Eric Dinnocenzo - The Tenant Lawyer (9 page)

Sure, I thought. Of course, they were going to return the moped. “Do you know what happened to him in court?”

“No.”

Her lack of knowledge about her son’s criminal history didn’t surprise me. In fact, most of my clients in drug eviction cases were similarly in the dark when it came to their sons’ activities.

“Anything else?”
I asked.

She shook her head. “No.”

“Does he live with you?”

“No. He used to stay with me sometimes, but he doesn’t live with me. You know, it was maybe once every one or two weeks, like when he wanted to shower and get some food. That’s it.”

I clasped my hands together and placed them on the table. “Okay. Well, if he didn’t live with you, why didn’t you take him off your lease?” I asked in a way that I hoped didn’t sound judgmental.

“I just didn’t think of doing it. When it was my lease renewal time, I just signed it. I didn’t think to take him off.”

“Did you not take him off because of your anxiety or depression? Like you forgot or you get overwhelmed by tasks, anything like that?”

“No.”

That meant that I could not allege a psychiatric disability as a defense to the eviction action. In other words, I could not claim that if it was not for her disability, Anna would have taken her son off the lease.

I shifted my focus to the drug arrest. According to Anna, Miguel’s friend had picked him up at his girlfriend’s apartment to go to the mall, and while they were on the road, the friend decided to stop at the Rite-Mart. After they parked, some guy came up to the window and within seconds a heroin deal went down with the friend selling and the guy buying. Miguel had no idea that it was going to happen, or, for that matter, that his friend had drugs in his possession. The police were on them so fast that he thought it had to be a sting.

“I don’t see how I can be evicted for what my son did,” Anna said. “That’s not something I did.”

“I’ll explain. I’ll go over that with you. But first, who was this friend of his?”

“Just some friend.
I don’t know who he is.”

“You don’t know his name?”

“No.”

“So is Miguel in jail?”

“He was, but he’s out now.”

“Does he have a criminal lawyer?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know who the lawyer is?”

“No.”

“Did you have any knowledge before the arrest of your son being involved with drugs?”

“Didn’t you just ask me that?”

“I asked you if he was arrested for drugs. Now I’m asking if you had any knowledge of him being involved with drugs.”

Anna shook her head. “No.”

I concluded that her case was a loser. All that the Worcester Housing Authority had to do in order to prevail was show by a preponderance of the evidence that Miguel had been involved in the drug deal, and it would not be a terribly difficult feat to accomplish. Miguel’s apparent excuse—that he and his friend were going to the mall and he was unaware that a drug deal was going to occur—didn’t strike me as particularly compelling. No doubt, it would seem even less compelling after
Merola
finished cross-examining him about his prior criminal activity. Moreover, Anna apparently knew very little about her son’s activities, and in my experience, that was not a good sign.

But I was nevertheless intrigued by the case based on a procedural aspect. There was a colorable claim that the notice to quit was defective which could possibly get the case dismissed. If I lost that battle, I would have to try what was essentially a losing case, but if I won, I would get Anna more time in her apartment and in the process keep
Merola
and the housing authority in line. They might think twice next time before using a fourteen as opposed to a thirty-day notice. The case posed a challenge, as opposed to being a routine matter, and it appealed to me for that reason.

I explained to Anna that she could, in fact, get evicted if her son was found to have engaged in illegal drug activity, and I cited the Supreme Court decision.

“How can that be the law? That’s so unfair.”

“I agree. But it’s the law.” I shrugged. “I think you have a very tough case, but I also think that on technical grounds the housing authority is not following the lease. I think an argument can be made that the Rite-Mart is not near George Washington and they should have given you a thirty-day notice.” I explained the lease requirements for using a fourteen as opposed to a thirty-day notice. “I can’t tell you that I can stop you from getting evicted. I just think that there is a chance I can get the case dismissed because they used the wrong type of notice. Even if I’m right, though, the housing authority can still turn around and file another case against you. And if that happens, your prospects won’t be very good in my opinion. These are just very tough cases, and the facts as I understand them aren’t in your favor. But anyway, if I’m lucky, I might be able to buy you more time.”

“Have you ever had these cases go to court?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Have you ever won?”

“No, I haven’t.”

Anna looked down at her lap. “I’ll have to move back to Puerto Rico with my son if I lose. I have a son, David, who’s in high school.”

“Another son?”

“He’s a senior. He’s got a scholarship to go to U. Mass. in Amherst. You know, I’m so proud of him for that, but if we have to move maybe he won’t get it.”

“A scholarship?”
This was highly unusual given that none of my past clients had children who went to college, much less children who had received scholarships.

“Yeah, he got a scholarship through the state. But if he’s not living here
any more
and not going to the high school, then he probably can’t get the scholarship. He needs to graduate from here.”

“The scholarship is through the state?”

“Yeah, David got good grades and he got high scores in that test.”

“The MCAS test?” The MCAS was a standardized test that Massachusetts students were required to pass in order to graduate from high school.

She nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. He’s in the honors courses and everything.”

“Well, that’s fantastic that he received it.” I paused. “Let’s just see what happens with your case, okay? I want you to know what you’re up against, but don’t stress out and jump to any conclusions just yet. It won’t do you any good. We don’t know exactly what will happen yet. What I’m going to do is to file papers with the court answering the eviction complaint. That will ensure that your case will be continued for at least two weeks, maybe longer.”

Anna suddenly brightened, as if a light had turned on inside her. “You don’t know what this means. I mean, I’ve been so nervous since I got this notice. Thank you so much.”

“I know. It’s very nerve-wracking. But we’ll just take it one step at a time.”

“Okay.”

“Also, I’ll need to meet with Miguel.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him next time I see him.”

