Posted on 12/19/2004 8:10:38 AM PST by MississippiMasterpiece
Berryl Fox, a psychologist and a widow with a young son, thought she had found the perfect tenants for the top three floors of her brownstone on West 90th Street, just a few steps from Riverside Drive.
The tenant, Peter Hall, was a former professional football player in his 60's who charmed everyone around him and talked of a private trust and financial dealings across Europe and the Middle East. His wife, Anne Torselius Hall, 40, meticulously supervised renovations, even offering to share the cost of building a roof deck.
They had two boys who attended a local public school who seemed like promising companions for Dr. Fox's own son.
The Halls signed a one-year lease in April 2003 and agreed to pay $5,800 a month, at a time when luxury rents had tumbled sharply and good tenants were hard to find. Dr. Fox, who lived on the bottom two floors, needed that rent to meet her monthly mortgage payments.
But after a few months, the Halls began paying their rent late, and after six months they stopped paying altogether, according to court papers. Dr. Fox was about to discover that despite their charms, the Halls were every landlord's worst nightmare - tenants unusually skilled at delaying and evading the perils of eviction.
It turned out that being an amateur landlady, and counting on that steady flow of cash from tenants, wasn't as easy as brokers sometimes suggest. Dr. Fox also learned that even more experienced landlords had been caught up in similar disputes with these same tenants, as the court records show.
Now, more than a year since their last rent payment, after a series of broken promises, three bankruptcy filings, four eviction notices, a mysterious foreign bank draft that took two months to clear and then was not honored, the Halls are still in residence at West 90th Street, along with three children (they recently had another boy, an event cited as an explanation for a delay in a court filing), two dogs and three large birds.
They owe $81,000 in back rent, or close to $100,000 if Dr. Fox's legal fees are included, while Dr. Fox had to take out a home equity loan to help cover expenses. And that doesn't include the $10,000 she agreed to spend on improvements to the rental apartment, including a new oak dining room floor, when the lease was signed.
At a hearing last Tuesday, Judge Sheldon J. Halprin of Housing Court in Manhattan lifted a stay and once again cleared the way for an eviction within 48 hours. Outside the courtroom, Dr. Fox's lawyer, Jeffrey Klarsfeld, was not celebrating. "It's not over," he said. And the lawyer for the Halls, Maria M. Malave, said that she was confident that any eviction threat would be postponed until after New Year's Day at the earliest, because marshals halt evictions during the week before Christmas.
"Housing Court is supposed to protect poor rent-regulated tenants from rich landlords," Dr. Fox said. "Here we have a struggling landlord being victimized in Housing Court by rich tenants who know how to use the system."
In response to several requests for a comment on the dispute, Mr. Hall twice e-mailed a reporter and refused to discuss it. "I love my landlady," he said.
Ms. Malave said, "Peter is a brilliant guy, but here, he is using protections and rights available to all tenants."
It was only after her troubles began that Dr. Fox learned that the Halls had a long history in court, including prior evictions from high-rent apartments, and multiple bankruptcy filings apparently timed to avoid evictions. Over the years, court records show, Mr. Hall had been accused of participating in fraudulent multimillion-dollar investment schemes including the use of fake letters of credit, but the cases were dropped.
Sherwin Belkin, a real estate lawyer who represents landlords, said he had never heard of a case as bad this, involving so many bankruptcies and so many apartments. "I have come across serial deadbeats, but never serial bankruptcy filers," he said. "The lesson is don't be penny wise and pound foolish when you are renting an apartment, especially at high rents."
In the 1990's, the Halls rented a luxury apartment on the top floor of 200 Central Park South, with its distinctive curved facade, but were sued repeatedly for back rent, and filed for bankruptcy, halting the eviction before they reached a settlement and left.
They had legal troubles again when they moved in to an $8,000-a-month apartment on the 12th floor of 441 West End Avenue. Eventually, the management company there, Lyndonville Property Management, rented Mr. Hall a total of four apartments in two buildings at the same time, for his own family, relatives and even his accountant, for a combined rent of $23,000 a month.
The Halls stopped paying and eventually owed more than $366,000 in back rent, according to court papers. They left the apartment only after both Peter and Anne Hall filed for bankruptcy on the eve of evictions, but evictions were carried out against the other three apartments.
Despite the troubles, Dr. Fox said that she had received a glowing reference from a managing agent at Lyndonville. Leonard Wassner, a principal at Lyndonville, said the employee who wrote the reference had since retired and did not represent the views of the company. Mr. Wassner said that he, too, had received a positive reference from Mr. Hall's previous landlord.
Mr. Hall grew up in western Pennsylvania, played basketball and was a quarterback for the football team at Marquette University in the late 1950's. He came to New York in 1960 when he was drafted by the New York Giants as a quarterback, and played one season as an end. He now lists his occupation as "financial consultant."
