Landlords Become Prime Target in Latest Battle to Abolish Drug Houses

The old house on Bowden Avenue in Clairemont had been the family home for years, but after the kids grew up, Reynaldo and Carmen Inchaurregui moved to a new home in South Bay.

Yet they kept the Bowden home, converted it into a rental, and for years the little one-story family-style house with the red trim and off-white stucco exterior served as a tidy rental property for the couple.

Until this summer, when police raided the house and found:

Drugs on top of the stereo. Drugs in a Tupperware container and along a mirror shelf in a back bedroom. White powder inside a pillow. A box of syringes under a bed. Scales used to measure drugs. A .22-caliber blue-steel revolver. Marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

City Threatened to Close

Then the city threatened to close the home under a new San Diego Drug Abatement Task Force program created by police and City Hall to go after property owners--rather than just drug dealers.

“A detective called us up one day and said they’d busted the place,” said the couple’s son, Rey (Cherokee) Inchaurregui Jr. “The detective told my mom that, if the drug activity continued, the city could actually sue to take the home away from us. That really shook us up.”

The Inchaurreguis did the smart thing. They evicted the tenants. They cleaned out the debris. They repainted the house. And now they have a new, responsible family living in the home.

Others have not been so fortunate.

The Bowden Avenue home is one of 15 properties reviewed by The Times that police have identified in recent years as being among the city’s worst drug houses. In the past two years, police raided all 15 homes and came away with large amounts of drugs, cash and illegal weapons. Many of the tenants have been jailed and the drug houses shut down. In some cases, the windows and doors have been boarded up and the properties abandoned.

Absentee Landlords

Many of the houses were assigned to the Drug Abatement Task Force after individual arrests of drug dealers and police searches failed to shut down the drug operations.

Most of them are owned by absentee landlords, and, in some cases, the owners could not be found by The Times at the addresses listed in the county’s property records.

Some of the owners live in Hawaii and Beverly Hills, so far away that they could not easily keep tabs on the rental properties. Another property owner who lives in the Banker’s Hill area of San Diego has been so afraid to visit her rental property a few miles away in the Southeast that today it is boarded up and empty.

And one of the owners of one drug house turned out to be the parents of an officer with the San Diego Police Department’s Narcotics Street Team.

Most of the owners said they never knew that their buildings were problem properties until the Drug Abatement Task Force notified them that drugs were being sold there.

Created in the fall of 1987, the task force is composed of members of the Narcotics Street Team and other anti-drug units, the city attorney’s office, the Fire Department, and representatives of the city’s housing and building-code enforcement divisions.

The premise of the task force is

simple: Drug dealers rarely own the property they use to sell their wares, and, when police come around, the criminals just move to a new location. Officials believe that property owners are more susceptible to pressures from police and City Hall.

“We’re not dealing with the ‘Miami Vice,’ Don Johnson type of dealers who live in big mansions and act as drug wholesalers,” said Joseph M. Schilling, a head deputy city attorney who helped create the task force.

“We’re dealing with the retailers. We’re trying to provide more relief to the individual neighborhoods. They’re the ones who are being terrorized by the drive-by shootings and drug dealing and gang warfare.”

Lt. Dan Berglund, head of the police Narcotics Street Team and chairman of the Drug Abatement Task Force, said arresting and jailing drug dealers is often a frustrating process because the crowded jails and courts put the criminals back on the streets. Going after the owners of the properties adds a new dimension to the war on crime.

“It gets the absentee owner off the dime,” he said. “When we come looking, he realizes he’s going to be impacted in his wallet.”

Members Cross-Trained

The task force members are cross-trained so that building inspectors are able to spot illegal drug residue while reviewing a home, and police officers can recognize fire and safety code violations while serving search warrants.

They meet informally once a month, share information, and attempt to identify properties that they believe constitute a public nuisance. Then they warn the property owners that they will be taken to court if they don’t shut down the drug houses.

The 15 properties reviewed by The Times were at various times scrutinized by the task force for drug violations. But many of them were dropped from the task force’s hit list after the owners evicted the tenants or the drug dealers were arrested or moved to evade police.

In other cases, the task force’s involvement has brought about a wide range of results:

- A house on Olivewood Terrace is the only property that actually has been shut down for a year by the task force because of repeat drug offenses.

The owner eventually lost the property in a bank foreclosure. But the drug dealing has resumed, and the task force now is negotiating with the out-of-town mortgage lender to clean up the premises.

- Another property near 30th and Commercial streets was such a mess that the plumbing company that owned the site simply tore the building down this summer.

- A home in Del Cerro, worth probably $250,000, was owned by a woman who lived in Guadalupe, Calif. Her son lived in the Del Cerro home until the task force came calling. Then the woman evicted her son, police arrested him, and she put money into rehabilitating the property.

Many property owners and managers, such as Steve Thomas of SCT Properties, said they do all they can to keep their homes occupied by law-abiding citizens. They said they carefully screen prospective tenants to eliminate any suspected drug dealers. And they said they try to act responsibly by evicting tenants involved in drug activity.

Thomas manages a triplex building in the 4000 block of Newton Avenue that was twice raided and where drugs, cash and guns was recovered. He said he was notified by police about the problems after the raids. And, although police expect him to immediately evict errant tenants, he said he actually must follow a lengthy and complicated legal process to remove many problem tenants.

“You can’t just go out and change the locks,” he said. “It takes three weeks to get somebody legally evicted. Well, in 18 or 20 days, a hell of a lot of drug dealing can go on.”

Dealers Became Squatters

Other property owners said that many seemingly responsible tenants hand the house keys over to drug dealers and then move out. The dealers then become squatters, and it is difficult to evict them.

