To my surprise, I received a check today in the amount my associates and I won for my company in a judgment against a local slumlord we rented from for a brief time. I say surprised because this crooked old man never came through on anything he said and didn't do jack shit as a landlord. This coming Monday I fully expected to have to file to have liens and whatnot put on his assets. Of course, I received more than a check.
Along with the payment was a letter scrawled into two pages about how disappointed he was that we took him to court to get our deposits, two of which that he had no right to take and one that he had no right to keep, back on a technicality. This after we gave him ample opportunity to be reasonable before resorting to bringing suit against him.
He tries to shame me, accusing me of not being a man of my word and not honoring a handshake agreement as I have claimed.
This slumlord seemed a reasonable man when I first had the pleasure to meet him. He was up front about how the fridge was old, the carpet was old, the sockets were old and that he had some work to do yet ... work he never returned to compete as he said he would. In truth, it was a firetrap with no fire alarms, extinguishers or escapes but it was affordable and a means to an end between better places. Only soon after moving in was the building discovered to be a roach infested hell with rampant junkies next door, a toilet that would back up with more than two squares of toilet paper, cable that had to be dug out of the wall and frayed and exposed outlet wires that presented an imminent fire and electrocution danger. To this last item the landlord complained to the judge that too many things were plugged in throughout the unit. When an element in the water heater (who knows how old that was!) burned out his solution was to "piggy back" another water heater onto the broken one resulting in water never getting more than luke warm. To this he complains that too many people were taking showers. When informed that there was a roach problem he says that he's never had a problem with roaches before and that we must have brought them there rather than have the damn things exterminated. He did nothing and, worse than that, kept all our deposits and tried to extort even more money from us to clean up the rest of his building.
I, on the other hand, kept my word that I was going to sue him, it was not an idle threat, and did just that when he did not respond to anything less than a trial date. I didn't want to. Court is not fun. But being bullied by a crook is less so. There is integrity and principle to defend here. And it was very disturbing to see the judge buy into this sweet, absent-minded old man shtick this scumbag plays off on people. Were it not for the fact that we nailed him with laws the judge could not ignore, I doubt we would have gotten a judgment in our favor. It was a very sobering lesson: judges may know the law but they are perfectly content to let you lose to your own ignorance of the law if they do not like you.
The letter goes on to say that he has to take this money out of his personal account (it's a company check, however) and that he is retired and on limited income with his three houses between Washington and Arizona, innumerous vehicles, a small empire of real estate assets and somewhere around a quarter to a half million in gross annual profit. And yet, his children who owns the building we rented a unit in that the old crook manages for them are experiencing hard times, according to him, and depend upon the income from that building. I guess this is supposed to justify stealing from renters who, before us, were of the type who never stood up to this asshole before.
This is a very nasty old man. In the days leading up to the hearing and trial days he harassed us, our friends and our associates trying to find something or someone to testify in his defense. There were none. He burns everyone. And we don't keep skeletons in our closet to find.
In response to his repeated threats that he is going to sue us for thousands of dollars in damages to the unit (for which we received no receipts and would tend to contradict our exit photo documentation), we contacted the board of health in order to retrieve the health violation records for a restaurant located in the building that we know has been shut down multiple times for roaches. In the process we've found out that the building isn't even zoned to have apartments and it's therefore highly unlikely that the slumlord had or has any permits to rent any units as apartments. Absolutely incredible.
At the end of the letter, he appeals to me to consider his sad (albeit fraudulent) plight before cashing the check to which I could only huff in disgust as I stamped it for deposit. The gall of some people!
