-year-old veteran housing advocate and former assembly member, still lives in a building Columbia has all but destroyed. She remembers a brutally simple sign hung, at that time in the lobby of a building on West 122nd Street, which the Columbia College of Pharmacy had bought. “MOVE,” the sign said, “This building is coming down … ”
Between 1960 and 1983, an estimated 15,000 tenants were displaced in Columbia’s rapacious drive toward its Manifest Destiny. After the university’s bitter confrontations with students and residents in 1968 — precipitated by plans to seize a major chunk of Morningside Park for a students-only gymnasium — it briefly pulled in its horns. Columbia hired the respected architect I.M. Pei to come up with a plan on how it could meet its growing space needs and still live at peace with its neighbors.
Pei’s blunt response, after a year-long study, was the recommendation that Columbia construct a large residential building with a mix of students and community residents on its own land. The school, wrote Pei in his report, ”should buy back the good will it has squandered.” Pei’s plan was quickly shelved and ignored. A couple of years later, Columbia president William McGill acknowledged that the school’s trustees had employed Pei only ”to try and … relieve community pressure.” (Incredibly, in the wake of housing protests this spring over its latest evictions, Columbia is trying the same gambit again. “We’re meeting with local leaders,” and are sensitive to community concerns,” said Columbia spokesman Fred Knubel. He said a new student/community housing project is on the agenda.)
By the 1980s, Columbia was the owner of 49 per cent of the nongovernment subsidized housing in Morningside Heights, with some 6260 apartments. And its heavy-handed manner had not changed. Columbia bought and emptied over 20 SRO hotels, a vital housing resource for the elderly and the infirm in its community. McGill publicly described SRO hotels as “the enemy.” In 1982, Columbia bought an SRO at 600 West 113th Street from one of the city’s worst harassers, Jerry Warski (a Voice Worst Landlord in 1984). Wartski’s manager told West Side assemblyman Ed Sullivan, a sharp critic of the school, that the hotel was being emptied to pave the way for Columbia’s purchase. After its purchase, Columbia tried to finish that job itself. In 1985, a former director of the Mayor’s Office of SRO Housing told Annette Fuentes of City Limits that Columbia was ”no better than the worst” SRO operators.
When Michael Sovern took over from McGill in 1982, he said Columbia’s days of SRO purchases were over. But when West Side real estate tycoon Lew Futterman offered to sell the school the 400-unit Carlton Hotel at 362 Riverside Drive, which he had succeeded in emptying of all but 28 residents, Sovern, in his own words, ”jumped at the chance.” A year later, Columbia was sued by the city for ignoring 150 housing code violations at the hotel and fined $4000. When a housing-rights coalition urged Sovern to set aside at least 20 per cent of the rooms for community people, Sovern refused, saying, ”the principle [of the proposal] eludes me.”
Columbia employed the same refuge as other scoundrel landlords when confronted with major fire damage to a building it owns at 579 Riverside Drive (see Mordy Sohn and Peter Pantelidis). Instead of repairing the building, Columbia saw an opportunity to house more students. Rather than seal the damaged roof and begin repairs, Columbia left the building open to the elements. Residents who were full-time affiliates of the school were rehoused. Others — some of whom had lived there for more than 30 years — were locked out and ignored. Columbia’s lawyers argued in court that the cost of repairs would be “confiscatory.” The school wasn’t really saying that it couldn’t afford the repairs, but that it shouldn’t be forced to make them on behalf of tenants it didn’t want. Former tenants went through a year of such havoc that one of them, novelist Lvnne Sharon Schwartz, was prompted to write a book — We’re Talking About Home — describing their travails.
This year Columbia again tightened the screws on its housing, targeting not only tenants unassociated with the university but some Columbia employees as well. It even evicted Suzana Acosta-Jaafar — a full-time employee in the school’s fiscal office — on the grounds that her
apartment had originally been leased to her brother. Acosta’s other failure was that she wasn’t an employee of enough standing to receive housing (affiliation rules, which are curiously vague, were redefined to include only those at grade 14 or above). Sixty-nine other tenants were put on the eviction list. When marshals came to evict Acosta, 46 students and community residents were arrested.
Challenged by critics on and off campus, Columbia resorted to a dissembling worthy of Admiral Poindexter. Kenny Schaeffer, a tireless tenant attorney and aide to Assemblyman Sullivan, produced a list from the school’s real estate billing office showing 700 apartments being warehoused at the time Acosta was evicted. Columbia real estate director Bill Scott, with no apparent embarrassment, called the university’s list “garbage,” insisting there were no more than 205 vacant units, all awaiting rehabilitation or student occupancy in the fall. Columbia’s credibility dropped even lower when former real estate director Daniel Rosenblatt told New York magazine that university “politics” sometimes dictated who was allowed to stay and who wasn’t.
Columbia can’t claim it’s underfunded. The university has an estimated $1.5 billion endowment. Last year it sold its land holdings in Rockefeller Center for $400 million. Its Board of Trustees boasts some of the most prominent names in the city’s Permanent Government: New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Rolls Royce chairman Samuel Higginbottom, developer Jerry Speyer, and Macy’s vice president G. G. Michelson. Columbia, says urban geography professor Neil Smith, isn’t really a university at all but “a multinational financial corporation.” Smith says that while Columbia’s nonprofit status entitles it to tax exemption on most properties, it earns a profit of $2 million a year on its housing.