But the task force maintains that no matter what happens inside a rental property, it is the owner who must be held ultimately responsible. When the task force identifies a drug house, warning letters are sent to the owners advising them that the property is a public nuisance and could come under civil abatement procedures.

The task force has evaluated about 60 properties so far, and half of them were considered to have serious enough violations that the task force declared them public nuisances.

Twenty of the property owners quickly and voluntarily complied. Either the drug dealers were arrested and the houses cleaned up, or the owners quickly evicted the tenants. Many of the owners also underwent counseling on how to choose tenants and monitor the activities at their rental properties.

The task force has filed civil complaints in five more cases, alleging that the owners are maintaining a public nuisance where drugs are sold, used or distributed. Maximum penalties include a one-year mandatory closing of the property, a $25,000 fine, the seizure of personal property and fixtures in the house and the repayment of city attorney’s fees.

Another five cases are being prepared for abatement proceedings, and Berglund and Schilling met recently to discuss ways to broaden the group’s efforts. “At this point in time,” Schilling said, “anything is going to be welcome news in the war against drugs.”

The war against drug house owners has led in many directions, and, in one case, to a place a block away from San Diego police headquarters.

Last August and September, police raided a three-story apartment building in the 1400 block of F Street. They found marijuana, methamphetamine and “white powder;” a rifle, a revolver and a loaded .44 magnum; a blue book with drug records; syringes hidden in a jewelry box and more than $7,000 in cash.

“Mostly they sold reefer and crystal,” said Marty Meyers, using colloquial references for marijuana and methamphetamine respectively.

Prostitutes “hung around with whoever sold the crystal. Clients hung around with the dealers,” said Meyers, who has lived in the 16-unit building for a year and now manages the apartments. “Somebody else sold the needles. Somebody else was here because there was money and he was fencing stolen goods. We had hot cars and stolen motorcycles lined up out back.

“There was no control of the building. Whoever was the strongest and had the most money ran the building. And everybody catered to whoever had the drugs. People ran through here wondering ‘Who’s got the crystal?’ It was like a shopping mall in here every night. And somebody’s light was always on.”

Meyers said that Harold Kaemerle, one of the owners, suspected that something was going on inside the building but never realized how bad it was until he met police outside the front door.

“I went over to check on things and the manager was unshaven,” said Kaemerle, who owns Emerald Properties.

“He personally looked like he hadn’t been taking care of himself for a couple of days. His place was filled with trash. There were a bunch of undesirable characters hanging around outside. The day we went over to fire him, the police had just taken him away.”

Kaemerle escaped the abatement process because he evicted most of the tenants, spruced up the building and hired Meyers as the new manager. “This was a real eye-opener for us,” he said.

Patti McWay, a Bankers’ Hill real estate broker, acknowledged that she failed to closely monitor a home she owns in the 2900 block of Webster Street for about 18 months.

She said a neighbor warned her that the house was a drug stronghold, but McWay was so scared of the neighborhood in Southeast San Diego that she refused to go there and inspect the property. Once she even had a prospective buyer, but turned down his offers because she couldn’t muster the courage to meet him at the house, she said.

Two months ago, she was notified by the task force that the property had been the site of numerous drug arrests.

“Police said this had been going on for over a year,” she said. She met with task force members, and came away feeling as if the whole problem was hers alone.

“Drugs are a major problem in this town,” she said. “And anything to rectify it, I am for it. But their reaction is as though I hired these people to live in there.”

The tenants moved out to elude police, who had found balloons of heroin under the carpet and inside the toilet. McWay boarded up the house. A large white “Abatement Order” sign declaring the structure a drug house was posted on all four walls outside. And McWay was left stuck with a mortgage and no incoming rent.

“I’ve tried to sell that place forever,” she said. “But anybody driving by there, when they see the people standing out in the corner, nobody wants it.”

At an apartment building in the 2200 block of K Street, a large group of children lives and plays in the three-story structure where drug dealers have occupied a room on the third floor. The front porch is torn down, and rusty nails lie exposed where Maria Venita’s five children play tag.

Police have served four search warrants at the house in the last two years, coming away with drugs and guns and large amounts of loose cash.

Everett Cooney, who keeps a second-floor apartment, has seen his car broken into three times. He has also seen police take away other tenants and their guests at least once a month. Once, he said, police handcuffed a 14-year-old girl and led her out.

“It’s common knowledge that, when you want something, this is where to go,” he said. “A lot of people come up here and stay only five minutes. They come in upright and they leave staggering.”

The building owner, Delbert E. Zachay, acknowledged that he has had problems with drug-dealing tenants. “But I don’t know of anybody right now that’s been doing drugs,” he said.

He also criticized police for not jailing enough dope pushers and addicts. He said police are too slow to respond to calls, and that police seem generally unconcerned about landlord-tenant problems that involve drugs.

“The police just do their own thing,” he said.

But Schilling, the head deputy city attorney, scoffed at Zachay’s assertions. “He tries to manage a lot of properties without the proper support,” Schilling said.

Another drug house turned out to be owned by the parents of an officer on the Narcotics Street Team.

Officer Max Camberos said he knew his father, Jose, was having problems with the tenants in the apartment above a grocery near 22nd Street and Logan Avenue. But what he didn’t know was that his colleagues on the Narcotics Street Team considered it a drug house and raided the property in 1987. They found 27 bindles of cocaine and police undercover drug-buy money inside.

“My father had people who used drugs and occupied it,” Max said. “But I don’t know that it qualifies as a shooting gallery. He’s always tried to keep a clean clientele. And every time we’ve ever had a problem, we’ve called the police.”

Camberos said the property has since been cleaned up.