6 Creepy Landlords Who Will Give You Nightmares
If you check among your friends, you'll find that every renter somehow ended up with the World's Worst Landlord. Obviously, some of them have got to be lying. But somewhere out there, in a ceiling-leaking, mold-fruiting apartment, is the poor bastard who's telling the truth.
Well, we think there's a good chance they're renting from somebody on this list:
Landlord Has Sex In Tenant's Bed, Wipes Dick With Her Wedding Dress
It's important not to bury the lede in a story about a Colorado Springs building manager sneaking into an apartment, fornicating on the renter's bed, and cleaning his dong off with the most expensive and precious item there. And that's what goddamn happened.
"In my defense, it's not a very large dong."
The renters, Logan Pierce and Mikaela DiGiulio, did not discover this by finding a dicklike stain on her dress and piecing together the mystery. Pierce owns a security camera, which he aimed directly at his own bed. Up until then, the camera's main job was almost certainly filming the back of his balls in his home movies, but at the end of last year, it finally performed its intended function. It detected noise, clicked on, and started live streaming footage to him at work. And this footage definitely violated several office policies.
The camera caught Pierce's landlord, Carlos Quijada, entering the room with his boyfriend, whereupon they began having vigorous sex on the renters' sheets. To make matters worse, this slimy landlord wiped the even slimier remains of their lovemaking on DiGiulio's wedding dress. And while she probably wasn't going to wear it again, this is the kind of thing that really sucks the sentimental value out of an heirloom.
"The cops took it for DNA evidence. We ... didn't ask for it back."
With a generous smear of DNA and disgustingly clear video evidence, the Colorado Springs police issued an arrest warrant for felony trespassing. Spoogey McTrespantser fled but was arrested in El Paso and placed in a jail cell they should consider bleaching after he leaves.
Landlord Couple Evict Tenants The Old Fashioned Way: Campaign Of Terror
In typical shitty landlord fashion, Kip and Nicole Macy bought an apartment building and immediately set about evicting their five tenants so they could jack up the rent. One of the tenants, a disabled man named Scott Morrow, went to court to fight the eviction. The law determined that he couldn't be evicted for a full year. The Macys decided the law could go fuck itself.
"Use the scales of justice to weigh how little fucks we give."
The Macys were so pissed at Morrow for thwarting their (highly illegal) plan to clear out the building that they cut off his electricity, cut his phone line, and even cut through the floor joists supporting his apartment. Then, since he didn't come crashing through, they went below his apartment and sawed a hole in his floor. Morrow was home and actually witnessed a freaking saw removing his floor while he was sitting on it. He and a friend attacked it and bent it, but the saw still managed to make a 2-foot-by-4-foot hole in his overpriced apartment with no electricity or structural support.
Step One: Hole. Step Two: 5,000 snakes.
While the Macys were terrorizing Morrow, two of their new tenants figured out they were being overcharged under San Francisco's rent-control law and started paying at the lawful rate. The Macys lost their minds, and their grasp on sanity was already at a saw-a-hole-in-a-handicapped-guy's-floor level.
They changed the locks, sneaked in to dismantle the furniture, and started stealing. They took a cellphone, a Gucci watch, and $2,000 in cash. One of the new tenants/terror victims caught Kip Macy ransacking his apartment, and Kip kicked him in the chest before running out.
Which was all caught on tape, because apparently tenants record everything.
Threatening notes started appearing at the tenants' doors, and their water was cut off. These people were living in a dark building with no water that might collapse at any minute while paying a just-barely-not-illegal amount of rent to a lunatic who was now their burglar and kumite opponent.
Nicole Macy, not to be outdone in the psycho department by her husband, got in on the action. She never kicked anyone in the chest, but she broke in and poured ammonia on the tenants' clothes, bedding, and electronics. And since all of this is stupidly illegal, it won't surprise you to find out that Kip Macy was accused of three felony conspiracy charges, three burglary charges, two stalking charges, two grand theft charges, one misdemeanor vandalism charge, and a felony count of shutting off service because of some silly laws they still have on the books against terrorizing the handicapped. Nicole Macy faced three conspiracy charges, three burglary charges, two stalking charges, two grand theft charges, one charge of cutting phone service, and one count of misdemeanor vandalism.
As well as several general counts of unlordlike conduct.