Like most rich bullies, Columbia relies on well-placed friends to assure its continued dominance. It pressured the city to turn over park land for its abortive gymnasium plan in 1968. Two years later, when then-president Grayson Kirk objected to a city proposal to build 1000 badly needed low- and moderate-income apartments west of Broadway, he got the project spiked. In the late 1970s, Columbia persuaded the city planning commission not only to grant it a zoning variance for a mammoth new dorm but to exempt it from public review as well. (In a slap at the local community board, which McGill said at the time would’ve been sure to oppose the dorm, Columbia offered a closet-sized room in the new building as “community space.” Insulted, the board rejected the offer. Sure enough, Columbia used it as a storage closet.)
Two years ago, a bill introduced by Assemblyman Sullivan to protect residents with big nonprofit landlords like Columbia passed the assembly. Tenant lobbyists say Sovern and NYU’s John Brademas called Senate Majority Leader Warren Anderson to stop the bill cold.
Despite Sovern’s contentious relationship with his neighbors, he has garnered widespread prestige; he was chosen as head of Governor Cuomo’s panel on governmental integrity last year. But no appointment was ever as shamefully counterfeit as Mayor Ed Koch’s placing Sovern on his Advisory Task Force on the Homeless in 1986. Sovern himself has three homes: the President’s House on campus, a subleased Columbia apartment at 435 Riverside Drive, and a luxury pad at Madison Avenue and 64th Street.
Severn’s most recent legal action was petty and retaliatory. This spring, the university filed a $300,000 lawsuit against Kenny Schaeffer and attorney C. Vernon Mason, who helped expose another of Columbia’s shames: the racism on its campus. (With their school making war on poor minorities in the neighborhood, Columbia students have had a good teacher.)
Sovern seems bent on carrying out an agenda described by his predecessor, William McGill, who said in 1980 that he was opposed to “SROs, bars — especially sleazy ones — and fast food joints. I don’t want people like that here. The people here aspire to the typical services that are available in the East 80s.” As noted Columbia planning professor Peter Marcuse sees it, McGill’s plan — with Sovern now at the helm — is succeeding. “This neighborhood is increasingly homogenized,” says Marcuse. “What was once a racially and economically integrated area just isn’t that way anymore.” Kenny Schaeffer says simply: “Columbia is turning a neighborhood into a dormitory.”
Through such behavior, Columbia has graduated into the upper echelon of the city’s real estate thugs.
JULIUS AUSCH tries to cloak his malevolence with the Bible. While the residents of 146 East 35th Street were barraged last winter by burglaries, thugs, heatless days, and a series of vicious pranks, Ausch sat in a dark and vacant ground-floor apartment thumbing through holy scriptures. Ausch may read the Bible, but Jaws is his text. Tenants say that when they entered the lobby of the five-story brick building, on an otherwise fashionable Murray Hill block, Ausch would spring from his chair and roar, “No more new leases for you. I own this building and I want it for myself!”
Ausch purchased the 20-unit building in 1985 for $485,000, and promptly filed with the state to have it removed from rent regulation so he could construct a 10-story high rise in its place. Tenants say he ignored massive leaks caused by Hurricane Gloria that September. That winter, they suffered through 45 days without heat and hot water. Winnie Beechan, a 62-year-old long-time resident whom tenants recall as spry and active, broke her hip while struggling with an electric heater to ward off the cold. Pneumonia set in, and she died. “There wasn’t any reason for Mrs. Beechan to die,” says tenant Vernon Dinkel.
In February, the first of three Con Ed shut-off notices arrived because Ausch had failed to pay the bills. Some tenants moved out that first bitter winter, but those who remained organized a rent strike. In response, Ausch hired as manager Harry Fotopoulos, a gun-toting Washington Heights harasser who made the Voice‘s Worst Landlord list in 1981. Fotopoulos went around banging loudly on apartment doors and demanding to be let in. Wary tenants wisely refused. Ausch left the building’s front door lock broken, and vagrants started using the halls as a crash pad and urinal. A rash of break-ins began plaguing residents. One tenant found garbage — from the same bag he had disposed of downstairs earlier that day — strewn over his bed and the electrical cords on all his appliances severed.
Ausch installed his own tenants in some of the vacant units, renting an apartment to two young barmaids from a Times Square tavern. The teenage women played music loudly enough to annoy tenants three floors below. When they came home from work at 4 a.m., they jumped up and down on the floor, making it obvious to the alarmed neighbor below that more than a party was going on. After repeated confrontations, the women acknowledged that they were acting on Ausch’s instructions. Ultimately, they agreed to tape a phone conversation with Ausch — which tenants later provided to the district attorney — during which the landlord apparently described his role to one of them, a woman named Ria:
Ausch: She’s [ the downstairs neighbor] stop from bothering you?
Ria: … she doesn’t bother me. I’m the one who bothers her, remember?
Ausch: Yes, yes. I’ll make sure she stops …. Did you make some noise last night?
Ria: Yeah.
Ausch: … Can you make some more noise tonight?
Ria: Okay, just a little, though, cause I’m gonna go to bed.
Ausch: A half-hour. Jump around. Up and down.
Ausch told the beleaguered downstairs neighbor: “Something horrible is going to happen to you before the end of the week. The girls’ boyfriends are angry at you. They’ll be the ones that did it.”
On two occasions several tenants found their locks filled with super-bonding glue. They walked into the hallway one morning and gagged on fumes that stung their eyes as well. Police, responding to their call, recognized the spray as Chemical Mace.
Throughout 1986, tenants and their attorney, Nicolas Rozos, fought legal battles with Ausch in housing court — where he was ordered to make repairs — and at the state housing division. Then, on February 13, 1987, Dina Ludavico, who had recently foiled an eviction attempt, was assaulted and beaten by two men hiding in a vacant apartment. The men took none of the jewelry she wore, but shouted at her, “Move! Move! Move!” Shortly after the incident, Ludavico did just that.
