Sept. 11 hijackers’ Florida apartment building to be razed

Reporting from Hollywood, Fla. — 

The whiff of evil lingers in a nondescript apartment in Hollywood, Fla.

There, in a second-floor walk-up, terrorists Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi briefly shared lodgings before their Sept. 11, 2001, odyssey of destruction.

Now the building faces a wrecking ball. Hollywood’s unhappy connection to the nation’s worst terrorist attack soon will be transformed into a parking lot and pool.

“I feel like no one will be upset about that, considering who used to be a tenant there,” said Bryan Grosman, the investor who recently bought the 13-unit apartment building.

“It is one of life’s little treats to be able to demolish a property like that, where a monster used to reside,” Grosman said.

The current occupant of apartment 3A is Madelyn Karpowicz, 65, who shares the cluttered, two-room, $500-a-month unit with three cats. The walls are an unappealing brown, and furniture haphazardly crowds the wood floor. The kitchen is makeshift, as is the sheet that serves as a curtain.

“It’s not the most beautiful apartment in the world,” Karpowicz concedes. “It looks like a hovel.”

Karpowicz knew of the unit’s previous tenants when she moved in seven months ago. “At first it was a little disconcerting,” she said. “There were times when I said, ‘God, do I want to live in an apartment that was used by murderers?’ ”

Atta and Al-Shehhi, pilots of the two planes that crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, occupied the corner apartment from May through June 2001.

The building seems an appropriate refuge for someone on the underside of society. Beer cans nestle among unraked leaves, flypaper sags from doorways, laundry drapes a wooden fence.

“It’s a dump,” said Susie Spingola, 59, from the front stoop, beer and cigarette in hand.

“It’s the worst place I ever lived,” said Lynda Bush, in her 50s. Bush only recently learned who preceded her in the building. “I got the heebie jeebies,” she said.

“It creeped me out so bad I wanted to move out,” said her sister, Kim Cannon, 56. “I don’t know what they kept hidden there, explosives or guns or anything.”

Many residents live on disability and don’t know where they will go. They rail against the new landlord for their displacement.

Grosman bought the building in late December so he could put in a pool and parking for the new housing complex he owns next door. He notified tenants that the building would be demolished this month. If they agreed to leave by Jan. 31, they would be forgiven that month’s rent. All accepted, Grosman said.

Former owner Frank LoRusso of New Jersey said he wouldn’t have bought the building in 2005 had he known the Sept. 11 terrorists once lived there.

“We didn’t want to have any part of that. We happened to have known a number of people who lost their lives on that day,” he said.

“We had nothing but aggravation from the day we bought that place,” LoRusso said. “It was like it was cursed.”

rnolin@sunsentinel.com