In 1989, he was arrested in connection with what prosecutors said was a fraudulent Haitian mortgage bank based in Queens and in Mr. Hall's Central Park South apartment that issued fake letters of credit and phony securities, and had dealings with the Palestine Liberation Organization, Libya and Iraq. The charges were dismissed.
Dr. Fox bought the house on West 90th Street in 2001 for $2.1 million, as both a home and an investment that she hoped would eventually provide some financial security for her son. Her husband, Bruce Hertz, a lawyer, had died of a brain tumor about two years earlier at age 46, and she used insurance proceeds to cover part of the purchase price, along with a $1.4 million mortgage.
The house was 17 feet wide and five stories high and needed extensive work on the bottom floors. But soon after Dr. Fox moved in and construction began, she learned she had ovarian cancer, now in remission, and found herself at one point supervising construction while undergoing chemotherapy. Last February, she was married to Robert Friedman, a math professor at Columbia University. She uses her married name socially.
When Dr. Fox first began to rent the apartment, she had great luck with tenants. In the hot New York market she was able to rent out the top three floors for $8,000 a month. But as interest rates fell, and prices rose, many people renting large luxury apartments began to buy instead. Her second tenant, the actress Marcia Gay Harden, moved out to buy her own brownstone.
Then the rental market stalled, and her broker was unable to rent the apartment. She decided to both lower the price and rent it out herself, saving the renter the broker's fee, typically 15 percent. And that is when she found the Halls.
She checked their references, including a call to the former managing agent at the Halls' prior apartment building at 441 West End Avenue, who gave them a glowing report. She got a bank statement showing an account containing $50,000 in cash. But she made one critical mistake - she didn't order a credit report that might have showed their history of bankruptcy filings.
When the rent was late in November 2003, she wrote the Halls a letter, and they promised to pay the rent as soon as they could have the money transferred "from the Middle East." The payments finally came in at the end of January, in the form of a bank draft from a Netherlands bank. But the draft was not readily negotiable. And after two months, Dr. Fox learned that the bank would not pay.
When she complained to Mr. Hall, he wrote her a lengthy letter about his efforts to get a second payment to her, discussing the difficulties of communications with his "asset management company in the Middle East."
"I knew my management officer was leaving on Monday for Libya (where he is a consultant to the government) for a two or three week stay," he wrote, "and my experience has taught me that Libya is still a very difficult part of the world to communicate with."
Dr. Fox filed suit in April 2004, and although she has won favorable rulings in court, has not gotten any money or her rental apartment back. After a series of postponements sought by the Halls, Dr. Fox won an eviction order at the end of July, and eviction was scheduled for mid-August. But the day before the eviction, Mr. Hall filed for bankruptcy in federal court, a move that automatically stayed the eviction.
In late September, Dr. Fox's lawyers were permitted by bankruptcy court to resume the eviction, and it was rescheduled for October. But a few days before the new eviction date, Ms. Hall filed for bankruptcy, too, delaying the eviction until mid-November.
Both bankruptcy filings were eventually dismissed by the court. Though the Halls listed almost no assets in their own names - making it difficult for Dr. Fox to enforce a court judgment against them - they have been looking into the purchase of a town house in the neighborhood, according to an account by Dr. Fox, confirmed by a real estate broker.
A city marshal was scheduled to carry out the eviction at 12:30 p.m. on Thursday. But, at 10:04 p.m. on Wednesday, the Federal Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan received an electronic filing in which someone else, Eleke Emeh, filed a bankruptcy petition, listing the Halls' apartment as an address. When the marshal was notified the next morning, the eviction was halted.
Dr. Fox and her lawyer said that they were certain the stay in the eviction would be lifted - but only after a hearing can be scheduled before the bankruptcy judge, during or after the busy holiday season. But they worry that the case won't end there.
And if she does get a chance to rent it out again, Dr. Fox said, she plans to use a broker and do a very thorough check before signing a lease.
Man! Have they never heard of a credit bureau background check?
There ought to be legal recourse against the previous landlords who gave "glowing references" to these deadbeats just to get rid of them and pass them along to some other poor schmuck.
What amazes me the most about this story is that there are people out there who would do something like this. I could never imagine screwing somebody over like this. How do they sleep at night? Some people have absolutely no morals whatsoever.
btttttt
You answered your own question.
Of course this is just a fantasy and in point of fact, is a plot for a screenplay I am writing in my spare time...I would never advocate this course of action to anyone. That would be unlawful.
Heh. How do people sleep at night after placing a gas-filled tire around someone's neck and lighting it...or cutting off someone's head for not believing in a certain religion?
Great story. You have sand. I'll give you that.