Last month, Ausch told us he had sold the building and had nothing to do with it anymore. He was lying. Having failed to make a single mortgage payment since his purchase, he was being foreclosed upon. He refused to discuss an earlier run-in with the law in New Jersey in 1981. There, Ausch and a brother, Naftali, owned a building in which they ran a state-sponsored shelter. After the state closed it for multiple health and building violations, the Auschs doubled their insurance coverage. Two months later the building burned down. The Auschs weren’t charged with arson, but the state appellate court ruled the insurer did not have to pay.
Ausch has been accompanied to court on the East 35th Street building by another relative, Yitzchok Ausch, who was convicted in 1986 of harassing tenants in a Borough Park building and fined $24,000. Yitzchok Ausch tried to use local political clout in that case by getting state assemblyman Dov Hikind to write a letter on his behalf. “I have known Yitzchok Ausch for over 10 years, and he is an outstanding and respected member of my community,” wrote Hikind of the landlord who was convicted of using verbal abuse and intimidation against his tenants.
KAYVAN and KAMRAN HAKIM have some 80 Manhattan buildings in their family’s real estate stable, many of them on fancy Upper East Side blocks. But don’t judge a Hakim building by its address; the Hakims visit plagues upon the privileged.
A couple of months ago, while Albert Hakim was giving TV testimony before the Iran-scam committees, one of Kayvan Hakim’s tenants worked up the nerve to ask him if he was related to the arms merchant. “I take the Fifth,” replied Hakim. But a Hakim spokeswoman acknowledged that they’re related. Like Albert, the Hakim brothers emigrated from Iran in the late 1960s. While Albert deals guns to outlaw nations, Kamran and Kayvan attack buildings the way the contras go after peasant cooperatives.
The city brought cases against the Hakims in six of their properties this past winter for failure to provide heat and hot water. Kamran Hakim was fined $1350. But the last three remaining residents of 30 East 92nd Street, a once-posh brownstone off Madison Avenue, tell the cruelest Hakim story. Once Kayvan Hakim had bought the 16-unit building, he filed an application to have it deregulated in order to demolish it. Hakim owns all the property down the block to Madison Avenue and around the corner (where he ousted Epstein’s stationery store, a neighborhood fixture for decades, by hiking the rent from $600 to $5000 a month). Kayvan offered each tenant up to $3000 to vacate their apartments. When they balked, he raised the stakes.
One tenant was evicted under the “personal use” provision of state law after Kayvan Hakim claimed he needed the apartment for his family. They never moved in. The apartment was later stripped of its fixtures by Hakim workers, and left unrepaired as leaks cascaded down the walls. Another tenant fled after gushers of black water spouted from the radiator and the Hakims refused to fix it. The front door to the building was left broken for over a year, and strangers entered constantly, sometimes sleeping in the lobby. Electricity was turned off in several apartments.
Esther Shaw, an 83-year-old lawyer who has lived in the building for 32 years, called Kayvan Hakim when the boiler malfunctioned and acrid smoke filled the halls. He told her he would “make no repairs — it’s inoperable.” Even a court order obtained by tenant attorney Robert Margulies failed to change the Hakims’ attitude: toilets stopped working because they wouldn’t buy new parts, leaks poured from holes in the roof down to the ground floor, and the heat and hot water all but disappeared.
The Hakims reduced the 13 vacant apartments, which had boasted all the trappings of turn-of-the-century East Side elegance, to rubble. Kavan Hakim told Margulies that if his clients wouldn’t cooperate, he would begin demolishing the building while they were still in it. A Hakim spokeswoman blamed the problems on the tenants, and said the building was too costly to operate as is.
The most diligent tenant resister at 30 East 92nd Street is Anita Menfi, a family therapist who has lived there for 15 years. After Menfi started fighting back, she found herself the target of surveillance and dirty tricks that would make Ollie North proud. Kayvan Hakim tried to evict her on the grounds that her apartment wasn’t her primary residence (currently, the landlord harassment tactic of choice across the city). After Menfi beat him in court, a series of strange incidents began. At the building where Menfi has her practice, two men told the doorman they were NYPD detectives investigating an accident involving her. They asked if Menfi lived there. When the doorman became suspicious and called Menfi, the men fled. Menfi’s sister-in-law, who lives in Boston, got a call from someone claiming to represent Citibank, asking for Menfi’s current address so that they could forward a closed account. Menfi has never banked at Citibank. The impersonator even tried to wheedle information from Menfi’s seven-year-old nephew about his “Aunt Anita’s apartment.”
The Hakim war of attrition continues at 30 East 92nd Street against Menfi, Shaw, and a third tenant, Judy Arpadi. But City Council member Carolyn Maloney helped expedite assistance and got the building’s boiler repaired, and city housing lawyers are now suing to force the Hakims to correct 50 violations. But the Hakims are keeping up the pressure. Last month Menfi got another eviction notice.
MAX GOLDBERG may become the first slumlord honest enough to invoke an insanity plea as his defense. When city lawyers questioned the 77-year-old Goldberg about how he calculatedly ousted 68 tenants from a West Side SRO, he stopped being able to understand English, lapsed into gibberish, and couldn’t recall the recent past. During a deposition, Goldberg got up and started taking off his clothes. Goldberg’s lawyers, from the high-powered firm of Finkelstein, Borah, Schwartz, Altschuler, and Goldstein, have sought to have a guardian appointed to take over his affairs, arguing that their client’s behavior was becoming “increasingly more bizarre.”
