Landlords’ Lament : Inglewood Judge Is Among Building Owners Being Victimized by Drug-Pushing Tenants

Inglewood Municipal Judge William M. Ormsby, who sometimes presides at court hearings for accused drug sellers, owns a nine-unit apartment building in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles that is known as a place to buy drugs.

Last winter and spring, after neighbors complained about cocaine and heroin sales in and around the building, Los Angeles police raided it three times.

Neighbors said brazen youths, operating in front of the building and apparently supplied from within it, routinely stopped cars to see if motorists wanted to buy rock cocaine.

They said there had been shootings in the vicinity and that people were afraid.

The judge’s building was “a very violent place,” confirmed a police officer who had been assigned to watch it.

There is no indication that the judge was involved in any criminal activity.

Rather, it appears likely that he was a victim--one of a substantial, and increasing, number of absentee landlords whose properties in high-density, low- to moderate-income areas of Los Angeles have been converted to drug stores without their consent.

That this could happen to a judge suggests the severity of the problem.

“I’m so glad I’m not a landlord it’s pathetic,” said Capt. Maurice R. Moore, commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest Division, which runs from the Crenshaw area to the Coliseum.

Moore said many landlords try faithfully to keep up their properties and screen their tenants but are tricked by people with good references who turn out to be fronting for drug dealers. “That’s what’s happening in this town,” he said.

Whether that is what happened to Ormsby is unclear. Ormsby, who lives in Inglewood and owns, according to property records, eight apartment houses in Los Angeles, declined to be interviewed for this article.

However, city officials familiar with his properties regard him as--as one put it--”a standard absentee landlord” and note that it is becoming increasingly difficult for such investors to operate rental properties successfully.

“It used to be that you could buy a set of buildings and collect your money,” said Ozie Hunt, chief deputy to Councilwoman Pat Russell. “But you can’t do that anymore in this type of area.”

Some frustrated landlords say they are caught in a bind. Their desire to preserve the quality of their properties by forcing out drug dealers conflicts with their desire to avoid physical clashes with the dealers.

Even landlords who are not intimidated find that getting rid of dealers is difficult.

Police may arrest a dealer, but, often as not, landlords say, the dealer is back in his apartment quickly--on bail.

Most dealers pay their rent promptly, landlords say, so straightforward evictions for non-payment of rent can only rarely be used.

And many landlords believe--erroneously, according to city officials--that the city’s “just cause” rent control law effectively prohibits them from evicting tenants who are paying their rent unless they can prove that the tenants are committing crimes.

“Any eviction for cause other than for non-payment of rent is a problem,” said Trevor Grimm, an eviction attorney who serves as general counsel to the 23,000-member Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles. In the case of drug dealers, “it’s as big a problem as the police have in convicting because, basically, to evict on those grounds, we have to prove the crime.”

But Barbara Zeidman, director of the city’s Community Development Department’s rent stabilization division, said the law is less demanding than that.

“You can prove (the drug dealer) is a nuisance without proving he is a drug dealer,” she said. To win a nuisance eviction, she said a landlord must show only that a tenant is interfering with the rights of other tenants to safely enjoy their surroundings.

Or, she said, landlords can win an eviction by showing in court that a drug-dealing tenant is violating the terms of his tenancy by running a business--any business--from residential property.

The hitch, landlords say, is that tenants would probably still have to testify to help the landlord make these kinds of eviction cases in court, and tenants are too scared to testify.

As one person who lives near Judge Ormsby’s building said, in explaining why he did not want to be quoted by name: “I don’t want to die behind some penny-ante punk dope pushers.”

Zeidman said she has heard of only two instances in Los Angeles where a landlord has used either approach to persuade a court to evict a drug dealer.

Meanwhile, she said, she has noticed “a rising level of concern among landlords and tenants” about the problem, not only in Crenshaw, but also in Venice, Van Nuys, Harbor-Gateway and the Bryant-Vanalden section of Northridge.

Landlords such as Eric Crumpton, who heads a citizen’s group called the Crenshaw Apartment Improvement Program, are lobbying for a change in the law that would allow them to evict drug dealers based on a police officer’s report of a drug-selling arrest.

Rights Abuse Feared

But an eviction based only on an arrest report--which might contain inaccuracies untested by courtroom questioning--could result in abuses of tenants’ rights, Zeidman said. “What landlords want is (for evictions) to be faster,” she said. “But you can’t have it faster and still ensure that you are not railroading the tenant.”

Because of such conflicts and because of overtaxed police, landlords are frequently required to fall back on their own resources to solve this kind of problem.

To keep drug dealers out, Crumpton said, it takes “people who are willing to take some risk, to be a little afraid sometimes. . . . I’ve had dealers offer me thousands of dollars so they could rent. I’ve also had shotguns pulled on me.”

