New Owner Gets Same Term in Slum

A Rolling Hills man who bought apartment buildings from a convicted slumlord was sentenced Thursday to the same thing as his predecessor--confinement for 30 days on his run-down property in addition to a term in the County Jail.

The sentence Los Angeles Municipal Court Commissioner Juleann Cathey imposed on Hyoung Pak was the latest action after Pak’s guilty plea last October to nine counts of city health, building and safety code violations in the aging apartment buildings at 1821 and 1839 S. Main St.

Cockroach Infestation

Prosecutors said at the time that the buildings, which include a total of 130 small apartments, were infested with rodents and cockroaches. They said windows were broken, paint was peeling, walls were cracked and the plumbing and electrical systems were in disrepair.

Pak, 48, was sentenced in October to $10,000 in fines, ordered to pay the city about $3,000 in investigative costs and placed on three years’ probation on the condition that he not commit any similar violations.

In February, Deputy City Atty. Stephanie Sautner appeared in Cathey’s court to argue that Pak failed to make repairs mandated by the conditions of his probation. A hearing on Pak’s probation status was set for Thursday, when Cathey revoked the probation and ordered him to appear in the court again May 26 for imposition of the sentence.

However, Cathey gave Pak an out: She said that if, by May 26, Pak has made every one of about 100 repairs listed in the city attorney’s complaint, the sentence will be stayed.

If not--and Sautner said Thursday that Pak “has never complied in the past”--Pak will have to spend the month as a tenant in one of the buildings on South Main Street before serving another 30 days in jail. While serving the term as a slum tenant, Pak would be required to wear an electronic anklet to alert authorities if he strayed more than 150 feet from his apartment.

Pak and his wife, Sook Pak, were charged last March with 43 violations of the health, building and safety code--about nine months after they took over the Main Street property they had purchased for $2.2 million from neurosurgeon Milton Avol of Beverly Hills.

The city’s struggles with Avol date back to 1979, when then-City Atty. Burt Pines led television crews through the hot, dingy corridors of the buildings to send a message to slumlords “that we mean business.”

Avol was fined $3,000 for fire code violations at the time, and in ensuing months was the target of civil suits by tenants and a variety of criminal complaints by the city attorney’s office.

Finally, in June, 1985, Judge Veronica Simmons McBeth ordered Avol to spend 30 days of “house arrest” at a run-down property he owned at 463 S. Bixel St., wearing the same sort of anklet Pak may have to wear. Sautner said Avol was not ordered to stay in either of the Main street properties because they had already been sold to Pak.

A judge later sentenced Avol to five months in County Jail, a sentence that he finished serving in February.