But city attorneys charge that in a separate case, Goldberg, along with eight others, was sane and savvy enough to have carried out a complicated four-year, $450,000 welfare check fraud, using homeless individuals as pawns. Goldberg and his common-law wife, Esther, were also apparently of sound mind when they told a reporter in November 1985 that they were willing to leave the SRO vacant and incur losses of $10,000 a month so they could sell or convert it.
Goldberg’s attack on tenants at the St. Clair Hotel at 69 West 38th Street is a classic case of SRO harassment. In early 1985, soon after the City Council ordered a ban on the alteration or demolition of SROs, the Goldbergs decided to use a neutron bomb strategy. By November of that year, 50 of the 69 residents had been driven out. Some had electricity turned off in their rooms, only one bathroom had hot water, and the elevator went out of order permanently. There were missing doors, broken windows, and debris was strewn throughout the halls. Longtime residents were summarily ordered by Goldberg and his manager, George Leguillero, to get out.
Tenant Robert Walker said in an affidavit that he returned from a three-week hospital stay on September 9, 1985, and was physically pushed out of the hotel by Max and Esther, who shouted, “We’re closing the building …. If you don’t get out, we’ll get the boys to get you.” When Walker went to retrieve his things, he found the door to his room nailed shut and his belongings stolen.
Leguillero forced Ira Burstein, a 33-year-old mentally ill man, out of the hotel. The disoriented Burstein spent the night on the street until his father found him and got the police to reinstate him in his room. A few days later, Burstein was again evicted. When tenant organizer Joanne Miceli, from the West Side SRO Legal Services Project, attempted to intervene on Burstein’s behalf, Esther Goldberg, according to Miceli’s affidavit, screamed at the father and son: “He’s an animal … he’s disgusting.”
Max Goldberg banged on Charles Harris’s door on the morning of October 15, 1985, handed him two shopping bags and told him, “Pack your stuff and go. Move out right away.”
Initially, housing court judge Ralph Waldo Sparks seemed willing to use the full clout of the law to force Goldberg to quit his terror campaign. He held Goldberg in contempt on November 2 and sentenced him to 30 days in the Bronx House of Detention. But Sparks balked at the next step — the appointment of a 7A administrator to take over management of the building. Bizarrely, Sparks declared that since so many city-owned buildings were in bad condition, the city had no business taking management away from a private owner. The city, said Sparks, “let the violations pile up on the building, and then they come along with a ploy pretending to do something about it.” Sparks removed legal services lawyer Saralee Evans from the case because, he insisted, her only interest was “to bring buildings up to standards,” not find residents a better place to live. He told New York Newsday reporter Sharman Stein that the St. Clair “ought to come down to the ground to be renovated.”
Conveniently, that was exactly what Goldberg’s attorney, Daniel Finkelstein, was arguing as well. When Sparks was later transferred to the Queens courts, Finkelstein moved to shift the ensuing trial to Queens. In his decision against Goldberg, Judge Lewis Friedman called those arguments “a litigation ploy.” Sparks left the bench in December 1986, and promptly went to work as an attorney for two other Worst Landlords, Peter Pantelidis and Julius Ausch. Sparks is now running for civil court in Brooklyn.
The tragedy of Max Goldberg is that although he is a concentration camp survivor, this didn’t stop him from abusing his tenants and physically pushing them into the streets.
Thanks to a timely stay by the appellate court, the St. Clair, over a year later, sits empty of all but one persistent and solitary tenant. Repeated attempts to reach Goldberg were unsuccessful.
PHILIP MOST is a double-dipper slumlord who loots tenants rights to decent housing as well as govcmment funds to provide it. Mot deprived his Brooklyn tenants of heat, hot water, and basic repairs while collecting regular rent increases. At the same time, he and two associates were running a highly profitable check-cashing scam for welfare recipients who weren’t tenants in his buildings. Most and two assistants, Robert Hoskins and Carol Valentin, pleaded guilty this April to one count of fraud against the U.S. government. For this crime, Most was sentenced to four years in federal prison on July 13. He will begin serving his sentence this month.
Most’s fraud operation involved buying “two-party” welfare checks (which require both tenant and landlord endorsement) from individuals who signed dummy leases with Most and his cohorts for nonexistent apartments. Most bought over 6000 government-issued checks this way, paying the recipients less than 10 cents on the dollar. He socked away $575,000 in proceeds in a Staten Island bank account.
Most’s indictment didn’t surprise his tenants. Carol Taylor moved into 2107 Bedford Avenue in 1982. Two years later, her two-party checks started disappearing from her mailbox.. Welfare officials told her they’d been cashed with someone else’s signature. Taylor was already battling in court to get Most to provide heat and make repairs. Taylor’s apartment came equipped with the slumlord’s lavatory: the toilet doesn’t flush, but the ceiling does. “Every other month,” she said, “the bathroom ceiling would collapse.” Most’s lawyer signed a “stipulation” (an often worthless repair agreement signed in housing court). Nothing was done. Most then grabbed every rent hike approved by the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. Taylor’s rent rose from $275 to $379. And Most made clear that he wouldn’t tolerate dissent: one woman who tried to start a tenants association was promptly served with eviction papers.
By this March, Most had let conditions at 2107 Bedford decline to the point where city inspectors logged 544 violations in the building’s 35 apartments. Even after Most sold the building in April, he tried one last scam. Tenant organizer Yves Vilus of the Erasmus Neighborhood Federation reported that Most sent Hoskins around to collect rents that belonged to someone else.
Most has savaged other buildings as well. At 1315 Eastern Parkway he chalked up 413 violations; at 1563 Sterling Place, 434 violations; at 1381 Sterling, 253 violations. Tenants at another Most property, 685 Nostrand Avenue, blame the no-heat conditions they endured for three months last winter for the death of one tenant who died from asphyxiation huddled under layers of blankets. When the city’s Housing Litigation Bureau took Most to court over the conditions, his attorney, Norman Shilling, insisted Most had no control over the building. Most never appeared at the trial, but his Atop Roofing and Siding Corporation was listed as the owner of the property.
