Pol wants Spitzer to probe rent row

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

ASSEMBLYMAN Adriano Espaillat (D-Washington Heights) called on Attorney General Eliot Spitzer yesterday to probe possible abuses of rent laws by the Pinnacle Group and other city landlords.
In a letter to Spitzer, Espaillat cited "possible fraud in the actions of building owners to raise rents in vacant rent-stabilized apartments."
He pointed to reports in the Daily News that Pinnacle submitted invoices to the state claiming $47,000 in repairs to a vacant apartment at 706 Riverside Drive, when the company actually spent considerably less. A Pinnacle spokesman has said all the invoices submitted for those repairs were proper.
Juan Gonzalez

Housing Wars: Pinnacle of Greed

By Heather Haddon From the May 10, 2006 issue

“I am full of stress,” said Hernandez, who is facing the twin burdens of a lawsuit and difficulty walking. “When will Pinnacle’s abuses stop?”
Thousands of residents citywide are asking that same question. The Pinnacle Group andits owner, Joel Saul Wiener, have unleashed an arsenal of threatening letters, eviction notices, and lawsuits against tenants. Wiener’s goal, according to tenants and advocates, is to push out long-term residents,use renovations and suspicious accounting toraise rents beyond stabilization limits, and then turn them into condos.“Pinnacle is a monster,” said Luis Tejada of the Mirabal Sisters, a Harlem organization supporting the growing ranks of angry tenants.
BANKING ON VACANCY DECONTROLUnscrupulous landlords have always thrived in New York. But Pinnacle is unique in itsscale and financing through the Praedium Group, a real estate investment trust (REIT)on steroids. REITs have been around for decades, but only in the late 1990s did big banks get in the action – just as New York State began allowing apartments with rents exceeding $2,000 to exit stabilization programs.

A handful of banks suddenly saw Harlem and the Bronx in a whole new light. “It’s viewed as a decent investment,” said Jerry Salama, a NYU professor and real estate expert. “The large investment banks are…going to Harlem and buying rundown multifamily homes and fixing them up.”
Credit Suisse First Boston, one of the country’s biggest investment banks, establishedPraedium in the nineties. One Praedium REIT, Praedium Fund V, pooled $465 millionfrom pensions, endowments and foundations to leverage $1.7 billion in acquisitions, according to financial industry reports. The bulk of that went to buy New York apartment buildings. A Praedium spokesperson said they do not comment on their individual holdings. But Kim Powell, a Pinnacle resident from Harlem, spoke candidly about Praedium, “They are not seeing that within their real estate work, there are habitants and human lives.”

Some housing experts are also wary about Praedium and its ilk. “Enron predicted growth in a certain way, and a lot of people lost money,” said Abbott Gorin, an attorney with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development who has sued Pinnacle for code violations. “Renegade actors ruin the investment for everyone. They accelerate a crash.” Praedium is especially brash. As its website states, the company seeks “properties that are ‘broken’ and can in turn be fixed and then sold upon stabilization.” What constitutes a broken property? Not one with faulty boilers, but those that fail to “aggressively manage the current tenant/leasing base.” To fix that, it recommends “strategic capital improvements and proactive leasing.”

MEET JOEL WIENERWho better to carry out that prescription than Joel Wiener? He comes from an oldschool Brooklyn real estate family. Two children from the third generation, Arthur and Joel, carry the torch. Their father, Paul Wiener, gave ownership of a Riverdale co-op to his children. One of the tenants, a woman who asked for anonymity because she is suing the Wieners, sought help when her roof collapsed in 1984. The damage was extensive, but the Wieners didn’t seem to care. “I could squeeze water out of my insulation. Paul said ‘I don’t see any water,’” the tenant said.

Joel has a reputation for being ruthless among many tenants. “He’s so evil. It’s just amazing,” said Laura Spalter, a Riverdale resident who fought the Wieners in the late seventies. Spalter and other residents managed to wrest control of their property, but only after extensive court proceedings. Wiener has done well for himself. He has a fancy car and high-end office, along with a luxury home. He is flattering and laudatory to some, a snide hothead to others, according to those who have tangled with him. Spalter found that Wiener’s own lawyers often couldn’t stop his rants.

Praedium, however, has rewarded Wiener for his behavior. Beginning in 2002, they financed Pinnacle’s acquisition of entire real estate portfolios, including those owned by veteran slumlord Baruch Singer. That deal – an off-market transaction of almost 3,000 northern Manhattan apartments for $500 million – is rumored to be one of the largest multi-family building deals in city history. Even in the hyperactive world of city real estate, Pinnacle’s sprawling web has grown enormously. Wiener owns thousands of apartments in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan.
His company controls entire swaths of Harlem, Sugar Hill and Washington Heights, along with significant chunks of the Bronx, Upper West Side, Flatbush and Crown Heights. In these areas, Pinnacle targets rent-stabilized properties that are a haven for lowincome residents – from Hispanic families to starving artists.

