''Landlords from Hell'' vanish

[Liberal_in_LA]

''Landlords from Hell'' vanish

6/29/2010

You may remember Kip and Nicole Macy, described by some as the ''Landlords from Hell'' based on their concerted, shall we say, effort to oust a pesky South of Market apartment unit tenant, which included, prosecutors say, cutting the floor beams out from underneath his unit.

Well, it seems that after giving up their passports and putting up a combined half-million dollars in bail in the criminal case, our "Bonnie and Clyde" former landlords are now on the lam.

They vanished early this month, not long after turning down what prosecutors billed a pretty good deal -- one year in the county jail and five years on probation.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?entry_id=66847&tsp=1#ixzz0sIBdqNVv

some background

Kip Macy and Nicole Macy bought the small apartment building in 2005 for $1 million and set out to evict the existing tenants so they could bring in new tenants at higher rents.

After failing in court to lawfully eveict the five tenants, the Macys essentially waged war on their renters, changing the locks, cutting phone service, turning off the water, breaking into apartments and trashing the contents, and even going so far as cutting the floor joists of one apartment from the one below.

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When one of their tenants, Scott Morrow, successfully fought eviction, Kip Macy and Nicole Macy allegedly told workers in September 2006 to cut the beams that supported his apartment’s floor. They also shut off Morrow’s electricity, cut his phone line and had workers saw a hole in his living room floor from below, prosecutors said.

http://a11news.com/50/kip-macy-nicole-macy-landlords-from-hell/


San Francisco landlords Kip and Nicole Macy allegedly falsified emails to defame pesky tenant

New details have emerged in the landlord-tenant dispute featuring Palo Alto couple Kip Macy, a software engineer who's worked on FreeBSD, and wife Nicole Macy, a local realtor. Emails were purpotedly fabricated in the name of tenant Scott Morrow, even though he told prosecutors that he has no email account:

When a court ruled in Morrow's favor in the eviction case, a lawyer at the firm representing the Macys got an email purportedly from the tenant that read, "One day you are going to come home to the Victorian house ... and find (your three children) missing. Then each day a package will arrive with a piece of them. You are f- with the wrong person."

http://valleywag.gawker.com/384970/san-francisco-landlords-kip-and-nicole-macy-allegedly-falsified-emails-to-defame-pesky-tenant

[Angry Dragon]

1. Gee..... makes one want to move to California

[Warren DeMontague]

3. It's okay

They're not in any danger of running out of people, with or without you.

[tammywammy]

2. Holy crap, what awful awful people! n/t

[arcadian]

4. The movie Pacific Heights comes to mind

[Warpy]

5. Amateurs

The way the scam ran in Boston was that a slumlord and a couple of lawyers set up a few dummy real estate holding companies and sold buildings back and forth among them, jacking up the paper value so they could get equivalent insurance on them, keeping the buildings underassessed by payoffs to the tax men. They'd then milk the tenants for everything they could get, one sweetheart I remember vividly even cutting the heat off in December and January during college vacation times, even though the places were mostly full of people with jobs, and doing little or no maintenance unless the tenants raised hell with the board of health.

When the repairs mounted up beyond what they wanted to be forced into doing, they simply torched the buildings. No warning, just a little realtor lightning, tough shit about all your stuff but you didn't own that much, anyway, certainly nothing the slumlord considered particularly important.

The insurance paid off and the slumlord sold the valuable lot for even more money, and then went looking for more properties.

Yes, some of them finally went to jail over it but even more of the small timers doing this stuff escaped.

It kind of puts the harassment these landlords put people through into different perspective. They were amateurs.

[Downtown Hound]

6. Why do people get this way?

they bought an apartment with the sole intention of driving somebody out of their home that had done no wrong just so they could make a few extra bucks. And when it didn't work, they went absolutely bonkers.

I don't understand it and I never will. Why are people so crazy about money?

[rbixby]

7. Wow, fabricated emails!

It doesn't take a genius to be able to track emails to their place of origin, and it doesn't take very much work to make it happen, I guess most people don't realize that the sending ip address is in the header of the email, along with all the stops it made along the way. Unless you're pretty sneaky and smart, it can easily be tracked to the computer that sent it. There are a few ways around it, using free wifi in a coffee shop or something, but the person who's being spoofed should be able to provide an alibi for the time the email was sent.

And wow, how ridiculous is all that? I guess with the landlords on the lam though, they don't have to pay rent anymore!

[mrbarber]

8. Karmas gonna bite these two in the ass.

Hopefully it will end with both of them in a shallow grave in some godforsaken desert somewhere.

[GoneOffShore]

9. I doubt that very much - But the law may well get them.