Getting Even : Homeless in his hometown, Richard Kreimer says he was treated like a dog. And so he struck back--he sued. And sued. And sued.

On most mornings, Richard Kreimer rises from his sleeping bag in the woods, zips on a filthy parka and walks into town to call his lawyers. Pulling crumpled notes from his pockets, the disheveled homeless man also dials TV hosts, publishers and movie producers.

As he pumps coins into a pay phone near City Hall, police watch with suspicion. Pedestrians make obscene gestures, then walk away in disgust. Across the street, a mother with small children sees Kreimer and hurries by.

“I’ve been treated like a dog for 10 years,” says the man whose caked beard and smelly clothes have become a landmark in the small town where he grew up. “If anybody ever violates my rights, I swear on my parents’ graves, I’ll sue them all again. Everybody. The whole damn town.”

Normally, the muttered threats of a homeless person would be ignored here. The wild man by the pay phone looks like just another loser, and his belligerence seems pathetic, if not deranged. But when Richard Kreimer talks lawsuits, Morristown listens.

Earlier this month, the City Council awarded him $150,000, settling a case in which he alleged that local police had harassed him and violated his civil rights. Embarrassed officials said they could not afford the open-ended costs of fighting Kreimer and his court-appointed lawyers--a bill some believe could have reached $1.2 million.

It’s thought to be the largest payment for civil rights violations ever made to a street person in the United States. Yet it was only the most recent legal victory for Kreimer, 42, who thinks of himself as a homeless Ralph Nader and has attracted national attention.

The stocky man with scabs over his eyes struck again in May, when a federal district judge agreed with him and ruled unconstitutional a Morristown library ordinance designed to exclude Kreimer and other “undesirables.” The decision has polarized librarians across the nation, pitting free-speech advocates against those who say libraries must not be taken over by armies of homeless men and women.

In April, Kreimer protested county laws that blocked him from voting because he had no address. He threatened yet another lawsuit, but the state attorney general ruled that the homeless had a right to vote in New Jersey--even if they listed their residence as a park bench, as had Kreimer.

To be sure, these victories have been engineered by a battery of private and public-interest attorneys. Kreimer has been represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, constitutional law experts, veteran civil rights litigators and members of the state’s public advocate office.

Yet all insist they could not have won without their client’s persistence and self-confidence. A voracious reader, Kreimer dug up legal facts and arguments in the local library that astonished his lawyers.

“Richard has a low tolerance for people being condescending to him, and that’s the mistake the town made,” says attorney Bruce Rosen, who aided Kreimer on his library case. “Before all this, he was a statistic, like so many other homeless persons. But now he’s become a lightning rod.”

Besides receiving extensive press coverage, Kreimer’s legal victories have generated movie and book offers. He talks of touring the country as a homeless advocate and speaking before the 1992 Democratic National Convention. If time permits, Kreimer says he’ll run for mayor in 1993. When he pockets his $150,000 in several months, he plans on giving a good chunk to homeless charities.

“Mr. Kreimer’s been very good at playing the system. . . . He’s educated and articulate and not really representative of the homeless in this area,” says Barbara Wilson, a former housing commissioner and longtime resident. “He’s also self-serving, egocentric and enjoying all this attention hugely.”

It’s been something of a shock for Morristown, a tree-lined community of 16,000 about 40 miles west of New York City. Like many suburbs, the New Jersey town is not used to dealing with homelessness. The influx of about 500 street people in recent years has been overwhelming, and some of Kreimer’s admirers say his lawsuits have focused attention on the problem.

Mayor Norman Bloch concedes that Kreimer deserved his day in court. But the mayor says the controversy shows how America’s legal system has been corrupted by litigation-crazy attorneys. Council members were forced to resolve the police lawsuit, Bloch notes, because the town’s insurance company refused to pay more than $150,000 to settle it. At one point, there were 32 defendants in the case and many had their own high-priced attorneys.

Others blame Kreimer for the Morristown mess, saying he has deep emotional problems. Why should the town cave in to a man who can’t function in society?

“The guy’s a rotten bum, that’s all there is to say,” says Al Mills, a longtime resident. “He held us up for ransom and made us look like fools. By now, people just wish he’d go away and leave us alone.”