WIENER’S ARMYWiener runs his operation with military resolve. He maintains a cadre of loyalists, and fires outsiders. Among Pinnacle’s first purchases were former Mitchell-Lama buildings in the Bronx in 2002. Pinnacle proceeded to fire much of the staff within days, according to the Daily News. That year, the city passed a law barring new owners from firing existing staff within 90 days. Wiener has broken the rule since.
Pinnacle has fired more than 200 building supers, as stated in a class action lawsuit filed in federal court last fall. Some were forcibly removed. “[A property manger] threw a Brooklyn super down the stairs,” said Luis Tejada, who spearheaded the suit with a labor law firm. “He walked away and told someone else to call an ambulance.” Most of the supers had decades of management experience. Many were replaced with inexperienced workers from Yugoslavia, according to the suit.

Frank Marino of the Marino Organization, a PR firm hired by Pinnacle, said that while staffing is done on a “building by building basis,” the net result is positive. “If you look at the number of staff working in the properties, you would find an increase,” he said. Perhaps, but the property managers don’t seem very attentive. “They don’t even get out of their cars,” said Fred Criswell, whose mother was fired by Pinnacle after it acquired a building in Inwood where she was the super. Harry Hirsch, Wiener’s right-hand man, revealed in court testimony that he had never visited a building he’d managed for years, nor could he name its super. Neither Hirsch nor Wiener keep complaint records for their buildings, nor do they have a tangible system for managing them, according to the suit. “It’s kooky,” stated Hirsch in his testimony. “I don’t know how we do it.”

FIX IT UP, PUSH ‘EM OUTWhen it comes to renovations, tenants say it’s the supers who are on the job, not licensed contractors. A laundry room erected at 706 Riverside Dr. was condemned because of serious code violations, according to Powell. Rebecca Gilmore, Powell’s neighbor, hired her own carpenter after supers doing a lead abatement left her unit mired in toxic dust. “They also lost my doors,” she said. “It was really shoddy work.”
All of the properties go through the same transformation: an army of security cameras are installed, mailboxes are replaced, then new front doors, lighting and other structural improvements are performed. Compared to some city slumlords, Pinnacle seems saintly. “We’re trying to bring these places back. Why see this as deceiving?” Wiener asked during an interview in which he denounced his critics. “Rather than criticize a landlord who puts in new front doors, you should provide good coverage of them.” But residents worry that the underlying goal is to push enough of them out for a condo conversion.

Pinnacle tenants all over Manhattan have seen vacancies increase, and two Riverside Drive buildings are in the process of becoming condos. Pinnacle says they are generously allowing current tenants to buy their homes. Few can afford the prices, however. “They are trying to sell apartments for over $1 million in buildings with bad pipes and elevators that are always down,” said Paula Odellas, a resident.

Pinnacle does make plenty of major capital improvements, like new windows and boilers.Some of these repairs, which create permanent rent increases, are necessary. Others appear fabricated say tenants. A former Bronx super was told to futz with the electrical plates in his building, and bill for an entire rewiring, according to a source close to the situation. The company intended to replace the entryways at 2300 Olinville Ave. in the Bronx without any obvious need. “I don’t want a new door,” said Joseph Brown, standing next to his solid entryway.
The needs of current residents are at the mercy of Praedium’s drive to “aggressively manage the current tenant base.” In that spirit, Pinnacle frequently takes residents to housing court. The suits are for back rent, but also use creative charges like rent checks using a married name instead of the maiden one, according to tenants. Kim Smith, who worked as staffer for former Councilman Bill Perkins, was shocked to find that a large percentage of residents in a 149th Street building were served court papers. According to city Housing Court records, Pinnacle has initiated over 1,500 cases in the Bronx alone since 2002.

Pinnacle disputes that number, but has yet to provide a different total. People on rent subsidies, including the elderly, have been a frequent target. Bronx Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz helped a 90-year-old Riverdale resident after Wiener sued him for back rent. Dinowitz’s staff found that the man had actually overpaid through credits from a state program assisting low-income seniors living in regulated apartments. “He was double dipping,” Dinowitz said.
Wiener has since said the property is owned by his brother, but Dinowitz’s staff says the management is one and the same.

“THE LANDLORDS HAVE THE EDGE”New tenants have also encountered problems. Those who request documentation of renovations – typically assessed at $25,000 per unit – sometimes learn that their apartments supposedly contain half-a-dozen toilets or hundreds of sheets of drywall.
Erica Martinez, a resident of 801 Riverside Dr., received a court-ordered rent rebate of $300 a month after bogus bills were nullified. “He tried to put all the construction supplies for the whole building onto my apartment,” she said. Frank Marino said the state Department of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), which oversees rent-stabilized apartments, would never approve inflated bills. “DHCR has been through this thousands of times,” he said. “They know what a realistic ballparkfigure is.”

