Eric Dinnocenzo - The Tenant Lawyer (5 page)

Kendra and her children lined up next to me. Her five-year-old stood behind her holding onto her pant leg while her ten-year-old stared straight ahead, his jaw firmly set. My heart raced and my palms were sweating. Judge McCarthy instructed Frank to begin his argument. He crossed his arms in front of himself and said, “Your Honor, a few weeks ago the landlord and the tenant entered into an agreement for judgment. It was a non-payment of rent case, and the tenant owed three months. The agreement said the tenant was allowed to stay in the apartment if she paid rent going
forward,
and also if she made payments towards the arrearage, which the landlord was good enough to cut in half in the agreement. The first payment came due of eight hundred dollars and the tenant hasn’t paid the landlord anything.” Frank lifted his hands with his palms facing upward, as if presenting an offering at an altar. “He has to ask for possession.”

Judge McCarthy looked at me. “Mr. Langley?”

“This is Kendra Clark, the tenant.” I gestured towards her. “The reason she fell behind in rent is that the father of her three children suddenly just moved out of the apartment one day. He was just gone. He was the one working and making money for the family and paying the rent, and Miss Clark was taking care of the children. When he left, she found out that he hadn’t paid the rent.” During the first couple of sentences my voice felt like it was shaking, though I wasn’t sure if it was noticeable, and after that I began to feel more confident.

“As for the arrearage,” I continued, “it was cut in half because there were bad conditions like roaches. It wasn’t just benevolently done. Miss Clark’s children are one, five, and ten. If they’re evicted, the oldest child will have his schooling disrupted and—”

“What are your defenses,” Judge McCarthy interrupted. “Why should your client stay? I take it you’re not challenging that she owes the money.”

“No, Your Honor, I’m not. Miss Clark is expecting a welfare check within a week and she’ll give that to the landlord. She just needs an opportunity to get things in order going forward, so she asks for more time to pay the arrearage. As I said, there is that check she can give.”

“How much is the check?”

“Three hundred.”

Judge McCarthy gave me a troubled look as if to say, that’s not enough.

Frank Green jumped in. “No one disagrees that the tenant is in an unfortunate position. The problem is that the eight hundred was due two weeks ago, and now she’s offering just three hundred in one week. Even if three hundred is paid, more than half of the rent will remain unpaid with the next month approaching fast. It seems like a situation that isn’t going to ever get on track.”

“He’s right, Mr. Langley. The amount owed is eight hundred. You’re only able to offer three hundred,” said Judge McCarthy, his tone not unkind.

“Your Honor, Ms. Clark can pay the three hundred within a week, then we can revisit the issue. We’re just asking for that week to pay the three hundred. Then we could come back here—”

“But the problem is that, as Mr. Green pointed out, it’s eight hundred that’s owed, not three hundred.” Judge McCarthy looked directly at Kendra. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have to give the landlord the execution.”

I dropped my head and heard a soft gasp come from Kendra. The clerk called the next case. I quickly gathered my things up from the counsel table and with a quick nod motioned to Kendra to go out into the hallway with me. She had a confused look on her face, as if she had just come out of the subway and had no idea where she was. After we exited the courtroom, I told her, “I’m sorry.”

A tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it away and then looked off to the side. “I don’t know where we’ll go.”

“You should try some shelters,” I suggested in a soft voice. “They may be able to help.”

“I tried. I really did.” She was slowly shaking her head back-and-forth while continuing to wipe away tears. “And now there’s this.”

“If you can get the money soon, let me know, okay? We can come right back here to ask the judge to let you stay.”

Kendra nodded. But we both knew that she wasn’t going to get the money and that she would be evicted. I looked over at her two oldest kids who were standing a few feet away. The five-year-old seemed oblivious to what was going on, and the ten-year-old had his head down and was looking at the floor. He knew what had just happened. With a somber, heavy feeling inside, I stood there as Kendra gathered her children together and left the court.

4

Wh
en I spotted Kevin
Merola
, the attorney for the Worcester Housing Authority, in the lobby I headed over to him. When I was just a few feet away from him, he abruptly turned in my direction with a surprised look on his face.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, no. It’s all right. You sort of snuck up on me there.”

I gave an innocent shrug. “Do you have a moment?”

“Sure.”

“So how’s your morning going?” I asked genially.

“Okay.
Yourself?”

“So-so. I’m feeling a little wound-up.
Too much coffee.”

“Is that so?” he answered with a hint of amusement in his voice.

“I had a
vente
Starbucks Gold Coast blend. It’s like
friggin
’ rocket fuel.”

Merola
grinned. We had a strange relationship in that we sometimes got along well and sometimes pissed each other off. Once in a while, like now, I acted a little strangely towards him just to keep him off-kilter. More often than not, I enjoyed talking with him because he had a sharp mind and some interesting stories to tell from his many years as a lawyer. But when we were on opposite sides of a case, he could be tricky and manipulative. For instance, one time we had agreed to postpone a matter, and later he took the position that we had never done so. He would also on occasion push me hard on a point, and when I pushed back he would accuse me of being overly aggressive. I perceived it to be a tactic he employed to try to get me to back down, although I did allow for the possibility that he genuinely saw me that way, as a hard-hitting young upstart who overreached at times. Because he had many more years of practice under his belt than I had, I suspected that he thought I should be deferential to him.

“So how can I help you?” he asked.

“I’d like to talk to you about the Maria Roman case.”

I was going to ask him about the case concerning the woman, Anna, whom I had just met, since as the housing authority lawyer he would be handling it, but I decided not to. Not yet having committed myself to representing her, discussing it with him could turn out to be a waste of time. Besides, he probably wouldn’t give me any useful information and instead would turn the tables and try to get details from me that could help his case.