Proving they never got around to considering the consequences of their actions, the two maniacs borrowed money from their parents to post a $500,000 bond and fled the country. They were found in Italy after Kip's mom reached out to bail bondsmen to track them down. The two still aren't quite sure what they did wrong, though in an interview with 20/20, Kip admitted he did "regret, you know, having moved the Mexicans' stuff into the hallway." That's pretty big of you, Kip.
Landlord Plants A Bomb To Get Rid Of Pizza Chef
This is a story about a man named Domenic Oberto who wanted to make pizza. He rented a restaurant, Willy Joe's Pizzeria, on the ground floor of a New Jersey apartment building owned by a man named Milan Bolich. A dispute about overdue rent got out of hand, and lawyers got involved. Oberto and Bolich were scheduled to appear in court on May 18, but Bolich knew a way to resolve things sooner. One entire day sooner.
If he could kick Oberto out in 30 days or less, the pizza would be free.
Early morning on May 17, Bolich called the police and said he smelled gasoline on the first floor. When they arrived, Bolich carefully took them through the back door to the mysterious origin of the mysterious gas smell. Not confident in the gasoline-smelling abilities of the officers, Bolich came right out and mentioned that, oh yeah, he saw a bomb by the front door. One surely planted by that deadbeat Oberto!
"If it isn't clear, I can add his name written in flaming gasoline."
The bomb was a homemade diesel, gasoline, and paint thinner monstrosity with a wire running into a light fixture that would have exploded had anyone opened the front door. The police evacuated the block and disarmed the bomb, during which time not a single member of law enforcement was fooled. Something about leading cops directly to a bomb and then suggesting it must have been made by that guy you hate ... it's the arts and crafts equivalent of telling a cop, "I've only had a couple beers" or "I fell into this outhouse with my night vision camera and SCUBA gear."
Bolich was instantly charged with filing a false police report, but the bigger crime was trying to sell his false report with a real bomb he had made. That got him charged with attempted aggravated arson, risking widespread injury, and possession of a weapon for unlawful purpose. If you took a crap by the Showbiz Pizza band and blamed it on the banjo player, it would be a more believable frame-up.
Well, news sites fell for it, but news sites fall for everything.
Uwa Lawrence, The Boston Butthole
Uwa Lawrence is a name that makes the Boston Housing Court collectively spit. He's been hauled before the court over 38 times since 2011 for refusing to address complaints about exposed wiring, rats, roaches, broken floorboards, broken doors, broken windows, oil drums stored in electrical rooms, and random debris dumped all over the properties. If you've ever seen any landlord do anything to address a renter's concern, that wasn't Uwa Lawrence.
Unless the renter was concerned their shithole wasn't shitty enough.
But Lawrence is absolutely not special because of what he didn't do. Let's start talking about what he did do: Lawrence had a female tenant who was taking legal action against him. So he went into her apartment and removed all the doors, windows, and circuit breakers. In February. In BOSTON. Forced to pick between leaving and freezing to death, she left.
Another one of Lawrence's tenants had a roommate who couldn't take any more Uwa. She took off, leaving behind a woman who couldn't cover the rent by herself. So Lawrence moved a random guy into the apartment's second bedroom. She was not OK with this for "personal and religious reasons," as if a woman would need to explain that waking up to a strange man in her bathroom is a problem.
It's one of the top two worst rooms for waking up to a pantsless strange man.
Lawrence told her to shut up and enjoy the creepy stranger, so she had to take him to court in order to resolve it. The term for what Lawrence did is "breach of the covenant of quiet enjoyment," which may sound like a badly translated Japanese submission hold but is actually a pretty serious landlord crime. Lawrence was forced to pay all her attorney fees and return three months' worth of rent. It's a much happier ending than most "sudden and unwanted man in your home" stories.
As for the doorless apartments, they're now being rented by happy exhibitionists.
Orazio Petito: Scumbag Slumlord And Artistic Muse
Orazio Petito, a man included on Bill de Blasio's list of New York City's worst landlords, bought three apartment buildings in Brooklyn with plans to flip them. When he realized he wouldn't be able to evict all the tenants and cash in, he went with his backup plan: ignore them. He, no bullshit, racked up 684 housing violations in 51 apartments. In fact, the three buildings qualified for the Alternative Enforcement Program, which targets the 200 crappiest buildings in New York and forces their owners to make them livable. It's like a safety net when human decency falls.