They might, but DHCR is notoriously lax. “When a landlord goes to DHCR, they get quick results,” Dinowitz said. “When a tenant goes to them, it can take years. In every way, the landlords have the edge.” DHCR punished Pinnacle for overcharging two Bronx tenants, but the agency dismissed future suits when the company issued a building- wide credit due to a “clerical error,” as letters to tenants stated. When Denise Prescod, a Riverside Drive tenant, went to DHCR to check if she was being overcharged, her unit had no listed rent history. DHCR also can’t determine the number of times a landlord has been sued for overcharges, as the agency “does not compile or maintain such information,” as stated in a letter.

“DHCR is of no help,” Prescod said dryly. Peter Moses, a DHCR spokesperson, said he had “little luck” in getting the department’s history of oversight for several Pinnacle buildings. Then he asked, nervously: “Are you really going to write about them?”
CULTIVATING POLITICAL ALLIESThere are no records of campaign contributions from Pinnacle, but Wiener likes to cultivate influential political allies. “Their strategy is to say they have friends in high places,” said former Councilman Perkins, who was approached for support by Wiener while he was in office.

Perkins says he received a call from Ken Fisher, a lobbyist from a politically connected Brooklyn family, to tout Pinnacle’s merits. Earlier this year, Pinnacle also made a $500,000 contribution to Youth Turn, a group run by Rev. C. Vernon Mason, a disbarred lawyer and ally of Rev. Al Sharpton. But most of Wiener’s sense of entitlement comes from within. “He’s extremely aggressive,” said Spalter, the Riverdale resident who fought Wiener successfully. “Any group that wants to fight Joel has to have several fronts going on at once.”
Many Pinnacle tenants are pragmatic. They know that prices will go up and neighborhoods will change. But they are indignant at being driven out of areas that have only now healed from years of crime and neglect. “You can’t expect to continue paying $200 [in rent],” said Marjorie Moore, a tenant at 725 Riverside Dr. “But we are looking at regional planning that is seeking to relocate us. Wiener wouldn’thave these buildings if we hadn’t stayed here to preserve them.”

Took panes to hike bills

Tenants fume: Glass cost 21G?
Three months ago, the landlord at 610 Riverside Drive applied to the state for a special rent increase for the rent-regulated building.
Standard procedure - unless the landlord happens to be Pinnacle Group LLC.
Pinnacle, one of the city's biggest owners of rent-stabilized housing, claimed on its state application that it spent $21,770 two years ago for a major capital improvement (MCI): brand-new lobby entrance doors.
Under state rent law, a landlord can pass such MCI costs on to a building's tenants. State approval of such increases is usually a formality once the landlord submits a claim and backup documentation.
But not at 706 Riverside.
"What new doors?" said Adriana Peterson, a tenant association leader who says her neighbors in the west Harlem building were furious when they learned of Pinnacle's application.
"All they did was replace the old locks and the plexiglass on the sides and top of the doors with real glass," Peterson said.
Her account was backed up by a half-dozen residents who spoke to the Daily News. The tenant association immediately filed an objection with the state.
Peterson says she counted 51 new pieces of glass, which would mean each piece cost more than $400.
Pinnacle's application also claimed the "new" doors were replacements for ones that were 35 years old.
Not exactly.
Peterson has lived in the building for more than 40 years and she keeps meticulous records for her tenant group. She quickly produced copies of an MCI rent increase the state had granted to the previous owner for lobby doors back in 1998. The useful life of lobby doors, according to state regulations, is 15 years.
Peterson even confronted Joel Wiener, the chief executive of Pinnacle, at a tenants meeting March 28.
Wiener has been under fire for months from housing advocates, who claim Pinnacle is harassing longtime tenants by systematically filing questionable eviction cases in Housing Court and delaying repairs of major violations. Critics say the company tries to empty and renovate apartments, then sharply drive up rents for newcomers.
The News reported last week that Pinnacle filed more than 5,000 eviction actions in Housing Court against its nearly 20,000 tenants since January 2004.
Wiener, who denies any improper actions, has sought to improve the company's image of late by meeting with his tenants and local political leaders.
"I told Mr. Wiener, 'You're gonna lose this one because we're not paying you $22,000 for 51 pieces of glass.'" Peterson said.
Two weeks later, the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR) denied Pinnacle's request for a rent hike at 610 Riverside. In its decision, the agency cited the previous MCI increase and concluded that the entrance doors' "useful life has not yet expired."
The agency did not look into the tenants' more serious claim that Pinnacle never installed new doors to begin with.
Two weeks ago, I asked Wiener about the MCI application for the building and his tenants' claims.
"I contract with an outside firm to file those MCIs and I'm looking into what happened," Wiener said.
But these are not the only allegations of false documents being filed by Pinnacle.
As The News reported Monday, several tenants at 706 Riverside complained to DHCR that the company improperly raised rents by claiming thousands of dollars in renovations that were never made.

