Out of the Closet and into Trouble

The closet! Every time a tenant moves out and the rooms are being cleaned for the next tenant, an experienced landlord will approach the closet cautiously. I often find travelers checks, cash, or other valuables tucked under the shelf paper. If the tenant hasn't skipped out owing me rent, I usually have their phone number and call them. But whenever I think I've seen it all, I find something in the closet that surprises even me, the seasoned slumlord.

Who would have expected to find big trouble lurking in a dozen or so reels of 8-mm films stashed on the top shelf of the linen closet in a high-priced urban rental?

Not me, even though they had skipped out half-way through the lease, left the apartment totally trashed, and owed a month's rent. We planned to do a thorough clean-up, make some upgrades, and get a bunch more money from the next tenant. Certainly not my husband, who took the reels to his ship that weekend to use the ship's projector to see what was on them.

He came right back, dropped the reels on my desk and said ... "We need to call the cops, right now!"

"Huh?" I replied, with my usual droll wit.
"It's porn!" he shrieked, gesturing frantically at the reels. You'd have thought he was a televangelist ranting about the weakness of the flesh, not a Navy officer with several cruises to the Med behind him.

"So throw it out," I replied in my calmest, don't bother me I'm eating breakfast voice.

" I mean it's PORN, and he was making the films in the apartment and it's him and he's naked and there's teeny-bopper girls and his wife and .... and .... " ... he sputtered to a halt, like a motorboat with a bad engine.

I shuddered at the thought. Mostly it was the thought of minors being exploited and the hassle that finding the evidence was going to be, but the thought of the 5' 5" 200+ pound ex-tenant .... naked. Ewwww!

We made a mad dash to retrieve the huge bags of trash we had collected from that apartment during the clean-up. Fortunately the bags were still on the fire escape, so we dragged them back into the apartment. We didn't even open them. We called the cops, who called the evidence squad, who looked at things, and then called more cops .... and it just kept going.

Before that episode of " Illegal Sex in the City " was over, I had been interviewed by FBI agents about the porn (yes, some of the girls were local teens earning "easy money"), Treasury Department's agents about the wife's money-making activities, Navy investigators about the multiple botched Navy identification cards showing my tenants' faces with several different names and ranks, other near-by law enforcement agencies about outstanding warrants for things I don't think people should ever be given bail or probation for, and a couple of repo men trying to recover expensive merchandise the duo bought with stolen identities and failed to make payments on.

I sang like a canary, giving every detail I could think of that could help track them. The FBI agent called me about three months later to let me know they found them, although they had abandoned the car, changed names twice, and had moved multiple times.

The moral of this story: If you are skipping out on the landlord, or running from the law, or both, don't forget to remove the evidence from the closet and take it with you. If the tenants had left the apartment "broom clean" like the lease required, all that lovely evidence would have been in the landfill, and the cops wouldn't have had any leads at all.