Cleveland Tenant Scores $482K Damage Award Over Sibling/Deadbeat Landlords With Reputation For Dodging Process Servers, Stiffing Judgment Creditors

In Cleveland, Ohio, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

• By some accounts, brothers Graig and Derek Brown are exceptionally bad landlords. Court documents and interviews portray the brothers as vindictive and mean-spirited with a track record of illegally shutting off utilities and locking out tenants for being a few days late with the rent or for complaining about conditions in their rental units.



• Cleveland Housing Court Judge Raymond Pianka made his feelings clear when he recently awarded $482,000 in compensatory and punitive damages to Cindy Smith, a former tenant of the Browns.(1)



• "The court has never, in its 31-year history, heard proof in so many cases of a landlord or landlords engaging in such repeated, ongoing, deliberate, cruel, harmful and illegal conduct," Pianka wrote. Neither the Browns nor their attorney, Fernando Mack, returned phone calls for this story.



• The Browns are unrepentant bullies, according to an account by an aggrieved tenant included in a 2006 Cleveland Housing Court decision. The Browns reportedly told the mother of a former tenant that they were proud of their hardhearted tactics and had been employing them for years.



• In this case, they had cut off a woman's electricity and water, locked her out and then took some of her family's belongings, including one shoe from each pair owned by her and her children.

For more, see Tenants, attorneys accuse Cleveland property owners of cruel treatment.

(1) The Browns, who reportedly own two apartment buildings and several houses in Cleveland, have also cemented their reputation in legal circles for their ability to evade service on subpoenas and for an inability to collect on judgments rendered against them, the story states. Judgments have been difficult to collect because the brothers often have transferred ownership of properties from one limited liability company to another, said one attorney, and when there are mortgages on properties, judgments are tough to collect because those claims are secondary to the mortgages themselves, according to the report.