Originally published on May 17, 2006

Their landlord from hell

By Juan Gonzalez NY Daily News

Five months ago, Angela Diaz walked into her apartment at 845 Riverside Drive and was shocked to discover four big screws sticking out of her bedroom wall.
A repairman for Pinnacle LLC, her landlord, had been next door installing a new bathroom cabinet for her neighbor. He did such a great job that the screws he used to fasten the cabinet passed right into Diaz's apartment.
"I complained the same day to the super and he just laughed," Diaz said. "It's been five months now, and they still haven't fixed my wall."
Then there's the softball-sized hole in the wall of Diaz's hallway closet. Pinnacle workers recently punctured the wall while running wires for a new intercom system. The workers then left without plastering the gap, and now rats have rushed through it into the apartment.
"It's like they're trying to force us all to leave," said Diaz, 54, who has lived in the same apartment for 28 years. She and a half-dozen other tenants say that after Pinnacle took over the Washington Heights building in October 2004, there was no heat or hot water for most of that winter.
These are among scores of horror stories that rent-regulated Pinnacle tenants all over the city have told the Daily News in recent weeks.
Tenants say they have to wait months for the company to fix major violations in their apartments - even after a Housing Court judge orders the work. And when Pinnacle work crews finally arrive, they often bungle the repairs or do slipshod work, the tenants charge.
Dorothy Hall, 68, is one of some 250 tenants at the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem to get a Housing Court eviction notice from Pinnacle since the company purchased the 540-unit complex last August.
In her case, she deliberately withheld her rent to force the company to make repairs to her apartment.
In a court stipulation reached earlier this year, Hall agreed to pay her back rent and the company agreed to complete repairs in early March.
It's now May, and the work is still not finished.
"Their workers brought me two sink cabinets with no drawers," Hall said. "My home has been upset and uprooted for two months, everything's off the walls and they haven't even called to say when they're gonna finish."
At 146 E. 19th St. in Brooklyn, a six-story tenement Pinnacle purchased in January 2005, resident Thomas Rudy says "everything went down the drain when they took over."
Rudy, a Vietnam veteran with two Purple Hearts and a veterans' counselor for the state Labor Department, has a long litany of complaints.
"They stopped cleaning the building," he said. "The incinerators are all nailed up, there's never hot water until 8 [a.m.] ... and they're not fixing anything. The only way I get their attention is by withholding rent."
Records from the City's Department of Housing and Preservation show there are 109 unresolved violations in the 41-unit building, including 91 that are classified as hazardous or immediately hazardous.
In Rudy's apartment, work crews recently installed a new bathroom sink.
"After they left, I happened to brush against it and the sink fell down," Rudy said. "They'd forgotten to fasten it to the wall."
In his kitchen there's no metal plate on one of his electrical sockets, and he has waited weeks for Pinnacle to supply one.
Over in Crown Heights, Lois Simmons-Wallace, 78, has lived in the same large rent-controlled apartment at 457 Schenectady Ave. for 40 years.
As soon as Pinnacle purchased the building in January 2005, it sued to evict her in Housing Court, claiming she owed four months back rent.
"I always pay rent on time, and I have a copy of every rent receipt since I moved in," she said.
After several trips to court, Simmons-Wallace produced her proof, and the case was dismissed.
But she has fought for months to get repairs to her apartment, including a new paint job - the last one was 15 years ago.
HPD records show 89 open housing code violations in the 94-unit building.
Last summer, part of a bedroom ceiling collapsed from a major leak. Simmons-Wallace sued Pinnacle in small claims court for damages to her rugs and furniture. In October, the court entered a default judgment against Pinnacle for $1,600.
"We do not have any knowledge of the small claims action," said Robert Barletta, a spokesman for Pinnacle when asked about Simmons-Wallace.
As for the chorus of complaints, Barletta said Pinnacle chief Joel Wiener commissioned an independent survey last week showing "an overwhelming majority of tenants are satisfied with their apartments."
Despite that survey, four community boards in northern Manhattan are convening an unusual joint public meeting Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Riverbank State Park at W. 145th St. and Riverside Drive.

"There is definitely something going on," said Jordi Reyes Montblanc, chairman of Community Board 9. "We don't know what, and that's why we're collecting information."