Crumpton said he has gotten rid of 15 drug dealers in buildings he owns. “Some I paid to leave, and some left after continuous harassment by the narcotics squad of the Police Department,” he said.

Another Crenshaw-area landlord, Oscar Gibson, has tried a preemptive approach. He said he tells prospective tenants: “ ‘I’m an informer. If you mess with drugs, I’m going to call the cops.’

“Telling them that in front, it seems to work pretty good.”

Other landlords, however, find it profitable to maintain their buildings for drug dealers, city officials and police said. Drug dealers not only tend to pay their rent on time, they may pay exorbitant rents. And they do not make many demands for services because they want to be left alone.

Ormsby’s building is on Palmwood Drive, a two-block cul-de-sac lined with small apartment houses next to the Crenshaw Shopping Center.

Drug sales were taking place openly on Palmwood, and it was “common knowledge” that the principal supplier to the street sellers was a resident of the judge’s building, said Police Officer David Jones in an affidavit for a search warrant last February.

The resident, a woman, lived in Apartment 6.

In two hours of watching that apartment, Jones said, he saw more than 30 people approach it, spend less than a minute at the door and leave. He arrested three of them. Each had rock cocaine.

Apartment Raided

Then police obtained a warrant and raided the woman’s apartment. They arrested her and others inside on suspicion of possessing cocaine for sale, seized rock cocaine with a street value of $600, and confiscated three weapons, including a loaded, stolen Colt .45.

The woman, Essalena Chess, had a rap sheet that showed she used 11 aliases and had 19 arrests, mainly on suspicion of committing petty crimes. Chess returned from jail quickly, residents said.

A few days later, Officer Jones was back, standing in a hallway watching Apartment 5, where he said he saw the tenant, Pete Washington Jr., sell a yellow balloon of heroin to a customer for $20. Jones said he also seized a red balloon and a green balloon containing heroin from Washington’s pocket.

In two weeks, police made nine arrests in the judge’s building and three outside. And they made five drug arrests in and around another building that was a trouble spot on the same street.

Police Capt. Moore said he had decided to make Palmwood, and the judge’s building, “an example for what we could do for any individual spot where there’s concentrated criminal activity.”

“Things got very quiet for about two weeks to a month maybe,” Moore recalled. “And then as our presence decreased, their presence increased.”

And then Moore dispatched more police officers.

In late April, Officer Dennis Bukowski lay on the ground, wearing a camouflage jacket and peering through binoculars at the judge’s building, logging what a colleague said was the building’s 160th hour under police surveillance.

Bukowski saw a parade of people go in, stay a minute or so, and leave. He said he learned through informants that the people were buying cocaine from Apartment 4 and that the dealers there were armed members of one of the Blood street gangs--an allegiance they advertised by wearing red clothes.

Bukowski said officers determined that the apartment had been rented by Lillian Cole, but that it did not appear she was in charge of the drug selling.

Guilty Plea

In a raid, officers arrested her and Nathan Covington, who said he lived elsewhere. Covington pleaded guilty to possessing cocaine for sale.

Cole, also charged with possessing cocaine for sale, was placed in a drug-diversion program and, according to court records, moved out.

Ormsby had served her with a notice to pay rent or move out the week before, court records show. She was 19 days late with her April rent.

The judge followed up, shortly after the raid, by contacting Moore. He also filed a complaint seeking eviction against Cole in Los Angeles Municipal Court.

In their meeting, Moore said, Ormsby told him he wanted to cooperate with police.

Moore said he told the judge that he would send him a letter identifying apartments in Ormsby’s building where officers had made arrests for sales or possession of narcotics and listing those arrested on the grounds of the building.

But Moore waited until August, when he said he sent the letter to the judge and told Ormsby that the building could be considered a public nuisance if things were not done to improve the situation.

Drug trafficking has remained a problem on Palmwood Drive, although much of the activity on the street has shifted away from the judge’s building toward the corner, neighbors and police said.

They said Washington has remained in Apartment 5, free on bail, awaiting trial on the charge that he sold heroin.

Chess, they said, has remained in Apartment 6. Neither she nor those arrested with her were formally charged by the district attorney’s office with any crimes. A deputy district attorney explained that a necessary portion of the search warrant was missing from a file that police provided to the prosecutor. The document apparently had been misplaced through a clerical error.

Officer Jones, who raided Chess’ apartment in February, visited Palmwood Drive early this month.

He was in the back of a van driven by an undercover officer, who attempted to buy some cocaine from a young man outside the judge’s building.

According to Jones, the young man went to a window of Apartment 6, apparently to try to get some cocaine to sell. But he came back empty-handed. He told the officer he would have to go to the apartment himself to make the buy.