The Perils of Rent Control

An update on the case mentioned here last week. “Queens Landlord Convicted in Plot to Kill Two Tenants”:

A Queens landlord was found guilty yesterday of trying to plot the murder of two tenants paying $400 a month for an apartment in his building, so that he could rent out their apartment to new tenants for at least $1,500 a month.

A jury in State Supreme Court in Queens found the landlord, Juan Basagoitia, 50, guilty of hiring two other tenants in the building to kill William Lavery, 35, and his brother, David Lavery, 40, who had lived in the three-bedroom apartment on the third floor since childhood.

The brothers, who were badly injured in the attack but survived, legally assumed the lease in recent years from their father, George Lavery, who first took the apartment in 1964 at the same rent.

On March 4, 2003, the two hired tenants, David Robles, 37, and Danny Machuca, 30, broke into the brothers’ apartment, on Ithaca Street in Elmhurst, and beat and stabbed them. The two attackers were arrested shortly after the attack and were found guilty in recent months.

After their arrests, they told the police that Mr. Basagoitia had agreed to pay them $2,500 to kill the brothers. Mr. Basagoitia, 50, a Bolivian immigrant who bought the building in 1997, was then arrested also.

After a two-week trial, the 12-member jury found Mr. Basagoitia guilty on several charges, including first-degree attempted murder and assault, conspiracy and burglary. He could face life in prison when he is sentenced on Jan. 12, said the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.

The landlord seems to have relied on a defense along the lines of, “I never intended to hurt them, just rough them up a little”:

Last night, Stewart Orden, a Manhattan lawyer, insisted that his client, Mr. Basagoitia, was a “hard-working immigrant” who was guilty only of “setting the ball in motion” by hiring the two men to scare the brothers, not harm them.

“My client only wanted the two men to intimidate and frighten the tenants,” he said. “He wanted to scare them, but never anything more than that.”

Mr. Orden said he believed the jury was influenced by a stereotype of the “so-called landlords from hell,” the proverbial New York City landlord willing to sink to any level to push out rent-controlled tenants.

“The apartment was worth about $2,000,” he acknowledged. “There’s no doubt my client wanted cash, and wanted them out to obtain fair-market value. But there’s a difference between scaring someone, or even beating them up, and wanting them killed.”

The brothers’ father, George Lavery, 69, said last night in a phone interview that he was happy with the verdict. His sons live elsewhere in Queens now, he added. He said that their former apartment was being rented at market value, but that the brothers were planning to sue Mr. Basagoitia.

“If he’d have hired the right guys, professionals, my boys would be dead now,” he said, referring to the landlord. “Thank God he didn’t.”

I sense a Law & Order episode coming on (if they haven’t already done this show!).

Bonus Points: Frank Bruni’s “Dispute at Ritzy Address Is Emblem of NYC Rent Control Debate,” New York Times, April 13, 1997 (reprint); The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics’ “Rent Control” entry.