But Most was involved enough to tell tenant Rosalie Hair that residents “were ready for the shelters.” Darlene Jones testified that Most told her to “go back to Africa.” When the tenants’ effective organizing threatened to overwhelm him in court. Most offered to refund tenant leader Wynona Johnson’s rent if she’d tell the judge that he’d begun repairs (he hadn’t), and get other tenants not to show up at the trial.
Attorney Shilling’s insistence that Most was not the real owner of 6585 Nostrand failed to convince Judge Ted Diamond, who fined Most $37,750. When Diamond ordered Most to jail for 30 days for contempt. Most feigned a phantom identity. He ran away from city process servers, locked himself in his car, and rolled up the windows. He shouted at them, “I’m Mr. Steinberg.” But he wouldn’t show his driver’s license, and sped off in his car.
Most’s phone has been disconnected, and his lawyer did not return repeated Voice phone calls.
HOWARD BUCK was one of the early yuppie speculators to leech onto the Lower East Side’s low-rent housing. Buck plunged into East Village real estate in the early 1980s and quickly assembled a mini-empire of 25 buildings. A former seminarian with an MA from Brown University, Buck shifted from literary agent to real estate agent when gentrification profits lured him from publishing to profiteering. With the help of a broker friend at Helmsley-Spear, Buck and a group of investors snared a choice parcel of buildings on the edge of Tompkins Square Park, and flipped them for a hefty profit. Buying and selling at least 35 buildings, “Fast Buck” seemed to have the golden touch.
But Buck may have sown the seeds of his own destruction when he bought an ailing tenement at 738 East 6th Street (at Avenue D). Buck claimed the building housed only junkies and swore on papers filed with the attorney general’s office that there were no legal tenants. Today Buck stands charged with multiple instances of fraud and tenant harassment in the attempted co-op conversion. If convicted, he could be barred from further conversions. According to Attorney General Robert Abrams, Buck and his partners purposely misled Abrams’s real estate unit by claiming that the building was vacant when they knew that five tenants still had valid leases. According to Abrams’s complaint, when three of the tenants refused to leave, Buck’s crew used sledgehammers to break down the walls of one apartment while a tenant was asleep inside. They threw the belongings of two other residents — including a large book collection — into the street and empty apartments.
Jarvis Jackson testified that he was asleep when two Buck workers, Kemys Goethe and Michael Swayze, came crashing through his closet with sledgehammer and screwdriver in hand. Jackson called police, who ordered the workers to stop. Jerome Kenny, who complained to Buck about lack of services, testified that the landlord told him, “We’ll see the day you move.” A few days later, Kenny found his books and belongings strewn throughout the building, in the street, and in a dumpster. Kenny said he talked to a friend working on the project, who told him that the owners had hired people to clear out his apartment “to teach me a lesson.”
After ousting the remaining residents, the Abrams suit charges, Buck and his partners sold the building to two attorneys to co-op it. He then lined up friends to buy the units as speculative investments, and subleased them to unwitting new tenants. Buck even collected illegal brokerage fees from people who rented apartments he owned himself. Had the original tenants not sought out Liz Gonzalez, a lawyer with MFY Legal Services, Buck and his friends might have gotten away with a lucrative rip-off. The new tenants didn’t stay duped for long, though, complaining in housing court and to the attorney general’s office about their illegal leases and lack of services. When challenged by Gonzalez, Buck and partner Michael Kane offered to let the original tenants back in the building after the rehab. But none of them were ever notified to return.
Buck has claimed in legal papers that there was no harassment and that tenants were amicably resettled. When contacted, Buck expressed hostility to the Voice, and refused to answer questions.
Buck bought the East 6th Street building in 1984 for $146,000 from an even bigger speculative vulture, Harry Skydell. Skydell and a partner, Jennie Blush, provided no upkeep and eventually obtained an “unsafe building order” from a supreme court judge. The suit states that Skydell himself never claimed in the sales contract that the building was empty. He even gave Buck the security deposit of one resident. Buck, however, testified that Skydell told him the building was vacant.
The building was so far gone, Buck said, that it resembled “Dresden after the war.” But investigators determined that he had done only a modest rehab. By his own estimate, Buck spent only $10,000 per apartment — well below the $50,000 that most “gut” rehab projects require. Once construction was finished, the co-op sales price was a whopping $995,000, providing what appears to be at least a half-million-dollar profit to be shared by Buck and his partners.
Much of that profit had been assured by Buck’s passing the building off to the attorney general as vacant. The attorney general must review all vacant co-op and condo offering plans within 30 days (occupied buildings take up to six months). Legal residents are entitled to protection from eviction, and usually get reduced “insider” prices. According to Karen Smith, the aggressive lawyer who has handled the case for the attorney general’s office, Buck even advised friends and business associates to buy the co-ops as investments without being there, while falsely filing papers that at least five buyers — the legal minimum — would themselves occupy apartments. In fact, Buck brokered all the newly sold units as rentals, offering leases that could be canceled at any time and rents that could be raised without limit.
Buck insists he was doing the neighborhood a favor by cleaning out a drug den and shooting gallery. He may just be suffering from Speculator’s Myopia, which blurs the distinction between criminals and law-abiding citizens, as long as they’re poor and nonwhite. But the tipoff to his pillaging is the manner in which he treated his more upscale, post-rehab tenants. They, too, have had enough of Buck’s vision of a redeveloped Lower East Side. All have fled the building.
