Tenant Assn. Leader Missing -So Is $1.7 Million Rent Money

Tenants in a luxury apartment building who waged a rent strike over balky elevators and cockroaches may have a bigger problem. Authorities say their leader has disappeared, along with $1.7 million of their money.

A warrant is out for the arrest of Steven Nelson Delit, 45, an accountant and president of the tenants’ association at the 45-story, tinted-glass apartment building on the fashionable East Side of Manhattan.

Delit used money from the account to pay his rent and gambling debts, Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert Morgenthau said Monday. A pizza parlor he owns also may have been bought with the money, the prosecutor said.

Delit organized a rent strike among some of the tenants who, while paying rents of $1,750 to $5,000 a month, complained of problems with the building’s elevators and air-conditioning, cockroach infestations and water leaks.

“When you live in a building and you pay 100% rent, you expect 100% services,” he said two years ago.

The tenants won a court order in September, 1988, allowing them to pay rents into a bank escrow account set up by Delit, instead of to the landlord, until the building’s alleged problems were fixed.

But the escrow account never was opened, investigators now say. The money paid by 40 to 60 tenants was deposited instead into an account over which Delit had sole authority.

Morgenthau said the tenants probably still have to pay the 27 months of rent. The bill could reach tens of thousands of dollars for some tenants.