Originally published on May 12, 2006

Phony repairs add to abuse

By Juan Gonzales NY Daily News

A hundred gallons of paint for a two-bedroom apartment. Five new flushometers for two toilets.
New doors, range hoods and pedestal sinks that were never installed.
These are just some of the renovations that Pinnacle Group LLC claimed to state officials when it sought to justify huge rent increases for several vacant apartments at 706 Riverside Drive, a rent-stabilized building the company owns in west Harlem.
A group of tenants who moved into the renovated units in 2001 later complained to state housing officials and the courts that Pinnacle was illegally overcharging tenants.
The dogged tenants eventually won major rollbacks in their monthly rent from Pinnacle - a big city landlord that has filed 5,000 eviction proceedings since 2004 against tenants who live in its nearly 20,000 apartments.
In the long 706 Riverside Drive legal battle, Pinnacle submitted hundreds of documents to the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal to try to justify charging as much as $2,000 in monthly rent to new tenants in a building where most current residents were paying about $600.
When they saw copies of Pinnacle's invoices, the new tenants said they were astonished to find their landlord had reported tens of thousands of dollars for work that either was never done, was double- or triple-billed or couldn't legally be claimed as rehab work.
"There was blatant fraud and padding of bills," said Mark Gordon, a Web designer who moved into a seventh-floor apartment with his wife, Anne Beaumont.
Pinnacle eventually agreed in Housing Court to reduce Gordon's rent from $1,900 to $1,100 and paid him $10,000 for overcharges. In doing so, the company admitted no wrongdoing.
Pinnacle originally claimed to the state that it spent $47,000 for improvements to Gordon's 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment, including a new kitchen and bath.
Under state law, a landlord who renovates a rent-stabilized apartment is allowed to increase its monthly rent by one-fortieth of the cost of those improvements. Thus, a $40,000 makeover translates into a $1,000-a-month increase.
But because the law doesn't require landlords to produce evidence of their repairs unless a tenant challenges the new rent, the system is vulnerable to abuse, housing advocates say.
Among the questionable invoices Pinnacle filed with the Division of Housing and Community Renewal for Gordon's apartment:
$1,500 for a new main electrical box. A construction expert hired by Gordon concluded there was no new box.
$1,029 for 100 gallons of latex paint and $454 for 45 gallons of ceramic adhesive. That's enough paint and adhesive for an entire building.
$1,800 for labor to install two new front doors and door handles, installed by contractor Shaban Cecunjanin. There were no new front doors or handles, and Cecunjanin is the building's superintendent.
$490 for 10 pieces of 3/4-inch, 4-foot-by-8-foot plywood and for 20 pieces of 4-foot-by-8-foot Sheetrock. There was no new plywood or Sheetrock installed in the apartment, Gordon's expert said.
Three separate invoices totaling $336 for five toilet flushometers. The apartment has only two bathrooms, and Gordon's expert concluded the existing flushometers showed no signs of recent replacement.
$396 for more than 120 brass nipple pipe fittings; Gordon's expert couldn't find any in the apartment.
$17,800 for two men to install new sinks, toilets and medicine cabinets in the two bathrooms. One of the contractors Pinnacle claimed it paid was Rasim Toscic, who also happens to be Pinnacle's super for other northern Manhattan buildings. The other was Toscic's brother, Rafaet.
A floor below, tenants Ted and Marjorie Charron found the same story with their invoices:
There was one invoice of $3,948 paid to Rasim Tokic (sic) for supplies purchased at Home Depot for rehab work on three apartments, including the Charrons' and Gordon's.
The actual Home Depot receipt that corresponded to the invoice revealed a few curious items, such as $169 for 240 light bulbs - 80 per apartment.
There was another invoice for the shipment on June 27, 2001, of 30 gallons of paint for the Charrons' apartment. Problem was, they had moved into their new apartment on June 5.
Other Charron invoices were for a new 30-inch range hood and a new pedestal. None was ever installed.
Most comical of all was Pinnacle's Houdini-like use of the invoice that included Gordon's 100 gallons of paint.
The total amount of that invoice was for $1,920. In addition to the paint, it included a bunch of supplies that Pinnacle claimed it used renovating other apartments in the building.
But in the documents it filed with the state, Pinnacle charged $1,200 from that invoice to the Charrons' apartment, $1,456 to Gordon's and $1,724 to tenant Don Gilmore on the eighth floor. Thus, $1,920 in supplies was magically transformed into $5,100 in charges.
All of these "costs" were used by Pinnacle to justify sharp increases to the rents of all the vacant apartments.
Asked about the fraud charges from the tenants of 706 Riverside, company spokesman Robert Barletta said Friday in a prepared statement: "Pinnacle believes that work [full renovations] and invoices were proper." In some cases, the company "settled with the tenants in order to avoid a lengthy litigation process," Barletta said.
Ted and Marjorie Charron eventually got their rent lowered from $1,900 to $1,300, though Pinnacle is appealing that decision.
To get that rollback, however, they had to battle not only their landlord but the bureaucrats at Division of Housing and Community Renewal and the city's Buildings Department. Those agencies repeatedly refused to investigate evidence of false filings by Pinnacle, the Charrons say.
"We're a complaint-driven agency," said Division of Housing and Community Renewal spokesman Peter Moses. "We have no records showing that anyone filed any allegations of fraudulent improvements by Pinnacle."
The agency may want to recheck its records.

On March 24, 2003, Marjorie Charron hand-delivered it a detailed complaint alleging the fictitious renovations by Pinnacle. The letter was time-stamped by the agency, and Charron has supplied a copy of it to the Daily News.
It included photographs of her apartment to prove what work had not been done.
More than three years later, state housing officials have not even bothered to look into whether anything improper occurred at 706 Riverside Drive, and if so, how prevalent such practices are among city landlords - especially Pinnacle.
Housing hearing

Four Northern Manhattan community boards will conduct a joint public hearing at 6:30 p.m. today to examine some of the problems in Pinnacle Group LLC buildings highlighted by the Daily News' Juan Gonzalez.
Tenants, company officials and elected officials are expected to attend the meeting at Riverbank State Park, 145th St. and Riverside Drive.