MORDY SOHN has had a little problem with fires in his buildings. Seven years ago, Joe Conason and Jack Newfield told in the Voice about how a Far Rockaway apartment building owned by Sohn, located across the street from the synagogue where he was then president, burned to the ground [”The Men Who Are Burning New York,” June 2, 1980]. lt was arson — a job carried out by the notorious Joe Bald, a neighbor and fellow congregant at Sohn’s temple. Sohn headed a nonprofit corporation formed by temple members to buy the building, whose low-income tenants apparently offended them. They called it the Golem Realty Corporation. It was meant to be an insider’s joke, which the mostly minority tenants would not understand: Golem means monster in Yiddish. Bald, revealed to be the head of a huge arson-for profit ring, went to jail for what was probably his only pro bono job. Sohn was never charged.
Today, the slumlord author of that sick joke is terrorizing tenants at 306 West 51st Street in Manhattan’s Clinton section, where the real estate market is now hot enough to bring back the hood’s old name of Hell’s Kitchen. There, Sohn and his brother Pinky have capitalized on another fire — termed suspicious by the fire department — which struck the 39-unit building on March 8, 1986. One man died in the blaze, which has not been connected to the Sohns. But the Sohns (legal papers list Pinky as owner and Mordy as managing agent, although Mordy appears to call the shots) were quick to declare the building a total loss. They sent their work crews to gut a total of 20 vacated apartments, both those that were fire-damaged and those that were not.
Until the tenants filed harassment charges against them, the Sohns ignored the fire-weakened roof so that plaster destroying water poured through one entire line of apartments. Nor did they repair the boiler. Tenants suffered over 40 days without heat or hot water until they took it upon themselves to make repairs.
Instead, the Sohns hired the ever resourceful law firm of Finkelstein, Borah to argue in court that the cost of repairs exceeded the building’s value. When a housing court judge sought to order repairs — which tenants say would have been modest had the Sohns acted with reasonable speed —attorney Myron Altschuler took the case to the “Landlord’s Hall of Justice” — the appellate term of supreme court. There, Judge Francis Pecora agreed that the lower court’s ruling would place an unreasonable financial burden on the Sohns and granted them a stay.
According to tenant attorney Geoff Smith, the Sohns also tried to get a demolition permit by misrepresenting to the buildings department that there were no rent-controlled tenants. Danny Hazelkorn, an organizer from Housing Conservation Coordinators, located nearby, spotted the flaw, and the agency issued a stop-work order.
Mordy Sohn’s campaign to empty his building may have been inspired by a glance out the back windows of 306 West 51st Street. A block away, huge steel frames are rising in what will be William Zeckendorf’s massive residential and commercial complex on the old Madison Square Garden site. Not that Sohn wasn’t doing fine financially with the building. He filed court statements showing that he earned $24,428 in 1984 and $30,410 in 1985. But just three months before the fire, Pinky Sohn took out a new $500,000 mortgage. Those new payments, in addition to fire-related costs, produced a convenient $281,430 loss last year. Tenant attorneys are awaiting a decision on the case. The Sohns did not return repeated Voice phone calls.
In the meantime, tenants are girding themselves legally and physically. Rose Alaio, an actress in afternoon soaps until the fire disrupted her life, took HCC’s boiler-repair course and now keeps hot water running in the building. And along with other neighborhood groups, the tenants took the battle to Mordy Sohn’s own turf, holding a picket line in front of his Rockaway synagogue. “Know Thy Neighbor,” read the flyer passed out to Sohn’s co-congregants.
VED PARKASH isn’t bothered by the drug dealers infesting his Jamaica, Queens, building. After tenants complained to police about the dealers, who day and night peddle their wares in the lobby, stairwells, and on the roof of 162- 05 89th Avenue, Parkash told the cops drugs weren’t a problem. Exasperated, the tenants took their troubles to Reverend Richard Ahlemeyer of Presentation Parish, who brought in officials of the Queens Citizens Organization. Ahlemeyer wrote Parkash, a fledgling slumlord with at least three other buildings, to request a meeting on the drug dealing and other problems — among them a nonfunctioning elevator, spotty heat, and collapsing ceilings. “These are decent, hard-working people who are trying to make the building a clean and safe place to live,” wrote Ahlemeyer.
Parkash wasn’t interested. But while the constant drug traffic doesn’t irk him, complaining tenants do. Since he bought the property two years ago, Parkash has twice tried to evict tenant leader Marsha Barnes, a 10-year resident. First he tried to boot her for having a washing machine (Parkash eliminated laundry service in the basement when he took over). Now he is using the “personal use” eviction strategy, claiming he needs her apartment for his family. But tenants and the Queens Citizens Organization report at least three vacant apartments in the building; Parkash lives in a three-story home a few blocks away.
This past spring Phyllis Winston took Parkash to court to force him to exterminate the rats and roaches in her apartment. Winston said when she returned home, she found a pile of human feces in front of her door. Her call to the super went unanswered for 24 hours. John Robinson, another resident, said he had constant problems with his electricity, as do many Parkash residents. Con Edison told the tenants there was nothing wrong with the wiring. One night when Robinson’s lights were flashing on and off, he went downstairs to investigate. He met Parkash coming out of the basement.
Parkash, however, might not be ready for the diligent watchdogging of the Queens Citizens Organization, which got the bank holding Parkash’s mortgage to order him to shape up or cash out. Repeated attempts to reach Parkash were unsuccessful.
