Sunday, April 19, 2015

Brooklyn slumlords arrested


From the NY Times:

Two Brooklyn landlords accused by tenants of trying to drive them out by making their buildings uninhabitable have been arrested, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said Thursday.

The landlords, the brothers Joel and Aaron Israel, were scheduled to be arraigned in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Thursday morning. Prosecutors did not immediately disclose the charges, but planned to speak about them in the afternoon outside a building owned by Joel Israel, 98 Linden Street in Bushwick.

Longtime tenants in several buildings owned by the Israels have complained of hazardous conditions they believe are an effort to force them to leave, so their units could be rented out at much higher rates.

Prosecution of landlords on criminal charges is rare, but the case of 98 Linden was particularly egregious, law enforcement officials and tenant advocates said.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm....Joel and Aaron...how Biblical.

Were their tenants "people of color"?
A little social engineering in progress....driving out certain factions to yuppify an "up and coming" neighborhood?

An eye for an eye a pig pen for a pair of pigs.
Biblical Justice....put bars on one of Joel's and Aaron's worst apartment hovels and make them live it for five years. Jail would be too cushy for scum like this.

Anonymous said...

Prosecution of landlords on criminal charges is rare...

Two questions:

1. why

2. why don't our electeds do something?

Anonymous said...

I like that Mayor

Lets build affordable housing

(translation: you lose your nice apartment in a good neighborhood but we have a shipping container for you in a former brownfield)

Anonymous said...

I WANT THAT SINK!

Anonymously Grey Gardens said...

The pattern continues, with two brothers of The Chosen as the latest slumlords du jour.

What's worse is how the doctrines of law (and the purportedly fair and honest court system that repeatedly fails to enforce them), is always a few decades behind--and even then, many victims must continue to rely on a wing and a prayer for a sane, qualified, competent judge, and one that isn't bought or patronized by the many political machines that have always betrayed civic justice---as the system itself likewise continues to delay and deny it, until way beyond the eleventh hour (and always at the mercy of its languishing subjects). Unbelievably sad and horrifying, but true.

And this is the second decade of the 21st century---not the early 20th century---but who can really tell, when corruption like is just as entrenched, if not worse!

JQ said...

Very tragic story, even if the lowlifes got locked up, because that family didn't have it hard enough as they were betrayed and was living in a virtual purgatory and those bags of dicks resembling people (that includes the mercenaries they sent to surgically make the apt. uninhabitable and the goon sent to scare them) tried to force them out for the wants of generation gentrification, all those actors fleeing burning california and for their immoral avarice.

Wanna bet that it's going on in Ridgewood? Surely the same thing might be going down in other places populated by hispanic and blacks like Woodside and Jackson Heights since those towns made the NY Times real estate section hot list.

Hell if anything it's similar to the tactics FEMA used when it was denying homeowners insurance
claims.

This bullshit ends today I hope.

Anonymously Grey Gardens said...

When fearless, lowlife sociopaths and a scourge like the Israel brothers engage in quality of life crimes that willfully destroy the peace and sanity of someone's home, and then proceed to hire dangerous goons to inhabit apartment space for the sold purpose of unlawful tenant harassment and intimidation, why then isn't there a special crime unit force within the District Attorney's Office to step in and take immediate control, and to simultaneously block lengthy court proceedings that make a deplorable condition worse?

Again, deliberate, unregulated weaknesses in an archaic system of toothless laws that ALWAYS waits for tragedy to strike---and even when it does, the system itself continues to look the other way, despite how it always continues to cause even more irreparable harm, destruction and death! Where does any of this mishegas inspire confidence in the only purportedly civic system of justice, when the branch of justice itself is tone deaf and corrupt?

Alas, Liberalism is what remains of perishable debris---only the rotting stench is left. Likewise, innocent people will always continue to rot in deeper states of adversity, beggary, obscurity, quiet desperation and lawlessness when there are glaring loopholes that allow this kind of barbaric and savage conduct to further decay society (with impunity, no less) in the first place!

Bring back the death penalty in New York State---far less barbaric than any human misery that the Israel brothers could ever create!

Anonymous said...

There's always going to be incentives to remove illegally a class of tenants paying less than the market rate and replacing them with tenants paying the market rate.

The system is so corrupt now that only landlords engaging in criminal tactics like this want to own rental property and take on the risks of being arrested for it. Life imitates art. The Hollywood version of this story.

Anonymous said...

Oy vey!
Remember those same types of slumlords that turned the south Bronx into shit?
First the arsonists burned out the tenants. Then the fire insurance money was collected.