Originally published on May 15, 2006

Firm at pinnacle of landlord disputes

By Juan Gonzalez NY Daily News

Carlos Delarosa, Russell Taylor and Rosa Elsevyf-Conrad share a few things in common.

They've all battled recently against eviction by the same landlord, the Pinnacle Group LLC, the real estate company that has filed an astonishing 5,000 eviction proceedings since 2004 against tenants who live in its nearly 20,000 apartments.

And all have suddenly seen Pinnacle drop its cases against them within hours of the Daily News inquiring about their particular situations.
On April 24, city marshals actually evicted delaRosa, his wife and two children from their Morrison Ave. apartment in the South Bronx and promptly changed the locks.
At the time, delaRosa, a restaurant deliveryman, owed a grand total of $493 - just half of the $986-a-month rent for the one-bedroom, fifth-floor walkup.
There must be some mistake, delaRosa told the marshal. He'd mailed Pinnacle most of what he owed the previous week and had an overdue balance of only $100. Besides, the federal government's Section 8 program was paying the bulk of the rent - $786 - directly to the landlord each month, he said.
Tell it to the judge, the marshal replied.
DelaRosa's wife, Jennifer Aguilar, quickly borrowed $100 from a friend, then her husband - armed with the cash - scurried over to Bronx Housing Court. He produced receipts for two postal money orders, payable to Pinnacle for $100 and $300, dated April 7 and April 19.
He also gave a sworn affidavit to Civil Court Judge Pierre Turner that he had mailed the money orders the same day he purchased them. With the $100 he had on him, delaRosa said, he should be up to date with his rent.
Pinnacle's attorney, however, claimed the company had no record of receiving the latest money orders.
Turner immediately granted delaRosa a show-cause order that banned any removal of the family's furniture until a hearing the following day.
But when delaRosa returned home, he discovered the marshals already had carted off the family's furniture and clothes to storage.
That's a rare move: Although some 7,000 evictions are ordered annually in the Bronx, barely 200 result in forcible action by marshals.
"I've never heard of anything like this," said Carmela Price, an assistant to state Sen. Ruben Diaz (D-Bronx), who intervened to assist the family.
The following day in court, Pinnacle's lawyers demanded delaRosa pay $2,000 for moving and storage costs of the furniture, the marshal's fee, plus legal expenses - or they wouldn't let him back in the apartment.
"We could barely pay the back rent." his wife said. "How are we supposed to come up with another $2,000?"
The next day, April 26, I called Pinnacle to ask about the case. Company chief Joel Weiner returned my call within a few hours.
Weiner has been under fire lately from housing advocates who say his company harasses rent-stabilized tenants in order to vacate apartments and sharply increase rents. Weiner says all his actions are aboveboard.
"As soon as I heard about it [delaRosa's eviction], I ordered my super to restore them immediately," Weiner said. "I felt the tenant misunderstood the legal situation. They won't have to pay anything."
That same evening, the family and its furniture were back in the apartment.
Meanwhile, Russell Taylor was locked in his own months-long court fight with Pinnacle.
Back in 2000, Taylor, an academic adviser at New School University, moved into an apartment on St. Nicholas Ave. in Harlem with his girlfriend.
The girlfriend, however, had signed the original lease, so when she moved out two years later, Taylor asked his landlord to add his name as tenant of record. The landlord was Baruch Singer, a reputed slumlord who has been in the news lately because of his relationship to the Brooklyn warehouses that spectacularly burned down last week.
The office people at Singer's Equity Management kept promising to change the name but never did so, Taylor said.
Still, he continued paying his rent for the next three years with no problem.
Last August, Pinnacle purchased the building, along with dozens of others owned by Singer, who still retains a minor share in the properties.
Pinnacle immediately moved to evict Taylor, claiming he owed $3,000 in rent.
"I always pay on time and I have the proof," Taylor said. In December, a Housing Court judge agreed and dismissed Pinnacle's complaint.
Weiner blames the mixup on poor records he inherited from the previous landlord. "Not all of Singer's stuff was accurate," Weiner said.
Taylor recalled that when he went to Housing Court, "practically everyone there was being sued by Pinnacle."
The day after Taylor's victory, Pinnacle lawyers started another eviction action against him, this time claiming he was not the apartment's legal tenant.
I asked Weiner about that second action. "I don't mind giving Taylor the right to stay there," he said. "That's a problem I'm trying to solve."
A few hours after that conversation, a Pinnacle lawyer called Taylor to tell him the company was dropping its eight-month campaign to oust him.
Then there's Elsevyf-Conrad. She's a supervisor at a city agency who has lived in the same apartment on Riverside Drive in Washington Heights for 25 years. Pinnacle claimed in court she really lives in the Bronx.
"I pay my mom's gas and electricity bills in the Bronx to help her out and my name is on the bills," she said. "I've given them my tax papers and all my documents and they still aren't satisfied."
Weiner said the building's super told Pinnacle she had moved to the Bronx. "If she actually lives there, it's fine," Weiner said, adding that he is now willing to let Elsevyf-Conrad stay.
These three people are lucky. But for the many still being sued by Pinnacle, the nightmare continues.

