Picket offense

It's about time we protest slumlords

by Walter Crockett

The third time the kids from the three-decker at 9-11 Enfield Street came down to smoke pot in front of my house I was mad as hell, and I wasn't going to take it anymore.

Not that I have anything against pot. If you're over 18 and you want to smoke it in privacy, that's your business. As a matter of fact, I had previously been mad as hell when DA John Conte stooped to prosecuting Worcester head shops. I mean, get a life.

But a bunch of teenagers toking it up in the street sets almost as bad an example as Bill Clinton for our few remaining impressionable youth. So I leashed up my trusty dogs and strolled out to let the kids know it was uncool to get high in front of a neighbor's house. They were not pleased.

Then I called 911, which I knew was the wrong number, but I couldn't remember the right "non-emergency" crime number. The guy who answered the phone laughed at me. "You think that's an emergency?" he asked. Then he hung up -- connecting me to a taped message that told me to look up the proper phone number in the white pages of my local directory. I was not pleased.

According to the assessor's office, David Nagati and Rohangez Gaval are listed as trustees of 9-11 Enfield Street Trust, which owns 9-11 Enfield Street. They bought it from Joe Cohen, the former airport commissioner, who kept the place in good shape and didn't rent to tenants from hell.

But since Joe sold out, the house has been nothing but a problem for my little neighborhood. Noise, theft, outdoor auto repair, drug use, kids intimidating their neighbors -- it's bringing our property values down.

To be precise: this absentee-landlord's investment is hurting the investments of all his neighbors, and that's not right. Yes there are many good landlords and many terrible tenants. But good landlords don't let bad tenants wreck neighborhoods.

So I vowed that if one more incident happened over there I'd organize the neighbors and go picket Nagati's house at 14 Midland Street. I figured embarrassing him in his peaceful middle-class abode might get some action. Imagine my surprise when I opened up the February 22 Sunday Telegram and found that some of Worcester's finest activists had already picketed 14 Midland Street -- among them, Jim and Norma Connolly of the Elm Park/PREP+ neighborhood group, Barbara Haller and Billy Breault of Main South, Mary Keefe of Crown Hill, and City Councilor Janice Nadeau.

But they weren't picketing Nagati. They were picketing Mehrdad "Danny" Gaval, who also lives at 14 Midland Street. They marched and chanted on the same day at the home of Mansour "Tony" Gaval at 100 Richmond Avenue.

This was the group's second venture into nonviolent action. Last fall members went all the way to Brookline to visit the house of Allan Kupelnick, who owns 63 Russell Street. This time they were protesting conditions at 114 Elm Street, which is owned by Mehrdad Gaval. It's kind of hard to tell who is who and who owns what in the extended Gaval family -- Nader, Mansour, Mehrdad, Sharokh, and Rohangez Gaval show up separately and in combination, with a variety of spellings on various pieces of property. So they picketed Mansour's house for good measure.

Their picketing seems to have had some effect. There is evidence that Mehrdad has corrected some of the 23 code violations found at 114 Elm in a January inspection. Then again, there is evidence that certain landlords try to stay one step ahead of the Housing Court, doing just enough work to keep the Section 8 checks coming in.

Jim Connolly heads the Elm Park/PREP+ group, which covers a modest little neighborhood bounded by Pleasant and Elm streets. It originally extended from Park Avenue to Russell Street and has recently been expanded to include Merrick Street. The group was formed in 1994 to deal with Kupelnick's 63 Russell Street, a six-family hellhole and haven for blatant drug dealers who carried guns and knives.

"It's not exaggerating to say that there was a drug deal coming down every two minutes," Connolly says. "They worked in shifts. We took videos, we wrote down registration plates. They were terrorizing our neighborhood."

After several years of working with the city, and months of meetings with an assistant state attorney general, the neighbors decided to take things into their own hands. They made up signs, wrote some chants, and chartered a bus to take them to Kupelnick's Brookline home. Tim Murray took a day off from campaigning for a city council seat to go with them. Mayor Ray Mariano gave them a sendoff speech.

They marched and chanted in front of Kupelnick's house for 45 minutes. It made the local paper and Fox TV. By January the state attorney general's office had reached a settlement with Kupelnick that included a $4000 fine and the potential for increased fines if he does a bad job screening tenants in the future.

Most of the people in Elm Park/PREP+ own their own homes. Many of them are landlords. Some of them are good absentee landlords. Connolly agrees that it's not easy to be a landlord; the tenants rights movement may have gone too far -- that the law makes it too hard for a landlord to get rid of bad tenants. But you don't picket a pitbull.

"Guess which houses on this street are owned by absentee landlords," Connolly says, standing in front of the single-family home he's owned since 1979. It's easy. Almost without exception, the owner-occupied homes on the street are well maintained -- like the little blue house with the manicured bushes. Almost without exception, the tenements owned by absentee landlords are shoddily kept -- like the green three-family across the street from Connolly's house, with eight cars and a dumpster mucking up the front yard.

After their victory at 63 Russell, the Elm Park/PREP+ group made a list of its top five targets. Mehrdad Gaval's ghastly green building at 114 Elm was one of its priorities. Among the complaints: gang activity, noise, cars all over the yard, litter everywhere, porches clogged with junk, code violations, neighbors afraid to walk by.

So Connolly spoke with Gaval's answering machine. "I called, left my name and number, told him we were unhappy with what was taking place at his property, and we weren't going to stand for it anymore," Connolly says.

Two weeks later, 23 people were picketing Gaval's house at 14 Midland, chanting "Get up to code or hit the road," and "114, nightmare on Elm Street."

Mehrdad didn't come to the door that day, but he told the T&G several days later that 114 Elm Street was in "tip-top shape."

It had extensive fire damage when he bought it, Gaval said, and he should be rewarded for making it livable again. Presumably he said that with a straight face. And he said each of the properties owned by Gaval family members should be judged separately.

For the record, Gaval bought 114 Elm at an auction in 1991 for $64,000. It had been owned by a notorious slumlord. It's now valued at $102,700, according to the assessor's office. That's a $38,000 appreciation, plus almost seven years of rent. So a skeptic might suggest that Gaval has already been rewarded for his efforts. And if code violations, broken fences, scalped hedges, trashed yards, and a bunch of scary tenants amount to "tip-top shape," a skeptic might well wonder what the place would look like if it were allowed to go to seed.

And a skeptic might suspect that there is a Gaval philosophy of home maintenance: do as little as possible to the exterior, don't paint the porches, use the cheapest siding, board up windows when necessary, rent to people who don't give a damn about the property or about their neighbors, install a relatively attractive door but leave it wide open, and make your money while you can.

Of course, I couldn't suspect such a thing, because they didn't return my calls. I did reach David Nagati (Remember him? He and Rohangez Gaval own 9-11 Enfield, which is a virtual pleasure dome compared to 114 Elm), but he told me I couldn't write anything he said and he didn't want his name in the paper.

So you be the judge. Drive by 114 Elm Street, owned by Mehrdad Gaval; 196 May Street, owned by Mehrdad and Nader Gaval; 26 Dale Street and 25 Bellevue Street, owned by Nader Gaval; or 6-8 Fruit Street, of which Mansour Gaval is a trustee. They're not the worst houses in the city, but they'll give you a taste.

And if it's a bad taste, give Jim Connolly a call. He's in the book. Tell him you'll join him on the picket line next time he targets a neighborhood destroyer. I just might be there too.