LANDLORDS VS. DRUG DEALERS : DRUG WAR CROSS FIRE : Narcotics: Caught in the middle between drug-dealing tenants and irate neighbors, landlords are being sued or their property seized for not taking action.

It all began when an Inglewood resident suspected that the tenants in a nearby rental house were dealing drugs.

The neighbor called the owners of the three-unit property, Melvin and Alice Hanberg, to tell them about the suspicious activity at their rentals.

Melvin Hanberg refused to deal with the problem, which he argued was the job of the police.

“I didn’t want to risk my neck. I’ve already fought in two wars,” said Hanberg, a retired Army colonel. “I didn’t want to serve in a third war--the drug war.”

Inglewood police made a series of drug-related arrests at the property, but when they failed to yield any convictions, police decided to take another--and much more serious--action. They referred the Hanbergs’ property to the Los Angeles office of the U.S. Attorney, which has sweeping power to seek property seizures and forfeitures on behalf of the government in drug-related cases.

Within several months of the neighbor’s phone call, the Hanbergs’ property had been seized. A trial court upheld the seizure and so did the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which in its opinion this August noted the couple’s “willful dereliction of social responsibility.”

The Hanbergs are appealing the case, but for now their $100,000 rental property is in the hands of the federal government.

Like it or not, the Hanbergs and many other landlords have found themselves caught up in the war on drugs.

More and more, owners who avoid confronting or evicting drug-dealing tenants are being sued by neighbors seeking to collect on nuisance claims, by cities seeking abatement and by the federal government, which can seize property used “in any manner or part” to facilitate the commission of a narcotics crime.

Landlords don’t have to be personally involved in narcotics trafficking to have their property taken away by the federal government. Tenants suspected of dealing drugs don’t even have to be convicted of anything in court. Because these are civil-law seizures and forfeitures, probable cause is all that’s needed by federal authorities to initiate a seizure. And, while criminal cases require prosecutors to establish guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” civil cases have a less onerous burden of proof.

Here are some results from the war on drugs:

--In Sun Valley, owners of a nine-unit apartment complex were sued by the Los Angeles city attorney after police reported 42 drug arrests at the property within 20 months. The owners were ordered to hire uniformed security guards, install high-intensity lighting and post signs warning tenants that they’d be evicted for drug possession.

--A Riverside County couple were recently obliged to evict their drug-using son from his residence. The parents held a first trust deed on the property and evicted their son to avoid losing their interest in the property, which the U.S. Marshals Service was planning to seize.

--In late July, a North Hollywood woman who allowed her home to become a reputed crash pad for drug users was served with a seizure warrant by federal authorities. The seizure of the $270,000 house--less than a block away from James Madison Jr. High School--is being contested by the woman.

As of August, 1991, the Marshals Service reported an inventory of almost 4,600 seized properties for sale or awaiting court action. The properties--concentrated mostly in California, Texas, Florida and New York--were valued at about $687 million.

In the Central District of California--which includes Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties--the Marshals Service reported an inventory of 368 pieces of real property, valued at about $121 million.

Twelve properties were taken over by marshals in October alone in the Central District, with an estimated worth of $3.91 million.

Seizure--and eventually forfeiture--are usually employed by authorities when other methods don’t work. Most law enforcement agencies begin dealing with drug dens by first contacting landlords about fixing up their properties and evicting troublesome tenants.

The police don’t suggest seizure unless repeated attempts to work with an owner have failed or where the owner is directly involved in narcotics activity.

Both state and federal law provide for the taking away of property used in connection with drug activity. State cases are handled by a district attorney. Federal cases, which are more common, are handled by a U.S. attorney.

For those landlords who don’t cooperate, seizure and forfeiture are perceived as “a law enforcement tool to effectuate a goal,” said William C. Cullen, a Los Angeles city attorney and special assistant at the U.S. Attorney’s office.

Cullen’s job is to oversee federal seizure warrants and get them signed by a U.S. magistrate. “Nothing happens,” he said, “without a court order.”

After a federal seizure, the government files a forfeiture complaint naming the property (not its owner) as defendant. Meanwhile, property management falls into the hands of the U.S. marshals.

Once forfeited, the property is sold at auction, and the proceeds are divided by law enforcement authorities and either the state or U.S. treasury, depending on who handled the case.