“Can we work out a probationary agreement?” I asked. “Like, say, the boyfriend doesn’t stay overnight for six months. If he violates it, you get the execution. If she abides by it and everything goes smoothly, the tenancy gets reinstated.”

Merola
scrunched his lips together as if he was passing a difficult bowel movement and slowly began to shake his head side-to-side. “That won’t work. This situation with the boyfriend really has to be addressed.” He knew my case wasn’t very strong, and I could tell that I wasn’t going to get a very good settlement.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“He’s been causing other problems at George Washington.”

“Like what?”

“He almost got into a fight with another tenant’s boyfriend a couple weeks ago. Supposedly, the two of them exchanged words and then your client’s boyfriend threatened to beat the shit out of him.” Kevin made the signal for quotation marks with his fingers when he said the words “beat the shit.”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it. Which tenant’s boyfriend? And did he really seriously threaten violence?”

Merola
massaged his beard with his fingers, looking at me as though I was an innocent rube unaware of how the world worked.
“The neighbor, Crystal’s boyfriend.
And he said he was going to beat the shit out of him, Mark, which I believe constitutes a serious threat of violence.”

I gave an exaggerated sigh. “Sometimes people say stupid stuff and sometimes they’re serious. My question is
,
which one is it?”

“I believe my witnesses will say that the threat was serious,” he replied dryly.

“Was the boyfriend named Luis?” I asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“He’s Crystal’s boyfriend and he used to go out with my client. I mention this because I think, if it indeed happened, there might be more to the story. I think the boyfriend is still interested in my client. He may have been egging on her current boyfriend or who knows what.”

“Whatever soap opera is going on involving your client, my understanding is that there was a threat, and the housing authority has to address that. They don’t think a probationary agreement will take care of things.”

“There was no actual violence, Kevin. And well, imagine that, someone in the projects talking trash. Who would believe it?
How shocking!”

“That’s the housing authority’s position,” he replied dispassionately. “We need the boyfriend out.”

“With her being able to stay?”

“I’m not positive, but I think we can do that.
Possibly.”

I knew right then that would be the best settlement offered, if one was offered at all, and that Maria would need to take it. Her case was simply too weak to take to trial, and she couldn’t risk losing her public housing just so that Jose could sleep over. Public housing was literally like gold for her, since her rent of $200 per month, calculated as one-third of her monthly income, was only about a quarter of the rent charged for a market-rate apartment in Worcester. But I knew that trying to sell the deal to her wouldn’t be an easy task. In fact I dreaded the prospect of doing it, anticipating that she’d react with anger and think that I was giving in without a fight. As much as
Merola
could be a pain in the ass, he generally didn’t puff in our negotiations, and I knew that trying to get more from him would be fruitless.

Thin, in his early-sixties, with fair skin and a gray beard,
Merola
had a slightly raspy voice that gave him a warm, avuncular manner. He and Frank Green were the top two landlord-tenant lawyers in all of Worcester County. While many lawyers in the region dabbled in that area of the law, he and Frank practiced it almost exclusively, so they knew the law inside-and-out. With other lawyers I could sometimes get away with posturing about the strengths of my case or the weaknesses of theirs, but that didn’t work with
Merola
and Frank.

Since all of my cases in the past against
Merola
had settled, we had never gone head-to-head at trial. I figured I could probably hold my own against him, but doubted that I could match him evenly. He had a certain comfort level and polished speaking style in court that I lacked. His words flowed forth in cogent sentences, as if they had been drafted in advance. He was skilled in constructing arguments, able to communicate his position in just a few sentences and then go on at length to fill in the background. More than once after we had argued motions against one another, I left the courtroom thinking to myself, I wish I could’ve done as good a job as he did.

Merola
was in a class with the most experienced Boston litigators I had seen in action. An ex-hippie and a product of the Sixties, he had started off his legal career years earlier as a public defender. After about seven years in that position, he opened his own law practice and over time moved away from criminal defense work to representing landlords and doing other real estate work. Criminal defense was an area that generally didn’t pay well, at least compared to civil work, unless your clients were white-collar criminals or wealthy drug dealers. He landed the Worcester Housing Authority and a couple of other large federal and state-subsidized apartment complexes as clients and gradually limited his landlord clientele to them. Those were the best clients to have with respect to housing court work, since they paid their bills and provided a constant stream of business.

It was my belief that by representing those public and quasi-public entities, he considered himself to be furthering liberal ends. His clients weren’t slumlords, as he saw it, but instead admirable purveyors of low-income housing. When we were adversaries in a case, he would sometimes portray his clients as being akin to saviors of the poor, as if they were doing God’s work. In contrast he would imply, if not state outright, that my clients were degenerates who were intentionally trying to harm the mission of public and subsidized housing by failing to obey their lease obligations. In a way he was right. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to live next door to most of my
clients. But, at the same time, he took too dim a view of them. They were just poor people who had problems, who had received a crappy roll of the dice in life, and aggressively evicting them wasn’t always the right answer. Despite his posturing, I suspected that deep down
Merola
felt a little less than pure on an ideological level. He was, after all, a former public defender now seeking to evict poor people from their homes. I believed that this unacknowledged guilt fueled a little hostility on his part towards me, a legal services lawyer who was often his adversary, and a young one at that who hadn’t been around during the Sixties like he had, who hadn’t paid his dues. The hostility surfaced in odd ways, like how he would push me hard on an issue and then recoil with surprise when I pushed back.