A Landlord’s Descent into Suburban Purgatory
Like too many things in life, the house on Park Meadow Drive in Canyon Country is not quite what it seems. It’s got a three-car garage, but the three bedrooms are tiny. It’s got cathedral ceilings, but no dining room. It’s lovely, though, from the outside--tons of curb appeal, as they say--and, as a flier on the kitchen counter announces, it’s “Ready to sell for only $219,850!”
The house has been empty for about four months, slowly and steadily draining the savings account of its owner, Nancy Cole, an account executive at an L.A. radio station. Believe it or not, this state of affairs is preferable to the one in which Cole found herself 18 months ago, when she leased the house, with an option to buy, to a middle-aged couple named Barry and Sandra Switzer, who seemed like nice, responsible folks.
In retrospect, Cole says, she probably should have been suspicious about Barry Switzer when he announced that “property taxes are illegal” as they signed the lease / option papers.
The Switzers made only two rental payments, Cole says, and late ones at that, before trying to purchase the home outright in November with a $640,000 check sent to a property management company. Not that the house was worth anything near that amount. In a letter to the management company, Switzer demanded a refund on the “overpayment.”
He didn’t get a refund. He got arrested.
But not before Cole was plunged into a landlord’s nightmare, an Alice-in-Wonderland sort of purgatory, where nothing was as it seemed. Except, that is, the stark demands of her two mortgage holders, who regularly and dispassionately informed her that she was falling behind in her obligations after she asked them to suspend her loan payments until she could evict the Switzers.
“How often do you wake up and find out your property is seceded from the Union?” asked Cole. “That money doesn’t exist, that the government is illegal?”
Every day, apparently, if you, like Barry Switzer, are a student of the odd fiscal theories once taught at a remote Montana farm occupied by an anti-government group known as the Freemen.
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The mailman knew there was something amiss about the new tenants on Park Meadow Drive. They didn’t seem to fit into the well-kept neighborhood, with its carefully tended lawns and tidy facades. They let the yard go to hell right away, he said, and their clunkers left big oil stains in the driveway. He recalled a bumper sticker on one: “Don’t steal . . . the government doesn’t like the competition.”
Also, he said, the Switzers would stamp “Returned for Cause” on mail that appeared to be bills.
All in all, the mailman wasn’t surprised when he was ordered to separate their mail for monitoring by the Postal Inspector, nor when, eventually, the FBI came for Barry Switzer.
Switzer has been in jail since his arrest last April on charges of conspiracy and various acts of fraud related to bogus checks. For the past three weeks, he has spent weekdays in a Los Angeles federal courtroom, where prosecutors are trying their case against him and four other defendants, most famously M. Elizabeth Broderick.
Broderick is the Palmdale woman who is alleged to have run one of the biggest bogus-check scams in the country, charging up to $200 a head at weekly seminars in which she sold bad checks, so-called comptroller’s warrants, to people who tried to use them to pay off debts. Prosecutors say Switzer conspired with Broderick and the others to issue about 8,000 bogus checks to dupe creditors and profit themselves. Switzer’s attorney says he believed the checks were valid, having been taught as much at a 1985 Freemen seminar.
Cole knew something was way off about Switzer’s attempt to buy her $200,000 home with a check for more than three times that amount. She notified her banks, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspector that a fraud seemed to be in progress. The government thanked her and told her to hang tight while they investigated. The banks thanked her and reminded her that her payments were past due.
“So much for standing up and being a good citizen,” Cole says. “You aren’t supposed to shoot the person who’s stopping the robbery.”
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It wasn’t until Cole opened her newspaper in March and read about LeRoy Schweitzer, the tax resister and Freemen leader whose signature appeared as “guarantor” on the checks Switzer was trying to use, that she realized she might be the victim not of a lone con artist, but of the philosophies of an entire screwball patriot nation.
A few days later, Cole says, “Mr. and Mrs. Switzer sent me a document that appeared to be taking possession of my property and declaring it independent of the United States of America.” That lease / option was a great-looking deal on paper. The Switzers looked like good prospective tenants. And their checks looked like bona fide instruments of finance. But the only real thing about the whole deal is the 50 grand that Nancy Cole has lost.
Of course, if Barry Switzer and his pals end up in jail, maybe they’ll secede and form a new nation.
They could call it the Republic of Wonderland.
* Robin Abcarian’s column appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Readers may write to her at the Los Angeles Times, Life & Style, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053.