Most forfeited properties were owned directly by medium-sized drug dealers or big-time distributors. A growing number of properties, however, belong to commercial property owners who have never sold or even used illegal drugs.

Holding landlords responsible for their tenant’s activities doesn’t sit well with Melvin Hanberg, however.

“This does not solve the problem,” said an angry Hanberg. He claims that he didn’t evict his tenants because he was afraid and because he didn’t have enough proof of drug dealing at the rental property.

Because criminal charges could never be made to stick against any of the tenants, Hanberg said, he was worried that an eviction notice would just bring a countersuit against him by the tenants for wrongful eviction.

The Hanbergs are appealing the seizure of their property. (Owners who have their property taken away can also file a petition for mitigation of forfeiture with the U.S. Department of Justice.)

“I’m not the police,” said Hanberg. Besides, he added, “I’m a sitting duck in my office. The dealers can come by and shoot me anytime.”

Carolyn Reynolds isn’t swayed by such arguments.

As special counsel in the U.S. Attorney’s 10-member real property forfeitures unit in Los Angeles, she has prosecuted most of the local cases involving landlords who have failed to act on drug dealing in their buildings.

“Once the owner has notice, he or she should take some steps to cure the problems,” Reynolds said. “It’s not our policy to take away property from an owner who doesn’t have notice.”

But once landlords have been told about alleged drug dealing by other tenants, neighbors or by the police, the landlord has to take action that either eliminates the drug dealing or the troublesome tenants, or face seizure.

“It is very easy to seize property, but it’s not what we want to do,” said Los Angeles police Lt. Rick Smith, head of the narcotics abatement unit known as FALCON--Focused Attack Linking Community Organizations and Neighborhoods.

FALCON’s goal is to clean up drug-infested buildings and to work with their owners to keep them clean. The program was created in November, 1990, and funded by the State Office of Criminal Justice Planning. On the FALCON team are seven Los Angeles Police Department officers, two city attorneys and a Department of Building and Safety inspector.

“We try to work with the owner in a cooperative spirit, not to make unreasonable demands,” Smith said. “We try to look at a neighborhood and examine the causal factors that made it easier for these crooks to ply their trade.”

This often includes forming “community impact teams” to help fix up a whole block. These teams include the Department of Sanitation to facilitate better trash pickup, the Department of Transportation to limit parking in areas with drug traffic or the Department of Street Lighting to illuminate dark areas that have attracted drug dealing.

About 90 properties in Los Angeles have been “abated” since November, 1990, with the help of their owners.

Meanwhile, similar abatement programs are being administered directly through the LAPD or other local police departments.

“We’re trying to have owners take responsibility for the people they rent to,” said Carlos Lopez, coordinator of PACE--Police Assisted Community Enhancement at the LAPD. “It’s part of being an owner.”

PACE targets properties identified by beat officers as having a disproportionate number of police service calls or complaints from neighbors.

PACE contacts the owners and encourages them to evict bad tenants, along with fixing up or boarding up the drug dens.

Owners who aren’t initially cooperative may find themselves at the center of a PACE-sponsored letter-writing campaign. Some owners have been prodded with up to 30 letters from the police, city council office, neighbors, Department of Building and Safety and anybody else with an interest in the neighborhood.

So far, PACE has been successful with its tactics and there has been no need to seize any properties, Lopez said.

Taking an owner’s property away doesn’t necessarily result in a quick resolution to the problems created at the property itself, Lopez noted. That’s why, he said, seizure and forfeiture should only be employed in the most extreme cases of owner intransigence.

Problem tenants and run-down buildings are best avoided by “maintaining a strong hand and being management intensive,” said Gary Holme, executive vice president of the Beaumont Co.

Los Angeles-based Beaumont manages about 8,500 apartment units, 10 to 12 of which have to cleared of drug-dealing tenants over the course of a year.

For small-time owners, the problems associated with a drug-dealing tenant are much more serious. “It puts them (the owners) in a really bad position,” Holme observed. “They don’t know where to turn.”

“It’s hard to prove somebody is a drug dealer,” Holme said. Most landlords don’t want to risk falsely accusing one of their tenants. Instead, they have to build a case for eviction based on nuisance, excessive traffic, boisterous conduct, or infringing on the quiet enjoyment of other tenants. These problems--often associated with drug dealing--can form the basis of an eviction notice.