Originally published on May 8, 2006

Landlord buys rundown buildings then goes after regulated apartments

By Juan Gonzalez NY Daily News

One of New York's biggest owners of rent-stabilized apartments is quietly carrying out an aggressive campaign to chase out many of its tenants. The Pinnacle Group LLC has filed more than 5,000 Housing Court eviction actions in the past two years, court records obtained by the Daily News show. That's an average of one court action for every four units that the company owns in the city. The company often buys a building in a low-income but up-and-coming neighborhood, such as Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, and Elmhurst, Queens; identifies tenants who, under the law, are vulnerable to being evicted, and begins eviction proceedings.

At Harlem's historic Dunbar Houses, a 534-unit complex that the firm took over last August, court records show that Pinnacle wasted no time. It initiated more than 250 eviction proceedings for nonpayment of rent or illegal occupancy during the first six months. At a 300-unit complex on Morrison Ave. in the South Bronx, the company took 173 tenants to court in 254 separate actions since acquiring the buildings in August 2004. For the entire Bronx, where Pinnacle controls more than 3,600 units, its lawyers filed nearly 2,000 dispossess actions during the past two years - an average of more than one for every two apartments. Joel Weiner, the company's chief executive and himself a lawyer, insists the firm's tactics are completely aboveboard and legal. "We only go to court when a tenant owes more than two months rent," Weiner said. Weiner acknowledged that he strictly enforces company policy that only the tenant-of-record on a lease can pay rent and occupy a Pinnacle apartment - going after those whom the company asserts are violating the policy. But neighborhood leaders say too many of Weiner's legal actions are based on flimsy or dubious claims. They say Pinnacle is using the courts and the law to harass and intimidate long-term tenants. "Their philosophy is, if I drag you into court enough, I'm going to wear you out," said a major Bronx landlord familiar with Pinnacle's efforts. "At least once a week, I get a call from someone in a Pinnacle building looking for another apartment," said the landlord, who asked not to be identified. It is unclear how

Full-court press vs. poor tenants

Full-court press vs. poor tenants
Landlord buys rundown buildings then goes after regulated apartments

By Juan Gonzalez NY Daily News

One of New York's biggest owners of rent-stabilized apartments is quietly carrying out an aggressive campaign to chase out many of its tenants.
The Pinnacle Group LLC has filed more than 5,000 Housing Court eviction actions in the past two years, court records obtained by the Daily News show.
That's an average of one court action for every four units that the company owns in the city.
The company often buys a building in a low-income but up-and-coming neighborhood, such as Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, and Elmhurst, Queens; identifies tenants who, under the law, are vulnerable to being evicted, and begins eviction proceedings.
At Harlem's historic Dunbar Houses, a 534-unit complex that the firm took over last August, court records show that Pinnacle wasted no time. It initiated more than 250 eviction proceedings for nonpayment of rent or illegal occupancy during the first six months.
At a 300-unit complex on Morrison Ave. in the South Bronx, the company took 173 tenants to court in 254 separate actions since acquiring the buildings in August 2004.
For the entire Bronx, where Pinnacle controls more than 3,600 units, its lawyers filed nearly 2,000 dispossess actions during the past two years - an average of more than one for every two apartments.
Joel Weiner, the company's chief executive and himself a lawyer, insists the firm's tactics are completely aboveboard and legal.
"We only go to court when a tenant owes more than two months rent," Weiner said.
Weiner acknowledged that he strictly enforces company policy that only the tenant-of-record on a lease can pay rent and occupy a Pinnacle apartment - going after those whom the company asserts are violating the policy.
But neighborhood leaders say too many of Weiner's legal actions are based on flimsy or dubious claims. They say Pinnacle is using the courts and the law to harass and intimidate long-term tenants.
"Their philosophy is, if I drag you into court enough, I'm going to wear you out," said a major Bronx landlord familiar with Pinnacle's efforts.
"At least once a week, I get a call from someone in a Pinnacle building looking for another apartment," said the landlord, who asked not to be identified.
It is unclear how many Pinnacle tenants were formally evicted or simply moved out once an eviction notice was filed. The company refused to provide any eviction data.
The News examined a sample of 85 eviction cases involving the Dunbar Houses in Harlem. More than a third resulted in a judge's warrant for Pinnacle to evict the tenant or take possession of the apartment.
Once an apartment becomes vacant, Pinnacle typically renovates the unit, then sharply increases the rent - often to double or triple the previous rate - housing advocates say.
"It's called working the building," said Evan Hess of the nonprofit Northern Manhattan Improvement Corp. "Landlords these days want to get rid of as many low-income tenants as possible."
Changes to rent laws that Albany lawmakers passed in 2003 make it easier for city landlords to hike prices after fixing up vacant apartments, Hess said.
On Riverside Drive in West Harlem, where Pinnacle owns more than a dozen buildings, Weiner is planning several condo conversions and is proposing to sell units for up to $1 million each.
"They have become the leading force for gentrification in northern Manhattan," says Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat (D-Washington Heights). "My office is being overwhelmed by complaints from families being crushed by this company."
The growing threat of displacement has sparked a huge backlash from hundreds of Pinnacle residents and local political leaders in a half-dozen neighborhoods.
State Assemblyman Keith Wright (D-Harlem) joined with a newly formed anti-Pinnacle group, Buyers and Renters United to Save Harlem (BRUSH), to picket the company's midtown headquarters last month. BRUSH has sponsored several neighborhood meetings in recent weeks that have drawn hundreds of irate Pinnacle tenants.
In Washington Heights, the Mirabal Sisters Cultural Center has collected signatures from more than 1,500 Spanish-speaking Pinnacle tenants demanding an investigation of the company.
Esther Martin and Juan Silva are two of those tenants.
Martin, 82, has lived in the same rent-controlled apartment at 610 Riverside Drive since 1951. Three years ago, Pinnacle sued to evict her. The company claimed she was illegally subletting while living in Florida.
"She has a daughter in Florida and visits there a couple of times a year, but she's always lived here in New York," said Silva, 66, the woman's nephew, who lives with his widowed aunt in the dilapidated three-bedroom apartment that overlooks the Hudson River.