PETER PANTELIDIS wasted no time mastering the art of cheating tenants out of decent homes. Less than 10 years ago, Pantelidis and his brother George were small-time contractors rattling around Brooklyn in an old panel truck. They owned a single run-down Park Slope apartment building. Today that building is a posh co-op and they own at least 30 others in Manhattan and Brooklyn with a value they estimate at $9.7 million. In addition, they own a 20 per cent interest in the old Lundy’s Restaurant building in Sheepshead Bay, two fried chicken outlets, a restaurant, and a car wash. In January, they bought an 80-unit building at 144th Street and Broadway for $1.4 million.
In spite of this phenomenal growth and apparently very deep pockets, when an electrical fire destroyed one building and part of another they owned on West 109th Street in Manhattan in December 1985, they refused to repair it. The fire caused the death of an elderly man and left 93 people homeless. The Pantelidises hadn’t done much to safeguard the building: prior to the blaze, it had 261 violations, including electrical violations and fire safety problems.
Even after the insurance company made a $400,000 payment, the Pantelidises refused to make repairs. Housing court judge Lewis Friedman quickly spotted their shamming. The Pantelidises, wrote Friedman in a decision ordering them to make the repairs, “intend to take the [insurance) proceeds, terminate … rights to tenancy, and then renovate the building as one not subject to rent regulations.” Four months later, on June 18, 1986, when still nothing had been done, Friedman found Peter Pantelidis in contempt and ordered him to jail.
But the Pan Brothers (as they call themselves, along with a third brother, James, in other holdings) had learned how to play the game. Their attorney, Mitchell Alter, obtained a stay from judges Jawn Sandifer, Stanley Parness, and Stanley Ostrau in the appellate term of supreme court.
If it weren’t for the persistence of City Council member Carolyn Maloney, tenant attorney Doug Kellner, organizer Greg Watson of the Tenant Takeover Team, and city housing attorney Carol Steinberg, the Pantelidises might have been home free. The two now-empty buildings would have become the crown jewels in the strip of 12 buildings they assembled with several partners on the same street. But the tenant advocates held together 14 of the homeless families (others were paid $2000 by the brothers to leave), and the Pantelidises are now trying to negotiate a settlement that would restore the tenants to one building at their original rents. ”They’re doing it because we’re making them,” Maloney told Jonathan Gill of The Westsider.
The Pan Brothers’ performance on West 109th Street matches their machinations at other properties. They bought the landlord-battered 333 West 16th Street in Chelsea for $300 and $100,000 in mortgages in a foreclosure action. That building was originally sacked by the deadly combo of Stephen Cardassi and Gerald Musano (Worst Landlords in 1982) and then literally assaulted by a gang led by the now-imprisoned Mike Sohayegh.
The Pantelidises have argued in court that the building should be removed from 7 A administratorship and given to them. But even with their high-priced legal help, they can’t keep their stories straight. They filed papers on the 16th Street building, pointing pridefully to their West 109th Street properties as worth $360,000 apiece. But when they were trying to convince a different judge about how little the same fire-damaged properties could earn them, they said the properties had a “low market value” and together were worth only $290,000.
Seven of the Pantelidises’ other occupied buildings carry a total of 988 violations, most of them serious and many health-impairing. Consumers might think twice about the Pan Brothers’ fried chicken. The Pantelidis brothers did not return repeated Voice phone calls.
RON DAVIS teaches social studies to Brooklyn grade schoolers by day; by night, he is the Predator of Park Slope. Tenants in Davis’s buildings experience malicious break-ins during which their most prized possessions are stolen or destroyed, and receive anonymous, violent phone threats.
Davis started with smaller buildings a few years ago, but now he’s moved into the big time, serving as the point man for a $2 million conversion of a 23-unit walkup at 394 Lincoln Place. His partners are Michael Klahr, Herbert Kramer, Fred Rosenberg, and Lilli Hoffman, all of whom have been named in harassment suits at other buildings. Charlayne Haynes, president of the building’s tenants association, charged that last August, on the day she was going to court against Davis, she received an ominous call. “Kill, Charlayne, kill,” said the male voice over the phone. Haynes was even more alarmed when Davis refused to fix her door. “There have been three breakins in the building within the last six months,” she said, “and I have a young daughter.”
Davis made his real estate bones in 1982 when he forced out residents of two small buildings. ‘Together with Fred Rosenberg, he bought 719 Carroll Street, an eight-unit limestone off Park Slope’s increasingly upscale Seventh Avenue. Like Davis, Rosenberg is also a teacher at I.S. 88 in Park Slope.
Even before they took title to their new property, Davis approached Harold Gilbert, an 80-year-old former concert violinist, who was one of three tenants in the building. Davis told him that renovations would be starting soon and he would have to leave. “You have two weeks,” Davis said. Gilbert decided he couldn’t resist, and packed his bags. But a few nights later, Gilbert came home and couldn’t get in the outside door. Someone had stuck putty in the lock. It was a portent of what was to come. When Gilbert finally made it upstairs to his apartment he found it ransacked. His TV set, tape console, and other appliances were smashed. And the vandals had added a coup de grace: Gilbert’s precious violin had been blasted to splinters — and then put back into the case.
Undaunted, Harold Gilbert decided he wasn’t moving after all. He said that over the next few weeks, Davis followed him around the neighborhood, and would knock on his door, shouting, “When are you moving?” Taking a new tack, Rosenberg, who lives in Staten Island, filed papers to evict the rent-controlled Gilbert on the grounds that the apartment was needed for his “personal use.” Gilbert responded by hiring Sam Himmelstein, a vigorous local tenant attorney, who filed harassment charges with the Office of Rent Control and won a rent rollback. The building was co-operated, but Gilbert remained.