While I agree with your thought, that would be deemed a constructive eviction. In NYC a landlord found guilty of a constructive eviction can be sentenced to prison time as it is a criminal offense.
I will tell you a story. My dad, when I was a kid, owned about 4 small frame houses which he rented out. Nothing extravagant, but nice, safe neighborhoods. My dad was so nice he hated to ask for the rent when people were late on payment. Many times after 10 days or so he went to the house to try to collect the rent only to find that the people had gone, the place was trashed, windows often knocked out and all sorts of problems. He got out of the buisness when he went over to one of the rent houses and the people who had rented had long gone. There was human excrement in 3 or 4 corners of rooms. They had urinated anywhere in the house the urge struck them. (The plumbing worked fine.) We shoveled the turds out, and wiped the crap up as best we could, and them went inside on the linoleum floor with a garden hose and after pouring lysol over the surface washed it out like you would a dirty garage floor. The carpeting, we ripped up had to have replaced. Several windows were knocked out and a door had a hole big enough to put your head thru. Somehow, this was not what being a landlord was all about in his mind. He sold all four houses at a very reasonable price and stuck the money in Humble Oil and Refinery (EXXON). Seems these renters spoken of in this article have become more sofisticated at gaming the system. I believe if most people do not own property, they will not respect anyones private property.
We threw G-d out of our classrooms circa 1962, and we have now bred entire generations of people like this. We reap what we sow.
In Massachusetts, we would have called those people good tenants.
After all, they left, no matter how much damage they did, and they didn't kill anyone in your family.
My God, that's a story to make a person dizzy with horror. That woman's lucky you didn't throw HER out the third story window. (If you had, of course, I'd think you deserved a good, stern talking to and perhaps a small fine for having endangered anyone she might have landed on.)
I hope their next place will be be rent free to them- the slammer!
I thought seriously of it.
Got out of the business almost in time to save my humanity.
The state of Texas is a little tougher on deadbeats! You can change locks and you have to make the keys available, but the keys can be in Lubbock and the property in Beaumont! You can also remove the front door! The tenant, if a professional crook can take as much as 7 months to evict! You have to be careful in the slum lord business! As far as trashing the place, you need to expect that! Make Ready is all a part of the slum lord business!
Not only would the landlord face prison, it would be the Hall's lucky day. Next thing you know, they would own the building. I know people who were paying $60 per month since the sixties under rent control. When the landlord started messing with them, they were awarded free rent for ten years.
Actually, I lied in my previous post, I still have one rental property, a tiny (800 sq ft) single family home. My tenant has been there about 15 years, he has a dog (it's very hard to find a place to rent where you can have a pet), he pays on time and takes very good care of the property, the yard is in FAR better condition than when he moved in.
He says he will stay there until he dies. When and if he leaves (and I hope and pray it's not in a box in the back of a hearse, he's a very nice man), I will sell the place.
To keep him there, I keep the rent miniscule, haven't raised it in three years, but last year, for the first time since I bought it (24 years), I actually broke even. This year I will make a profit of a few hundred dollars.
A tenant like this is worth his weight in gold and they are few and far between. The longer they stay the better your income. Every time a tenant moves out you're looking at about $3,000-$5,000 in fix up costs.
As a landlord, it took me a couple tenants worth to learn to do credit checks, they are a gold mine of information. It's also a good idea to drive by the place they're living in at the time they apply to rent.
However, my horrible experiences came from having rental properties in a poor town and poor area of town and I thought I HAD to get them rented out as they had been empty for months while I waited to find someone decent. I learned that the wrong tenants can cost far more than just letting the place sit vacant.
All in all, I don't think being a landlord is too hard to do (if you skip the learning curve), but it helps a lot if you can do most of the maintenance yourself, and you pick good tenants. It can be done, it's just not for me anymore.
I've never been faced with tenants like these in the article, ones who come into the place with a goal to pay nothing and stay for years, and ones who know the system as well as these do.
I love the story about Judy from the freeper above. Having been through hell, I take a great deal of vicarious pleasure from his/her story.
Oh my! Your poor father. He sounds like such a nice person and completely undeserving of such treatment.
You have, unfortunately, made me wonder if the carpet in my place was soaked from doggie urine or if it was from the tenants themselves. I pulled that carpet out all by myself, too. Yikes. Thanks for putting that thought in my head.
(I'm just teasing you--whatever it was it's over and done with.)
I still feel bad for lying to the new landlord about my tenants from hell, but it was a property management company and hopefully they got them out quickly once they figured out how awful they were. Truly, I was at my wit's end.
"stuck the money in Humble Oil and Refinery (EXXON)"
Then he did okay, very okay, didn't he? Sheesh, he's probably a millionnaire by now.
It must have been a message from God.
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