Source: Times Union (NY)
Copyright: 1999, Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation
Contact: tuletters@timesunion.com
Address: Box 15000, Albany, NY 12212
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Author: Dan Lynch, Times Union Columnist, 454-5412.

LANDLORDS GET CAUGHT IN DRUG WAR

We'll call him Robert.

He was a drug dealer. He got nailed. Robert was a guest of the taxpayers for
nearly a year.

In the interim, his landlady, Janice Potter, found another tenant for the
apartment. She removed Robert's stuff and stored it. She neglected, however,
to formally evict him. When he got sprung, Robert went to the law and got
back the apartment.

Janice Potter had to move her new tenant to another unit. She had to move
Robert's stuff back into the apartment. She had to let him resume living in
the place before she went to court to get Robert's butt bounced out as an
undesirable.

Janice Potter is a nice lady with gray hair. She was telling me this story
Monday in the rotunda of Albany City Hall. We'd just watched Attorney
General Eliot Spitzer, accompanied by Mayor Jerry Jennings and Sheriff Jim
Campbell, announce a new statewide program to fine or even jail landlords
who permit drug dealers to operate on their premises. No new laws are
needed, Spitzer was saying. He has the statutory authority to seek
injunctions against landlords who don't evict drug dealers. They do it in
Binghamton, Eliot Spitzer said. And the program is a huge success in
Philadelphia.

"Landlords," the mayor said into the microphone, "take us seriously."

Well, Janice Potter was taking these guys every bit as seriously as she'd
been forced to take Robert the drug dealer a few years ago. She also takes
seriously the hardships of operating residential rental property in poor
neighborhoods.

After all, it was just a few weeks ago that her husband, the Rev. Daniel M.
Potter, mentioned to a tenant on Clinton Avenue that the rent was late. The
tenant has been charged with beating the Rev. Potter to death with a piece
of wood.

In theory, this landlord thing is a fine idea. The street trade in drugs has
slowed. It's too easy to get busted if you peddle on pavement. The cops come
up, pat you down, slap on the cuffs and away you go.

Plus, sometimes you have to pull out an Uzi and fight for the corner. Drug
dealers tend to be ferociously competitive capitalists.

But, if you operate out of a building, the cops need probable cause for a
search warrant. So, the drug trade has tended to move indoors, as dealers
develop a sharper appreciation for the niceties of the law.

That means you need a place of business. Since you don't report your income
to the IRS, it also means that normal means of credit to buy a place
generally isn't available.

So, you find an apartment. You smile nicely. You hand the landlord three
months rent in cash. Then you start selling. Those are the landlords that
Eliot Spitzer, Jerry Jennings and Jim Campbell are after -- landlords who
specialize in not knowing a thing and who don't care what happens to the
neighborhoods in which they own property.

A nice lady called me not long ago. She has lived for 35 years in a house
she owns on Second Street near Quail. A drug dealer has moved in next door.
The trade, she tells me, goes on all night long. She's not fond of the
landlords in her neighborhood.

The problem will be proving what the landlords know and when they knew it.
As one landlord told me the other night, "If the cops know they're dealers,
they can arrest them. I'm not a cop. How do I know?"

It's not a bad argument. Tenants, even bad ones, are not all that easy to
bounce out. But this drug thing is a war, and a just one.

And, like it or not, New York's landlords just got drafted.

Dan Lynch can be reached at 454-5412.