Davis was more successful in a two-family house at 416A 13th Street (at Carroll Street), which he co-owned with yet another I.S. 88 colleague, Don Duncanberg. Here no rent regulations protected the tenants, and Davis simply told them to leave. Michael Anderson and his wife, Anne Pasmanick, who lived on the top floor, balked. Both were active in tenant organizing on the block, which, after the old Ansonia Clock factory around the corner was converted into co-ops, had turned into a Dunkirk of gentrification. Anderson and Pasmanick took Davis to court to delay their eviction. But while the tenants were making legal motions in court, they were being victimized by crime at home. On December 22, 1982, thieves took property and cash worth $2300 and ransacked their apartment. There was no sign of forced entry. Two weeks later, another burglary occurred. This time, Pasmanick’s $2500 flute was stolen. The couple were later evicted. Davis denies any involvement with these incidents.
In the Lincoln Place building, Davis has teamed up with Michael Klahr and Steven Bass, who were arrested along with three other men on August 28, 1984, for burglary and criminal mischief at a building they owned at 384 15th Street in Park Slope. Those criminal charges were later dismissed, but according to city legal papers, Klahr and Bass went to the apartment of John and Alberta Reich with sledgehammers and a crowbar and smashed the couple’s washing machine, dishes, and plumbing fixtures. Klahr and Bass had tried to remove everyone from the six-unit building so they could co-op it, refusing to repair dozens of violations, and cursing tenants when they refused to leave.
Partners Lilli Hoffman and Herbert Kramer are both named in a suit brought by Attorney General Abrams charging fraud, harassment, and coercion in their drive to co-op two other Park Slope buildings, at 180 Prospect Place and 390 2nd Street. According to the suit, which seeks to bar them from participating in any further conversions, Hoffman, Kramer, and two other partners — Allan Fogelson and Phyllis Jalbert — told the mostly minority tenants they “wouldn’t be able to afford” the new co-ops, and would have to leave. They then refused all repairs and started rehab work without proper permits. According to tenants, Fogelson was the lead harasser. Fogelson denied this to the Voice.
Charlayne Haynes took her apartment at 394 Lincoln Place with the intention of purchasing it as a co-op. As a goodwill gesture, Davis gave her a free dinner at a local sushi bar. The food was fine, but Haynes said she began to get edgy when plumbing problems went unrepaired, although Davis and Rosenberg would soothe her and promise they would be taken care of. On the day the owners pledged that the work would be completed, Haynes returned home to find nothing done. When she called Davis in a rage, he told her he hadn’t been able to get to it, but had left a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. By then, Davis had lost a co-op sale. Haynes fired off a letter to him, saying: “I do not want any champagne, or any free sushi. I just want the apartment I’ve been paying for.” ❖
Dishonorable Mention
There are far too many ‘Tenant ‘Terminators at work in the city to fit into just one article. Listed below are some snapshots of those who deserve dishonorable mention (several of these landlords would not return phone calls; others refused to comment):
ISRAEL BLUM and EWAR REICHMAN agreed in court to stop harassing their tenants at 1113 59th Street in Borough Park. But instead, according to city attorneys, they began demolishing everything around the apartment of a 62-year-old woman with a heart condition and her 37-year-old son, who is paralyzed. They cut a gaping hole through the floor just outside her door, snuffed out the hall lights, and left the stairs filled with construction debris. City housing attorneys Len Lubiti and Les Epstein intervened, and forced Blum and Reichman out, getting a court-appointed administrator in their stead.
ROBERT WALSEY and MONICA GOBSINGH have earned a special place in the Landlord’s Hall of Infamy for their attacks on residents of 446 West 38th Street, several of whom suffer from AIDS. One tenant, Louis Weingarden, told police he suffered a cut on his throat after being attacked by Gobsingh’s brother. Other tenants say they’ve had to call the police over a dozen times to protect them from Walsey and Gobsingh, who have chased them with hammers and lead pipes. Weingarden told Margo Schneidman of the Chelsea-Clinton News that he heard Walsey tell Gobsingh, “We don’t have to worry about emptying the building, they’re all dying of AIDS.”
ABE HIRSCHFELD spent $6 million last year to flash his smile and his inane ideas to New York State voters in his abortive run for lieutenant governor. He may have fooled a lot of people into thinking he was a sweet and harmless old guy — but not his tenants at two Jackson Heights buildings at 89th Street and Thirty-Fourth Avenue. Hirschfeld wants to co-op the apartments now occupied by low-income, mostly Hispanic tenants, but according to workers from the city’s Human Rights Commission, he hasn’t been willing to repair over 400 violations. When the tenants fought back, the smiling Abe slapped the leaders with a $900,000 suit for interfering with his ”business.” Hirschfeld acknowledged the suit. “The tenants are screwballs,” he said.
HARVEY LEVINE tried to ride roughshod over his tenants at 167 East 77th Street when they objected to his rehab work, which left them without heat, gas, water, or mail service for days and weeks at a time. But he met his match in tenant Marion O’Grady, who dragged Levine to court and brought in the state Division of Housing. When O’Grady first asserted her rights by going to city officials, Levine warned her “not to do that again.” But it was Levine who wound up convicted of harassment by the state, and was fined $6000 for his “clear intent to harass” O’Grady.
MARK SCHORR runs an Upper West Side building at 511 Amsterdam Avenue, and lists Helmsley-Spear as his managing agent. But this is one building in which Leona Helmsley won’t be sleeping. Last winter, tenants charged, there was only sporadic heat. They claim Schorr hasn’t tried very hard to rid his vacant units of drug dealers, but he’s offered everybody else money to move. When one resident asked about repairs, Schorr said, ”There’s no more money — and I hope you people enjoy living in that building.” — J.N. & T.R.