There’s little chance of that. Kreimer has heard the taunts on the street. He’s read the editorials that portray him as an ingrate and seen the cartoons that picture him with flies buzzing around his head. He’s received death threats and been beaten up more than once. And he doesn’t care.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Kreimer says, thumbing through scraps of paper for phone numbers he’ll be calling. “I was raised here. This is my town. And I’ve seen it from both sides of the tracks.”

Years ago, Richard Kreimer never dreamed of such celebrity. He was raised by one of Morristown’s most prominent Jewish families, which owned an industrial paper supply company. An average student, he played high school sports and looked like any other longhaired kid who grew up in the ‘60s.

Kreimer says his world turned upside down in 1968, when his father died of a heart attack. Soon afterward, his mother also suffered a debilitating heart attack, and Kreimer had to drop out of community college to take care of her at home. Her 1973 death devastated him.

Over the next seven years, Kreimer lived in his family’s split-level home, working at a succession of odd jobs. But family disputes over the inheritance followed, and he lost control of the house in 1980.

Through a chain of events he refuses to discuss, Kreimer became destitute. He says only that “legal difficulties,” still in litigation, forced him into an economic tailspin. He moved to Colorado, then returned home in 1984 with almost nothing.

“It was like culture shock,” he says. “I suddenly realized that people who I had grown up with perceived me in a different way. People who had been friendly to me now looked the other way, because I didn’t have such nice clothes and didn’t have any money.”

To survive, Kreimer slept in the woods near the house where he grew up. He also slept on church steps and in the boiler room of the municipal building. On freezing winter nights, he bummed rides to New York City and spent the night in subway cars, returning to Morristown the next day.

Although an outcast, Kreimer still had some friends in town who occasionally helped him with meals and spare clothing. He periodically qualified for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments, and managed to squirrel away some money. But he never held a steady job.

“I tried to do that,” he says defensively. “I had two jobs while I was homeless. But when people found out about my condition, they fired me. If I had known then what I know now, I would have sued them, too.”

Like many homeless, Kreimer refused to sleep in shelters. He didn’t want charity from people who mixed religion with relief, charging that officials at one shelter tried to tell him that Jesus would cure homelessness.

Soon, Morristown lost patience with his lifestyle. Kreimer says police began rousting him from the church steps and, on one occasion, held a gun to his head in the municipal boiler room. He regularly visited the town library, reading novels, magazines and law books for several hours a day. But some residents and librarians began complaining bitterly about him.

“People told me they had to move away from the table he would be at because the stench actually drove them away,” says Mayor Bloch. “They also told me he stood there and glowered at them for minutes at a time.”

Kreimer angrily denies the charges, adding that he was offended by the heavy perfume worn by several women in the library. But he never believed it gave him the right to eject them: “In a democracy, that’s garbage.”

The library board, however, passed a law barring attendance by people who were “staring at another with intent to annoy” and “patrons whose bodily hygiene is so offensive as to constitute a nuisance to other persons.” It was aimed at Kreimer, and police began evicting him.

That was the last straw. Kreimer used the library to sue the library--and the police. He filed two lawsuits in federal court without an attorney. Luckily, the cases were assigned to Judge Lee Sarokin, one of the country’s most liberal federal jurists.

Sarokin assigned lawyers to represent Kreimer free of charge and eventually overturned the library ordinance. “If we wish to shield our eyes and noses from the homeless,” Sarokin wrote, “we should revoke their condition, not their library cards.” The case will be heard on appeal early next year.

As the dust settles, many residents are trying to forget about the whole controversy. But for Kreimer, the biggest battle has just begun.

Already, the pressures are intense. Mindful that many homeless people who get housing eventually go back on the streets, he plans to undergo counseling. Angered that the media he has courted might now hound him, he wants privacy.

“I’m going to have to get used to living maybe in an apartment house with 80 different people,” he says. “Now, I can go to the woods and be alone.

“When you’re homeless, you don’t concern yourself too much with your appearance. So I have to wonder, do I really want a closet full of clothes again? Is my appearance as important as it once was?”

It’s been 11 years since Richard Kreimer had a bank ATM card, drove his own car and went over to a girlfriend’s house. After years of feeling like a failure, he’s finally a big shot in his hometown. But not without a price.

“I’m tired of all the attention and people expecting me to measure up,” he says, watching another police car cruise by.

“Maybe I won’t want to do nothing with homelessness when it’s all over. Maybe, I’ll just get a room, get a color TV and watch ESPN all day. And have nothing to do with the rest of the world.”