Even if its name makes it sound like a mafia racket.
The tenants got together to fight back by taking pictures of the horrible conditions -- piles of garbage, cracked windows and floors, rickety fire escapes, visible mold -- and created an art show out of them. They say art comes from suffering, and when you live in a crumbling debris field with a lung full of slime mold, you have the makings of a great artist.
And art soars in value once the artist dies.
Cataloging all the ways Petito screwed his tenants would take eight more articles, but here are some examples of how awful he was. The electrical boxes were all propped open, with a cheap plastic fan constantly blowing on them to keep them from catching fire. The basement was full of trash (literally -- the garbage was 10 feet deep the last time someone was allowed in to measure it). The boiler had been broken for three years, and the residents went without hot water, lights, air conditioning, and heating, all the while hoping tonight wasn't the night a fusebox fire circumvented their plastic fan fireproofing. Because if the building did go up, the fire escapes almost certainly wouldn't hold them. One tenant even had a broken toilet in the way of their fire exit anyway.
The bathroom, meanwhile, has been on fire for three months.
Mice, rats, roaches, and bedbugs were everywhere, and the building was declared an "imminent" hazard by the fire marshal. It's the Walking Dead Season 7 of apartments-- grimy and post-apocalyptic, but a miserable, unfun kind of apocalypse.
Petito was fined (he never paid), and the buildings were foreclosed on and given to a new owner in 2012. But apparently the new owner had just as much interest in fixing things as Petito. As of February 2015, the residents were still begging for help, specifically for sewage flooding. That means their home went from an overpriced unlivable wasteland to an overpriced actual river of shit.
Someone, bring back Petito. #NotMyLandlord
Landlords Are Watching Naked Tenants All The Time
Like farting on cake and pretending to bang your sister, voyeurism is a big porn business. The point is, pornographers don't have a ton of ethics. And thanks to cheap, easy-to-hide cameras, voyeurism is more prevalent than ever. And thanks to creepy, reprehensible landlords, there is no shortage of porn producers and unwilling porn stars.
David Sealy, proud owner of degrees in communications and women's studies (really), worked for a broadcasting company in Canada. He decided to do some private producing of his own during off-hours, but rather than pay hard-working actresses to act like no one is watching, he just recorded his female tenants in their most intimate moments and uploaded them to the internet.
*quick double check* Yeah, women's studies. Really.
The whole thing came to light when one of the unwitting actresses was informed by a friend that her naughty times were being broadcast to perverts. She called the police, who found more than 150 goddamned video clips of women Sealy had made. The police couldn't identify most of the victims, so they appealed to the public for help. "Public, please look at this footage none of these women want you to see so we can figure out who they are, and maybe put their name into ButtHub and see if they did any FFM cream pie scenes."
"To ease identification, all women in the city should send us comparable videos."
Sealy was promptly arrested ... but if you're thinking this is some kind of rare, isolated incident, we have bad news. Or great news, if you're a sex offender or sex offender-adjacent! Allow us to rattle off just a few examples of this startlingly common crime:
A landlord in Sydney, Australia, rented small, cheap spaces targeted at students. He installed cameras in all 15 units, which all fed into a porno nerve center where he could watch them change, pee, and study, but definitely not in that order.
He liked the other two, but nothing got him off like watching people cram for midterms.
There was a British landlord who hid a camera under a couch cushion so he could film his tenant from the waist down. And then there was Thomas Daley, who was arraigned on over 2,000 charges related to 19-plus years of recording his female tenants in several apartments. The cameras all fed to the recording equipment in Daley's Masturbation Man-Cave, where he sadly cranked on his sad wiener for almost 20 years.
What we're trying to say is, if you're a renter, never change clothes or poop in your apartment ever again.
Think Nana and Pop-Pop's loving 60-year monogamous relationship is quaint and old-fashioned? First off, sorry for that disturbing image, but we've got some news for you: The monogamous sexual relationship is actually brand new relative to how long humans have been around. Secondly, it's about to get worse from here: monkey sex.
On this month's live podcast, Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff welcome Dr. Christopher Ryan, podcaster and author of "Sex at Dawn," onto the show for a lively Valentine's Day discussion about love, sex, why our genitals are where they are, and why we're more like chimps and bonobos than you think.
Get your tickets here.
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