“You should try to contact him soon because I want to meet with him sooner rather than later. I’ll want to speak with his criminal attorney, too, to get the police report and whatever records he has.”

I took Anna’s paperwork from her and tucked it away between the pages of my notebook. We both rose from the table and shook hands, and then I escorted her out of the conference room to the lobby.
Lucelia
was at the reception desk, looking quite pretty with her hair down, flowing past her shoulders, and I stood in front of her desk as I watched Anna walk out the door to the elevator. I wondered what caused her two sons to take such different paths in life and hoped I might gain some insight into that as her case progressed. I glanced at
Lucelia
and sensed that she was a little annoyed that I was hanging around her desk, so I returned to my office.

8

St.
Mary’s church was a dark red brick structure with tall front doors made of vertical wooden slats and curved in a half-moon shape at the top. Its gray steeple jutted sharply into the sky and towered high above the neighborhood with thin greenish-gray colored strips traveling from its base along each edge up to the tip. St. Mary’s had a distinctly medieval appearance. When I was a kid and my family drove up to it on Sunday mornings, I’d get the feeling that I was traveling back in time to the age of King Arthur.

I pulled up to the curb in front of the church and spent a few moments just looking at it before getting out of my car. My eyes traced its height from the doors up to the tip of the steeple, and then I silently cursed the colonel for sending me on this mission. Back in high school I had been very involved with the St. Mary’s community, but after I went away to college, I stopped attending mass and disassociated myself from the church. Father Kelly knew that I returned home for holidays and other times as well; he was aware of my absence. Now he was the one who was spearheading the CDBG meetings I had been attending, and each time I went to one I felt a little uncomfortable due to my history with him and St. Mary’s.

I got out of my car and hunched over a little in response to the cold, jamming my hands into my pockets. Taking small, careful steps I managed to navigate the hard-packed snow and ice on the walkway. In the summertime weeds sprouted from the cracks between the cement blocks, and an image came into my head of the end of mass on those summer days when I was a teenager, when Father Kelly would stand on the front steps and greet parishioners as they exited the church, always giving me a knowing look when he saw me.

I went around to the side entrance of the church and down the stairs to the basement. After passing through a narrow hallway with a low ceiling, I entered the small conference room where the meeting was being held. People were seated around a rectangular table with metal legs and a fake wood-grained surface. Father Kelly was at the head of the table. I was the last person to arrive and felt self-conscious when everyone turned to look at me. I noticed that a new person was in attendance, a Hispanic woman in her forties who was a little on the chunky side and wore a lot of makeup.

Once I took my seat, the meeting got underway with Father Kelly introducing the woman. “This is Gloria Ortiz. She’s the new director of the Worcester Hispanic Center, and she’s going to be joining us.” To Gloria he added, “Mark is a lawyer with legal services.” Then to the rest of us he said, “I’m going to start off by giving Gloria an overview of what’s happened thus far.”

I was familiar with the Hispanic Center, as they had previously referred clients who were facing eviction to my office. Father Kelly explained to Gloria that each year HUD distributed funds to Worcester and other cities with populations over fifty thousand under the Community Development Block Grant program, otherwise known as “CDBG.”
The amount of money that each city received correlated with its population and poverty level, and in the last calendar year, Worcester received seven million dollars.
According to federal regulations, CDBG funds were to be used for the purpose of providing decent housing and expanding economic opportunities for low and moderate income citizens. Examples were the rehabilitation of existing housing, the construction of new housing, mortgage down payment assistance, and rental assistance. In fact, before receiving CDBG funds, eligible cities had to prepare a plan describing the intended uses for the funds, and the public had to be given a chance to comment on it at public hearings.

I was impressed by Father Kelly’s knowledge of the subject matter. He really knew what he was talking about. He knew more than I did.

Father Kelly explained that over the past few years not all of the CDBG funds that had been distributed to the city of Worcester had been spent, and so a slush fund of about one million dollars had accumulated. Recently, the city manager and city council, acting together, had authorized the distribution of the funds to pay John Miller’s construction company to build a skywalk between the downtown sports arena and an adjacent hotel. John Miller was a well-known developer and landlord in the city; in the past I had represented his tenants in eviction cases. The remainder of the cost of the project was being financed by private sources. In entering into this arrangement, Father Kelly said, the city had bypassed the public comment requirement and, more importantly, had put the funds to an improper use.

“The funds aren’t being used for the benefit of poor people, as is the objective of the CDBG program,” he said. “The only argument the city could make that a skywalk in the downtown area would assist the poor is that it would create jobs for them, which is a permissible use of CDBG funds under what’s called the ‘Jobs Benefit Test.’ But the city would have to show that the skywalk would involve the employment of low-income people. For instance, it would need to show that they’d be employed in the construction process or afterwards by the hotel or the arena. But we think that type of argument is a stretch. The people employed for the construction would be the workers employed by Miller. And it’s not likely that a skywalk would create new economic opportunity once it’s in place.” Father Kelly briefly paused and looked around the room. “The question now is what steps to take.”

Lawrence
Geuss
, the fiery, sometimes wild-eyed director of the South Main Neighborhood Center, was seated across the table and to the right of me, and his clenched fist was resting on the table. The South Main area was the poorest area of the city, a center of drugs and prostitution. Having been a fixture there for the past twenty years, he had earned street-cred among social services people, but at the same time they considered him abrasive and self-righteous, as well as a little crazy. He had a history of pushing hard for his agenda, without any regard for those he might offend in the process. Sometimes his approach helped him get results; sometimes it did the opposite. Every time I saw him he was dressed in jeans and a plaid work shirt. He had a kind of electric craziness that reminded me of Doc Brown from
Back to the Future
.