Like Holme, property manager Mark Dolan has also had to cope with evicting drug dealers.

“I fear for my safety every day of my life,” said Dolan, president of Dolan & Knight Property Management Inc. of Pasadena. Dolan manages about 450 apartment units and he has to evict anywhere between six and 12 drug-dealing tenants each year.

“It’s a very frightening situation . . . you don’t know what is going to happen,” Dolan said. “You take your life in your hands when you get out of your car.”

Dolan said he has been verbally threatened and has had his tires slashed in the course of evicting problem tenants. And, even when the tenant is arrested, he said, “most of the people are back on the streets within 24 hours.”

A police report does help in evictions, said Dolan, but the process is still time consuming and expensive.

It takes several months to evict most tenants. During this period, the landlord collects little or no rent, and usually there are hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in legal bills, Dolan said.

Drug dealers scare other tenants in a building away, creating higher vacancies. And, once the apartment is vacated, Dolan said, it can cost several thousand dollars just to repair the damage done by angry and often violent drug dealers.

All told, Dolan said, one drug dealer can easily cost a landlord $10,000.

“You cannot turn your back on the problem,” said Dolan. “It is like the proverbial snowball.”

The best time to head off such problems is in the tenant screening process, Dolan said. But, he conceded, “no matter how much background checking you do, these people slip by and get into your building.”

Often the dealers send a “friend” to rent an apartment. “Next thing you know, the friend is gone and someone else is there.”

In Los Feliz, Dolan rented a luxury apartment to a sick grandmother and her family who were supposedly in Los Angeles for medical care. The family paid three months of rent in advance and moved in.

Within several months, grandma had disappeared, while the others were all incarcerated for drug distribution.

This Los Feliz case points to the fact that no area and no landlord is immune to the problems associated with drug dealing. Regular maintenance and on-site management do help, however.

“A lot of property owners are not familiar with the condition of their properties,” said Kathy Godfrey, senior field deputy in the Hollywood office of Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo.

The council office makes an effort, Godfrey said, to focus on particularly troubled properties and to work with community groups to put pressure on recalcitrant landlords.

“If you own property, you’re responsible for what happens at that property,” said Godfrey. For the most part, she added, “we’ve had a very positive response from property owners.”

Most police department abatement units report equally positive responses from most landlords.

Officers at the South Bureau LAPD abatement unit provide owners with a list of suggested improvements aimed at curtailing drug activity. These include more comprehensive background checks, keeping the grounds clean, installing interior and exterior lighting, security doors, warning signs and model leases that provide for a quick eviction in the case of drug dealing or possession.

“We want to work with the owner and make the neighborhood a better place to live,” said Sgt. Sam Layton of LAPD’s South Bureau. “We get 98% to 99% cooperation. . . . Our intent is not to take property.”

Holding landlords responsible for not evicting tenants is an unfair burden on the owner, said Trevor Grimm, general counsel for Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles.

“To take somebody’s property based on what somebody else is doing is rather Draconian,” Grimm said. “The cruel reality is that if it goes to the mat you have a 50/50 chance of being successful in evicting the tenant.”

Wayne Abb, a San Fernando Valley eviction attorney, worries about what happens when authorities get too much authority.

One of his clients, who foreclosed on a troubled property, was surprised to find that the property had been bulldozed. The City of Los Angeles had seized the property and apparently didn’t notify the note holder. This matter is now the subject of legal wrangling.

On the federal level, problems are beginning to surface in connection with seizure and forfeiture.

A General Accounting Office report issued in April said the U.S. Marshals Service is mismanaging seized properties. The report charged the marshals with having caused “embarrassment to the government”--especially in failure to conduct thorough title searches.

In San Diego County, a U.S. magistrate recently returned a seized 21-unit apartment building to its owner after concluding that drug dealing at the property worsened under government custody. Federal authorities were chastised by the magistrate for how they handled this case. The U.S. Attorney’s office has dropped all remaining proceedings.

Forfeiture is not a panacea, said Joseph M. Schilling, deputy city attorney in San Diego and a part of San Diego’s Drug Abatement Response Team.

“We try to develop an action plan for the owner to undertake abatement,” said Schilling. The key is getting things fixed quickly, he added. “For those living in a war zone, asset forfeiture isn’t going to work.”