The supposed illegal tenant Pinnacle named in its complaint, Silva said, was Martin's husband, Joseph Martin, who has been dead since 1996.
Silva accompanied his aunt to Housing Court a half-dozen times over a three-year period. In January, Pinnacle's lawyers suddenly offered them $30,000 to vacate the apartment.
"We refused the money and told them, 'Let the judge decide,'" Silva said.
Pinnacle dropped its case after getting Martin to sign an agreement not to seek succession rights for her nephew in the apartment.
Asked about Martin, company chief Weiner said: "Do I want to sue an 82-year-old lady? No. We had information she owned a condo in Florida. Anyway, now she gets to stay."
Weiner points out he spends millions of dollars to improve some of the city's worst-kept and most crime-ridden slum housing. "I love to restore old buildings," Weiner said.
During interviews with The News and a recent tour of a dozen of his northern Manhattan properties, he showed off some of those improvements. At the sprawling Dunbar Houses, for example, he has reduced the number of city housing violations from 2,000 to less than 700 since taking over last year.
Weiner, who receives major financing from The Praedium Group, a nationwide private equity fund, refuses to say how many buildings he has acquired. Many of Pinnacle's properties are held by subsidiary partnerships and operate under different names. But a review of city records shows that Weiner and the partnerships he controls own at least 440 properties with nearly 20,000 apartments.
Even his strongest critics concede Weiner usually improves common areas as soon as he buys a building. Pinnacle typically renovates public entrances, installs new intercoms, security cameras and bright outdoor floodlights, and invariably raises an American flag on all the company's properties.
But dozens of Pinnacle tenants interviewed in recent weeks say those are largely cosmetic changes to attract new tenants. They accuse Pinnacle of delaying major repairs in existing tenants' apartments for months.
"They [Pinnacle] are awful to tenants," said Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz (D-Bronx), who successfully battled several Pinnacle court actions against senior citizens in his district. "They are quick to institute eviction proceedings ... but they never get back to us when we call."
One resident's sorry saga
City College music student Frank Montoya knows firsthand how far Pinnacle Group LLC will go to try to evict one of its rent-stabilized tenants.
In 2001, Montoya, 34, moved into a new apartment at 845 Riverside Drive near his school's campus. He roomed with a Columbia University pal who had initially leased the apartment.
When the roommate moved in 2003, Montoya secured the lease in his own name from the landlord at the time. He then got two new roommates to share the $1,300 rent.
A year later, Pinnacle purchased the six-story building.
Last summer, Montoya made his annual trip to his parents' farm in New Mexico, where he usually works a few months as a chef at a nearby assisted-living facility.
In August, Pinnacle sent a registered letter to Montoya's Manhattan address, notifying him that his lease was not being renewed because Pinnacle had evidence he was a legal resident of New Mexico.
Montoya returned to the city in the fall. He sent Pinnacle his rent checks for September and October but the company refused to accept them, even though his lease didn't expire until Nov. 30.
Pinnacle sued for eviction in Housing Court, claiming Montoya doesn't live in New York and is illegally subletting the unit.
"I've been in this city for eight years," Montoya said from his apartment, its walls adorned with his original artwork.
"My driver's license is from New York and I'm registered to vote here. I still need one more course to get my degree," he said. "What more proof do they need?"
Montoya has been to court several times with his documents but the case keeps getting postponed. Pinnacle's lawyers recently filed a discovery motion demanding copies of his income tax returns and the chance to depose him and his two roommates.
The next court date is at the end of the month. Like most tenants Pinnacle sues, Montoya can't afford to pay for a private attorney.
"How can this company just make up a story like this and keep dragging me through court for months?" he said.

Originally published on May 7, 2006
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/415628p-351129c.html

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